Their only peace is darkness, Their rest to hasten on Into the heart of midnight, Forever from the dawn. Across far phantom ice-floes The eye of night may mark These horror-haunted were-wolves Who hound them to the dark.
All through this hideous journey, They are the souls of men Who in the far dark-ages Made Europe one black fen. They fled from courts and convents, And bound their mortal dust With demon wolfish girdles Of human hate and lust.
These who could have been god-like, Chose, each a loathsome beast, Amid the heart’s foul graveyards, On putrid thoughts to feast; But the great God who made them Gave each a human soul, And so ’mid night forever They circle round the Pole.
A praying for the blackness, A longing for the night, For each is doomed forever By a horror of the light; And far in the heart of midnight, Where their shadowy flight is hurled, They feel with pain the dawning That creeps in round the world.
Under the northern midnight, The white, glint ice upon, They hasten, still they hasten, With their horror of the dawn; Forever and forever, Into the night away They hasten, still they hasten Unto the judgment day.
BELATED.
The year drifts sadly back this way, With Autumn’s grief and pain; But with the red leaf and the gold She ne’er will come again.
This world hath its weird beauteousness, That youth in music stirs, But time will ne’er bring back to earth The beauty that was hers.