I IT lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death. II Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone, Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'T is the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain, Which humanize and harmonize the strain. III And from its head as from one body grow, As grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock, And with unending involutions show Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw. IV And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hies After a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. V 'T is the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapor of the air Become a and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there -- A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HOW THEY GO ON by JAMES GALVIN THE LITTLE BEACH BIRD by RICHARD HENRY DANA (1787-1879) THE TEST by RALPH WALDO EMERSON TO A GARDEN IN APRIL by WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG A HOP AT SARATOGA by LEVI BISHOP THE PATIENT WAYS by HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE |