Darkling, I Listen

House Accurst by Leah Bodine Drake

“A curse upon this house!” cried he,

Slamming the door behind,

Turning to shake a furious fist

At windows closed and blind.

“A curse upon it night and day,

From north unto the south,

And east and west and in and out

I curse it with my mouth!”

“Down with this house of treachery,

And down with all within!”

While those who listened gave no sign

Or answer to his din.

But as the lengthening shadows fell

Of dark hills all around,

From that day forward fell the curse

On all that house and ground.

For panes grew cloudy and with greenish film

That once had been clear as air;

Doors stuck fast and a mirror cracked,

And the newell fell from the stair.

Fungi gleamed from the dairy’s flags

And walls grew dark with damp;

The chimney fouled and would not draw

And the flame burned low in the lamp.

Then up from the cellars swarmed the rats

In frightened and frantic gangs!

They slew the cat on the kitchen floor

And the dog howled under their fangs.

Tails and whiskers and blood-shot eyes,

They hurried away in the dark;

That was the night that the well went dry

And the lamp would not show a spark.

Quietly, steadily, sank the house…

Of those who huddled here

One went mad, but nobody fled,

Bound in a spell of fear.

Then came the night when the earth beneath

Cracked with a stealthy sound,

And a huge mouth opened…and all that house

Vanished into the ground!

The Dark House by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Where a faint light shines alone,

Dwells a Demon I have known.

Most of you had better say

“The Dark House,” and go your way.

Do not wonder if I stay.
For I know the Demon’s eyes

And their lure that never dies.

Banish all your fond alarms,

For I know the foiling charms

Of her eyes and of her arms,
And I know that in one room

Burns a lamp as in a tomb;

And I see the shadow glide,

Back and forth, of one denied

Power to find herself outside.

The Haunted House by Alice Cary

The winds of March are piping shrill,
The half-moon, slanting low,
Is shining down the wild sea-hill
Where, long and long ago,
Love ditties singing all for me,
Sat blue-eyed Coralin –
Her grave is now beneath the tree
Where then she used to spin.

Three walnut trees, so high and wild,
Before the homestead stand –
Their smooth boles often, when a child,
I’ve taken in my hand;
And that the nearest to the wall,
Though once alike they grew,
Is not so goodly, nor so tall,
As are the other two.

The spinning work was always there –
There all our childish glee;
But when she grew a maiden fair,
The songs were not for me.
One night, twice seven years ’t has been,
When shone the moon as now,
The slender form of Coralin
Hung swinging on the bough

That’s gnarled and knotty grown; in spring,
When all the fields are gay
With madrigals, no bird will sing
Upon that bough, they say.
And through the chamber where the wheel
With cob-webs is o’erspread,
Pale ghosts are sometimes seen to steal,
Since Coralin is dead.

The waters once so bright and cool,
Within the mossy well,
Are shrunken to a sluggish pool;
And more than this, they tell,
That oft the one-eyed mastiff wakes,
And howls as if in fear,
From midnight till the morning breaks –
The dead is then too near.

The Old House By The Mere by Madison Julius Cawein

Five rotten gables look upon
Wan rotting roses and rank weeds,
Old iron gates on posts of stone,
Dim dingles where the vermin breeds.
Five rotten gables black appear
Above bleak yews and cedars sad,
And thence they see the sleepy mere
In lazy lilies clad.

At morn the slender dragon-fly,
A burnished ray of light, darts past;
The knightly bee comes charging by
Winding a surly blast.
At noon amid the fervid leaves
The quarreling insects gossip hot,
And thro’ the grass the spider weaves
A weft with silver shot.

At eve the hermit cricket rears
His vesper song in shrillful shrieks;
The bat a blund’ring voyage steers
Beneath the sunset’s streaks.
The slimy worm gnaws at the bud,
The Katydid talks dreamily;
The sullen owl in monkish hood
Chants in the old beech tree.

At night the blist’ring dew comes down
And lies as white as autumn frost
Upon the green, upon the brown,
You’d deem each bush a ghost.
The crescent moon with golden prow
Plows thro’ the frothy cloud and ’s gone;
A large blue star comes out to glow
Above the house alone.

The oozy lilies lie asleep
On glist’ring beds of welt’ring leaves;
The starlight through the trees doth peep,
And fairy garments weaves.
And in the mere, all lily fair,
A maiden’s corpse floats evermore,
Naked, and in her raven hair
Wrapped o’er and o’er.

And when the clock of yon old town
Peals midnight o’er the fenny heath,
In haunted chambers up and down
Marches the pomp of Death:
And stiff, stiff silks make rustlings,
Sweep sable satins murmuringly;
And then a voice so sweetly sings
An olden melody.

