Full seven times the summer sun
Had waked the dreaming summer flowers,
And seven times they slept again
Beneath the winter snow and showers;
And still, through summer’s parching heat,
Through winter’s storm, and rain, and snow,
Had Thekla dragged her weary feet
In one long pilgrimage of woe.
The beasts fled back at her approach,
The sunshine shunshine ceased to flicker round,
The flowers withered at her touch,
And fell like corpses to the ground.
Where’er she passed there lay a gloom,
The young birds shivered in the nest,
All nature echoed back her doom,
And spurned the sinner from her breast.
She flung her sighs out to the wind:
The peasants heard that mournful wail,
And, crouching down by winter fires,
Said: “’Tis the witch‐fiend in the vale.”
They laid down food beneath the trees,
And waited, trembling, till she came,
Then fled away, for none would speak
To one so bann’d by sin and shame.
She gathered autumn leaves and moss,
Within a cavern lone and deep,
And there she crept each night to rest,
To rest, but never more to sleep.
No human voice came near to soothe,
Her anguish dimm’d no human eye,
The bond of sisterhood was rent
Between her and Humanity.
But ever when the moon was full,
All in the moonlight weird and still
Came evermore upon her ear
The moanings by the lonely mill;
And seven dread shadows entered in
And gathered round her lowly bed,
The ghastly witnesses of sin,
A silent freezing sight of dread.
All night they stayed, those phantoms pale,
Those formless phantoms phantons dim and drear,
And looked at her with fixed cold eyes,
That chilled her very blood with fear.
In vain she tried to hide her face;
She felt their presence still around,
And well she knew no pitying grace
From these dread beings could be found.
She could not weep, she dare not pray,
But lay like one in coffined clay,
Till those weird phantoms, one by one,
Melted away in the morning sun,
Which fell like the light of the judgement‐day,
When the doom of the Lord is done.
Oft wandering round the ancient church,
The ruined church where they were wed,
She vainly tried to cross the porch,
And lay therein her weary head;
And her weary load of shame and sin
Upon the altar steps within.
But never, since the fatal night
She fled away from Erick’s sight,
Curs’d with his ban of deepest hate,
Had human hand unbarred the gate;
Nor priest nor chorister was there,
Nor sacred rite nor holy prayer:
Foredoom’d and desolate it stood
All in the lonely beechen wood.
God’s curse it is a bitter thing
To fall on a human soul,
Alone with its awful suffering,
With its deadly sin and dole;
’Mid the ghastly wrecks of a human life,
And memories of shame,
When thoughts of a past that would not sleep,
Like barbèd arrows came.
