William Motherwell

Cruxtoun Castle

THOU gray and antique tower,
Receive a wanderer of the lonely night,
Whose moodful sprite
Rejoices at this witching time to brood
Amid thy shattered strength’s dim solitude!
It is a fear-fraught hour,—
A deathlike stillness reigns around,
Save the wood-skirted river’s eerie sound,
And the faint rustling of the trees that shower
Their brown leaves on the stream,
Mournfully gleaming in the moon’s pale beam:
O, I could dwell forever and forever
In such a place as this, with such a night!
When o’er thy waters and thy waving woods
The moonbeams sympathetically quiver,
And no ungentle thing on thee intrudes,
And every voice is dumb, and every object bright!

*        *        *        *        *

Relique of earlier days,
Yes, dear thou art to me!
And beauteous, marvellously,
The moonlight strays
Where banners glorious floated on thy walls —
Clipping their ivied honors with its thread
Of half-angelic light;
And though o’er thee Time’s wasting dews have shed
Their all-consuming blight,
Maternal moonlight falls
On and around thee full of tenderness,
Yielding thy shattered frame pure love’s divine caress.

*        *        *        *        *

Light feet have trod
The soft, green, flowering sod
That girdles thy baronial strength, and traced,
All gracefully, the labyrinthine dance;
Young hearts discoursed with many a passionate glance,
While rose and fell the Minstrel’s thrilling strain
(Who, in this iron age, might sing in vain, —
His largesse coarse neglect, and mickle pain!)
Waste are thy chambers tenantless, which long
Echoed the notes of gleeful minstrelsie, —
Notes once the prelude to a tale of wrong,
Of royalty and love. Beneath yon tree,
Now bare and blasted,—so our annals tell, —
The martyr queen, ere that her fortunes knew
A darker shade than cast her favorite yew,
Loved Darnley passing well, —
Loved him with tender woman’s generous love,
And bade farewell awhile to courtly state
And pageantry for yon o’ershadowing grove,
For the lone river’s banks where small birds sing, —
Their little hearts with summer joys elate, —
Where tall broom blossoms, flowers profusely spring;
There he, the most exalted of the land,
Pressed, with the grace of youth, a sovereign’s peerless hand.

*        *        *        *        *