To a Midnight Phantom

Pale, melancholy one!
Why art thou lingering here?
Memorial of dark ages gone,
Herald of darkness near:
Thou stand'st immortal, undefiled —
Even thou, the unknown, the strange, the wild,
Spell-word of mortal fear.
Thou art a shadowy form,
A dreamlike thing of air;
My very sighs thy robes deform,
So frail, so passing fair —
Thy crown is of the fabled gems,
The bright ephemeral diadems
That unseen spirits wear.
Thou hast revealed to me
The lore of phantom song,
With thy wild, fearful melody,
Chiming the whole night long
Forebodings of untimely doom,
Of sorrowing years and dying gloom,
And unrequited wrong.
Through all the dreary night,
Thine icy hands, that now
Send to the brain their maddening blight,
Have pressed upon my brow —
My phrenzied thoughts all wildly blend
With spell-wrought shapes that round me wend,
Or down in mockery bow.
Away, pale form, away —
The break of morn is nigh,
And far and dim, beyond the day
The eternal night-glooms lie:
Art thou a dweller in the dread
Assembly of the mouldering dead,
Or in the worlds on high?
Art thou of the blue waves,
Or of yon starry clime —
An inmate of the ocean graves,
Or of the heavens sublime"?
Is thy mysterious place of rest
The eternal mansions of the blest,
Or the dim shores of time?
Hast thou forever won
A high and glorious name,
And proudly grasped and girdled on
The panoply of fame —
Or wanderest thou on weary wing
A lonely and a nameless thing,
Unchangingly the same?
Thou answerest not. The sealed
And hidden things that lie
Beyond the grave, are unrevealed,
Unseen by mortal eye —
Thy dreamy home is all unknown,
For spirits freed by death alone
May win the viewless sky.