human
Can you write me a poem about gerald metcalfe and christabel in the style of George Cary Eggleston?
assistant
Sure, here's a poem about gerald metcalfe and christabel in the style of George Cary Eggleston:
  Mr. Gerald Metcalfe, for Coleridge's "Christabel," in _The
Poems of Coleridge_, published by John Lane.
_Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread._
I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night.
I went to the window to see the sight:
All the dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.
In its delicate loveliness "The Forsaken Merman" ranks high
among Mr. Arnold's poems. It is the story of a Sea-King,
married to a mortal maiden, who forsook him and her children
under the impulse of a Christian conviction that she must
return and pray for her soul.--_H. W. Paul._
She sate by the pillar: we saw her clear;
"Margaret, hist! Come quick, we are here!
Dear heart," I said, "We are long alone;
The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan."
But, ah, she gave me never a look,
For her eyes were seal'd to the holy book.
. . . a picturesque embodiment of a strange mediaeval legend
touching Judas Iscariot, who is supposed to be released from
Hell for a few hours every Christmas because he had done in
his life a single deed of charity.--_H. W. Paul._
At each throw of my net there's a life must go down into death
on the sea.
At each throw of my net it comes laden, O rare, with my wish
back to me.
With my choice of all treasures most peerless that lapt in the
oceans be.
Who rideth through the driving rain
At such a headlong speed?
Naked and pale he rides amain,
Upon a naked steed.
Who meet there, my mother, at dawn and at even?
Who meet by that wall, never looking at heaven?
O sweetest my sister, what doeth with thee
The ghost of a nun with a brown rosary
And a face turned from heaven?
And the socket floats and flares,
And the house-beams groan
And a foot unknown
Is surmised on the garret stairs
And the locks slip unawares. . .
The beauty is chiefly in the central idea of forgiveness, but
the workmanship of this composition has also a very remarkable
beauty, a Celtic beauty of weirdness, such as we seldom find
in a modern composition touching religious
tradition.--_Lafcadio Hearn._
The body of Judas Iscariot
Lay stretched along the snow.
'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot
Ran swiftly to and fro.
The churchyard bride is accustomed to appear to the last
mourner in the churchyard after a burial, and, changing its
sex to suit the occasion, exacts a promise and a fatal kiss
from the unfortunate lingerer.
He pressed her lips as the words were spoken,
And his banshee's wail--now far and broken--
Murmured "Death" as he gave the token
By the bonny green woods of Killeevy.
"The Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by
Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house on the occasion of
the dedication of St. Mary Redcliffe's. One after another the
"antichi spiriti dolenti" rise up and salute the new edifice:
Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman
knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol.--_H. A.
The thing attempted in "Christabel" is the most difficult of
execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by
daylight--and the success is complete.--_John Gibson
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.
'Twas all souls' night, and to and fro
The quick and dead together walked,
The quick and dead together talked,
On Kingston bridge.
Another elaborate variation on the theme of the return of a
mother from her grave to rescue her children. Miss Crawford's
mother does not go as far as the ghost in Robert Buchanan's
"Dead Mother," who not only makes three trips to assemble her
neglected family, but manages to appear to their delinquent
father, to his great discomfort and the permanent loss of his
sleep.
A ballad unsurpassed in our literature for its weird
suggestiveness.--_Richard Garnett._
She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine;
The sorrows of thy line!
An' oh! mon Dieu! w'en he turn hees head
I'm seein' de face of my boy is dead.
This was the last of the pirate crew;
But many a night the black flag flew
From the mast of a spectre vessel sailed
By a spectre band that wept and wailed
For the wreck they had wrought on the sea, on the land,
For the innocent blood they had spilt on the sand
=Field=, Eugene. The Peter-bird. (In his Songs and Other Verse.)
These are the voices of those left by the boy in the farmhouse,
Into the smoke of that witch brewing her damnable porridge!
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer--a shade.
O hush your crowing, both grey and red,
Or he'll be going to join the dead;
O cease from calling his ghost to the mould
And I'll come crowning your combs with gold.
Upon those wheels on any path
The rain will follow loud,
And he who meets that ghostly man
Will meet a thunder-cloud.
And whosoever speaks with him
May next bespeak his shroud.
Still another phantom ship, a treacherous hulk that broke from
its moorings and drifted with a crew of children into the fog.
Hard was the struggle, but at the last
With a stormy pang old Mawgan past,
And away, away, beneath their sight,
Gleam'd the red sail at pitch of night.
Dabbled with blood are its awful lips
Grinning in horrible glee.
The wolves that follow with scurrying feet
Sniffing that goblin scent, at once
Scatter in terror, while it slips
Away, to the shore of the frozen sea.
