Poem by Archibald Lampman

The Weaver

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 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-axe cleaves, and the foemen cry,
  And the red swords swing and slay."

"Nay, wife, what boots it 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.

1. The Little Handmaiden
2. Abu Midjan
3. Temagami
4. A Ballade of Waiting
5. Before Sleep

Eva Gore-Booth The Weaver ("I was the child that passed long hours away")

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