An Inland Tempest

By night was heard the melancholy Wind
With a wild lullaby, and weird, low hum,
Rocking the cradle of the restless Storm
That slumbered in her mantle, moaning now,
And tumbling the black clouds that covered him –
Now hushed and cold, as if the heart that heaved
Should heave no more for trouble or for joy.
A short, sharp rattle of great drops, distinct
In measured cadence, breaking on the roots,
Precluded tempest, as the signal shot
A corsair launches, the close conflict tells;
Then sudden silence, and the storm still slept.

Anon with a great shudder, open flashed
His eyes of wrath deep set in cavernous crags,
Gloomed with black lashes of the thunder cloud!
And such a noise as filled the jarring sky
When God pushed back its adamantine bolts
And bade the Deluge – “Go!” – tore cloud and air,
And shook the chambered centre: and the rain –
If rain it were that, neither drops nor stream,
Ran sheeted cataracts – roared along the pines,
As in the throat of the devouring sea
Its choking reef of pebbles!

        As if awed
By the fierce outbreak, the astonished wind,
A moment held her breath, and every leaf,
Lit by the livid lightning, hung down straight
In the descending torrents, till a spasm
Re-filled her hollow bosom, and she yelled
And shrieked among the tree-tops, that streamed back
Like plumes of maniac riders charging home
On the red batteries of the thunder storm.

The crooked lightnings clove their crags of jet,
That for a moment seemed to ruin down
Like the black arch of an exploding mine,
All heaven was burning darkness, falling, crushed
And threat’ning all beneath its avalanche;
Then quenched in deeper darkness with no rent,
Till a new flash and crash burst over us,
Splintering the solid night!

        So might have shot
Alternate fire and blackness, if two gods
Of rival kingdoms – Thor with barbed fire,
And Hrym with black half armed, and drifted gloom.
Warred in mid-heaven and clashed their dismal arms.

The swollen cataracts, down the sharp ravines
Leapt, shouting with a hoarse, continuous roar,
Filling the pauses of the thunder-psalm
With dithyrambic chorus! Rocks and trees
Torn from the jutting ledges, dashed below,
Rolling and writhing in the all-white chasm,
Invisible but when the livid bolts
Flared down the foaming rifts their ghastly light.

One grey oak, mossy, huge and many-armed,
So old it seemed the centuries had ceased
To notch their winters on its iron gnarls,
Upheaved its hoary trunk, a battered tower,
From which the haunting Dryad looking, saw
Whole nations perish in her endless youth,
And the tall forest from their ashes grow.
But now the implacable lightnings had found out
The way to her grim fortress, and like Thugs
Had struck and vanished! Every giant bough,
And every twisted fibre of its trunk
Was torn and ravelled like the hempen shreds
When a new hawser snaps before the strain
Of a restless iceberg. One sharp jag
Stood up and threatened like a gleaming pike
With all the shattered glories of the tree
Strewn round it, crushed, as when some playful hand,
With fingers spread, has stripped a greenling weed
Downward on all sides round its shivered stalk.

There, close among the fern-leaves, by a rock,
A little sparrow on her downy brood
Lifted a frightened eye at every flash,
Imploring pity where no pity seemed! 
Yet false the seeming, for no pulse said, “fly.”
Timidly braving all the terrors there,
She shook her warm wings, nestling closer down
When fiercer poured the deluge! Ah, behold,
In her small bosom, the Great Providence –
A sparkle of the Infinite Tenderness –
Lived and kept warm the little lives below!

At last the tempest, wearied of its rage.
Sank moaning into silence, and anon,
With a transfiguring alchemy, the Dawn
Made glory of its tattered robes of mist,
Perched on the naked splinter, one glad throat
Poured jubilant thanksgiving for the light,
One little heart dissolved in melody!