FullReads

Then rose a wild sound of the human voice choking
Through vile brutal organs–low tremulous croaking:
Cries swallow’d abruptly–deep animal tones
Attuned to strange passion, and full-utter’d groans;
All shuddering weaken, till hush’d in a pause
Of tongues in mute motion and wide-yawning jaws;
And I guessed that those horrors were meant to tell o’er
The tale of their woes; but the silence told more,
That writhed on their tongues; and I knelt on the sod,
And pray’d with my voice to the cloud-stirring god,
For the sad congregation of supplicants there,
That upturn’d to his heaven brute faces of prayer;
And I ceased, and they utter’d a moaning so deep,
That I wept for my heart-ease,–but they could not weep,
And gazed with red eyeballs, all wistfully dry,
At the comfort of tears in a stag’s human eye.
Then I motion’d them round, and, to soothe their distress,
I caress’d, and they bent them to meet my caress,
Their necks to my arm, and their heads to my palm,
And with poor grateful eyes suffer’d meekly and calm
Those tokens of kindness, withheld by hard fate
From returns that might chill the warm pity to hate;
So they passively bow’d–save the serpent, that leapt
To my breast like a sister, and pressingly crept
In embrace of my neck, and with close kisses blister’d
My lips in rash love,–then drew backward, and glister’d
Her eyes in my face, and loud hissing affright,
Dropt down, but swift started away from my sight!

This sorrow was theirs, but thrice wretched my lot,
Turn’d brute in my soul, though my body was not,
When I fled from the sorrow of womanly faces,
That shrouded their woe in the shade of lone places,
And dash’d off bright tears, till their fingers were wet,
And then wiped their lids with long tresses of jet:
But I fled–though they stretch’d out their hands, all entangled
With hair, and blood-stain’d of the breasts they had mangled,–
Though they call’d–and perchance but to ask, had I seen
Their loves, or to tell the vile wrongs that had been:
But I stayed not to hear, lest the story should hold
Some hell-form of words, some enchantment, once told,
Might translate me in flesh to a brute; and I dreaded
To gaze on their charms, lest my faith should be wedded
With some pity,–and love in that pity perchance–
To a thing not all lovely; for once at glance,
Methought, where one sat, I descried a bright wonder
That flow’d like a long silver rivulet under
The long fenny grass,–with so lovely a breast,
Could it be a snake-tail made the charm of the rest?

So I roamed in that circle of horrors, and Fear
Walk’d with me, by hills, and in valleys, and near
Cluster’d trees for their gloom–not to shelter from heat–
But lest a brute-shadow should grow at my feet;
And besides that full oft in the sunshiny place
Dark shadows would gather like clouds on its face,
In the horrible likeness of demons (that none
Could see, like invisible flames in the sun);
But grew to one monster that seized on the light,
Like the dragon that strangles the moon in the night;
Fierce sphinxes, long serpents, and asps of the south;
Wild birds of huge beak, and all horrors that drouth
Engenders of slime in the land of the pest,
Vile shapes without shape, and foul bats of the West,
Bringing Night on their wings; and the bodies wherein
Great Brahma imprisons the spirits of sin,
Many-handed, that blent in one phantom of fight
Like a Titan, and threatfully warr’d with the light;
I have heard the wild shriek that gave signal to close,
When they rushed on that shadowy Python of foes,
That met with sharp beaks and wide gaping of jaws,
With flappings of wings, and fierce grasping of claws,
And whirls of long tails:–I have seen the quick flutter
Of fragments dissevered,–and necks stretch’d to utter
Long screamings of pain,–the swift motion of blows,
And wrestling of arms–to the flight at the close,
When the dust of the earth startled upward in rings,
And flew on the whirlwind that follow’d their wings.