What's O'Clock/Tomb Valley

by Amy Lowell

TOMB VALLEY

Down a cliff-side where rock-roses,
Shallow-rooted, scantly bloom,
And the mountain goats in passing
Barely find a foothold's room,
While the boulders of the summit
Cast an everlasting gloom.

Leaps a torrent from behind
The jutted angle of a wall
In a long, unbroken sliding,
For it touches not at all
Any rock, or stone, or pebble
For a thousand feet of fall.
For a thousand feet it rushes

Like a heavy, laden air,
Playing over some tremendous
Sound which surely must be there,
For you hear it, lose it, hear it.
Does it come from anywhere?

Seething, bubbling, churning, groaning,
Has the water in its flight
Shattered on the stony bottom
Of the valley, while its height
Drawing upward like a ribbon
Palely grows upon the sight?

But the sound is chiller, deeper,
Long and dreary like a moan
Caught forever on an echo
'Twixt two balanced shafts of stone,
Whence it surges and resurges
In protracted monotone.

Far below, within the valley,
Runs a river, cold and sleek,
Never oar has cut its smoothness,
It has shattered on no beak
Of shallop or of galley,
Its tide is slow and meek.

And the trees within that valley,
Of every broad-leaved kind,
Wave to and fro compactly,
For there's never any wind.
Ten thousand branches blowing
All one way is hard to find.

And the shadows which their movement
Casts upon the sandy ground
Are like footsteps weaving dances
To that ghastly, haunting sound
Ringing round the chilly valley,
Round and round and round and round.

Where the river curves about it,
And the water lilies strew
Silver petals on the pebbles
Mingling with dropped cones of yew,
Stands a sepulchre of granite
Striped with bars of green and blue.

Green and blue bars painted crosswise
From its bottom to its crown,
At its apex is a statue,
Coldly, boldly, gazing down,
Gazing fiercely, gazing wildly,
Tn an everlasting frown.

And upon its knees a woman
Kneels and clasps the granite thighs,
And clings upon the roughened stone
While tears drop from her eyes.
The surly yews wave back and forth
Beneath a red moonrise.

And a hollow, draughty moaning
Fills the valley like a gong.
Women's voices weeping, wailing,
All the waving trees among,
Where no shapes or shadows flicker
But the low moon, broad and long.

Slowly rising from the cliff-tops,
Like a gnawed and crumbled cone,
It appears in perfect semblance
To a sepulchre of stone,
And the bars are striped upon it
Like cross-sticks of blackened bone.

In a bitter orange moonlight
Lies the woman on the knees
Of that austere thing of granite,
All surrounded by the trees,
And the curling, sneering river,
And nothing else but these.

On a sudden, she has risen,
And with clenched fists beats the face
Of that frozen granite horror,
And her blows in that drear place
Are as thunder-claps resounding
Upon vastnesses of space.

For an instant still she batters
At that changeless, mocking frown,
Then flings her bleeding hands
Above her head and plunges down
To the smooth and careful river
With sere rushes overgrown.

But no ripple marks her entrance
To that water, bright as flame,
And no pucker stirs the granite face
To tell she ever came.
The trees blow and the moaning
Continues just the same.

But every moonlight night, they say,
She drowns herself once more,
And by the queasy daylight
You can see her from the shore
Lying like a lily petal
On the river's glassy floor.

So they say, but no one proves it.
No one ever ventures in
To that valley. Only passers-by
Above can hear a thin
Weary wailing, if they note it
Through the torrent's distant din.

As they wander on the cliff-edge
Where the scant rock-roses blow,
And the mountain goats go shrewdly
In the footways that they know,
While the crash of tumbling water
Sounds a thousand feet below.