Never there hovers a hope of the Spring by it --
Never a glimmer of yellow and green:
Only the bat with a whisper of wing by it
Flits like a life out of flesh and unseen.
Here are the growths that are livid and glutinous,
Speckled, and bloated with poisonous blood:
This is the haunt of the viper-breed mutinous:
Cursed with the curse of weird Catherine Flood.
He that hath looked on it -- hurried aghast from it,
Hair of him frozen with horror straightway,
Chased by a sudden strange pestilent blast from it --
Where is the speech of him -- what can he say?
Hath he not seen the fierce ghost of a hag in it?
Heard maledictions that startle the stars?
Dumb is his mouth as a mouth with a gag in it --
Mute is his life as a life within bars.
Just the one glimpse of that grey, shrieking woman there
Ringed by a circle of furnace and fiend!
He that went happy and healthy and human there --
Where shall the white leper fly to be cleaned?
Here, in a pit with indefinite doom on it,
Here, in the fumes of a feculent moat,
Under an alp with inscrutable gloom on it,
Squats the wild witch with a ghoul at her throat!
Black execration that cannot be spoken of --
Speech of red hell that would suffocate Song,
Starts from this terror with never a token of
Day and its loveliness all the year long.
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