THE GHOST OF SHAKESPEARE

Crimson was the twilight, under that crab-tree,

Where — old tales tell us — all a midsummer's night,

A mad young poacher, drunk with mead of elfin-land,

Lodged with the fern-owl, and looked at the stars.

There, from the dusk where the dream of Piers Plowman

Darkens on the sunset, to this dusk of our own,

I read, in a history, the record of our world.

The hawk-moth, the currant-moth, the red-striped tiger-moth

Shimmered all around me, so white shone those pages;

And, in among the blue boughs, the bats flew low.

I slumbered, the history slipped from my hand.

Then I saw a dead man, dreadful in the moon-dawn,

The ghost of the master, bowed upon that book.

He muttered as he searched it,— what vast convulsion

Mocks my sexton's curse now, shakes our English clay?

Whereupon I told him, and asked him in turn

Whether he espied any light in those pages

Which painted an epoch later than his own.

I am a shadow, he said, and I see none....

I am a shadow, he said, and I see none.

Then, O then he murmured to himself ( while the moon hung

Crimson as a lanthorn of Cathay in that crab-tree ),

Laughing at his work and the world, as I thought,

Yet with some bitterness, yet with some beauty,

Mocking his own music, these wraiths of his rhymes: