Zinzendorff and Other Poems/The Dead Horseman
THE DEAD HORSEMAN.
Occasioned by reading the manner of conveying a young man to burial, in the mountainous region about Vettie's Giel, in Norway.
Who's riding o'er the Giel so fast,
'Mid the crags of Utledale?
He heeds nor cold, nor storm, nor blast;
But his cheek is deadly pale.
A fringe of pearl, from his eye-lash long,
Stern Winter's hand hath hung;
And his sinewy arm looks bold and strong,
Though his brow is smooth and young.
O'er his marble forehead, in clusters bright
Is wreathed his golden hair;
His robe is of linen, long and white,
Though a mantle of fur scarce could 'bide the blight
Of this keen and frosty air.
God speed thee now, thou horseman bold!
For the tempest awakes in wrath;
And thy stony eye is fixed and cold
As the glass of thine icy path.
Down, down the precipice wild he breaks,
Where the foaming waters roar;
And his way up the cliff of the mountain takes,
Where man never trod before.
No checking hand to the rein he lends,
On slippery summits sheen;
But ever and aye his head he bends
At the plunge in some dark ravine.
Dost thou bow in prayer, to the God who guides
Thy course o'er such pavement frail?
Or nod in thy dream o'er the steep, where glides
The curdling brook, with its slippery tides,
Thou horseman, so young and pale?
Swift, swift o'er the breast of the frozen streams,
Toward Lyster-Church he hies—
Whose holy spire, 'mid the glaciers gleams,
Like a star in troubled skies.
Now stay, thou ghostly traveller—stay
Why haste in such mad career?
Be the guilt of thy bosom as dark as it may,
'Twere better to purge it here.
On, on! like the winged blast he wends,
Where moulder the bones of the dead—
Wilt thou stir the sleep of thy buried friends,
With thy courser's tramping tread?
At a yawning pit, whose narrow brink,
'Mid the swollen snow was grooved,
He paused. The steed from that chasm did shrink,
But the rider sate unmoved.
Then down at once, from his lonely seat,
They lifted that horseman pale,
And laid him low in the drear retreat
And poured in dirge-like measure sweet,
The mournful funeral wail.
Bold youth! whose bosom with pride had glowed
In a life of toil severe—
Did'st thou scorn to pass to thy last abode
In the ease of the slothful bier?
Must thy own good steed, which thy hands had drest,
In the fulness of boyhood's bliss,
By the load of thy lifeless limbs be prest,
On a journey so strange as this!
Yet still to the depths of yon rock-barred dell,
Where no ray from heaven hath glowed,
Where the thundering rush of the Markefoss fell,
The trembling child doth point and tell,
How that fearful horseman rode.