Far behind him crept blackness and flickering glimmer,
To the northward, slow mounting, the tempest was rising,
While luridly glaring all earth lay expecting,
Voiceless and breathless, the yell of the tyrant.
Thus he entered the high, vacant halls of the forest:
No bird in its branches, no antler beneath them,
Nor boom of the beetle, nor bay of the wild dog.
Only, Priestess of Mystery, glides a White Shadow,
On he’r lip her forefinger — and faithful he followed,
Well knowing his fate led him on to the combat,
Well knowing a mandate of silence upon him.
The trunks of the great trees like time-furrowed castles, —
Gray glimmered through darkness impassive and awful,
Broad at base and at battlement broader the oak boles.
And a canopy dusky, snake-twisted, of branches,
Like crypts of cathedrals, low-groined and broadpillared,
Stretched mazily this way and that in perspective.
As sweet the evening glories faded
O’er Fionula’s bower,
A lone sad voice the maid upbraided,
Charming the twilight hour.
With parted lips and hand to ear
She hearkened to the melody
So wildly and so faintly clear,
At the open casement dreamily.
The lonely splendour of a star
Lay trembling in her virgin tear;
And with the music, nigh or far,
There fell upon her heart a fear;
Swift round her ivory throat she drew
The cloak that doth in crimson fold her —
Swift round her shoulder, veined with blue,
And polished as a statue’s shoulder;
Then snapped the jewel in her cloak,
Still through the casement wildly gazing,
Like one whom spirit-songs have woke
From earthly sleep to sights amazing.
The Princess to the postern hied,
Upon her throat the jewel’s spark;
Her hand her pearly ear beside,
Her great eyes gleaming through the dark.
“From close of flower, till song of lark,
By mist or moonshine, hill and hollow —
To follow still and still to hark —
To hearken still and still to follow.”
Strange music of an ecstasy —
’Twas hardly sound, and came unsought;
She smiled, and listened to the lay
As listening to a sad, sweet thought.
Glares in the west a stain of blood,
The Wizard North its black storm raises —
And eastward o’er Morrua’s wood,
One great white star portentous gazes.
Sitting, spinning in the hall,
With lamps alight, the sunset after,
The whirring task her maids speed all
With silvery song and girlish laughter.
But, like an apparition, she
Is lost — and lost — and lost for ever,
And O their loving eyes shall see
The splendrous Fionula — never.
Lost; but her love she’ll never find —
Sooner the foam wreath in its wake,
O’er ocean’s waste, in ocean’s wind,
The flying ship shall overtake.
Through the woods of Morrua and over its rootknotted flooring,
The hero speeds onward, alone, on his terrible message;
When faint and far-off, like the gathering gallop of battle,
The hoofs of the hurricane louder and louder come leaping,
There’s a gasp and a silence around him a swooning of nature,
And the forest trees moan, and complain with a presage of evil.
And nearer, like great organ’s wailing, high-piping through thunder,
Subsiding, then lifted again to a thousand-tongued tumult,
And crashing, and deafening and yelling in clangorous uproar
Soaring onward, down-riding, and rending the wreck of its conquest,
The tempest swoops on: all the branches before it bend, singing
Like cordage in shipwreck; before it sear leaves fly like vapour;
Before it bow down like wide armies, plumed heads of the forest,
In frenzy dark-rolling, up-tossing their scathed arms like Maenads.
Dizzy lightnings split this way and that in the blind void above him;
For a moment long passages reeling and wild with the tempest,
In the blue map and dazzle of lightning, throb vivid and vanish;
And white glare the wrinkles and knots of the oak trees beside him,
While close overhead clap the quick mocking palms of the Storm-Fiend.
Now southward drift the din and glare,
Like navies battling in the air;
On boom the thunder and the wind,
And wreck and silence lie behind,
While whirlwind roars and lightning burns,
The hero neither tires nor turns.
‘Mid the wild wail of shrilly boughs,
And pealing thunder’s claps and soughs;
And by the lightning’s livid tapers,
And the black pall of eddying vapours,
He follows the White Shadow’s call,
That never swerved for flash or wind,
And never stops nor looks behind,
But leads him to his funeral.
The forest opens as he goes,
And smitten trees in groups and rows
Beneath the tempest’s tune,
Stand in the mists of midnight drooping,
By moss-grown rocks fantastic stooping,
In the blue shadows of the yellow moon.