ELPHIN.

The eve was a burning copper,

The night was a boundless black

Where wells of the lightning crumbled

And boiled with blazing rack,

When I came to the coal-black castle

With the wild rain on my back.

Thrice under its goblin towers,

Where the causey of rock was laid,

Thrice, there at its spider portal,

My scornful bugle brayed,

But never a warder questioned,—

An owl's was the answer made.

When the heaven above was blistered

One scald of blinding storm,

And the blackness clanged like a cavern

Of iron where demons swarm,

I rode in the court of the castle

With the shield upon my arm.

My sword unsheathed and certain

Of the visor of my casque,

My steel steps challenged the donjon

My gauntlet should unmask;

But never a knight or varlet

To stay or slay or ask.

My heels on the stone ground iron,

My fists on the bolts clashed steel;—

In the hall, the roar of the torrent,

In the turret, the thunder's peal;—

And I found her there in the turret

Alone by her spinning-wheel.

She spun the flax of a spindle,

And I wondered on her face;

She spun the flax of a spindle,

And I marvelled on her grace;

She spun the flax of a spindle,

And I watched a little space.

But nerves of my manhood weakened;

The heart in my breast was wax;

Myself but the hide of an image

Out-stuffed with the hards of flax:—

She spun and she smiled a-spinning

A spindle of blood-red flax.

She spun and she laughed a-spinning

The blood of my veins in a skein;

But I knew how the charm was mastered,

And snapped in the hissing vein;

So she wove but a fiery scorpion

That writhed from her hands again....

Fleeing in rain and in tempest,

Saw by the cataract's bed,—

Cancers of ulcerous fire,

Wounds of a bloody red,—

Its windows glare in the darkness

Eyes of a dragon's head.