nbefooled by the heart's compassion,
Undeterred by form and feature,
Caught the creature,
Tried by the test of water and fire,
Pierced and pinioned with silver wire,
Circled with signs that could control,
Battered with spells that tame and torture
The demon nature,
Till he writhed in his shape, a fiend confest,
And vanished--
Then had come back, the poor soul banished,
Then had come back the little soul.
But now there is nothing to do or to say.
Will no one grip him and tear him away,
The Thing of Blood that gnaws at my breast?

Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.
Unconcerned I sat and heard
Little things,
Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,
A frightened bird--
Or faint hands at the window-pane?
And now he will never come again,
The little soul. He is quite lost.

I have summoned him back with incantations
Of heart-deep sobs and whispering cries,
Of anguished love and travail of prayer,
Nothing has answered my despair
But long sighs
Of pitiful wind in the fir-plantations.
Poor little soul! He cannot come.
Perchance on a night when trees were tost,
The Changeling rode with his cavalcade
Among the clouds, that were tossing too,
And made the little soul afraid.
They hunted him madly, the howling crew,
Into the Limbo of the lost,
Into the Limbo of the others
Who wander crying and calling their mothers.

Now I know
The creatures that come to harry and raid
How they ride in the airy regions,
Dance their rounds on meadow and moor,
Gallop under the earth in legions,
Hunt and holloa and run their races
Over tombs in burial-places.

In the common roads where people go,
Masked and mingled with human traces,
I have marked, I who know,
In the common dust a devil's spoor.

To somebody's gate
A Thing is footing it, cares not much
Whether he creep through an Emperor's portal
And steal the fate
Of a Prince, or into a poor man's hutch--
For the grief will be everywhere as great
And he'll everywhere spread the smirch of sin--
So long as a taste of our blood he may win,
So long as he may become a mortal.

I beseech you,
Prince and poor man, to watch the gate.
The heart is poisoned where he has fed,
The house is ruined that lets him in.
Yet I know I shall never teach you.
With the voice of the dear and the eyes of the dead
He will come to the door, and you'll let him in.

If I could forget
Only that ever I had a child