Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

Swerved his courser, and plunged with fear

ALL ALONE I LIE:

His cry might have wakened the dead men near,

ALL ALONE, UP IN THE SKY.

The very dead that lay at his feet,

Lapt in the mouldy winding-sheet.

But he curbed him and spurred him, until he stood

Still in his place, like a horse of wood,

With nostrils uplift, and eyes wide and wan;

But the sweat in streams from his fetlocks ran.

A ghost grew out of the shadowy air,

And sat in the midst of her moony hair.

In her gleamy hair she sat and wept;

In the dreamful moon they lay and slept;

The shadows above, and the bodies below,

Lay and slept in the moonbeams slow.

And she sang, like the moan of an autumn wind

Over the stubble left behind: Alas, how easily things go wrong!

A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,

And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,

And life is never the same again.

Alas, how hardly things go right!

'Tis hard to watch on a summer night,

For the sigh will come and the kiss will stay,

And the summer night is a winter day.

"Oh, lovely ghosts my heart is woes

To see thee weeping and wailing so.

Oh, lovely ghost," said the fearless knight,

"Can the sword of a warrior set it right?

Or prayer of bedesman, praying mild,

As a cup of water a feverish child,

Sooth thee at last, in dreamless mood

To sleep the sleep a dead lady should?

Thine eyes they fill me with longing sore,

As if I had known thee for evermore.

Oh, lovely ghost, I could leave the day

To sit with thee in the moon away

If thou wouldst trust me, and lay thy head

To rest on a bosom that is not dead."

The lady sprang up with a strange ghost-cry,

And she flung her white ghost-arms on high:

And she laughed a laugh that was not gay,

And it lengthened out till it died away;

And the dead beneath turned and moaned,

And the yew-trees above they shuddered and groaned.

"Will he love me twice with a love that is vain?

Will he kill the poor ghost yet again?

I thought thou wert good; but I said, and wept:

'Can I have dreamed who have not slept?'

And I knew, alas! or ever I would,

Whether I dreamed, or thou wert good.

When my baby died, my brain grew wild.

I awoke, and found I was with my child."

"If thou art the ghost of my Adelaide,

How is it? Thou wert but a village maid,

And thou seemest an angel lady white,

Though thin, and wan, and past delight."