Living slew Love, and Sympathy hew'd out The bosom-sepulchre of Sympathy? Chiefly I sought the cavern and the hill Where last we roam'd together, for the sound Of the loud stream was pleasant, and the wind Came wooingly with woodbine smells. Sometimes All day I sat within the cavern-mouth, Fixing my eyes on those three cypress cones That spired above the wood; and with mad hand Tearing the bright leaves of the ivy. screen, I cast them in the noisy brook beneath, And watch'd them till they vanish'd from my sight Beneath the bower of wreathed eglantines: And all the fragments of the living rock (Huge blocks, which some old trembling of the world Had loosen'd from the mountain, till they fell Half-digging their own graves) these in my agony Did I make bare of all the golden moss, Wherewith the dashing runnel in the spring Had liveried them all over. In my brain The spirit seem'd to flag from thought to thought, As moonlight wandering thro' a mist: my blood Crept like marsh drains thro' all my languid limbs; The motions of my heart seem'd far within me, Unfrequent, low, as tho' it told its pulses; And yet it shook me, that my frame would shudder, As if 'twere drawn asunder by the rack. But over the deep graves of Hope and Fear, And all the broken palaces of the Past, Brooded one master-passion evermore, Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky Above some fair metropolis, earthshock'd, Hung round with ragged rims and burn ing folds, Embathing all with wild and woful hues, Great hills of ruins, and collapsed masses Of thundershaken columns indistinct, And fused together in the tyrannous light Ruins, the ruin of all my life and me! Sometimes I thought Camilla was no more, Some one had told me she was dead, and ask'd If I would see her burial: then I seem'd To rise, and through the forest-shadow borne With more than mortal swiftness, I ran down The steepy sea-bank, till I came upon Wreathed round the bier with garlands: in the distance, From out the yellow woods upon the hill Look'd forth the summit and the pinnacles Of a gray steeple thence at intervals Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black; One walk'd abreast with me, and veil'd his brow, And he was loud in weeping and in praise Of her, we follow'd: a strong sympathy Shook all my soul: I flung myself upon him In tears and cries: I told him all my love, How I had loved her from the first; whereat He shrank and howl'd, and from his brow drew back His hand to push me from him; and the face, The very face and form of Lionel brain, And at his feet I seem'd to faint and fall, To fall and die away. I could not rise Albeit I strove to follow. They past on, The lordly Phantasms! in their floating folds They past and were no more: but I had fallen Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass. Alway the inaudible invisible thought, Artificer and subject, lord and slave, Shaped by the audible and visible, Moulded the audible and visible; All crisped sounds of wave and leaf and wind, Flatter'd the fancy of my fading brain; The cloud-pavilion'd element, the wood, The mountain, the three cypresses, the cave, Storm, sunset, glows and glories of the moon Below black firs, when silent-creeping winds Laid the long night in silver streaks and bars, Were wrought into the tissue of my dream: The moanings in the forest, the loud brook, Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turn'd in a lock, owl-whoop and dorhawk-whirr Awoke me not, but were a part of sleep, And voices in the distance calling to me And in my vision bidding me dream on, Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams, Which wander round the bases of the hills, And murmur at the low-dropt eaves of sleep, Half-entering the portals. Oftentimes The vision had fair prelude, in the end Opening on darkness, stately vestibules To caves and shows of Death: whether the mind, With some revenge,known, -even to itself un Made strange division of its suffering With her, whom to have suffering view'd had been Extremest pain; or that the clear-eyed Spirit, Being blunted in the Present, grew at length Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow Clambering, the mast bent and the ravin wind In her sail roaring. From the outer day, Betwixt the close-set ivies came a broad And solid beam of isolated light, Crowded with driving atomies, and fell Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth Well-known well-loved. She drew it long ago Forthgazing on the waste and open sea, One morning when the upblown billow ran Shoreward beneath red clouds, and I had pour'd Into the shadowing pencil's naked forms Colour and life: it was a bond and seal Of friendship, spoken of with tearful smiles; A monument of childhood and of love; The poesy of childhood; my lost love Symbol'd in storm. We gazed on it together In mute and glad remembrance, and each heart Grew closer to the other, and the eye Was riveted and charm-bound, gazing like The Indian on a still-eyed snake, lowcouch'd A beauty which is death; when all at once That painted vessel, as with inner life, Began to heave upon that painted sea; An earthquake, my loud heart-beats, made the ground Reel under us, and all at once, soul, life And breath and motion, past and flow'd away To those unreal billows: round and round A whirlwind caught and bore us; mighty gyres Rapid and vast, of hissing spray winddriven Far thro' the dizzy dark. Aloud she shrieked; My heart was cloven with pain; I wound my arms About her: we whirl'd giddily; the wind From thunder into whispers; those six maids With shrieks and ringing laughter on the sand Threw down the bier; the woods upon the hill Waved with a sudden gust that sweeping down Took the edges of the pall, and blew it far Shrank in me, like a snowflake in the hand, Waiting to see the settled countenance Of her I loved, adorn'd with fading flowers. But she from out her death-like chrysalis, Studded with one rich Provence rose a light Of smiling welcome round her lips - her eyes And cheeks as bright as when she climb'd the hill. One hand she reach'd to those that came behind, And while I mused nor yet endured to take So rich a prize, the man who stood with me Stept gaily forward, throwing down his robes, And claspt her hand in his : again the bells Jangled and clang'd: again the stormy surf |