Classic Poem

'Twas in a fever-dream I saw and knew
Its mottled tiger-bloom of jaundiced gold,
Its fleshy leaves that dropped with clammy dew,
Its swarthy blotches hideous to behold.
In the black, noisome marsh that horror grew,
And slimy, snake-like weeds coiled round it, fold on fold.

The heavy, starless, cypress roof o'erhead
Left all below to fitful glare and gloom,
Where danced the wayward witch-fires of the dead
Like fiends carousing in a pillared tomb.
The sagging vines and knotted knees upspread
Took forms like those which haunt some murder-blasted room.

A dense and deathly exhalation rose,
Luminous with evil light, from pool and fen,
Feeding the demon-flower, whose throbbing throes
Greedily quaffed and quaffed that breath again.
And in that mist I viewed unnumbered woes: —
Wide desolate towns, waste fields, and crowds of maddened men;

The infant clinging to the stricken breast,
Drawing death's potion from the fount of life;
The hidden corpse; the sufferer's last behest
Driving far from him mother, child, and wife;
The piteous prayers that vainly seek to wrest
One priceless victim more from out the loathsome strife.

I saw the face blaspheming turned to heaven;
The thin hand clutching in the empty air,
Grappling a viewless palm; the wanderer driven,
Like olden lepers, to his wretched lair;
All genial human ties asunder riven;
The thieving hand; the knife; the torches' hovering glare.

And round the rootlets of that dreadful flower
The soil is full of shapes, a grisly throng.
Some bear the blood dagger-marks of power,
And some the miry stains of meaner wrong.
Some pale, some dusky; there they writhe and cower,
And feed the poisonous roots that cling and quaff and long.

Yet, as I gazed, there came a sudden blast,
Riving the night of foliage; and the stars
Looked down upon me; and below them passed
A pitying, radiant face, that told of wars
Surmounted, and old hatred backward cast.
The flowing robe of Peace had hidden all her scars.

And from the crown that sparkled on her brow
With jewels radiant as the Frost-King's throne,
She shook a pearl and ruby; and below
They fell on the great bale-flower, shivering lone.
The hairy stalk began to quake and bow, —
And when I looked again, the spectral scene had flown.

In a rich glade two flower-stems interwound
Above the firm and healthful summer sod;
The airs of heaven blew o'er them; and around
Bloomed the sky-pointing hopeful golden-rod;
And one was white, one sunny red, I found,
And both were beautiful in the sight of man and God.