* The Poet’s Calender : December : : By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Riding upon the Goat, with snow-white hair,
I come, the last of all.
This crown of mine
Is of the holly; in my hand I bear
The thyrsus, tipped with fragrant cones of pine.

I celebrate the birth of the Divine,
And the return of the Saturnian reign;–
My songs are carols sung at every shrine,
Proclaiming “Peace on earth, good will to men.

** Haunted House
by Thomas Hood
Oh, very gloomy is the house of woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,
With all the dark solemnities that show
That Death is in the dwelling!

Oh, very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles,
But smitten by the common stroke of doom,
The corpse lies on the trestles!

But house of woe, and hearse, and sable pall,
The narrow home of the departed mortal,
Ne’er looked so gloomy as that Ghostly Hall,
With its deserted portal!

The centipede along the threshold crept,
The cobweb hung across in mazy tangle,
And in its winding sheet the maggot slept
At every nook and angle.


The keyhole lodged the earwig and her brood,
The emmets of the steps has old possession,
And marched in search of their diurnal food
In undisturbed procession.


As undisturbed as the prehensile cell
Of moth or maggot, or the spider’s tissue,
For never foot upon that threshold fell,
To enter or to issue.


O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted.


Howbeit, the door I pushed—or so I dreamed–
Which slowly, slowly gaped, the hinges creaking
With such a rusty eloquence, it seemed
That Time himself was speaking.


But Time was dumb within that mansion old,
Or left his tale to the heraldic banners
That hung from the corroded walls, and told
Of former men and manners.


Those tattered flags, that with the opened door,
Seemed the old wave of battle to
to remember,
While fallen fragments danced upon the floor
Like dead leaves in December.


The startled bats flew out, bird after bird,
The screech-owl overhead began to flutter,
And seemed to mock the cry that she had heard
Some dying victim utter!

A shriek that echoed from the joisted roof,
And up the stair, and further still and further,
Till in some ringing chamber far aloof
In ceased its tale of murther!

Meanwhile the rusty armor rattled round,
The banner shuddered, and the ragged streamer;
All things the horrid tenor of the sound
Acknowledged with a tremor.


The antlers where the helmet hung, and belt,
Stirred as the tempest stirs the forest branches,
Or as the stag had trembled when he felt
The bloodhound at his haunches.


The window jingled in its crumbled frame,
And through its many gaps of of destitution
Dolorous moans and hollow sighings came,
Like those of dissolution.


The wood-louse dropped, and rolled into a ball,
Touched by some impulse occult or mechanic;
And nameless beetles ran along the wall
In universal panic.


The subtle spider, that, from overhead,
Hung like a spy on human guilt and error,
Suddenly turned, and up its slender thread
Ran with a nimble terror.


The very stains and fractures on the wall,
Assuming features solemn and terrific,
Hinted some tragedy of that old hall,
Locked up in hieroglyphic.


Some tale that might, perchance, have solved the doubt,
Wherefore, among those flags so dull and livid,
The banner of the bloody hand shone out
So ominously vivid.


Some key to that inscrutable appeal
Which made the very frame of Nature quiver,
And every thrilling nerve and fiber feel
So ague-like a shiver.


For over all there hung a cloud of fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,
But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly,
The while some secret inspiration said,
“That chamber is the ghostly!”

Across the door no gossamer festoon
Swung pendulous, –no web, no dusty fringes,
No silky chrysalis or white cocoon,
About its nooks and hinges.


The spider shunned the interdicted room,
The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished,
And when the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom,
The very midge had vanished.


One lonely ray that glanced upon a bed,
As if with awful aim direct and certain,
To show the Bloody Hand, in burning red,
Embroidered on the curtain.


— Thomas Hood

*** The Mountain
by Robert Frost
The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.

Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.

And yet between the town and it I found,
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.

The river at the time was fallen away,
And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.

I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.

And there I met a man who so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no hand to stop him altogether.

“What town is this?” I asked.

“This? Lunenburg.
”
Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
But only felt at night its shadowy presence.

“Where is your village? Very far from here?”
“There is no village–only scattered farms.

We were but sixty voters last election.

We can’t in nature grow to many more:
That thing takes all the room!” He moved his goad.

The mountain stood there to be pointed at.

Pasture ran up the side a little way,
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks:
After that only tops of trees, and cliffs
Imperfectly concealed among the leaves.

A dry ravine emerged from under boughs
Into the pasture.

“That looks like a path.

Is that the way to reach the top from here?–
Not for this morning, but some other time:
I must be getting back to breakfast now.
”
“I don’t advise your trying from this side.

There is no proper path, but those that have
Been up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd’s.

That’s five miles back.
You can’t mistake the place:
They logged it there last winter some way up.

I’d take you, but I’m bound the other way.
”
“You’ve never climbed it?”
“I’ve been on the sides
Deer-hunting and trout-fishing.
There’s a brook
That starts up on it somewhere–I’ve heard say
Right on the top, tip-top–a curious thing.

But what would interest you about the brook,
It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.

One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox’s breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles–
You know the kind.
Then let the sun shine on it!”
“There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain–if it isn’t wooded
Clear to the top.
” I saw through leafy screens
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow,
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up–
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;
Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow.

“As to that I can’t say.
But there’s the spring,
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.

That ought to be worth seeing.
”
“If it’s there.

You never saw it?”
“I guess there’s no doubt
About its being there.
I never saw it.

It may not be right on the very top:
It wouldn’t have to be a long way down
To have some head of water from above,
And a good distance down might not be noticed
By anyone who’d come a long way up.

One time I asked a fellow climbing it
To look and tell me later how it was.
”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was a lake
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.
”
“But a lake’s different.
What about the spring?”
“He never got up high enough to see.

That’s why I don’t advise your trying this side.

He tried this side.
I’ve always meant to go
And look myself, but you know how it is:
It doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain
You’ve worked around the foot of all your life.

What would I do? Go in my overalls,
With a big stick, the same as when the cows
Haven’t come down to the bars at milking time?
Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
‘Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it.
”
“I shouldn’t climb it if I didn’t want to–
Not for the sake of climbing.
What’s its name?”
“We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right.
”
“Can one walk around it? Would it be too far?”
“You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,
But it’s as much as ever you can do,
The boundary lines keep in so close to it.

Hor is the township, and the township’s Hor–
And a few houses sprinkled round the foot,
Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
Rolled out a little farther than the the rest.
”
“Warm in December, cold in June, you say?”
“I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all.

You and I know enough to know it’s warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.

But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.
”
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
“Ever since Hor
Was no bigger than a—-” What, I did not hear.

He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.
— Robert Frost

**** Pending.. .