Explore "Hallowe'En" by Madison Cawein on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe'en, / Where silence and darkness had built them a lair, / That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen, / And heard her still step on the ghost-haunted air.
It was last Hallowe'en in the glimmer and swoon / Of mist and of moonlight that thickened and thinned, / That I saw the gray gleam of her eyes in the moon, / And hair, like a raven, blown wild in the wind.
It was last Hallowe'en where starlight and dew / Made mystical marriage on flower and leaf, / That she led me with looks of a love that I knew, / And lured with the voice of a heart-buried grief.
It was last Hallowe'en in the forest of dreams, / Where trees are eidolons and shadows have eyes, / That I saw her pale face like the foam of far streams, / And heard, like the leaf-lisp, her tears and her sighs.
It was last Hallowe'en, the haunted, the dread, / In the wind-tattered wood by the storm-twisted pine, / That I, who am living, kept tryst with the dead, / And clasped her a moment and dreamed she was mine.