The Rhyme Of The Lady Of The Rock. Fitte The Fifth. Poem by Emily Pfeiffer

My lady sat in her bower, and span
From a newly plenished creel;
She loved the wild sea noise that drowned
The droning of her wheel,
Nor feared to hear the low winds race
Through the tall spear-grass to their meeting-place.
But the restless wind awoke her heart
Where her love was laid asleep,
And it rose up wild like a startled child,
It waked like a child to weep;—
O world forlorn in the wan grey weather,
And young heart weeping and wailing together!
For the wrestling wind recalled a time
When the grey wan world was green,
When the sun was high, her lost love nigh,
And the sting of love so keen
In the stroke that cleft her heart in twain,
She knew not if it were joy or pain.
The wind, the waves, the droning wheel,—
No new sound thrilled the air,
But her flesh made motion that some strange thing,
Some loathly to life, stood there.
She stopped her wheel, the fine thread broke;
It was her lord, he laughed, he spoke:
'Would'st give your thought in my thought's stead,
You'd win by the exchange,' he said.
She turned from him, she locked her hands
And laid them athwart her breast;
She feared belike his questing gaze
From sanctuary might wrest
A name she knew the faintest breath
Betraying, would betray to death.
'Put by your wheel and spin no more,
Come, lady, and come with me;
You ever have loved the singing wind,
You love the dancing sea;
My biorlin is on the shore,
Leave flax and fancies, spin no more.'

His voice was soft, his words were smooth,
His eye had a feline glow,
You seemed to see it burn more bright
That the light was waxing low.
He smiled, repeating as before:
'Leave flax and fancies, spin no more.'
She left her wheel, she left her bower,
She followed the false Maclean,
The piper piped them to the shore,
He piped a doleful strain:
The pibroch of Macrimmon Môr:
'The way you go you'll come no more.'
The chieftain's foster-brethren twain
Hung on to the shallop's side,
That shook in the breeze as a courser shakes
Ere he steadies himself in his stride;
The lady barely brooked their help,
In her strength of youth and pride;
They back the boat through the blown sea-scurf
And board her all in the boiling surf.
The helm was ta'en of the red Maclean,
The oars by Donald Dhu,
And Shamesh, he of the bloody hands—
And they were a grisly crew;
But my lady's spirit rose bold and free
'Twixt the singing wind and the dancing sea.
O youth, what art thou for gallant stuff?
Well known to the fiend Despair,
Of him you haply will take of Death
But never will doff to Care;
A gleam of sun, a breath of brine,
Will mount your pulses as brisk new wine.
The good boat breasted the creaming waves,
She rose in the teeth of the breeze,
She charged again as a fiery steed
When stricken aback by the seas.
The mountains seemed to soar and dive;
The dim world heaved as yet alive.
The Norse-built keep of Castle Duart,
That one while, gaunt and bare,
Looked glowering from its stony height,
Melted as smoke in air;
As faint from that dissolving shore
The pibroch wailed, 'You'll come no more.'
But where the two winds meet, the drift
Had loosed a lurid cloud
Which floated up as the sun went down—
In fashion as a shroud,
Or liker to a woman drowned,
With arms outspread, and hair unbound.
As the rowers caught in the lady's eyes
A shadow of vague affright,
They turned about on their labouring oars,
To question the waning light;
And deep in the downdraught of one thought
A moment those four souls were caught.
Then looked at her with wolfish eyes
And fierce, the red Maclean;
Then looked at her with conscious eyes
And keen, those gillies twain;
Their meeting glances quelled her breath,
They seemed to smite, and deal her death.
The pibroch's note was heard no more,
The pallid mist had spread
O'er all the world a winding-sheet
For all the world seemed dead;
The wind and the waves upon its track
Shrieking the lost world's coronach.
But broadening over their bows they see
A line of angry foam
That hard on a bare, nigh-sunken rock
With maddened haste beats home;
And all the woe that was no more,
The dead world's woe, was in its roar.
The lady heard, and she rose up pale,
In the quivering boat upright;
It was but the blind young blood that rose,
Alas! what hope in flight,
What hope of any help might be
Betwixt the dead world and the sea?
And looking ahead where the breakers struck
The black, low-lying shore,
'Twas a man's hoarse voice that smote her ear—
Smote through the deafening roar:
'There one in love with death,' it said,
'Might have white sheets for a marriage-bed.'
Then not for tumult of wind or wave
That lady's heart beat high,
It swung with the dead, dull weight of lead,
It struck as for danger nigh
A wild alarum, whereat each sense
Doubled the force of its frail defence.
And, served by the drift of the landward seas,
The boat makes straight for the rock;
She shoots the waves, and in the trough
Lies stunned as if with the shock;
Then rights herself as fearing more
The helmsman than the deadly shore.
Dumb 'mid the thunder of wind and surge,
That savage helmsman steers,
The world in lapsing from out their sight
Is clamouring at their ears;
But through the tumult they can feel
The shingles grind a quivering keel.
And swept ashore on a towardly wave,
They haul the good boat in,
And without a word the brethren fall
To work in the wildering din:
Some deadlier task, and still to come,
Would seem to hold those brethren dumb.
Then swift as strokes of the stormy sea,
More rude than the raging wind,
The lady is 'ware of two sudden arms
That seize her body and bind,
And knows from its beating that dull way
The heart her dagger had kept at bay.
The red Maclean! none other than he,
He has her in hand at last,
And oh, ye smouldering fires of hell!
This time he holds her fast;
The teeth of the dragon beneath her vest
Are buried deep in her bleeding breast.
He stood with his bride on that trampled shore—
They two, and they alone—
And with brackish kisses he pressed and pressed
As one who would make his own
Her shuddering lips; then he cast her down
As a man might cast a stone,
And the rock that was all that was left of the world
Seemed sinking with that light weight so hurled.
He turned where the tattered fringe of the sea
Lighted the falling night;
That face, that face on the brown sea-ware
Had shown so ghastly white!
He dares the foaming wrath of the surge,
He boards his boat as in flight,
He shouts: 'Haste, brothers, make for the large!'
The waves are roaring a countercharge.
The foster-brothers they heave their hearts
Loud beating against the prow,
But in face of the countervailing sea
The labour of man is slow
And somewhat white hangs on to the boat,
Forbearing the shallop to get afloat:
Ah! what but the swift young blood again,
Uprisen as with a cry—
The voice of its still-aspiring life
'Not yet is it time to die,'
Has sent my lady in this wild way
With grappling hands to plead and to pray?
He struck her off, the caitiff Maclean—
The very breakers had fled
To let her kneel—but there be lost men
And damned or ere they be dead.
'Kneel, woman, kneel,' said the red Maclean,
'And kneel as once I knelt—in vain!'
The sea in its sovereign strength returned
And took the maid to its breast,
Then arched itself—a triumphant wave—
And bore her high on its crest,
To lay the face so ghostly fair
Unharmed again on the brown sea-ware.
My lady rose in the strength of her pride,
She saw herself there alone—

