dots-menu
×

Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Meeting

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Meeting

By Edgar Fawcett (1847–1904)

I SAW in dreams a dim bleak heath,

Where towered a gaunt pine by a rock,

And suddenly, from the earth beneath,

That rent itself with an angry shock,

A shape sprang forth to that wild place,

Whose limbs by chains were trenched and marred,

And whose sardonic pain-worn face

Was grimly scorched and scarred.

He waited by the spectral pine;

Aloft he lifted haggard eyes;

A woman’s form, of mien divine,

Dropt earthward in seraphic wise.

Chaste as though bathed in breaking day,

And radiant with all saintly charms,

She flew toward him till she lay

Close-locked in his dark arms!

I heard a far vague voice that said:

“On earth these twain had loved so well

That now their lives, when both are dead,

Burst the great bounds of Heaven and Hell.

Alike o’er powers of gloom and light

Prevailed their fervid prayers and tears;

They meet on this bleak heath one night

In every thousand years!”