A Chilly Night by Christina Rossetti

I rose at the dead of night
And went to the lattice alone
To look for my Mother’s ghost
Where the ghostly moonlight shone.

My friends had failed one by one,
Middleaged, young, and old,
Till the ghosts were warmer to me
Than my friends that had grown cold.

I looked and I saw the ghosts
Dotting plain and mound:
They stood in the blank moonlight
But no shadow lay on the ground;
They spoke without a voice
And they leapt without a sound.

I called: “O my Mother dear,” –
I sobbed: “O my Mother kind,
Make a lonely bed for me
And shelter it from the wind:

“Tell the others not to come
To see me night or day;
But I need not tell my friends
To be sure to keep away.”

My Mother raised her eyes,
They were blank and could not see;
Yet they held me with their stare
While they seemed to look at me.

She opened her mouth and spoke,
I could not hear a word
While my flesh crept on my bones
And every hair was stirred.

She knew that I could not hear
The message that she told
Whether I had long to wait
Or soon should sleep in the mould:
I saw her toss her shadowless hair
And wring her hands in the cold.

I strained to catch her words
And she strained to make me hear,
But never a sound of words
Fell on my straining ear.

From midnight to the cockcrow
I kept my watch in pain
While the subtle ghosts grew subtler
In the sad night on the wane.

From midnight to the cockcrow
I watched till all were gone,
Some to sleep in the shifting sea
And some under turf and stone:
Living had failed and dead had failed
And I was indeed alone.

A Nightmare by Christina Rossetti

I have a friend in ghostland –
Early found, ah me, how early lost! –
Blood-red seaweeds drip along that coastland
By the strong sea wrenched and tossed.
In every creek there slopes a dead man’s islet,
And such an one in every bay;
All unripened in the unended twilight:
For there comes neither night nor day.

Unripe harvest there hath none to reap it
From the watery misty place;
Unripe vineyard there hath none to keep it
In unprofitable space.
Living flocks and herds are nowhere found there;
Only ghosts in flocks and shoals:
Indistinguished hazy ghosts surround there
Meteors whirling on their poles;
Indistinguished hazy ghosts abound there;
Troops, yea swarms, of dead men’s souls. –

Have they towns to live in? –
They have towers and towns from sea to sea;
Of each town the gates are seven;
Of one of these each ghost is free.
Civilians, soldiers, seamen,
Of one town each ghost is free:
They are ghastly men those ghostly freemen:
Such a sight may you not see. –

How know you that your lover
Of death’s tideless waters stoops to drink? –
Me by night doth mouldy darkness cover,
It makes me quake to think:
All night long I feel his presence hover
Thro’ the darkness black as ink.

Without a voice he tells me
The wordless secrets of death’s deep:
If I sleep, his trumpet voice compels me
To stalk forth in my sleep:
If I wake, he hunts me like a nightmare;
I feel my hair stand up, my body creep:
Without light I see a blasting sight there,
See a secret I must keep.

Ghosts by Margaret Louisa Woods

Where the columned cliffs far out have planted
Their daring shafts in the Northern foam,
There hangs a castle that should be haunted,
A ruin meet for a phantom’s home.

For heavily in the caverns under
The hidden tide like a muffled drum,
Beats distinct through the level thunder
Of the wintry waste whence storm-winds come.

And fire has blackened the mouldering rafter,
And stairs have crumbled from bolted doors;
At night there’s a sound of wail and laughter,
And footsteps crossing the creaking floors.

And in and out through the courts forsaken
Wild shapes are drifted from hall to hall,
With a trumpet sound the towers are shaken,
And banners flutter along the wall.

‘Tis but the storms and the seas enchant it,
Its ghosts are shadow and wind and spray.
If ever a phantom used to haunt it,
That too was mortal and passed away.

The ghosts have found where the hills embosom
A windless garden—they walk at noon,
When the beds and branches burn with blossom,
And hardly wait for the rising moon

When the starry charm of the night is broken
And the day but lives as a child unborn,
They pass with echoes of words once spoken
And silent footsteps and eyes forlorn.

From the blind gray house where all are sleeping
A mocking music sounds wild and clear,
The faint lights glimmer and past them sweeping
The dancers appear and disappear.

And the swinging branches close to cover
The two who tremble there heart to heart,
The ghostly lady and phantom lover,
The souls long parted that cannot part.

They seem as shadows of morn and even,
For ever fading to come again;
They are as shadows of tempest driven,
Stormily sighing across the plain.