And foam-white creatures flit and dance
Along the dusty galleries,
With long, loose locks that strangely glance
And demon-glaring eyes.
But in one chamber, when the moon
Casts her cold silver wreath on wreath,
Holds there proud state on ghastly throne
The skeleton Death.

A Dead House by George MacDonald

When the clock hath ceased to tick

Soul-like in the gloomy hall;

When the latch no more doth click

Tongue-like in the red peach-wall;

When no more come sounds of play,

Mice nor children romping roam,

Then looks down the eye of day

On a dead house, not a home!

But when, like an old sun’s ghost,

Haunts her vault the spectral moon;

When earth’s margins all are lost,

Melting shapes nigh merged in swoon,

Then a sound—hark! there again!—

No, ’tis not a nibbling mouse!

’Tis a ghost, unseen of men,

Walking through the bare-floored house!

And with lightning on the stair

To that silent upper room,

With the thunder-shaken air

Sudden gleaming into gloom,

With a frost-wind whistling round,

From the raging northern coasts,

Then, mid sieging light and sound,

All the house is live with ghosts!

Brother, is thy soul a cell

Empty save of glittering motes,

Where no live loves live and dwell,

Only notions, things, and thoughts?

Then thou wilt, when comes a Breath

Tempest-shaking ridge and post,

Find thyself alone with Death

In a house where walks no ghost.

Silences by Thomas Hardy

There is the silence of a copse or croft
When the wind sinks dumb,
And of a belfry-loft
When the tenor after tolling stops its hum.

And there’s the silence of a lonely pond
Where a man was drowned,
Nor nigh nor yond
A newt, frog, toad, to make the merest sound.

But the rapt silence of an empty house
Where oneself was born,
Dwelt, held carouse
With friends, is of all silences most forlorn!

Past are remembered songs and music-strains
Once audible there:
Roof rafters, panes
Look absent-thoughted, tranced, or locked in prayer.

It seems no power on earth can waken it
Or rouse its rooms,
Or its past permit
The present to stir a torpor like a tomb’s.

The Empty House by Walter de La Mare

See this house, how dark it is

Beneath its vast-boughed trees!

Not one trembling leaflet cries

To that Watcher in the skies—

‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze,

Innocent of heaven’s ways,

Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright,

On secrets hidden from sight.’
‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind,

‘Vacancy is all I find;

Every keyhole I have made

Wails a summons, faint and sad,

No voice ever answers me,

Only vacancy.’

‘Once, once … ’ the cricket shrills,

And far and near the quiet fills

With its tiny voice, and then

Hush falls again.
Mute shadows creeping slow

Mark how the hours go.

Every stone is mouldering slow.

And the least winds that blow

Some minutest atom shake,

Some fretting ruin make

In roof and walls. How black it is

Beneath these thick boughed trees!

The House by H.P. Lovecraft

‘Tis a grove-circled dwelling
Set close to a hill,
Where the branches are telling
Strange legends of ill;
Over timbers so old
That they breathe of the dead,
Crawl the vines, green and cold,
By strange nourishment fed;
And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.

In the gardens are growing
Tall blossoms and fair,
Each pallid bloom throwing
Perfume on the air;
But the afternoon sun
With its shining red rays
Makes the picture loom dun
On the curious gaze,
And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.

The rank grasses are waving
On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
When the red sun has set,
And the soul of the watcher is fill’d with faint pictures he fain would forget.

It was in the hot Junetime
I stood by that scene,
When the gold rays of noontime
Beat bright on the green.
But I shiver’d with cold,
Groping feebly for light,
As a picture unroll’d—
And my age-spanning sight
Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.

The Haunted Chamber by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each heart has its haunted chamber,
Where the silent moonlight falls!
On the floor are mysterious footsteps,
There are whispers along the walls!

And mine at times is haunted
By phantoms of the Past
As motionless as shadows
By the silent moonlight cast.

A form sits by the window,
That is not seen by day,
For as soon as the dawn approaches
It vanishes away.

It sits there in the moonlight
Itself as pale and still,
And points with its airy finger
Across the window-sill.

Without before the window,
There stands a gloomy pine,
Whose boughs wave upward and downward
As wave these thoughts of mine.

And underneath its branches
Is the grave of a little child,
Who died upon life’s threshold,
And never wept nor smiled.

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
That haunt my troubled brain?
That vanish when day approaches,
And at night return again?

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
But the statues without breath,
That stand on the bridge overarching
The silent river of death?

Low Barometer by Robert Bridges

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.
On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;
And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.
Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.
Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.
Some have seen corpses long interr’d

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,
That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.