Poems, 1799

Excerpt

THE FIRST BOOK.

  Orleans was hush'd in sleep. Stretch'd on her couch
  The delegated Maiden lay: with toil
  Exhausted and sore anguish, soon she closed
  Her heavy eye-lids; not reposing then,
  For busy Phantasy, in other scenes
  Awakened. Whether that superior powers,
  By wise permission, prompt the midnight dream,
  Instructing so the passive [1] faculty;
  Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog,
  Flies free, and soars amid the invisible world,
  And all things 'are' that [2] 'seem'.

                               Along a moor,
  Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate,
  She roam'd a wanderer thro' the cheerless night.
  Far thro' the silence of the unbroken plain
  The bittern's boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep,
  It made most fitting music to the scene.
  Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind,
  Swept shadowing; thro' their broken folds the moon
  Struggled sometimes with transitory ray,
  And made the moving darkness visible.
  And now arrived beside a fenny lake
  She stands: amid its stagnate waters, hoarse
  The long sedge rustled to the gales of night.
  An age-worn bark receives the Maid, impell'd
  By powers unseen; then did the moon display
  Where thro' the crazy vessel's yawning side
  The muddy wave oozed in: a female guides,
  And spreads the sail before the wind, that moan'd
  As melancholy mournful to her ear,
  As ever by the dungeon'd wretch was heard
  Howling at evening round the embattled towers
  Of that hell-house [3] of France, ere yet sublime
  The almighty people from their tyrant's hand
  Dash'd down the iron rod.
                           Intent the Maid
  Gazed on the pilot's form, and as she gazed
  Shiver'd, for wan her face was, and her eyes
  Hollow, and her sunk cheeks were furrowed deep,
  Channell'd by tears; a few grey locks hung down
  Beneath her hood: then thro' the Maiden's veins
  Chill crept the blood, for, as the night-breeze pass'd,
  Lifting her tattcr'd mantle, coil'd around
  She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart.

  The plumeless bat with short shrill note flits by,
  And the night-raven's scream came fitfully,
  Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid
  Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank
  Leaps, joyful to escape, yet trembling still
  In recollection.

                    There, a mouldering pile
  Stretch'd its wide ruins, o'er the plain below
  Casting a gloomy shade, save where the moon
  Shone thro' its fretted windows: the dark Yew,
  Withering with age, branched there its naked roots,
  And there the melancholy Cypress rear'd
  Its head; the earth was heav'd with many a mound,
  And here and there a half-demolish'd tomb.

  And now, amid the ruin's darkest shade,
  The Virgin's eye beheld where pale blue flames
  Rose wavering, now just gleaming from the earth,
  And now in darkness drown'd....