For these depart as the rest departed,
The garden under the hill shall be
As ghost-forsaken, as past-deserted
As the castle over the Northern sea.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace –
Radiant palace – reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there;
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This – all this – was in the olden
Time long ago),
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically,
To a lute’s well-tuned law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene,
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

And travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh – but smile no more.

The Wraiths by Edythe C. Toner

Hosts of the martyred dead!
In dreams I see them pass—
Pale, wistful shadows
In their march
Upon the soundless grass.
And gleaming with the lustre
Of a star strewn sky,
I see long rows
Of glistening stones
Which mark the place of rest
Of these
Who now pass by!

I hear no sound of music
But a muffled drum
Beating a slow retreat. …
A bugle in the distance
Calling: “Come!”
And back in the void they go,
These sad, reproachful young
And silent wraiths.

Then: From out the cool-gray depths
Of darkling forest glen
Which held these lads
Within its drear retreat
I hear a cry!
Ceaseless … Moaning … Wavering
… As the eternal billows’ hollow beat
Upon the shore which bounds
The longing Sea
From out the melancholy distance
Floating … Echoing … Sighing
… Back to me!
“Why … Why … Why …
Should we who were so young
And so in love with life,
Thus die … Thus die?”

The Ghost Kings by Robert E. Howard

The ghost kings are marching; the midnight knows their tread,
From the distant, stealthy planets of the dim, unstable dead;
There are whisperings on the night-winds and the shuddering stars have fled.

A ghostly trumpet echoes from a barren mountain head;
Through the fen the wandering witch-lights gleam like phantom arrows sped;
There is silence in the valleys and the moon is rising red.

The ghost kings are marching down the ages’ dusty maze;
The unseen feet are tramping through the moonlight’s pallid haze,
Down the hollow clanging stairways of a million yesterdays.

The ghost kings are marching, where the vague moon-vapor creeps,
While the night-wind to their coming, like a thund’rous herald sweeps;
They are clad in ancient grandeur, but the world, unheeding sleeps.

In the Marshes by Arthur Glyn Prys-Jones

I
We do not know in the marsh
What dim things hover and come
Down from the yellow moon
To the lure of the witch’s drum:
Deep in the bulrush-beds
The thin reeds quake all day
For what they see in the dark …
They quake … but they cannot say.

II
There at the turn of the tide
Deep in the oozy mud
Are the hands of men who died
When the marshes sank in flood:
And the marshmen hear their throes
In the winds each gusty day,
But only the witch-wife knows
Why the mud-banks hold their prey.

III
When the dark has sealed the West
The marsh is loud with feet
That move in old unrest …
And wings that whir and beat
Hover over the sands
From year to desolate year,
And even the trees are gnarled with pain
And the waters grey with fear.

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.

The Wood Water by Madison Julius Cawein

An evil, stealthy water, dark as hate,
Sunk from the light of day,
‘Thwart which is hung a ruined water-gate,
Creeps on its stagnant way.

Moss and the spawny duckweed, dim as air,
And green as copperas,
Choke its dull current; and, like hideous hair,
Tangles of twisted grass.

Above it sinister trees, as crouched and gaunt
As huddled Terror, lean;
Guarding some secret in that nightmare haunt,
Some horror they have seen.

Something the sunset points at from afar,
Spearing the sullen wood
And hag-gray water with a single bar
Of flame as red as blood.

Something the stars, conspiring with the moon,
Shall look on, and remain
Frozen with fear; staring as in a swoon,
Striving to flee in vain.

Something the wisp that, wandering in the night,
Above the ghastly stream,
Haply shall find; and, filled with frantic fright,
Light with its ghostly gleam.

Something that lies there, under weed and ooze,
With wide and awful eyes
And matted hair, and limbs the waters bruise,
That strives, yet can not rise.

Evil Landscape by Tristan Corbière (Translated by C.F. MacIntyre)

 

Sand of old bones—The wave gasps

knells: breaking sound on sound…

—pale salt marsh, where the moon downs

fat worms to make the night pass.

—Calm of pestilence, where

fever cooks…The curs’d marsh-light

dies.—Stinking grass where the hare

is a scared warlock in flight…

—The White Laundress spreads

the dirty clothes of the dead,

to the sun of the wolves...— The toads

little precentors of gloom,

poison with their bellies’ loads

their round stools, the mushrooms.