for they resolvëd in some forest dim
to kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.
So on a pleasant morning, as he leant
into the sun-rise, o’er the balustrade
of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent
their footing through the dews; and to him said,
“You seem there in the Quiet of content,
Lorenzo, and we are most loath to invade
calm speculation; but if you are wise,
bestride your steed while cold is in the skies.
to-day we purpose, aye, this hour we mount
to spur three leagues towards the Apennine;
come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
his dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont,
bowed a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine;
and went in haste, to get in readiness,
with belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman’s dress.
And as he to the court-yard passed along,
each third step did he pause, and listened oft
if he could hear his lady’s matin-song,
or the light whisper of her footstep soft;
and as he thus over his passion hung,
he heard a laugh full musical aloft;
when, looking up, he saw her features bright
smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.
“Love, Isabel!” said he, “I was in pain
lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow:
Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain
I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow
of a poor three hours’ absence? but we’ll gain
out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow.
Good bye! I’ll soon be back.”—“Good bye!” said she:—
and as he went she chanted merrily.
So the two brothers and their murdered man
rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream
gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan
itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
the brothers’ faces in the ford did seem,
lorenzo’s flush with love.—They passed the water
into a forest Quiet for the slaughter.
There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
there in that forest did his great love cease;
ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
it aches in loneliness—is ill at peace
as the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin:
they dipped their swords in the water, and did tease
their horses homeward, with convulsëd spur,
each richer by his being a murderer.
They told their sister how, with sudden speed,
lorenzo had ta’en ship for foreign lands,
because of some great urgency and need
in their affairs, requiring trusty hands.
Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,
and ‘scape at once from Hope’s accursëd bands;
to-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
and the next day will be a day of sorrow.
She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
sorely she wept until the night came on,
and then, instead of love, O misery!
She brooded o’er the luxury alone:
his image in the dusk she seemed to see,
and to the silence made a gentle moan,
spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
and on her couch low murmuring “Where? O where?”
But Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long
its fiery vigil in her single breast;
she fretted for the golden hour, and hung
upon the time with feverish unrest—
not long—for soon into her heart a throng
of higher occupants, a richer zest,
came tragic; passion not to be subdued,
and sorrow for her love in travels rude.
In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
the breath of Winter comes from far away,
and the sick west continually bereaves
of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
of death among the bushes and the leaves,
to make all bare before he dares to stray
from his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
by gradual decay from beauty fell,
because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes
she asked her brothers, with an eye all pale,
striving to be itself, what dungeon climes
could keep him off so long? They spake a tale
time after time, to Quiet her. Their crimes
came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom’s vale;
and every night in dreams they groaned aloud,
to see their sister in her snowy shroud.
And she had died in drowsy ignorance,
but for a thing more deadly dark than all;
it came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance,
which saves a sick man from the feathered pall
for some few gasping moments; like a lance,
waking an Indian from his cloudy hall
with cruel pierce, and bringing him again
sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain.
It was a vision.—In the drowsy gloom,
the dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
had marred his glossy hair which once could shoot
luster into the sun, and put cold doom
upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
from his lorn voice, and past his loamëd ears
had made a miry channel for his tears.
Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
for there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
to speak as when on earth it was awake,
and Isabella on its music hung:
languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
as in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung;
and through it moaned a ghostly under-song,
like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
with love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
from the poor girl by magic of their light,
the while it did unthread the horrid woof
of the late darkened time,—the murderous spite
of pride and avarice,—the dark pine roof
in the forest,—and the sodden turfëd dell,
where, without any word, from stabs he fell.
Saying moreover, “Isabel, my sweet!
red whortle-berries droop above my head,
and a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
comes from beyond the river to my bed:
go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
and it shall comfort me within the tomb.”
“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human-nature dwelling
alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
while little sounds of life are round me knelling,
and glossy bees at noon do field ward pass,
and many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
and thou art distant in Humanity.”
“I know what was, I feel full well what is,
and I should rage, if spirits could go mad;
though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,
that paleness warms my grave, as though I had
a Seraph chosen from the bright abyss
to be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;
thy beauty gr
ows upon me, and I feel
a greater love through all my essence steal.”
The Spirit mourned “Adieu!”—dissolved and left
the atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
as when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
we put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
and see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
it made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache,
and in the dawn she started up awake;
“Ha! ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life,
I thought the worst was simple misery;
I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife
portioned us—happy days, or else to die;
but there is crime—a brother’s bloody knife!
Sweet Spirit, thou hast schooled my infancy:
I’ll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,
and greet thee morn and even in the skies.”
