The Dark Chateau

The mysteries of your former dust, Your lives declined from solar light— These would you know, or these surmise? Beneath a swathed and mummied sun, Descend where dayless dials rust, Where the, void hourglass fills with night; And seeing with still-living eyes Dim Acherontic rivers run, Follow where shrouded barges float And fall, in regions of the dead, Into the sable-foaming depths. Then over ghostland mountains go To find, beyond a bridgeless moat, What stairs with shadow carpeted Crumble behind the climber's steps In some foreknown forlorn chateau. Where exile ghosts of gales that blew At eve from vintages antique Still stir the blurring tapestries, And empty armor guards the rooms By rotting portraits that were you, Pass on. From airless cupboards bleak Startle memorial spiceries And plagues adrowse in attared glooms. By oriels charged with stifled stains, With night-blent purples, gules embrowned, And spring's lost verdure, graver now Than cypress at the set of day, Pause, and look forth: no ghost remains Save you to gaze on that dim ground Where once the budding almond-bough Waved, and the oleander-spray. Hoar silence is the seneschal Of court and keep, of niche and coigne. With drumless ear no lute annoys, Nor clang from farring jambarts drawn, Death, with dlulled arrasses for pall, Waits whitely there; and none will join Your quest, nor ever any voice Speak from. the chambered epochs gone: Till from the vaults with shadows brimmed Shall come a cowled lampadephore, holding his lamp, by no breath blown, To mirrors moony-clear and still Where never living face is limned, But wan reflections fixed of yore— Long-mouldered shapes that were your own— Graven in glass, unchanged and chill.