Ballad of Reading Gaol | Page 5

through a mist:

They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate turn and twist,

And with formal pace and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their
tryst.
With mop and mow, we saw them go,
Slim shadows hand in hand:


About, about, in ghostly rout
They trod a saraband:
And the
damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand!
With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:

But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they
led,
And loud they sang, and loud they sang,
For they sang to wake
the dead.
"Oho!" they cried, "The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!

And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he
does not win who plays with Sin
In the secret House of Shame."
No
things of air these antics were
That frolicked with such glee:
To
men whose lives were held in gyves,
And whose feet might not go
free,
Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things,
Most terrible to
see.
Around, around, they waltzed and wound;
Some wheeled in
smirking pairs:
With the mincing step of demirep
Some sidled up
the stairs:
And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,
Each helped us
at our prayers.
___
The morning wind began to moan,
But still the
night went on:
Through its giant loom the web of gloom
Crept till
each thread was spun:
And, as we prayed, we grew afraid
Of the
Justice of the Sun.
The moaning wind went wandering round
The weeping prison-wall:

Till like a wheel of turning-steel
We felt the minutes crawl:
O
moaning wind! what had we done
To have such a seneschal?
At last I saw the shadowed bars
Like a lattice wrought in lead,

Move right across the whitewashed wall
That faced my three-plank
bed,

And I knew that somewhere in the world
God's dreadful dawn
was red.
___
At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was
still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed
to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.
He did not pass in purple pomp,
Nor ride a moon-white steed.

Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows' need:

So with rope of shame the Herald came
To do the secret deed.
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We
did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope:


Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It
slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron
heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:

For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man
accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and
the worst.
We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So,
like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But
each man's heart beat thick and quick
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,

And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the
sound that frightened marshes hear
From a leper in his lair.
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We
saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And
heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:

For he who live more lives than one
More deaths than one must
die.
IV.
There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The
Chaplain's heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far to wan,
Or there is
that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,

And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,


And down the iron stair we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
Out into God's sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this
man's face was white with fear,
And that man's face was grey,
And
I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that
little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every careless

cloud that passed
In happy freedom by.
But their were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,

And knew that, had each go his due,
They should have died instead:

He had but killed a thing that lived
Whilst they had killed the dead.
For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And
draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And
makes it bleed great gouts of blood
And makes it bleed in vain!
Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,

Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;

Silently we went round and round,
And no man