The world by the gathering twilight
In a gauzy dusk was clad;
It went in through my eyes to my spirit,
And made me a little sad.
Grew and gathered the twilight,
And filled my heart and brain;
The sadness grew more than sadness,
And turned to a gentle pain.
Browned and brooded the twilight,
And sank down through the calm,
Till it seemed for some human sorrows
There could not be any balm.
IV.
Then I knew that, up a staircase,
Which untrod will yet creak and shake,
Deep in a distant chamber,
A ghost was coming awake.
In the growing darkness growing--
Growing till her eyes appear,
Like spots of a deeper twilight,
But more transparent clear--
Thin as hot air up-trembling,
Thin as a sun-molten crape,
The deepening shadow of something
Taketh a certain shape;
A shape whose hands are uplifted
To throw back her blinding hair;
A shape whose bosom is heaving,
But draws not in the air.
And I know, by what time the moonlight
On her nest of shadows will sit,
Out on the dim lawn gliding
That shadow of shadows will flit.
V.
The moon is dreaming upward
From a sea of cloud and gleam;
She looks as if she had seen us
Never but in a dream.
Down that stair I know she is coming,
Bare-footed, lifting her train;
It creaks not--she hears it creaking,
For the sound is in her brain.
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