Classic Poem

Twelve by the chime: from idle dreams awaking,
I trim my lamp and mount the creaking stair;
The shadows through the carven arches shaking
Seem mocking phantoms that pursue me there.

The faded portraits in the lamp-light's glamour
Look down with cold inquisitorial gaze;
The sculptured busts, the knights in rusted armor,
Loom large against the window's pictured maze.

Thick dust falls from the time-worn, tattered hangings,
Thick dust lies on the tessellated floor;
My step sounds loud, the door's sepulchral clangings
Roll far along the gusty corridor.

Ah me! amid my dwelling's desolation
It seems some fable that my brain recalls,
That once a glad and gallant generation
Loved, laughed, and feasted in these lonely halls.

Silent the voice of song, and hushed the laughter,
Cheerless and cold the empty banquet-room;
The spider weaves in gilded groin and rafter,
The shrill wind whistles through the vaulted gloom.

Vanished those dear ones, by what hidden highways,
In what far regions, o'er what stormy waves,
I know not, nor in what oblivious byways
The sere grass sighs above their nameless graves.

And yet, as if my soul's imperious longing
Were as a spell unspoken yet supreme,
Pale shapes seem through the hollow darkness thronging,
Like those wan visitants which haunt a dream.

They gather round me through the silent spaces,
Like clouds across the waning twilight blown,
Till all the room is filled with flickering faces
And hovering hands that reach to wring my own.

With friendly greeting and familiar gesture,
Wearing the form and feature that they wore
When youth and beauty clothed them like a vesture,
They come, the unforgotten ones of yore.

On cheek and brow I feel their chill caresses,
Like cold, faint airs of autumns long ago;
I hear the sighing of their ghostly tresses,
The trailing of their garments to and fro.

Up from the gulfs of time, the blind abysses,
Those radiant phantoms of the past arise,
And bring again the perfume of their kisses,
The peril and the splendor of their eyes.

But cold their lips, they breathe no warm affection,
And cold their breasts as frozen shapes of snow;
Their luminous eyes are but a vague reflection;
Stray starbeams in the ice-bound stream below.

'Tis well: nay, if by spell or incantation
The loved and lost I might again behold,
Breathing and warm in youth's bright incarnation,
And glowing with the loveliness of old. —

That word I would withhold, for their sakes only:
Estranged and changed as in a haggard dream,
Time-tossed and tempest-beaten, old and lonely,
To their young eyes what spectres we should seem!