“What mean you,” cried Taven, “by swaying so
Your limp head like a poplar to and fro?”
Then turning to the stricken twain, “My dears,
You know the Laundress? Oft-times she appears
On Mount Ventour, and then the common crowd
Are wont to take her for a long, white cloud.
“But shepherds, when they see her, pen their sheep.
The Laundress of destruction, who doth keep
The errant clouds in hand, is known too well.
She scrubs them with a strength right terrible;
Wringing out buckets full of rain, and flame.
And neatherds house their cattle at her name;
“And seamen, on the angry, tossing wave,
Upon our Lady call, their craft to save.”
Here drowned her speech a discord most appalling,
Rattling of latches, whimpering, caterwauling,
With uncouth words half-uttered intervening,
Whereof the devil only knows the meaning;
And brazen din through all the cave resounding,
As one were on a witch-caldron pounding.
Then whence those shrieks of laughter, and those wails
As of a woman in her pains? Prevails
Hardly amid the howl the beldam’s speech,
“Give me a hand that I may hold you each,
“And let your magic garlands not be lost!”
Here were they jostled from their feet almost
By rush of something puffing, grunting, snorting,
Most like a herd of ghostly swine comporting.
On starlit winter-nights, when Nature slumbers
Under her snowy sheets, come forth in numbers
The fowlers, torch in hand, who bush and tree
By river-side will beat right vigorously,
Till all the birds at roost arise in haste,
And, as by breath of smithy-bellows chased,
Affrighted, rush until the net receive:
So drave Taven the foul herd with her sieve
Into the outer darkness. With the same
She circles traced, luminous, red as flame,
And divers other figures. All the while,
“Avaunt!” she cried, “ye locusts, ye who spoil
The harvest! Quit my sight, or woe betide you!
Workers of evil, in your burrows hide you!
“Since, by the pricking of your flesh, ye know
The hills are still with sunshine all aglow,
Go hang yourselves again on the rock-angles,
Ye bats!” They flit. The clamour disentangles,
And dies away. Then to the children spake
The witch: “All birds of night themselves betake
“To this retreat what time shines the daylight
On the ploughed land and fallow; but at night,—
At night the lamps are lighted without hand
In churches void and triply fastened, and
The bells toll of themselves, and pavement stones
Upstart, and tremble all the buried bones,
“And the poor dead arise and kneel to pray,
And mass is said by priests as pale as they.
Ask the owls else, who clamber down the steeple
To drain the lamps of oil; and if the people
Who thus partake of the communion
Be not all dead except the priests alone!