Darkling, I Listen

Shadow Land by Johannes Bobrowski (Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead)

The rustling voices,

leaves, birds, I came

three ways before a great snow.

On the bank, burrs and awns

in her ringlets, Ragana with her hounds

shouted for the ferryman, he stood

in the water, midstream.

Once,

following the mists

across the dell with golden wings,

the bustard flew, they set

horny feet on the grass,

light, the day, flew after them.

Cold. On the tip of a grass-blade

the emptiness, white,

reaching to the sky. But the tree

old, there is

a shore, mists with thin

bones move on the river.

Darkness, whoever lives here

speaks with the bird’s voice.

Lanterns have glided

above the forests.

No breath has moved them.

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.“

When the Gloom is on the Glen by William Makepeace Thackeray

When the moonlight’s on the mountain

And the gloom is on the glen,

At the cross beside the fountain

There is one will meet thee then.

At the cross beside the fountain;

Yes, the cross beside the fountain,

There is one will meet thee then!
I have braved, since first we met, love,

Many a danger in my course;

But I never can forget, love,

That dear fountain, that old cross,

Where, her mantle shrouded o’er her—

For the winds were chilly then—

First I met my Leonora,

When the gloom was on the glen.
Many a clime I’ve ranged since then, love,

Many a land I’ve wandered o’er;

But a valley like that glen, love,

Half so dear I never sor!

Ne’er saw maiden fairer, coyer,

Than wert thou, my true love, when

In the gloaming first I saw yer,

In the gloaming of the glen!

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: An Ode by Ann Radcliffe

High mid Alverna’s awful steeps,
Eternal shades, and silence dwell,
Save, when the gale resounding sweeps,
Sad strains are faintly heard to swell:

Enthron’d amid the wild impending rocks.
Involv’d in clouds, and brooding future woe,
The demon Superstition Nature shocks,
And waves her Sceptre o’er the world below.

Around her throne, amid the mingling glooms,
Wild—hideous forms are slowly seen to glide;
She bids them fly to shade earth’s brightest blooms,
And spread the blast of Desolation wide.

See! in the darkened air their fiery course!
The sweeping ruin settles o’er the land,
Terror leads on their steps with madd’ning force,
And Death and Vengeance close the ghastly band!

Mark the purple streams that flow!
Mark the deep empassioned woe!
Frantic Fury’s dying groan!
Virtue’s sigh, and Sorrow’s moan!

Wide—wide the phantoms swell the loaded air
With shrieks of anguish—madness and despair!
Cease your ruin! spectrs dire!
Cease your wild terrific sway!
Turn your steps—and check your ire,
Yield to peace and mourning day!“

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!

The Vain Spell by Edith Nesbit

The house sleeps dark and the moon wakes white,
The fields are alight with dew;
‘Oh, will you not come to me, Love, to-night?
I have waited the whole night through,
For I knew,
O Heart of my heart, I knew by my heart,
That the night of all nights is this,
When elm shall crack and lead shall part,
When moulds shall sunder and shot bolts start
To let you through to my kiss.’

So spake she alone in the lonely house.
She had wrapped her round with the spell,
She called the call, she vowed the vow,
And the heart she had pledged knew well
That this was the night, the only night,
When the moulds might be wrenched apart,
When the living and dead, in the dead of the night,
Might clasp once more, in the grave’s despite,
For the price of a living heart.

But out in the grave the corpse lay white
And the grave clothes were wet with dew;
‘Oh, will you not come to me, Love, to-night,
I have waited the whole night through,
For I knew
That I dared not leave my grave for an hour
Since the hour of all hours is near,
When you shall come to the hollow bower,
In a cast of the wind, in a waft of the Power,
To the heart that to-night beats here!’

The moon grows pale and the house sleeps still
Ah, God! do the dead forget?
The grave is white and the bed is chill,
But a guest may be coming yet.
But the hour has come and the hour has gone
That never will come again;
Love’s only chance is over and done,
And the quick and the dead are twain, not one,
And the price has been paid in vain.