Category: Haunted Landscape

Night-Blowing Flowers by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

 

Children of night! unfolding meekly, slowly,

To the sweet breathings of the shadowy hours,

When dark-blue heavens look softest and most holy,

And glow-worm light is in the forest bowers;

To solemn things and deep,

To spirit-haunted sleep,

To thoughts, all purified

From earth, ye seem allied,

O dedicated flowers!
Ye, from the gaze of crowds your beauty veiling,

Keep in dim vestal urns the sweetness shrined;

Till the mild moon, on high serenely sailing,

Looks on you tenderly and sadly kind.

So doth love’s dreaming heart

Dwell from the throng apart,

And but to shades disclose

The inmost thought, which glows

With its pure life entwined.
Shut from the sounds wherein the day rejoices,

To no triumphant song your petals thrill,

But send forth odours with the faint, soft voices

Rising from hidden streams, when all is still.

So doth lone prayer arise

Mingling with secret sighs,

When grief unfolds, like you,

Her breast, for heavenly dew

In silent hours to fill.

Night by Ann Radcliffe (from Romance of the Forest)

 

Now Ev’ning fades! her pensive step retires,

And Night leads on the dews, and shadowy hours:

Her awful pomp of planetary fires,

And all her train of visionary powers.
These paint with fleeting shapes the dream of sleep,

These swell the waking soul with pleasing dread;

These through the glooms in forms terrific sweep,

And rouse the thrilling horrors of the dead!
Queen of the solemn thought—mysterious Night!

Whose step is darkness, and whose voice is fear!

Thy shades I welcome with severe delight,

And hail thy hollow gales, that sigh so drear!
When, wrapt in clouds, and riding in the blast,

Thou roll’st the storm along the sounding shore,

I love to watch the whelming billows, cast

On rocks below, and listen to the roar.
Thy milder terrors, Night, I frequent woo,

Thy silent lightnings, and thy meteor’s glare,

Thy northern fires, bright with ensanguine hue,

That light in heaven’s high vault the fervid air.
But chief I love thee, when thy lucid car

Sheds through the fleecy clouds a trembling gleam,

And shews the misty mountain from afar,

The nearer forest, and the valley’s stream:
And nameless objects in the vale below,

That floating dimly to the musing eye,

Assume, at Fancy’s touch, fantastic shew,

And raise her sweet romantic visions high.
Then let me stand amidst thy glooms profound

On some wild woody steep, and hear the breeze

That swells in mournful melody around,

And faintly dies upon the distant trees.
What melancholy charm steals o’er the mind!

What hallow’d tears the rising rapture greet!

While many a viewless spirit in the wind

Sighs to the lonely hour in accents sweet!
Ah! who the dear illusions pleas’d would yield,

Which Fancy wakes from silence and from shades,

For all the sober forms of Truth reveal’d,

For all the scenes that Day’s bright eye pervades!

Haunted Spot by Emma Lazarus

 

The close-twined branches interlock o’erhead,

‘Twixt leaf and leaf no ray, no glimpse of blue;

From the live roof is gray green twilight shed,

Heavily clings at noon the dull chill dew;

The snake-like roots of the large trees break through

The black, moist sod; rank weeds spread everywhere,

Damp shadow and mirk vapors fill the air.
A yellowish pool hath slowly filtered here

From drip and ooze and frequent wash of rains:

No lapse of living waters greets the ear,

Thick crust of slime its sluggish surface stains.

Here Silence dwells — a vague, wild terror gains

The soul before this mystery divine,

Evil in action, evil in design.
The poisoned flower hath overwrought the brain.

The wood seems peopled with strange images,

Huge forms uncouth in slow unending train,

Life’s terrors and its nameless miseries,

Now like a sullen mist between the trees,

Now close and threatening, distinct and near,

While hateful discords grate upon the ear.
Sin, madness, poverty, disease and age,

And, halting last, the unmixed evil, death.

How near to her they come, life’s heritage

Of ancient ills! No outlet openeth:

Her wild cry echoes far above, beneath,

Fills the thick air with trouble, wanes and dies,

Meeting the hollow earth and empty skies.

Haunted Hour by Leah Bodine Drake

 

The sky is coloured like a peacock’s breast;

There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold

Down where the woods their somber branches hold

In silhouette against the fading west.

Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest,

Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold.

A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold,

Like one sharp note from angel viol wrest.
This is the haunted hour — such woods surround

Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale;

In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found

The faery woman in the river-vale;

And underneath this star long, long ago

The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!

The Frightened Path by Abbie Farwell Brown

 

The wood grew very quiet

As the road made a sudden turn;

Then a wavering, furtive path crept out

From the tangled briar and fern.
“Where does it lead?” I asked the child;

She shivered and shook her head.

“It doesn’t lead to any place,

It is running away!” she said.
“It is running away on tiptoe

Through the untrodden grass,

To join the cheerful highroad,

Where real, live people pass.
“It runs from a heap of ruins

Where a home stood in old days;

But nothing living goes there now,

And — Nothing Living stays!”

The Lost Path by Elinor Wylie

I.

