Poems (Holley)/The Haunted Castle

by Marietta Holley

THE HAUNTED CASTLE.

It stands alone on a haunted shore,
With curious words of deathless lore
 On its massive gate impearled;
And its carefully guarded mystic key
Locks in its silent mystery
 From the seeking eyes of the world.

Oft do its stately walls repeat
Echoes of music wildly sweet
 Swelling to gladness high—
With mournful ballads of ancient time,
And funeral hymns—and a nursery rhyme
 Dying away in a sigh.

Pictures out of each haunted room,
Up through the ghostly shadows loom,
 And gleam with a spectral light;
Pictures lit with a radiant glow,
And some that image such desolate woe
 That, weeping, you turn from the sight.

Shining like stars in the twilight gloom
Brows as white as a lily's bloom
 Gleam from its lattice and door;
And voices soft as a seraph's note,
Through its mysterious chambers float
 Back from eternity's shore.

In the mournful silence of midnight air
You hear on its stately and winding stair
 The echoes of fairy feet.
Gentle footsteps that lightly fall
Through the enchanted castle hall,
 And up in the golden street.

And still in a dark forsaken tower,
Crowned with a withered cypress flower,
 Is a bowed head turned away;
A face like carvéd marble white,
Sweet eyes drooping away from the light,
 Shunning the eye of day.

And oft when the light burns low and dim
A haggard form ungainly and grim
 Unbidden enters the door;
With chiding eyes whose burning light
You fain would bury in darkness and night,
 Never to meet you more,

Mysteries strange its still walls keep,
Strange are the forms that through it sweep—
 Walking by night and by day.
But evermore will the castle hall
Echo their footsteps' phantom fall,
 Till its walls shall crumble away.