THERE goes a wandering soul in desert places;
(Good Lord, deliver!)
About its way lie dumb, with livid faces,
Slain virtures and slain hopes in locked embraces;
(Good Lord, deliver!)
And drear black crags tower from unholy ground
Sheer upward in thick air,
Where breathes no prayer;
No wind is there,
No sound;
(Good Lord, deliver!)
And there is no way out, and round and round,
With haggard eye and dragged and staggering paces,
Through years that soul a ghastly circuit traces.
(Good Lord, deliver!)
The sun, all shorn of rays, with lurid fire
Blasts where it strikes: Doom’s own red eye of ire:
And all night long is seen unhallowed shimmer,–
Half life, half mire,–
Of things made manifest that should be hid;
Yet Will is numb that should their play forbid;
And so they crowd and crawl in gloom and glimmer,
Loathed and unchid;
And lo! that soul among them, moving dimmer.
(Good Lord, deliver!)
At the soul’s back behold a burden yonder,
A monstrous thing of slime;
Two paces forth,–no more,–that Doomed may wander
For all its time;–
Two wretched paces from the accurs
(Louisa Sarah Bevington)
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