38
ORACLES
You guess how gladly to the door I rushed
And flung it wide. Why! no one’s there!
Arouse !
Iam asleep. What horror came and crushed
My whole soul’s life out as some shadow
brushed
My body and passed in? All sense allows
At last the fearful truth—This is the house !
This is my old house on the marsh, and here,
Here is the terror of the distant sea
Moaning, and here the wind that wails, the
drear
Groans like a ghost’s, the desolate house of
fear
Whence I fled once from my great enemy—
This is the house! O speechless misery !
Here the great silver candlesticks illume
The agéd book, the blackness blazoned o’er
With golden characters and scarlet bloom
Twined in the blue-tinged sigils wrought for
doom,
And dreadful names of necromancer’s lore
Written therein : so stood my room before
When the hissed whisper came, ‘‘ Beware!
Beware !
They’re coming !” and “‘ They’re coming !””
when the wind
Bore the blank echoes of their stealthy care
To creep up silently and find me there,
Hid in the windowless old house, stark
blind .
For fear—and then—what horrors lurked
behind
The door firm barred !—and thus they cried
in Vain : , .
‘* Open the door !”” Then crouched I mad
with fear
Till at the dawn their footsteps died again.
They can do nothing to me—that is plain—
While the door bars them! What is it
runs clear
Truth in my mind? Once more they may
be near ?
And then came memory.
stood
And—what had brushed me as it passed?
What froze
My dream to this awakening—fearful flood
Of horror loosed, loosing a sweat of blood,
An agony of terror on these brows?
God! God! Indeed, indeed this is the
house !
Wide the portal
The candles sputtered and went out. I stood
Fettered by fear, and heard the lonely wind
Lament across the marsh. A frenzied flood
Of hate and loathing swept across my mood,
And with a shudder I flung the door to.
Mind
And body sank a huddled wreck behind.
Nought stirred. Draws hither the grim doom
of Fate?
A long, long while.
Now—in the central core
Of my own room what accent of keen hate,
Triumphant malice, mockery satiate,
Rings in the voice above the storm’s wild
roar?
It cries ‘‘ Open the door ! Open the door !”
ANIMA LUNAE.
Written partly under the great rock Sigiri, in
Ceylon, partly in Arabia, near Aden,
ZOHRA the king by feathered fans
Slept lightly through the mid-day heat.
Swart giants with drawn yataghans
Guard, standing at his head and feet,
Zohra, the mightiest of the khans!
Each slave Circassian like a moon
Sits smiling, burning with young bloom
Of dawn, and weaves an airy tune
Like a white bird’s song bright and bold
That dips a fiery plume.
So the song lulled, lazily rolled
In tubes of silver, lutes of gold ;