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.
