The Maniac's Song
There lay in the
shade of a
cypress tree,
A pilgrim dark from a far country;
His eyes were bright with a
subtle flame,
And his
brow seem'd
scorch'd with
woe and
shame;
He lay
beneath the cypress tree,
And thus to the cold
moon chanted he:---
"Roll on, thou
glitt'ring eye-ball, roll---
Thou seest the
hell of this
sinful soul;
So calm, so
gentle, and so bright,
Was that lady's brow on her
bridal night;
Soon
ghastly, dim, and
pale its
gleam,
As
thine shall be at morning's beam.
"My
infants
gorged the greedy sea,
Into its
waves they were cast by me;
The grey-hair'd ones who call'd me child,
Their
ghosts are wand'ring the forest wild,
Where their bones
unburied lie all green
With
ivy, and blue where
decay hath been.
"And the
spirits of the dead are here---
They
gaze from the stars, and they
hiss in mine ear,
They
bay me, like
pitiless bloodhounds, forth,
To
wander, like
Cain, the blacken'd earth---
To live
accurst, and die, and be
Fit
vassal,
Beelzebub, for thee."
He hath
fled from the shade of the cypress tree,
That
pilgrim dark from a far country;
He wanders through deserts, but not alone---
The
fiend of
madness is with him gone;
And
Guilt her snakes round his
bosom weaves,
Till he longs for the
garland of cypress leaves.
Peter John Allan, The Poetical Remains of Peter John Allan, Esq., Late of Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1853