STRANGLED.
There is a legend in some Spanish book
About a noisy reveller who, at night,
Returning home with others, saw a light
Shine from a window, and climbed up to look,
And saw within the room, hanged to a hook,
His own self-strangled self, grim, rigid, white,
And who, struck sober by that livid sight,
Feasting his eyes, in tongue-tied horror shook.
Has any man a fancy to peep in
And see, as through a window, in the Past,
His nobler self, self-choked with coils of sin,
Or sloth or folly? Round the throat whipped fast
The nooses give the face a stiffened grin.
’Tis but thyself. Look well. Why be aghast?
PROMETHEAN FANCIES.
I.
When on to shuddering Caucasus God pours
The phials of his anger hoarded long,
Plunging in each abyss his fiery prong
As if to find a Titan; when loud roars
The imprisoned thunder groping for the doors
Of never-ending gorges; when, among
The desperate pines, Storm howls his battle-song—
Then wakes Prometheus, and his voice upsoars.
Yea, when the midnight tempest hurries past,
There sounds within its wail a wilder wail
Than that which tells the anguish of the blast;
And when the thunder thunders down the gale,
A laugh within its laugh tells woe so vast
That God’s own angels in the darkness quail.
II.
Prometheus—none may see him. But at night
When heaven’s bolt has made some forest flare
On Caucasus, and when the broad red glare
Rushing from crag to crag at infinite height
Stains sleeping wastes of snow, or, ruby bright,
Runs sparkling up the glacier crests to scare
The screaming eagles out of black chasms, where
But half dislodged the darkness still clings tight—
Then on some lurid monstrous wall of rock
The Titan’s shadow suddenly appears
Gigantic, flickering, vague; and, storm-unfurled,
Seems still to brave, with hand that dim chains lock,
Midway in the unendingness of years,
The Author of the miscreated world.
THE END.
Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London.