The Hag is astride,
This night for to ride,
The Devil and she together.
Through thick, and through thin,
Now out, and then in,
Though ne'er so foul be the weather.
O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
"The place is Haunted!"
A man and maid are plighting their troth in the tomb of an old
knight, the girl's father, when the man lucklessly drops the
ring through a crack in the floor of the tomb.
"Let not thy heart be harried and sore
For a little thing!"
"Nay! but behold what broodeth there!
See the cold sheen of his silvery hair!
Look how his eyeballs roll and stare,
Seeking thy handsel ring!"
Ha! they are on us, close without!
Shut tight the shelter where we lie!
With hideous din the monster rout,
Dragon and vampire, fill the sky!
My curragh sailed on the western main,
And I saw, as I viewed the sea,
A withered old man upon a wave,
And he fixed his eyes on me.
=Keats=, John. La Belle Dame sans Merci.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd---"La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall."
"A serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,
Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
And Lycius' arms were empty of delight,
As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
The swevens came up round Harold the earl
Like motes in the sunnes beam;
And over him stood the Weird Lady
In her charmed castle over the sea,
Sang "Lie thou still and dream."
--Ne m'arrete pas, fantome odieux!
Je vais epouser ma belle aux doux yeux.
--O mon cher epoux, la tombe eternelle
Sera notre lit de noce, dit-elle.
Je suis morte!--Et lui, la voyant ainsi,
D'angoisse et d'amour tombe mort aussi.
'Tis the Indian's babe, they say,
Fairy stolen; changed a fay;
And still I hear her calling, calling, calling,
In the mossy woods of Carr!
For right ahead lay the Ship of the Dead
The ghostly Carmilhan!
Her masts were stripped, her yards were bare,
And on her bowsprit, poised in air,
=Macdonald=, George. Janet. (In Linton and Stoddard's Ballads and
The night was lown and the stars sat still
A glintin' down the sky;
And the souls crept out of their mouldy graves
A' dank wi' lying by.
And every year at Beltan E'en
The Kelpie gallops across the green
On a steed as fleet as the wintry wind,
With Jessie's mournful ghost behind.
The linen that would wrap the dead
She beetled on a stone,
She stood with dripping hands, blood-red,
Low singing all alone--
"His linen robes are pure and white,
For Fergus More must die tonight."
The hungry worm my sister is,
The winding sheet I wear.
And cold and weary lasts our night,
Till that last morn appear.
They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her birch canoe.
No one walks there now;
Except in the white moonlight
The white ghosts walk in a row,
If one could see it, an awful sight.
"Listen!" said Fair Yolande of the flowers,
"This is the tune of Seven Towers."
I in a vision
Saw my lost sweetheart,
Fearlessly toward me
I saw her stray.
So pale! I thought then;
She smiled her answer:
"My heart, my spirit,
I've kissed away."
To-night on holy Saturday
The weary ghost came back,
And laid his hand upon my brow,
And whispered me, "Alack!
There sits no angel by the tomb,
The Sepulchre is black."
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
And we passed to the end of a vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb--
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said--"What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of that legended tomb?"
She replied--"Ulalume--Ulalume--
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume."
She never doubts but she always wonders. Again and again in
imagination she crosses the bridge of death and explores the
farther shore. Her ghosts come back with familiar forms,
familiar sensations, and familiar words.--_Elisabeth Luther
I looked and saw the ghosts
Dotting plain and mound.
They stood in the blank moonlight
But no shadow lay on the ground.
They spoke without a voice
And they leaped without a sound.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
"We must not look at goblin men.
We must not buy their fruits;
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
It was Lilith the wife of Adam.
(Eden Bower's in flower)
Not a drop of her blood was human,
But she was made like a soft sweet woman.
Its forty-two short verses unfold the whole story of the
wronged woman's ruthless vengeance on her false lover as she
watches the melting of the "waxen man" which, according to the
old superstitions, is to carry with it the destruction, body
and soul, of him in whose likeness it was fashioned.--_H. R.
"Ah! What white thing at the door has cross'd,
Ah! What is this that sighs in the frost?"
"A soul that's lost as mine is lost,
Little brother!"
Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
'Twas lang i' the night, and the bairnies grat.
Their mither she under the mools heard that.
A vision appearing to a Scottish sentinel on the eve of
. . . Down the destined plain
'Twixt Britain and the bands of France
Wild as marsh-borne meteor's glance,
Strange phantoms wheeled a revel dance
And doom'd the future slain.
Drawn up I was right off my feet,
Into the mist and off my feet,
And, dancing on each chimney top
I saw a thousand darling imps
Keeping time with skip and hop.
