The Dread Voyage Poems

by William Wilfred Campbell

 

STORM

 
BLACK trees wind-shaken against the wild night sky,
      Deep in your glooms you cradle the voice of storms;
While far to west and south the night blows by,
      With shadowy, fleeting forms.

Under the stars with turbid, sullen mood,
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      Hid in a dream of dark the river sweeps;
Where all the world by frozen field and wood,
      Chilled into numbness, sleeps.

Here dwell no pallid spirits of the day,
      But out across the icy, desolate dream,
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The world of night is all storm-blown one way,
      In a loud, gusty gleam.

Soon, soon from arctic cave and bastion strong,
      With elves of frost and wrinkled, sleep-eyed ghosts,
Out of the north with hornings loud and long,
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      Will come the grim storm-hosts.

And faster and faster on the shadowy air,
      Across the phantom glimmerings of the moon,
Will fold the silences, far, chilled and bare,
      In one white, mantling swoon;
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And howl and shriek and moan and pass away,
      Leaving the world one whited death forlorn,
When stir the slim-cold-fingered ghosts of grey
      The curtains of the morn.