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I. CONFRONTING each other the pictures stare | |
| Into each other’s sleepless eyes; | |
| And the daylight into the darkness dies, | |
| From year to year in the palace there: | |
| But they watch and guard that no device | 5 |
| Take either one of them unaware. | |
| |
| Their majesties the king and the queen, | |
| The parents of the reigning prince: | |
| Both put off royalty many years since, | |
| With life and the gifts that have always been | 10 |
| Given to kings from God, to evince | |
| His sense of the mighty over the mean. | |
| |
| I cannot say that I like the face | |
| Of the king; it is something fat and red; | |
| And the neck that lifts the royal head | 15 |
| Is thick and coarse; and a scanty grace | |
| Dwells in the dull blue eyes that are laid | |
| Sullenly on the queen in her place. | |
| |
| He must have been a king in his day | |
| ’T were well to pleasure in work and sport: | 20 |
| One of the heaven-anointed sort | |
| Who ruled his people with iron sway, | |
| And knew that, through good and evil report, | |
| God meant him to rule and them to obey. | |
| |
| There are many other likenesses | 25 |
| Of the king in his royal palace there; | |
| You find him depicted everywhere,— | |
| In his robes of state, in his hunting-dress, | |
| In his flowing wig, in his powdered hair,— | |
| A king in all of them, none the less; | 30 |
| |
| But most himself in this on the wall | |
| Over against his consort, whose | |
| Laces, and hoops, and high-heeled shoes | |
| Make her the finest lady of all | |
| The queens or courtly dames you choose, | 35 |
| In the ancestral portrait hall. | |
| |
| A glorious blonde: a luxury | |
| Of luring blue and wanton gold, | |
| Of blanchéd rose and crimson bold, | |
| Of lines that flow voluptuously | 40 |
| In tender, languorous curves to fold | |
| Her form in perfect symmetry. | |
| |
| She might have been false. Of her withered dust | |
| There scarcely would be enough to write | |
| Her guilt in now; and the dead have a right | 45 |
| To our lenient doubt if not to our trust: | |
| So if the truth cannot make her white, | |
| Let us be as merciful as we—must. | |
| |
II. The queen died first, the queen died young, | |
| But the king was very old when he died, | 50 |
| Rotten with license and lust and pride; | |
| And the usual Virtues came and hung | |
| Their cypress wreaths on his tomb, and wide | |
| Throughout his kingdom his praise was sung. | |
| |
| How the queen died is not certainly known, | 55 |
| And faithful subjects are all forbid | |
| To speak of the murder which some one did | |
| One night while she slept in the dark alone: | |
| History keeps the story hid, | |
| And Fear only tells it in undertone. | 60 |
| |
| Up from your startled feet aloof, | |
| In the famous Echo-Room, with a bound | |
| Leaps the echo, and round and round | |
| Beating itself against the roof,— | |
| A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound,— | 65 |
| Dies ere its terror can utter proof | |
| |
| Of that it knows. A door is fast, | |
| And none is suffered to enter there. | |
| His sacred majesty could not bear | |
| To look at it toward the last, | 70 |
| As he grew very old. It opened where | |
| The queen died young so many years past. | |
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III. How the queen died is not certainly known; | |
| But in the palace’s solitude | |
| A harking dread and horror brood, | 75 |
| And a silence, as if a mortal groan | |
| Had been hushed the moment before, and would | |
| Break forth again when you were gone. | |
| |
| The present king has never dwelt | |
| In the desolate palace. From year to year | 80 |
| In the wide and stately garden drear | |
| The snows and the snowy blossoms melt | |
| Unheeded, and a ghastly fear | |
| Through all the shivering leaves is felt. | |
| |
| By night the gathering shadows creep | 85 |
| Along the dusk and hollow halls, | |
| And the slumber-broken palace calls | |
| With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep; | |
| And then the ghostly moonlight falls | |
| Athwart the darkness brown and deep. | 90 |
| |
| At early dawn the light wind sighs, | |
| And through the desert garden blows | |
| The wasted sweetness of the rose; | |
| At noon the feverish sunshine lies | |
| Sick in the walks. But at evening’s close, | 95 |
| When the last, long rays to the windows rise, | |
| |
| And with many a blood-red, wrathful streak | |
| Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur | |
| His cruel vigilance and her | |
| Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak | 100 |
| A hopeless hate that cannot stir, | |
| A voiceless hate that cannot speak | |
| |
| In the awful calm of the sleepless eyes; | |
| And as if she saw her murderer glare | |
| On her face, and he the white despair | 105 |
| Of his victim kindle in wild surmise, | |
| Confronted the conscious pictures stare,— | |
| And their secret back into darkness dies. | |
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