Chapter I: Part I: To Bridget

THE INVOCATION.

Though oft-times ill-sifting memory with deft digits thickly draws
Ashen grey curtains thwart my vagrant brain;
She ne’er from me can hide thy face and form,
Nor cloaked Oblivion, from streams of Lethe borne.
Ensnare in sable trammel, behind her basalt doors
Thy eyes, thy lips, thy smile,—that ere again
My gaping senses steep
And lull to fragrant sleep.
Fiercer in Morning Sun than in turgid hues of Night
Calcined and adust, parching my thirsting sight
Thy welcome form appears,
Grief-giving while it cheers.
Bridget! Unreal! Dead phantom of a form
Yet living, breathing—sneering, wreathed in olive scorn
Haunt not my seered soul pierced by thy secret sting;
Death to a pulsing throb, Life to a pulseless thing!
Now through the Gardens of Sleep, I see thy lovely mystic face
Pale ’gainst the scandent tendrils and resin-bleeding cones
Paler than ivory white, colder than bleachened bones,
Pallid and alburnous, fired for a lingering space
By eyes that never human in earthy regions saw.
Let me yet behold thee, far fairer than ere of yore!
For ’neath that polished painted mask of seeming deadened Love
I know some poignant passion must course in sinuous stream
Plashing with crystal foam in lustrous realms above,
From a sea, where the gods’ romances are woven in wondrous dream.
Bridget unmask! speak to me, awake, and radiant rise!
Phœnix-inspired flying from former fires into cerulean skies!
Though still wrapped in the scented cerements of the mummy I thought
was you
I would gaze on the risen Bridget, as a being both real and true;
Nothing strange or new—just true.
In the place of a ghost of a woman, whose self I never knew
In the place of an empty phantom as cold as the summer dew.