When the full morning came, she had devised
how she might secret to the forest hie;
how she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
and sing to it one latest lullaby;
how her short absence might be unsurmised,
while she the inmost of the dream would try.
Resolved, she took with her an aged nurse,
and went into that dismal forest-hearse.
See, as they creep along the river side,
how she doth whisper to that aged Dame,
and, after looking round the champaign wide,
shows her a knife.—“What feverous hectic flame
burns in thee, child?—What good can thee betide,
that thou should’st smile again?”—The evening came,
and they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed;
the flint was there, the berries at his head.
Who hath not loitered in a green church-yard,
and let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
to see skull, coffined bones, and funeral stole;
pitying each form that hungry Death hath marred
and filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
when Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
She gazed into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
one glance did fully all its secrets tell;
clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
upon the murderous spot she seemed to grow,
like to a native lily of the dell:
then with her knife, all sudden, she began
to dig more fervently than misers can.
Soon she turned up a soiled glove, whereon
her silk had played in purple fantasies,
she kissed it with a lip more chill than stone,
and put it in her bosom, where it dries
and freezes utterly unto the bone
those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:
then ‘gan she work again; nor stayed her care,
but to throw back at times her veiling hair.
That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
until her heart felt pity to the core
at sight of such a dismal laboring,
and so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
and put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
three hours they labored at this travail sore;
at last they felt the kernel of the grave,
and Isabella did not stamp and rave.
Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
O for the gentleness of old Romance,
the simple plaining of a minstrel’s song!
Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
for here, in truth, it doth not well belong
to speak:—O turn thee to the very tale,
and taste the music of that vision pale.
With duller steel than the Persean sword
they cut away no formless monster’s head,
but one, whose gentleness did well accord
with death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
if Love impersonate was ever dead,
pale Isabella kissed it, and low moaned.
‘Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned.
In anxious secrecy they took it home,
and then the prize was all for Isabel:
she calmed its wild hair with a golden comb,
and all around each eye’s sepulchral cell
pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
with tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
she drenched away:—and still she combed, and kept
sighing all day—and still she kissed, and wept.
Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews
of precious flowers plucked in Araby,
and divine liquids come with odorous ooze
through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,—
she wrapped it up; and for its tomb did choose
a garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
and covered it with mould, and o’er it set
sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
and she forgot the blue above the trees,
and she forgot the dells where waters run,
and she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
she had no knowledge when the day was done,
and the new morn she saw not: but in peace
hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
and moistened it with tears unto the core.
And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
so that it smelt more balmy than its peers
of Basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
from the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
so that the jewel, safely casketed,
came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.
O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, from some somber isle,
unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
and make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.
Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
from the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
Through bronzëd lyre in tragic order go,
and touch the strings into a mystery;
sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
for simple Isabel is soon to be
among the dead: She withers, like a palm
cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.
O leave the palm to wither by itself;
let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!—
It may not be—those Baalites of pelf,
her brethren, noted the continual shower
from her dead eyes; and many a curious elf,
among her kindred, wondered that such dower
of youth and beauty should be thrown aside
by one marked out to be a Noble’s bride.
And, furthermore, her brethren wondered much
why she sat drooping by the Basil green,
and why it flourished, as by magic touch;
greatly they wondered what the thing might mean:
they could not surely give belief, that such
a very nothing would have power to wean
her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
and even remembrance of her love�
��s delay.
Therefore they watched a time when they might sift
this hidden whim; and long they watched in vain;
for seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
and seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
and when she left, she hurried back, as swift
as bird on wing to breast its eggs again;
and, patient as a hen-bird, sat her there
beside her Basil, weeping through her hair.
Yet they contrived to steal the Basil-pot,
and to examine it in secret place;
the thing was vile with green and livid spot,
and yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face:
the guerdon of their murder they had got,
and so left Florence in a moment’s space,
never to turn again.—Away they went,
with blood upon their heads, to banishment.
O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
from isles Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
Spirits of grief, sing not your “Well-a-way!”
For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
will die a death too lone and incomplete,
now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet.
Piteous she looked on dead and senseless things,
asking for her lost Basil amorously;
and with melodious chuckle in the strings
of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry
after the Pilgrim in his wanderings,
to ask him where her Basil was; and why
’Twas hid from her: “For cruel ’tis,” said she,
“to steal my Basil-pot away from me.”
And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
in pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
from mouth to mouth through all the country passed:
still is the burthen sung—“O cruelty,
to steal my Basil-pot away from me!”
La Belle Dame Sans Merci1
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
alone and palely loitering;
the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
and no birds sing.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
so haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
and the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
with anguish moist and fever dew;
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 10