NAILED to these green laths long ago, You cramp and shrivel into dross, Blotched with mildews, gnawed with moss, And now the eye can scarcely know The snake among you from the kite, So sharp does Death's fang bite. I guess your stories; you were shot Hovering above the miller's chicks; And you, coiled on his threshold bricks -- Hissing you died; and you, sir Stoat, Dazzled with stableman's lantern stood And tasted crabtree wood. Here then you leered-at luckless churls, Clutched to your clumsy gibbet, shrink To shapeless orts; hard by the brink Of this black scowling pond that swirls To turn the wheel beneath the mill, The wheel so long since still. There's your revenge, the wheel at tether, The miller gone, the white planks rotten, The very name of the mill forgotten, Dimness and silence met together. Felons of fur and feather, can There lurk some crime in man, In man your executioner, Whom here Fate's cudgel battered down? Did he too filch from squire and clown? The damp gust makes the ivy whir Like passing death; the sluices well, Dreary as a passing-bell. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SONG-TIME by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH MEN OF WAKE by WILLIAM ROSE BENET THE FIRST SNOW by J. B. BENTON THE SUMMER POOL by ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN FIFTY YEARS SPENT by MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT AN INVOCATION by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE |