Uncategorized – Darkling, I Listen

After Sunset by Rosamund Marriott Watson

The black downs tower to westward

A tomb for the buried sun,

The flats of the water meadows

Are fading from green to dun.

Dark spreads the vast arena,

Swart on the yellow light,

And out of the gloom and the silence

A strange voice cries to the night.

Cries — and a strange voice answers,

Sudden, and hoarse, and slow.

Heavy with pain past telling.

The weight of a monstrous woe.

Still, as I wait and hearken,

I know not which they may be;

Voices of down and marshland.

Or the voice of my heart in me.

But I know that the cry they echo

Was old when the world was young,

The plaint of a nameless sorrow

Whose speech is an unknown tongue.

To Melancholy by Ann Radcliffe (from The Mysteries of Udolpho)

Spirit of love and sorrow—hail!

Thy solemn voice from far I hear,

Mingling with ev’ning’s dying gale:

Hail, with this sadly-pleasing tear!
O! at this still, this lonely hour,

Thine own sweet hour of closing day,

Awake thy lute, whose charmful pow’r

Shall call up Fancy to obey.
To paint the wild romantic dream,

That meets the poet’s musing eye,

As on the bank of shadowy stream,

He breathes to her the fervid sigh.
O lonely spirit! let thy song

Lead me through all thy sacred haunt;

The minster’s moon-light aisles along,

Where spectres raise the midnight chaunt.
I hear their dirges faintly swell!

Then, sink at once in silence drear;

While, from the pillar’d cloister’s cell,

Dimly their gliding forms appear!
Lead where the pine-woods wave on high,

Whose pathless sod is darkly seen,

As the cold moon, with trembling eye,

Darts her long beams the leaves between.
Lead to the mountain’s dusky head,

Where, far below, in shade profound,

Wide forests, plains, and hamlets, spread,

And sad the chimes of vesper sound.
Or guide me where the dashing oar

Just breaks the stillness of the vale;

As slow it tracks the winding shore,

To meet the ocean’s distant sail:
To pebbly banks, that Neptune laves,

With measur’d surges, loud and deep;

Where the dark cliff bends o’er the waves,

And wild the winds of autumn sweep:
There pause at midnight’s spectred hour,

And list the long-resounding gale:

And catch the fleeting moon-light’s pow’r,

O’er foaming seas and distant sail.“

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.

Meeting of Phantoms by Anders Osterling

I in a vision

Saw my lost sweetheart.

Fearlessly toward me

I saw her stray.

So pale! I thought then;

She smiled her answer:

“My heart, my spirit

I’ve kissed away.

“I to the breezes

Gave my life gladly,

Soon it was vanished,

Gone with a breath.

If I have grieved you,

Pardon the sorrow;

We are but phantoms,

Like now in death.”

My voice I heard then:

“That is forgiven

If unremembrance

Can pardon aught.

Give me again but

My heart, my spirit,–

You alone found them

Of all that sought.”

Then I came nearer:

“Give me them quickly!

My road is long, love,

I cannot stay.”

She never heard me,

She in the night sang:

“All heart, all spirit

I’ve kissed away.”

I looked aside then,

By memory tortured,

Shrank back in terror

Toward daylight’s door.

I felt upon me

Those dark eyes resting,

Eyes that too well knew

My heart before.

Like wand’ring phantoms

Meseemed we both were–

A sigh, a whisper,

And fled was she.

No more could either

Help now the other,

We saw but, grieving,

That it was we.

The Glimpse by Thomas Hardy

She sped through the door

And, following in haste,

And stirred to the core,

I entered hot-faced;

But I could not find her,

No sign was behind her.

‘Where is she?’ I said:

“Who?” they asked that sat there;

“Not a soul’s come in sight.”

‘A maid with red hair.’

“Ah.” They paled. “She is dead.

People see her at night,

But you are the first

On whom she has burst

In the keen common light.”
It was ages ago,

When I was quite strong:

I have waited since,—O,

I have waited so long!

Yea, I set me to own

The house, where now lone

I dwell in void rooms

Booming hollow as tombs!

But I never come near her,

Though nightly I hear her.

And my cheek has grown thin

And my hair has grown gray

With this waiting therein;

But she still keeps away!

The Shadow On The Stone by Thomas Hardy

I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition—
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

Something Tapped by Thomas Hardy

Something tapped on the pane of my room

When there was never a trace

Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom

My weary Belovèd’s face.
“O I am tired of waiting,” she said,

“Night, morn, noon, afternoon;

So cold it is in my lonely bed,

And I thought you would join me soon!”
I rose and neared the window-glass,

But vanished thence had she:

Only a pallid moth, alas,

Tapped at the pane for me.

The Little Sister by Dora Sigerson Shorter

The wind knocks at the window,
⁠And my heart is full of fear.
For I know when it is calling
⁠That some evil thing is near.

It whispers in the chimney,
⁠And I strike the log to name,
Lest it come down and take me
⁠To the land that hath no name.

For once I had a sister,
⁠Who now am left alone,
And here we sat together,
⁠When the wind did sigh and moan«.

There came a gentle knocking
⁠Quick and sudden at the door.
And my sister hushed my terror.
⁠Saying, “’Tis the wind, a-stór!”

She took my arms from round her,
⁠She kissed me, cheek and chin,
But I cried, “Oh, little sister.
⁠Do not let the robber in!”

She rose up from me laughing,
⁠But her face was strange and white.
And she opened wide the window,
⁠Looking long into the night.
And I said, “Oh, little sister,
There is on your cheek a tear!”
“’Tis but the rain,” she whispered;
But my heart was full of fear.

And I said, “Oh, little sister.
There’s a hand upon the door.”
Soft she chid me from my crying,
Saying, “’Tis the wind, a-stór.”

And turning from me smiling.
She took down the bar and chain,
But her cheek was like the lily
As she went into the rain.

And I said, “Oh, little sister,
Will you then return no more?”
But I only heard the pushing
Of the wind upon the door.

Long I cried, “Oh, little sister.
Will you soon come back again?”
But I only heard the beating
Of the storm upon the pane.

Now my mother sits in sorrow,
Weeping all the livelong day;
And I think she dreads the robber
Who did take her child away.

So I put up bar and shutter
When the wind goes howling by.
For I know when it comes knocking
That some evil thing is nigh.

Wraith by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Thin Rain, whom are you haunting,
That you haunt my door?”
—Surely it is not I she’s wanting;
Someone living here before—
“Nobody’s in the house but me:
You may come in if you like and see.”

Thin as thread, with exquisite fingers,—
Have you seen her, any of you?—
Grey shawl, and leaning on the wind,
And the garden showing through?

Glimmering eyes,—and silent, mostly,
Sort of a whisper, sort of a purr,
Asking something, asking it over,
If you get a sound from her.—

Ever see her, any of you?—
Strangest thing I’ve ever known,—
Every night since I moved in,
And I came to be alone.

“Thin Rain, hush with your knocking!
You may not come in!
This is I that you hear rocking;
Nobody’s with me, nor has been!”

Curious, how she tried the window,—
Odd, the way she tries the door,—
Wonder just what sort of people
Could have had this house before …