The Song of Arda

Low as a lute, my love, beneath the call     Of storm, I hear a melancholy wind;     The memorably mournful wind of yore     Which is the very brother of the one     That wanders, like a hermit, by the mound     Of Death, in lone Annatanam. A song     Was shaped for this, what time we heard outside     The gentle falling of the faded leaf     In quiet noons: a song whose theme doth turn     On gaps of Ruin and the gay-green clifts     Beneath the summits haunted by the moon.     Yea, much it travels to the dens of dole;     And in the midst of this strange rhyme, my lords,     Our Desolation like a phantom sits     With wasted cheeks and eyes that cannot weep     And fastened lips crampt up in marvellous pain.     A song in whose voice is the voice of the foam     And the rhyme of the wintering wave,     And the tongue of the things that eternally roam     In forest, in fell or in cave;     But mostly tis like to the Wind without home     In the glen of a desolate grave     Of a deep and desolate grave.     The torrent flies over the thunder-struck clift     With many and many a call;     The leaves are swept down, and a dolorous drift     Is hurried away with the fall.     But mostly tis like the Wind without home     In the glen of a desolate grave     Of a deep and desolate grave.     Whoever goes thither by night or by day     Must mutter, O Father, to Thee,     For the shadows that startle, the sounds that waylay     Are heavy to hear and to see;     And a step and a moan and a whisper for aye     Have made it a sorrow to be     A sorrow of sorrows to be.     Oh! cover your faces and shudder, and turn     And hide in the dark of your hair,     Nor look to the Glen in the Mountains, to learn     Of the mystery mouldering there;     But rather sit low in the ashes and urn     Dead hopes in your mighty despair     In the depths of your mighty despair.