When Southern winds sowed all the skies, Angelica! With bloom-storms of the flowering May; When all the battle-field was gay With scented garb of sainted flowers, I found a stream Cold as thy heart to paramours! Deep as the depth of thy blue eyes! And like a dream I found a grotto 'mid the flowers, Cool 'mid the sunlight-sprinkled bowers, Angelica!
My casque I dofft to scoop the fount, Angelica! With beaded pureness bubbling cool-- It clashed into the purling pool;-- Thy name lay chiseled in the rock, And underneath-- And then meseemed deep night did block My steel-chained heart in one huge mount Foreshadowing death!-- _Medoro_ deep in every rock! The Moorish name my soul did mock, Angelica!
No more wild war my veins ensteeps, Angelica! No more gay lists flaunt all their guiles!-- White wastes before me miles on miles With one low, ruby sunset bound-- Thou fleest before, I follow on: a far off sound Of oceans gnawing at dark steeps Swells to a roar.-- 'Mid foam thou smil'st: I spurn the ground-- I sink, I swim, waves hiss around-- Oh, could I sink 'neath the profound, And think of thee no more!
Its casements' diamond disks of glass Stare myriad on a terrace old, Where urns, unkempt with ragged grass, Foam o'er with frothy cold. The snow rounds o'er each stair of stone; The frozen fount is hooped with pearl; Down desolate walks, like phantoms lone, Thin, powd'ry snow-wreaths whirl.
And to each rose-tree's stem that bends With silver snow-combs, glued with frost, It seems each summer rosebud sends Its airy, scentless ghost. The stiff Elizabethan pile Chatters with cold thro' all its panes, And rumbling down each chimney file The mad wind shakes his reins.
Lone in the Northern angle, dim With immemorial dust, it lay, Where each gaunt casement's stony rim Stared lidless to the day. Drear in the Northern angle, hung With olden arras dusky, where Tall, shadowy Tristrams fought and sung For shadowy Isolds fair.
Lies by a dingy cabinet A tarnished lute upon the floor; A talon-footed chair is set Grotesquely by the door. A carven, testered bedstead stands With rusty silks draped all about; And like a moon in murky lands A mirror glitters out.
Dark in the Northern angle, where In musty arras eats and clings The drowsy moth; and frightened there The wild wind sighs and sings Adown the roomy flue and takes And swings the ghostly mirror till It shrieks and creaks, then pulls and shakes The curtains with a will.