SOME air-born genius, with malignant mouth,
Breathed on the cold clouds of an Arctic zone--
Which o'er long wastes of shore and ocean blown
Swept threatening, vast, toward the amazèd South:
Over the land's fair form at first there stole
A vanward host of vapors, wild and white;
Then loomed the main cloud cohorts, massed in might,
Till earth lay corpse-like, reft of life and soul;
Death-wan she lay, 'neath heavens as cold and pale;
All nature drooped toward darkness and despair;
The dreary woodlands, and the ominous air
Were strangely haunted by a voice of wail.
The woeful sky slow passionless tears did weep,
Each shivering rain-drop frozen ere it fell;
The woodman's axe rang like a muffled knell;
Faintly the echoes answered, fraught with sleep.
The dawn seemed eve; noon, dawn eclipsed of grace;
The evening, night; and tender night became
A formless void, through which no starry flame
Touched the veiled splendor of her sorrowful face;
Like mourning nuns, sad-robed, funereal, bowed,
Day followed day; the birds their quavering notes
Piped here and there from feeble, querulous throats.
Fierce cold beneath--above, one riftless cloud
Wrapped the mute world--for now all winds had died--
And, locked in ice, the fettered forests gave
No sign of life; as silent as the grave
Gloomed the dim, desolate landscape far and wide.
Gazing on these, from out the mist one day
I saw, a shadow on the shadowy sky,
What seemed a phantom bird, that faltering nigh,
Perched by the roof-tree on a withered spray;
With drooping breast he stood, and drooping head;
This fateful time had wrought the Minstrel wrong;
Even as I gazed, our southland lord of song
Dropped through the blasted branches, breathless, dead!
Yet chillier grew the gray, world-haunting shade,
Through which, methought, quick, tremulous wings were heard;
Was it the ghost of that heartbroken bird
Bound for a land where sunlight cannot fade?
