In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, What a tale their terror tells How they clang, and clash, and roar! And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; In the jangling, And the wrangltng, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells— Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells— What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats 759 A pæan from the bells! Keeping time, time, time To the sobbing of the bells:— To the tolling of the bells— To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. TO MY MOTHER Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, 760 Therefore by that dear name I long have called you— And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you, My mother my own mother, who died early, The sickness—the nausea— Have ceased with the fever And oh! of all tortures That torture the worst For the naphthaline river I have drank of a water Of a water that flows, With a lullaby sound, From a spring but a very few From a cavern not very far Down under ground. And ah! let it never Be foolishly said That my room it is gloomy And narrow my bed; For a man never slept In a different bed— And, to sleep, you must slumber In just such a bed. My tantalized spirit Of myrtles and roses: For now, while so quietly A holier odor About it, of pansies— A rosemary odor, Commingled with pansies— With rue and the beautiful Puritan pansies. And so it lies happily, A dream of the truth And the beauty of Annie— Drowned in a bath Of the tresses of Annie. She tenderly kissed me, To sleep on her breast— Deeply to sleep From the heaven of her breast. When the light was extinguished, And I lie so composedly, That you fancy me dead— Now, in my bed, (With her love at my breast) That you fancy me dead— That you shudder to look at me, Thinking me dead: |