Read "The Dream of Dread" by Madison Cawein online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
/ I have lain for an hour or twain / Awake, and the tempest is beating / On the roof, and the sleet on the pane, / And the winds are three enemies meeting; / And I listen and hear it again, / My name, in the silence, repeating.
/ Then dumbness of death that must slay, / Till the midnight is burst like a bubble; / And out of the darkness a ray -- / 'T is she! the all beautiful double; / With a face like the breaking of day, / Eyes dark with the magic of trouble.
/ I move not; she lies with her lips / At mine; and I feel she is drawing / My life from my heart to their tips, / My heart where the horror is gnawing; / My life in a thousand slow sips, / My flesh with her sorcery awing.
/ She binds me with merciless eyes; / She drinks of my blood, and I hear it / Drain up with a shudder and rise / To the lips, like the serpent's, that steer it / And she lies and she laughs as she lies, / Saying, "Lo, thy affinitized spirit!"
/ Then I hear -- as if torturing swords / Had shivered and torments had grated / Hoarse iron deep under; and words / As of sins that howled out and awaited / A fiend who lashed into their hords, / And a demon who lacerated.
/ And I shriek and lie clammy and stark, / As the curse of a devil mounts higher, / Up -- out of damnation and dark, / Up -- a hobble of hoofs that is dire; / I feel that his mouth is a spark, / His features, of filth and of fire.
/ "To thy body's corruption, thy grave! / Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen! " / And a blackness rolls down like a wave / With a clamor of tongues that are swollen -- / And I feel that my flesh is the slave / Of a -- vampire, diakka, eidolon?