And yet I am an honest man
Who only sought to kill his foe:
Could I sit down to see each plan
That I took up frustrated so,
When as each plan was marred and balked,
And in the sun my man still walked,
I felt my hate still greater grow?
I thought, “At dusk with stealthy tread
I’ll seek his dwelling, and I’ll creep
Upstairs and hide beneath his bed,
And in the night I’ll strike him deep.”
And so I went; but at his door
The figure, masked just as before,
Sat on the step as if asleep.
Bent, spite all fear, upon my task,
I tried to pass: there was no space.
Then rage prevailed; I snatched the mask
From off the baffling figure’s face,
And oh, unutterable dread!
The face was mine, mine white and dead,
Stiff with some frightful death’s grimace.
What sins are mine, O luckless wight,
That doom should play me such a trick
And make me see a sudden sight
That turns both soul and body sick?
Stretch out thy hands, thou priest unseen
That sittest there behind the screen,
And give me absolution, quick!
O God, O God, his hands are dead!
His hands are mine, O monstrous spell!
I feel them clammy on my head.
Is he my own dead self as well?
Those hands are mine—their scars, their shape:
O God, O God, there’s no escape,
And seeking Heaven, I fall on Hell!
AN ODE TO THE TRAVELLING THUNDER.
(Suggested by a line in the magnificent opening description of Miss A. Mary F. Robinson’s “Janet Fisher.”)
God’s wrath is travelling overhead,
God’s wrath upon the wing,
Which makes man cower in his bed
If he has heaven’s strength to dread,
And hides some guilty thing.
The booming peals of thunder shake
These walls and the black night;
They make the mountains thrill and quake:
I listen as I lie awake,
While Earth and Heaven fight.
What seek’st thou with repeated stroke,
Wrath, as thou hurriest past?
Is it, through night’s scorched riven cloak,
Some huge old solitary oak
Or some doomed storm-bent mast?