Category: Strange Woods

Mid-Forest Fear by Roderic Quinn

She is standing at the gate,
Tall and sweet,
And although the hour be late
She will greet
Me, her lover,
Smiling over
Absent mind and tardy feet.

‘Rest,’ I’ll say to her, ‘and more rest,’
As she wraps her love around me,
And I’ll tell her of the forest,
Of the strange, fear-haunted forest
Where the fleshless beings found me.

For I trod a rock-strewn rude way
Thinking only of my lover,
When the moonlight on the woodway,
Made a weird-way of the woodway,
And a place where demons hover.

For the leaves that had been sleeping
On the sodden soil-bed lying,
Look a motion and ’gan creeping,
Like a thousand small feet creeping,
And there rose a distant sighing.

Why the trees did droop their tresses,
Weeping leaves for something under,
And what bode in dim recesses,
Feline-lurked in dim recesses,
Paled my cheeks and heart to ponder.

Had I feet I would have hurried,
But the moonlit forest chained me,
Soul and body grasped and worried,
With frost-fingers gripped and worried,
Till, half-stayed, my hurt heart pained me.…

‘Rest,’ I’ll say, ‘my Love, and more rest;
Things unseen have life and motion
And they haunt the moonlit forest—
Soul-affronting haunt the forest,
And men meet them on the ocean.’

She will look so grave and kind,
Saying ‘Rest—
Rest is here for heart and mind
On this breast—
Put aside all
Fancies idle,
I will shield you—Love is best.’

Superstition by Madison Julius Cawein

In the waste places, in the dreadful night,
When the wood whispers like a wandering mind,
And silence sits and listens to the wind,
Or, ‘mid the rocks, to some wild torrent’s flight;
Bat-browed thou wadest with thy wisp of light
Among black pools the moon can never find;
Or, owlet-eyed, thou hootest to the blind
Deep darkness from some cave or haunted height.
He who beholds but once thy fearsome face,
Never again shall walk alone! but wan
And terrible attendants shall be his
Unutterable things that have no place
In God or Beauty that compel him on,
Against all hope, where endless horror is.

Haunted by Siegfried Sassoon

Evening was in the wood, louring with storm.
A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool
And baked the channels; birds had done with song.
Thirst was a dream of fountains in the moon,
Or willow-music blown across the water
Leisurely sliding on by weir and mill.

Uneasy was the man who wandered, brooding,
His face a little whiter than the dusk.
A drone of sultry wings flicker’d in his head.
The end of sunset burning thro’ the boughs
Died in a smear of red; exhausted hours
Cumber’d, and ugly sorrows hemmed him in.

He thought: ‘Somewhere there’s thunder,’ as he strove
To shake off dread; he dared not look behind him,
But stood, the sweat of horror on his face.
He blunder’d down a path, trampling on thistles,
In sudden race to leave the ghostly trees.
And: ‘Soon I’ll be in open fields,’ he thought,
And half remembered starlight on the meadows,
Scent of mown grass and voices of tired men,
Fading along the field-paths; home and sleep
And cool-swept upland spaces, whispering leaves,
And far off the long churring night-jar’s note.

But something in the wood, trying to daunt him,
Led him confused in circles through the thicket.
He was forgetting his old wretched folly,
And freedom was his need; his throat was choking.
Barbed brambles gripped and clawed him round his legs,
And he floundered over snags and hidden stumps.
Mumbling: ‘I will get out! I must get out!’
Butting and thrusting up the baffling gloom,
Pausing to listen in a space ‘twixt thorns,
He peers around with peering, frantic eyes.
An evil creature in the twilight looping,
Flapped blindly in his face. Beating it off,
He screeched in terror, and straightway something clambered
Heavily from an oak, and dropped, bent double,
To shamble at him zigzag, squat and bestial.
Headlong he charges down the wood, and falls
With roaring brain–agony–the snap’t spark–
And blots of green and purple in his eyes.
Then the slow fingers groping on his neck,
And at his heart the strangling clasp of death.

The Phantom by Henry Sylvester Cornwell

Out in the dark old forest,
There dwells a phantom of woe;
When the winds arise I can hear his sighs,
As he wanders to and fro!

He smites the woods in his frenzy,
He strips the branches bare,
And sows like chaff, with a demon laugh,
The blood-red leaves on the air!

He wrestles with woes Titanic,
And dark deeds unforgiven;
And grieves alone in a tongue unknown,
Like a soul shut out of heaven.

Above the crash of the tempest,
And the dismal roar of the rain,
When the bare limbs creak, I can hear his shriek
Of terror and of pain!

Last night from my chamber window,
I saw in the midst of the swamp,—
Through the murky gloom, his black pine plume,
And the gleam of his spectral lamp!

Outright his baleful omen
Three times the owlet cried;
And on the hearth the cricket’s mirth
In sudden silence died.

In the midnight dead and solemn
He troubles my spirit most;
For the soul still hears, though mortal ears
Their grosser sense have lost.

From trouble-haunted slumber
I start to hear aghast—
In the darkness deep, the awful sweep
Of his phantom steed—the blast.

But when, like a captive lady,
Looks the moon from her cloudy tower,
And the winds are at rest he loveth best
The influence of the hour.

Ah, then, the shadowy giant,
In mountain caverns deep,
Find space of rest for his troubled breast,
And grieves himself to sleep!

Oh, say, do I live in Witchland?
Or is it the fever flame,
Whence fear is fed by a morbid dread
Of something without a name?

For there dwells in the forest somewhere,
I am sure, a phantom of woe;
When the winds arise I can hear his sighs,
As he wanders to and fro!

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!

Fantasy by Ruth Mather Skidmore

I think if I should wait some night in an enchanted forest
With tall dim hemlocks and moss-covered branches,
And quiet, shadowy aisles between the tall blue-lichened trees;
With low shrubs forming grotesque outlines in the moonlight,
And the ground covered with a thick carpet of pine needles
So that my footsteps made no sound, —
They would not be afraid to glide silently from their hiding places
To the white patch of moonlight on the pine needles,
And dance to the moon and the stars and the wind.

Their arms would gleam white in the moonlight
And a thousand dewdrops sparkle in the dimness of their hair;
But I should not dare to look at their wildly beautiful faces.

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

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 Mewlips by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool’s borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they’ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.