Heard are the softly flapping wings
Of unseen bats. The shimmer flicks
Upon the carven panellings
The banners of the heretics.
The stiffly bended gauntlets play
In the dull glow incarnadine,
And, creaking, to the helmets gray
Pour bumpers full of Rhenish wine;
Or with their daggers keen of blade
Carve boars upon the plates of gold.
The corridor's uncanny shade
Hath clamours vague and manifold.
The orgy waxes riotsome—
One could not hear God's voice for it—
For when a phantom sups from home,
What wrong if he carouse a bit?
Now every ghostly care they drown
With jokes and jeers and loud guffaws.
A wine-cascade is running down
Each rusty helmet's iron jaws.
The full and rounded hauberks bulge,
And to the neck the river mounts.
Their eyes with liquid fire effulge.
They're howling drunk, these valiant counts!
One through the salad idly wields
A foot; another scolds the sick.
Some like the lions on their shields
With gaping mouths the fancy trick.
In voice still hoarse from silence long
In the tomb's dampness and restraint,
Max playfully intones a song
Of thirteen hundred, crude and quaint.
Albrecht, of quarrelsome repute,
Stirs right and left a war intense,
And drubs about with fist and foot,
As once he drubbed the Saracens.
And heated Fritz his helmet doffs,
Not deeming he's a headless trunk.
Then down pell-mell mid roars and scoffs
Together roll the phantoms drunk.