Poetry Archives

All day, all day, round the clacking net
  The weaver’s fingers fly:
Gray dreams like frozen mists are set
  In the hush of the weaver’s eye;
A voice from the dusk is calling yet,
  “Oh, come away, or we die!”

Without is a horror of hosts that fight,
  That rest not, and cease not to kill,
The thunder of feet and the cry of the flight,
  A slaughter weird and shrill;
Gray dreams are set in the weaver’s sight,
  The weaver is weaving still.

“Come away, dear soul, come away or we die;
  Hear’st thou the moan and the rush! Come away;
The people are slain at the gates, and they fly;
  The kind God hath left them this day;
The battle-axes cleaves, and the foemen cry,
  And the red swords swing and slay.”

“Nay, wife, what boots to fly from pain,
  When pain is wherever we fly?
And death is a sweeter thing than a chain:
  ’Tis sweeter to sleep than to cry,
The kind God giveth the days that wane;
  If the kind God hath said it, I die.”

And the weaver wove, and the good wife fled,
  And the city was made a tomb,
And a flame that shook from the rocks overhead
  Shone into that silent room,
And touched like a wide red kiss on the dead
  Brown weaver slain by his loom.

Yet I think that in some dim shadowy land,
  Where no suns rise or set,
Where the ghost of a whilom loom doth stand
  Round the dusk of its silken net,
Forever flyeth his shadowy hand,
  And the weaver is weaving yet.