The garden’s full of scented wallflowers,
And, save that these stir faintly, nothing stirs;
Only a distant bell in hollow chime
Cried out just now for far-forgotten time,
And three reverberate words the great bell spoke.
The knocker’s made of brass, the door of oak,
And such a clamor must be loosed on air
By the knocker’s blow that knock I do not dare.
The silence is a spell, and if it break,
What things, that now lie sleeping, will awake?
II.

Are simple creatures lying there in cool
Sweet linen sheets, in slumber like the pool
Of moonlight white as water on the floor?
Will they come down laughing and unlock the door?
And will they draw me in, and let me sit
On the tall settle while the lamp is lit?
And shall I see their innocent clean lives
Shining as plainly as the plates and knives,
The blue bowls, and the brass cage with its bird?

III.

But listen! listen! surely something stirred
Within the house, and creeping down the halls
Draws close to me with sinister footfalls.
Will long pale fingers softly lift the latch,
And lead me up, under the osier thatch,
To a little room, a little secret room,
Hung with green arras picturing the doom,
The most disastrous death of some proud knight?
And shall I search the room by candle-light
And see, behind the curtains of my bed,
A murdered man who sleeps as sleep the dead?
IV.

Or will my clamorous knocking shake the trees
With lonely thunder through the stillnesses,
And then lie down–the coldest fear of all–
To nothing, and deliberate silence fall
On the house deep in the silence, and no one come
To door or window, staring blind and dumb?

The Ancient Track by H. P. Lovecraft

There was no hand to hold me back
That night I found the ancient track
Over the hill, and strained to see
The fields that teased my memory.
This tree, that wall—I knew them well,
And all the roofs and orchards fell
Familiarly upon my mind
As from a past not far behind.
I knew what shadows would be cast
When the late moon came up at last
From back of Zaman’s Hill, and how
The vale would shine three hours from now.
And when the path grew steep and high,
And seemed to end against the sky,
I had no fear of what might rest
Beyond that silhouetted crest.
Straight on I walked, while all the night
Grew pale with phosphorescent light,
And wall and farmhouse gable glowed
Unearthly by the climbing road.
There was the milestone that I knew—
“Two miles to Dunwich”—now the view
Of distant spire and roofs would dawn
With ten more upward paces gone. . . .

There was no hand to hold me back
That night I found the ancient track,
And reached the crest to see outspread
A valley of the lost and dead:
And over Zaman’s Hill the horn
Of a malignant moon was born,
To light the weeds and vines that grew
On ruined walls I never knew.
The fox-fire glowed in field and bog,
And unknown waters spewed a fog
Whose curling talons mocked the thought
That I had ever known this spot.
Too well I saw from the mad scene
That my loved past had never been—
Nor was I now upon the trail
Descending to that long-dead vale.
Around was fog—ahead, the spray
Of star-streams in the Milky Way. . . .
There was no hand to hold me back
That night I found the ancient track.

The Path by Walter de la Mare

Is it an abbey that I see
Hard-by that tapering poplar-tree,
Whereat that path hath end?
‘Tis wondrous still
That empty hill,
Yet calls me, friend.

Smooth is the turf, serene the sky,
The timeworn, crumbling roof awry;
Within that turret slim
Hangs there a bell
Whose faint notes knell?
Do colours dim

Burn in that angled window there,
Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare?
Would, from that narrow door,
One, looking in,
See, gemlike, shine
On walls and floor

Candles whose aureole flames must seem –
So still they burn – to burn in dream?
And do they cry, and say,
‘See, stranger; come!
Here is thy home;
No longer stray!’

Mildew by Charlotte Dacre

Behold, within that cavern drear and dank,
Whose walls in rainbow tints so dimly shine,
A wretch, with swollen eyes and tresses lank,
Does on a heap of mould’ring leaves recline.

Unwholsome dews for ever him surround,
From his damp couch he scarcely ever hies,
Save when blue vapours, issuing from the ground,
Lure him abroad, to catch them as they rise.

Or else at eve the dripping rock he loves,
Or the moist edge of new-dug grave, full well;
To get the sea spray too at night he roves,
And, gem’d with trickling drops, then seeks his cell.

Such his delights, his green and purple cheek,
His bloated form, his chill, discolour’d hand
He would not change; and if he guests would seek,
He steals among the church-yard’s grisly hand.

Haunted by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

A noisome mildewed vine
Crawls to the rotting eaves;
The gate has dropped from the rusty hinge,
And the walks are stamped with leaves.

Close by the shattered fence
The red-clay road runs by
To a haunted wood, where the hemlocks groan
And the willows sob and sigh.

Among the dank lush flowers
The spiteful fire-fly glows,
And a woman steals by the stagnant pond
Wrapt in her burial clothes.

There’s a dark blue scar on her throat,
And ever she makes a moan,
And the humid lizards gleam in the grass,
And the lichens weep on the stone;

And the Moon shrinks in a cloud,
And the traveller shakes with fear,
And an Owl on the skirts of the wood
Hoots, and says, Do you hear?

Go not there at night,
For a spell hangs over all –
The palsied elms, and the dismal road,
And the broken garden-wall.

O, go not there at night,
For a curse is on the place;
Go not there, for fear you meet
The Murdered face to face!