To Petra Camara

In Spain, as Nodier's pen has told, Three officers in night's mid hours Came on a castle dark and old, With sunken eaves and mouldering towers,

A true Anne Radcliffe type it was, With ruined halls and crumbling rooms And windows graven by the claws Of Goya's bats that ranged the glooms.

Now while they feasted, gazed upon By ancient portraits standing guard In their ancestral frames, anon A sudden cry rang thitherward.

Forth from a distant corridor That many a moonbeam's pallid hue Fretted fantastically o'er, A wondrous phantom sped in view.

With bodice high and hair comb-tipped, A woman, running, dancing, hied. Adown the dappled gloom she dipped,-- An iridescent form descried.

A languid, dead, voluptuous mood Filled every act's abandon brief, Till at the door she stopped, and stood Sinister, lovely past belief.

Her raiment crumpled in the tomb Showed here and there a spangle's foil. At every start a faded bloom Dropped petals in her hair's black coil.

A dull scar crossed her bloodless throat, As of a knife. Like rattle chill Of teeth, her castanets she smote Full in their faces awed and still.

Ah, poor bacchante, sad of grace! So wild the sweetness of her spell, The curvèd lips in her white face Had lured a saint from heaven to hell!

Like darkling birds her eyelashes Upon her cheek lay fluttering light. Her kirtle's swinging cadences Displayed her limbs of lustrous white.

She bowed amid a mist of gyres, And with her hand, as dancers may, Like flowers she gathered up desires, And grouped them in a bright bouquet.

Was it a wraith or woman seen, A thing of dreams, or blood and flesh, The flame that burst from out the sheen Of beauty's undulating mesh?

It was a phantom of the past, It was the Spain of olden keep, Who, at the sound of cheer at last, Upbounded from her icy sleep,

In one bolero mad, supreme, Rough-resurrected, powerful, Showing beneath her kirtle's gleam The ribbon wrested from the bull.

About her throat the scar of red The deathblow was, dealt silently Unto a generation dead By every new-born century.

I saw this self-same phantom fleet, All Paris ringing with her praise, When soft, diaphanous, mystic, sweet, La Petra Camara held its gaze,--

Closing her eyes with languor rare, Impassive, passionate of art, And, like the murdered Ines fair, Dancing, a dagger in her heart.