Then I mount the blast, and we ride full fast,
And laugh as we stride the storm,
I, and the witch of the Cruachan Ben
And the scowling-eyed Seul-Gorm.
=Shanly=, C. D. The Walker of the Snow. (In Stedman's Victorian
. . . I saw by the sickly moonlight
As I followed, bending low,
That the walking of the stranger
Left no footmarks on the snow.
=Sharp=, William. ("Fiona McLeod.") Cap'n Goldsack.
Down in the yellow bay where the scows are sleeping,
Where among the dead men the sharks flit to and fro--
There Cap'n Goldsack goes creeping, creeping, creeping,
Looking for his treasure down below.
I have 'nointed myself with infant's fat,
The fiends have been my slaves.
From sleeping babes I have sucked the breath,
And breaking by charms the sleep of death,
I have call'd the dead from their graves.
And the Devil will fetch me now in fire
My witchcrafts to atone;
And I who have troubled the dead man's grave
Will never have rest in my own.
But when the year is at its close
Right down the road to Hell he goes.
There the gaunt porters all agrin
Fling back the gates to let him in,
Then damned and devil, one and all,
Make mirth and hold high carnival.
The four boards of the coffin lid
Heard all the dead man did.
The first curse was in his mouth,
Made of grave's mould and deadly drouth.
The most successful rendering of Buerger's much-translated
"Lenore," and the direct inspiration of Scott's "William and
Tramp, tramp across the land they speede,
Splash, splash across the sea:
"Hurrah! The dead can ride apace.
Dost fear to ride with me?"
What is it cries with the crying of the curlews?
What comes apace on those fearful, stealthy feet?
Back from the chill sea-deeps, gliding o'er the sand dunes,
Home to the old home, once again to meet?
No foot is on thy silent deck,
Upon thy helm no hand,
No ripple hath the soundless wind
That smites thee from the land.
Ring and bracelet all are gone,
And that ice-cold hand withdrawn;
But she hears a murmur low,
Full of sweetness, full of woe,
Half a sigh and half a moan:
"Fear not! Give the dead her own."
_The darkness behind me is burning with eyes,
It needs not my turning, I know otherwise:
The air is a-quiver with rustle of wings
And I feel the cold shiver of spiritual things!_
from "The Book of Winifred Maynard."_
. . . Down the path--
_Is it but shadow?_--steals a thread of wrath,
A red bright thread. It reaches him. He reels.
_Wet! Warm!_ Wily athwart his step it steals
And stains his white court footgear, toes to heels.
There was a damned successful Poet.
There was a Woman like the sun.
And they were dead. They did not know it.
They did not know their time was done.
So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams.
The Bridegroom smiled a twisted smile,
"The wine is strong," he said.
The Bride she twirled her wedding ring
Nor lifted up her head;
And there were three at John Flint's board,
And one of them was dead.
I dreamed that a rose-leaf hand did cling;
Oh, you cannot bury a mother in spring!
.    .     .     .     .     .     .     .
I nestled him soft to my throbbing breast,
And stole me back to my long, long rest.
---- The Were-wolves. (In Stedman's Victorian Anthology.)
Each panter in the darkness
Is a demon-haunted soul,
The shadowy, phantom were-wolves
That circle round the pole.
Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds
With the Judgment in their face;
And to their mates' "God save you!"
Have never a word of grace.
Up from the round dim sea
And reeling dungeons of the fog,
I am come back to thee!
Down the long path, beset
With heaven-scented, haunting mignonette,
The gardeners say
A little grey
Ghost-lady walks!
"O dream-taught man," said the woman--
She stood where the willows grew,
A woman from the country
Where the cocks never crew.
Drowned men since 'eighty-four
On the cliff against the sky,
Ailsa, wife of Malachi
That cold woman--
Sits and knits eternally.
She slanted her small bead-brown eyes
Across the empty street
And saw Death softly watching her
In the sunshine pale and sweet.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
All of these dead were stirring
Each unto each did call,
"A witch, a witch is sleeping
Under the churchyard wall."
Mother of mercy! there she sat,
A woman clad in a snow-white shroud,
Streamed her hair to the damp moss-mat,
White the face on her bosom bowed!
Yet I often wonder
If these things are really dead.
If the old trunks never open
Letting out grey flapping things at twilight.
If it is all as safe and dull
As it seems?
High and fair, through cloud and air, a silver moon was fleeting,
Some say they saw the dead man steer--
The dead man steer the blind man home--
Though, when they found him dead,
His hand was cold as lead.
As I was marching in Flanders
A ghost kept step with me--
Kept step with me and chuckled,
And muttered ceaselessly.
And when at last I stand outside
My garret door I hardly dare
To open it,
Lest when I fling it wide
With candle lit
And reading in my only chair
I find myself already there.
