V
Medusa mouths and harpy hands,
And Gorgon eyes where death abode;
Like idols, wherein heathen lands
Image the Plague’s black god.
Round mighty door and window-frame,
On floor and vault, behold,
The chiselled forms were all the same—
Gray with exuding mold.
VI
And I, who entered in, in dread
Felt silence like some awful hymn—
Or was ’t the effluvia of the dead
That round me seemed to swim?
Miasms, from which had oozed its walls,
Had rotted, breath on breath,
This house, within whose haunted halls
Death sat and dreamed of death.
EIDOLONS
The white moth-mullein brushed its slim
Cool, fairy flowers against his knee;
In places where the way lay dim
The branches, arching hollowly,
Made tomb-like mystery for him.
The wild-rose and the elder, drenched
With rain, made pale a misty place,—
From which, as from a ghost, he blenched;
He walking with averted face,
And lips white-closed and teeth tight-clenched.
For far within the forest,—where
Weird shadows stood like phantom men,
And where the ground-hog dug its lair,
The she-fox whelped and had her den,—
The thing kept calling, buried there.
One dead trunk, like a ruined tower,
Dark green with toppling trailers, shoved
Its wild wreck o’er the brush; one bower
Looked like a dead man, capped and gloved,
The thing that haunted him each hour.
Now at his side he heard it: thin
As echoes of a thought that speaks
In sleep: and, listening with his chin
Upon his palm, unto his cheeks
He felt the moon’s slow silver win.