She rose and blest the sundering sea,
The islet was all her own;
She rose and rose to its topmost ledge—
She made thereof a throne;—
She cried: 'Maclean of Duart, farewell!
We're parted now as heaven and hell!'
No blot on the shrouding mist, Maclean
With his whole dark world seemed dead,
All, even to very hate of him,
Gone like a knotless thread,
So that behind, as about, above,
Was nothing left her but Death and Love.
Then she wept for ruth of her maiden truth:
'O Love, have I waked for thee
By day and night, but to face thee now
With this lothèd stain on me?
Come, ocean, and with your bitter brine
Sweeten these ravished lips of mine!'
The hydra heads of the western waves
Broke, parted to north and south,
They lipped the shore, commixed, and closed
As one vast, foaming mouth
That hungered for her evermore,
That all but slew her with its roar.
And still she called upon Love: 'False Love,
To think thy summery breath
Should drive a soul that trusted thee
On this wild way of death!'
The foam-fringed rock was wearing small,
Scarce bigger now than a maiden's pall.
The clamouring surges formed and fell,
Pressed nearer and yet more near,
Then plunged and quivered in pale recoil
Of pity, or eke of fear.
They broke, they wandered round her seat—
They went, they came, they licked her feet.
And still she cried and still she clung:
'O treacherous sea, and slow,
Come take my life and make an end,
Since death will have it so!'
The mad sea melted at her commands,
Came back and kissed her clinging hands.
The charging waves come on, fall off,
Rise, sheer as a wall, and steep—
O Christ, must the whole dead world go down,
Entombed in the charnel deep?
The strong tide lays her bosom bare,
She feels it dragging her tangled hair.
Her hands have ceased to clasp and cling,
She has shaken her spirit free,
She will strive no more, she will make no moan,
She will go with the clamouring sea.
The waves ring only against the rock,
But it feels as yielding beneath the shock.
And still the breakers lift their crests,
'O maiden Mary,' she cries,
'Who will tell my lover my heart was true,
Who will right me in love's eyes?'
But the hydra heads have come and gone,
And in face of death she still lives on.
But they come no more, dear God, so nigh
They come not again, they fall
And trample the rock beside her feet,
Fierce monsters, but held in thrall,
Tamed in their very pride's excess
To this turbulent show of humbleness.
The battle-front of the daunted sea,
Though the waves still chop and churn,
Is in forced retreat, the wavering tide
Has trembled long on the turn;
Then one white wave came back and surged
About her—and her lips were purged.
And she lay there washed as for the grave,
And purer than virgin snow,
Her beauty seemed as a conquering power
In this its overthrow;
Her eyes were blinded, choked her breath,
Her ears were open gates of death.
A panic seized on the routed waves:
They fled to the sandy shelves,
They writhed, they foamed, they broke, they turned,
And foundered upon themselves;
But in that maiden was no stir;
Great Love had had his will of her.
The terror deepened upon the sea,
The stillness grew on the wind;
They fled together, these fierce allies,
And left their spoil behind—
The one sole thing that glimmered white
And pure in all that world of night.