Chapter II

My hopes are as a closed-up book,
Drearily,
Upon whose clasp of love I look
Wearily.

All night the rain raved overhead,
Drearily;
All night I wept, awake in bed,
Wearily.

I heard the wind sweep wild and wide,
Drearily;
And turned upon my face and sighed
Wearily.

The wind and rain spake unto me,
Drearily:--
"What is this thing God takes from thee,
Wearily?"

I said unto the rain and wind,
Drearily:--
"The love, for which my body sinned,
Wearily."

The rain and wind spake unto me,
Drearily:--
"What are these things that burden thee,
Wearily?"

I said unto the wind and rain,
Drearily:--
"Past joys, and dreams whose ghosts remain,
Wearily."

"Thou lov'st him still," they made reply,
Drearily.--
I said, "Would God that I could die!"
Wearily.

KU KLUX

We have sent him seeds of the melon's core,
And nailed a warning upon his door:
By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more.

Down in the hollow, 'mid crib and stack,
The roof of his low-porched house looms black;
Not a line of light at the door-sill's crack.

Yet arm and mount! and mask and ride!
The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!
And for a word too much men oft have died.

The clouds blow heavy toward the moon.
The edge of the storm will reach it soon.
The kildee cries and the lonesome loon.

The clouds shall flush with a wilder glare
Than the lightning makes with its angled flare,
When the Ku Klux verdict is given there.

In the pause of the thunder rolling low,
A rifle's signal--who shall know
From the wind's fierce hurl and the rain's black blow?

Only the signature, written grim
At the end of the message brought to him--
A hempen rope and a twisted limb.

So arm and mount! and mask and ride!
The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!
And for a word too much men oft have died.

AT DAWN

Far off I heard dark waters rush:
The sky was cold: the dawn broke green:
And wrapped in twilight and strange hush
The gray wind moaned between.

A voice rang through the House of Sleep,
And through its halls there went a tread;
Mysterious raiment seemed to sweep
Around one lying dead.

And then I knew that I had died,
I, who had suffered so and sinned--
And 'twas myself I stood beside
In the gray dawn and wind.

PRÆTERITA

I

Low belts of rushes ragged with the blast;
Lagoons of marish reddening with the west;
And o'er the marsh the water-fowl's unrest
While daylight dwindles and the dusk falls fast.
Set in sad walls, all mossy with the past,
An old stone gateway with a crumbling crest;
A garden where death drowses manifest;
And in gaunt yews the shadowy house at last.
Here, like an unseen spirit, silence talks
With echo and the wind in each gray room
Where melancholy slumbers with the rain:
Or, like some gentle ghost, the moonlight walks
In the dim garden, which her smile makes bloom
With all the old-time loveliness again.

II

When slow the twilight settles o'er its roof,
And from the haggard oaks unto its door
The rain comes, wild as one who rides before
His enemies that follow, hoof to hoof;
And in each window's gusty curtain-woof
The rain-wind sighs, like one who mutters o'er
Some tale of love and crime; and, on the floor,
The sunset spreads red stains as bloody proof:--
From hall to hall and haunted stair to stair,
Through all the house, a dread, that drags me to'ard
The ancient dusk of that avoided room,
Wherein she sits with ghostly golden hair,
And eyes that gaze beyond her soul's sad doom,
Waking the ghost of that old harpsichord.

IN SHADOW

I

A moth sucks at a flaming flower:
The moon beams on the old church-tower:
I watched the moth and rising moon,
One silver tip
Of glimmer, slip
Through ghostly tree-tops, deep with June,
To dream above the church an hour.

II

The gray moth on the dewy pod
Dreams; and the sleepy poppies nod
Their drugged heads in the languid breeze,
That whispers low
Of some dim woe,
And spirit-like among the trees,
Strews snowy petals on the sod.

III

My soul dreams at life's blood-red heart
Of that thou art: of thee, who art
All silence: saying something fair
As phantoms know
When moon-flowers blow
And spirits meet: the beauty rare
Of which thou, too, hast grown a part.

IV

My heart, behold, is but a bloom
A pale thought clings to by a tomb,
A tomb that holds the one I love,
All wan of cheek,
Whom, wild and weak,
My heart bows down and breaks above,
Grief-haunted in the moonlit gloom.

IN THE OWL-LIGHT

I

Uplifted darkness and the owl-light breaks,
Scuds the wild land, pursuing patch with patch,
As when deep daisy fields a swift wind shakes.--
How clumsily I raised the crazy latch!...
So.--When yon black cloud, light-absorbing, rakes
Again the moon's bald disk--
Out! and the storm will snatch
Again my hair, made lank with wind and rain
Two hours since.... There! from the ragged plain
A great cloud-besom sweeps the beams again!--
Out! out!... No fear of risk?...

II

First, past the fellside, where the bramble-hollow
Whines, wolf-like, with the wind; gaunt wind, that grieves
Through the one sickly ash, whose withered leaves
Worry and mutter, shriveled as the lips
Of bent hags kissing. Then--the slope that whips
The face with brush; and where a gnarled vine slips,
Snake-like, from off a rock, that seems to wallow,--
One mass of briers,--a humpbacked hulk of hair,
A gorgon head of writhings, huge, that heaves,
When, heaped abruptly on it, _flare_!
Burst rain and tempest-glare.--
This passed, I follow
A thorny slip of path until
I reach the storm-scarred summit of the hill.