The Curse of Mother Flood

Wizened the wood is, and wan is the way through it;     White as a corpse is the face of the fen;     Only blue adders abide in and stray through it     Adders and venom and horrors to men.     Here is the ghost of a garden whose minister     Fosters strange blossoms that startle and scare.     Red as mans blood is the sun that, with sinister     Flame, is a menace of hell in the air.     Wrinkled and haggard the hills are the jags of them     Gape like to living and ominous things:     Storm and dry thunder cry out in the crags of them     Fire, and the wind with a woe in its wings.     Never a moon without clammy-cold shroud on it     Hitherward comes, or a flower-like star!     Only the hiss of the tempest is loud on it     Hiss, and the moan of a bitter sea bar.     Here on this waste, and to left and to right of it,     Never is lisp or the ripple of rain:     Fierce is the daytime and wild is the night of it,     Flame without limit and frost without wane!     Trees half alive, with the sense of a curse on them,     Shudder and shrink from the black heavy gale;     Ghastly, with boughs like the plumes of a hearse on them:     Barren of blossom and blasted with bale.     Under the cliff that stares down to the south of it     Back by the horns of a hazardous hill,     Dumb is the gorge with a grave in the mouth of it     Still, as a corpse in a coffin is still.     Never there hovers a hope of the Spring by it     Never a glimmer of yellow and green:     Only the bat with a whisper of wing by it     Flits like a life out of flesh and unseen.     Here are the growths that are livid and glutinous,     Speckled, and bloated with poisonous blood:     This is the haunt of the viper-breed mutinous:     Cursed with the curse of weird Catherine Flood.     He that hath looked on it hurried aghast from it,     Hair of him frozen with horror straightway,     Chased by a sudden strange pestilent blast from it     Where is the speech of him what can he say?     Hath he not seen the fierce ghost of a hag in it?     Heard maledictions that startle the stars?     Dumb is his mouth as a mouth with a gag in it     Mute is his life as a life within bars.     Just the one glimpse of that grey, shrieking woman there     Ringed by a circle of furnace and fiend!     He that went happy and healthy and human there     Where shall the white leper fly to be cleaned?     Here, in a pit with indefinite doom on it,     Here, in the fumes of a feculent moat,     Under an alp with inscrutable gloom on it,     Squats the wild witch with a ghoul at her throat!     Black execration that cannot be spoken of     Speech of red hell that would suffocate Song,     Starts from this terror with never a token of     Day and its loveliness all the year long.     Sin without name to it man never heard of it     Crime that would startle a fiend from his lair,     Blasted this Glen, and the leaf and the bird of it     Where is there hope for it, Father, O where?     Far in the days of our fathers, the life in it     Blossomed and beamed in the sight of the sun:     Yellow and green and the purple were rife in it,     Singers of morning and waters that run.     Storm of the equinox shed no distress on it,     Thunder spoke softly, and summer-time left     Sunsets forsaken bright beautiful dress on it     Blessing that shone half the night in the cleft.     Hymns of the highlands hosannas from hills by it,     Psalms of great forests made holy the spot:     Cool were the mosses and clear were the rills by it     Far in the days when the Horror was not.     Twenty miles south is the strong, shining Hawkesbury     Spacious and splendid, and lordly with blooms.     There, between mountains magnificent, walks bury     Miles of their beauty in green myrtle glooms.     There, in the dell, is the fountain with falls by it     Falls, and a torrent of summering stream:     There is the cave with the hyaline halls by it     Haunt of the echo and home of the dream.     Over the hill, by the marvellous base of it,     Wanders the wind with a song in its breath     Out to the sea with the gold on the face of it     Twenty miles south of the Valley of Death.