V

He seats himself on a rock and gazes steadily into the stream:

And here alone I sit and it is so!-- O vales and hills! O valley-lands and knobs! What cure have you for woe? What balm that robs The brain of thought, the knowledge of its woe? None! none! ah me! that my sick heart may know!-- The wearying sameness!--yet this thing is so! This thing is so, and still the waters flow, The leaves drop slowly down; the daylight throbs With sun and wind, and yet this thing is so! There is no sympathy in heaven or earth For human sorrow! all we see is mirth, Or madness; cruelty or lust; Nature is heedless of her children’s grief; Man is to her no more than is a leaf, That buds and has its summer, that is brief, Then falls, and mixes with the common dust. Here, at this culvert’s mouth, The shadowy water, flowing toward the south, Seems deepest, stagnant-stayed.-- What is it yonder that makes me afraid? Of my own self afraid?--I do not know!-- What power draws me to the striate stream? What evil? or what dream? Me! dropping pebbles in the quiet wave, That echoes, strange as music in a cave, Hollow and thin; vibrating in the shade, As if ’t were tears that fell, and, falling, made A crystal sound, a shadow wail of woe, Wrung from the rocks and waters there below; An ailing phantom that will not be laid; Complaining ghosts of sobs that fill my breast,-- That will not forth,--and give my heart no rest.

There, in the water, how the lank sword-grass Mats its long blades, each blade a crooked kris, Making a marsh; ’mid which the currents miss Their rock-born melodies. But there and there, one sees The wide-belled mallow, as within a glass, Long-pistiled, leaning o’er The root-contorted shore, As if its own pink image it would kiss. And there the tangled wild-potato vine Lifts beakered blossoms, each a cup of wine, As pale as moonlight is:-- No mandrake, curling convolutions up, Loops heavier blossoms, each a conical cup That swoons moon-nectar and a serpent’s hiss.-- And there tall gipsy lilies, all a-sway, Of coppery hue Streaked as with crimson dew, Mirror fierce faces in the deeps, O’er which they lean, bent in inverted view.-- And where the stream around those rushes creeps, The dragon-fly, in endless error, keeps Sewing the pale-gold gown of day With tangled stitches of a burning blue: Its brilliant body is a needle fine, A thread of azure ray, Black-pinioned, shuttling the shade and shine. But here before me where my pensive shade Looks up at me, the stale stream, stagnant, lies, Deep, dark, but clear and silent; streaked with hues Of ragweed pollen, and of spawny ooze, Through which the seeping bubbles, bursting, rise.-- All flowers here refuse To grow or blossom; beauties, too, are few, That haunt its depths: no glittering minnows braid Its sleepy crystal; and no gravels strew With colored orbs its bottom. Half afraid I shrink from my own eyes There in its cairngorm of reflected skies.-- I know not why, and yet it seems I see-- What is ’t I see there moving stealthily?

I know not what!--But where the kildees wade, Slim in the foamy scum, From that direction hither doth it come, Whate’er it is, that makes my soul afraid. Nearer it draws to where those low rocks ail, Warm rocks, on which some water-snake hath clomb, Basking its spotted body, coiling numb, Brown in the brindled shade.-- At first it seemed a prism on the grail, A bubble’s prism, like the shadow made Of water-striders; then a trail, An angled sparkle in a webby veil Of duckweed, green as verdigris, it swayed Frog-like through deeps, to crouch, a flaccid, pale, Squat bulk below.... I gaze, and though I would, I can not go. Reflected trees and skies, And breeze-blown clouds that lounge at sunny loss, Seem in its stolid eyes, Its fishy gaze, that holds me in strange wise. Ghoul-like it seems to rise, And now to sink; its eldritch features fail, Then come again in rhythmic waviness, With arms like tentacles that seem to press Thro’ weed and water: limbs that writhe and fade, And clench, and twist, and toss, Root-like and gnarled, and cross and inter-cross Through flabby hair of smoky moss.

How horrible to see this thing at night! Or when the sunset slants its brimstone light Above the pool! when, blue, in phantom flight, The will-o’-the-wisps, perhaps, above it reel. Then, haply, would it rise, a rotting green, Up, up, and gather me with arms of steel, Soft steel, and drag me where the wave is white, Beneath that boulder brown, that plants a keel Against the ripple there, a shoulder lean.-- No, no! I must away before ’tis night! Before the fireflies dot The dark with sulphur blurrings bright! Before, upon that height, The white wild-carrots vanish from the sight; And boneset blossoms, tossing there in clusters, Fade to a ridge, a streak of ghostly lustres: And, in that sunlit spot, Yon cedar tree is not! But a huge cap instead, that, half-asleep, Some giant dropped while driving home his sheep: And ’mid those fallow browns And russet grays, the fragrant peak Of yonder timothy stack, Is not a stack, but something hideous, black, That threatens and, grotesquely demon, frowns.

I must away from here.-- Already dusk draws near. The owlet’s dolorous hoot Sounds quavering as a gnome’s wild flute; The toad, within the wet, Begins to tune its goblin flageolet: The slow sun sinks behind Those hills; and, like a withered cheek Of Quaker quiet, sorrow-burdened, there The spectral moon ’s defined Above those trees,--as in a wild-beast’s lair A golden woman, dead, with golden hair,-- Above that mass of fox-grape vines That, like a wrecked appentice, roofs those pines.-- Oh, I am faint and weak.-- I must away, away! Before the close of day!-- Already at my back I feel the woods grow black; And sense the evening wind, Guttural and gaunt and blind, Whining behind me like an unseen wolf. Deeper now seems the gulf Into whose deeps I gaze; From which, with madness and amaze, That seems to rise, the horror there, With webby hands and mossy eyes and hair.-- Oh, will it pierce, With all its feelers fierce, Beyond the pool’s unhallowed water-streak?--

Yes; I must go, must go! Must leave this ghastly creek, This place of hideous fear! For everywhere I hear A dripping footstep near, A voice, like water, gurgling at my ear, Saying, “Come to me! come and rest below! Sleep and forget her and with her thy woe!”-- I try to fly.--I can not.--Yes, and no!-- What madness holds me!--God! that obscene, slow, Sure mastering chimera there, Perhaps, has fastened round my neck, Or in my matted hair, Some horrible feeler, dire, invisible!-- Off, off! thou hoop of Hell! Thou devil’s coil!... Back, back into thy cesspool! Off of me!-- See, how the waters thrash and boil! At last! at last! thank God! my soul is free! My mind is freed of that vile mesmerism That drew me to--what end? my God! what end? Haply ’twas merely fancy, that strange fiend: My fancy, and a prism Of sunset in the stream, a firefly fleck, That now, a lamp of golden fairy oil, Lights me my homeward way, the way I flee. No more I stare, magnetic-fixed; nor reck, Nor little care to foil The madness there! the murder there! that slips Back to its lair of slime, that seeps and drips, That sought in vain to fasten on my lips.