forest sound,
No cry the empty midnight cuts--
The midnight space that grows imbrued
With damp breaths from the ashy ground.

The fishers hail each other not--
Nor help--in their fraternal lot;
Doing but that which must be done.
Each fishes for himself alone.

And this one gathers in his net,
Drawing it tighter yet,
His freight of petty misery;
And that one drags up recklessly
Diseases from their slimy bed;
While others still their meshes spread
Out to the sorrows that drift by
Threateningly nigh;
And the last hauls aboard with force
The wreckage dark of his remorse.

The river, round its corners bending,
And with the dyke-heads intertwined.
Goes hence--since what times out of mind?--
Toward the far horizon wending
Of weariness unending.
Upon the banks, the skins of wet
Black ooze-heaps nightly poison sweat.
And the mists are their fleeces light
That curl up to the houses' height.

In their dark boats, where nothing stirs,
Not even the red-flamed torch that blurs
With halos huge, as if of blood.
The thick felt of the mist's white hood,
Death with his silence seals the sere
Old fishermen of madness here.

The isolated, they abide
Deep in the mist--still side by side.
But seeing one another never;
Weary are both their arms--and yet
Their work their ruin doth beget.

Each for himself works desperately,
He knows not why--no dreams has he;
Long have they worked, for long, long years,
While every instant brings its fears;
Nor have they ever
Quitted the borders of their river,
Where 'mid the moonlit mists they strain
To fish misfortune up amain.

If but in this their night they hailed each other
And brothers' voices might console a brother!

But numb and sullen, on they go,
With heavy brows and backs bent low,
While their small lights beside them gleam,
Flickering feebly on the stream.

Like blocks of shadow they are there.
Nor ever do their eyes divine
That far away beyond the mists
Acrid and spongy--there exists
A firmament where 'mid the night.
Attractive as a loadstone, bright
Prodigious planets shine.

The fishers black of that black plague,
They are the lost immeasurably,
Among the knells, the distance vague,
The yonder of those endless plains
That stretch more far than eye can see:
And the damp autumn midnight rains
Into their souls' monotony.

THE ROPE-MAKER

In his village grey
At foot of the dykes, that encompass him
With wea