Into the storm he drives! Full is the sail;
But the wind blows wilder and shriller!
'Tis the ghost of a Sea-King, my father, rigid and pale,
That holds so firm the tiller!
He coughed, he turned; and crystal-eyed
He stared, for the bolted door stood wide,
And on the threshold, faint and grand,
He saw the awful Gray Man stand.
His flesh was a thousand snails that crept,
But his face was calm though his pulses leapt.
=Herford=, Oliver. Ye Knyghte-mare. (In The Bashful Earthquake.)
Ye log burns dimme, and eke more dimme,
Loud groans each knyghtlie gueste,
As ye ghost of his grandmother, gaunt and grimme,
Sits on each knyghte hys cheste.
The red ship is the Lusitania. "She goes to the bottom all in
red to join all the other dead ships, which are in white."
She took his head upon her knee
And called him love and very fair.
And with a golden comb she combed
The grave-dust from his hair.
In polyphonic prose. The body buried at the crossroads
struggles for twenty years to free itself of the stake driven
through its heart and wreak vengeance on its enemy. It is
finally successful as the funeral cortege of this enemy comes
down the road.
"He wavers like smoke in the buffeting wind. His fingers blow
out like smoke, his head ripples in the gale. Under the sign
post, in the pouring rain, he stands, and watches another
quavering figure drifting down the Wayfleet road. Then swiftly
he streams after it. . ."
Drink and forget, make merry and boast,
But the boast rings false and the jest is thin.
In the hour that I meet ye ghost to ghost,
Stripped of the flesh that ye skulk within,
Stripped to the coward soul 'ware of its sin,
Ye shall learn, ye shall learn, whether dead men hate!
"I'm a-weary of them there mermaids,"
Says old Bill's ghost to me,
"It ain't no place for Christians,
Below there, under sea.
For it's all blown sands and shipwrecks
And old bones eaten bare,
And them cold fishy females
With long green weeds for hair."
She lives upon an iceberg to the norred
'N' she combs the weeds upon her forred
With poor drowned sailors' bones.
. . . "Saint Catherine," in which the spotless virginity of the
saint is made ashamed by the pitiful ghosts, who whisper their
humanity to her in a dream.--_William Stanley Braithwaite._
Ghostly ships in a ghostly sea. . .
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high--higher than most--
And the green gate was locked.
Now we, who wait one night a year
Under these branches long,
May see a flaming ship, and hear
The echo of a song.
The dead are coming back again, the years are rolled away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.
It happed at the time of Hallowmass, when the dead may walk
abroad,
That the wraith of Ralph of the Peaceful Heart went forth from
the courts of God.
Untroubled, untouched by the woes of this world are the
moon-marshalled hosts that invade
. . . Deelish! Deelish! My woe forever that I could not sever
coward flesh from fear.
I called his name and the pale ghost came; but I was afraid to
meet my dear.
And, ere the tomb-thrown mutterings have ceased,
The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.
'Twas I that stood to greet you on the churchyard pave--
(O fire o' my heart's grief, how could you never see?)
You smiled in pleasant dreaming as you crossed my grave
And crooned a little love-song where they buried me!
Out from the House of Ghosts I fled
Lest I should turn and see
The child I had been lift her head
And stare aghast at me.
How an angel obligingly took upon itself the form and
performed the duties of Father Gilligan while the father was
asleep at his post.
Based upon a scrap of folklore in "The Celtic Twilight" and
apparently among the simplest of his poems, nothing he has
ever done shows a greater mastery of atmosphere, or a greater
metrical mastery.--_Forrest Reid._
He heard, while he sang and dreamed,
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
"_From Ghaisties, Ghoulies, and long-leggity Beasties
and Things that go Bump in the night--
Good Lord, deliver us._"
She's turned me into an ugly worm
And gar'd me toddle about the tree.
The most notable of the ballads of the supernatural, from the
dramatic quality of its story and a certain wild pathos in its
expression.
"Is there ony room at your head, Saunders,
Is there ony room at your feet?
Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain I wad sleep?"
And aye as she turned her round about,
Aye taller he seemed to be;
Until that the tops o' that gallant ship
Nae taller were than he.
O he has doen him to his ha'
To make him bierly cheer,
An' in it came a griesly ghost
Steed stappin' i' the fleer.
For she has made me the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o' the tree,
And my sister Masery she's made
The machrel of the sea.
A Lyke-wake Dirge.
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
--Every nighte and alle,
Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
And Christ receive thy saule.
And pleasant is the fairy land
For those that in it dwell,
But ay at end of seven years
They pay a teind to hell;
I am sae fair and fu' of flesh
I'm fear'd 'twill be mysell.