Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE DESOLATE HOUSE, by ANNETTE ELISABETH VON DROSTE-HULSHOFF


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE DESOLATE HOUSE, by                    
First Line: Deep in a dell a woodsman's house
Last Line: And echoes of the dead man's flute.
Alternate Author Name(s): Droste-hulshoff, Annette Von
Subject(s): Houses, Deserted


DEEP in a dell a woodsman's house
Has sunk in wild dilapidation;
There buried under vines and boughs
I often sit in contemplation.
So dense the tangle that the day
Through heavy lashes can but glimmer;
The rocky cleft is rendered dimmer
By overshadowing tree-trunks gray.

Within that dell I love to hear
The flies with their tumultuous humming,
And solitary beetles near
Amid the bushes softly drumming.
And when the trickling cliffs of slate
The color from the sunset borrow,
Methinks an eye all red with sorrow
Looks down on me disconsolate.

The arbor peak with jagged edge
Wears many a vine-shoot long and meagre
And from the moss beneath the hedge
Creep forth carnations, nowise eager.
There from the moist cliff overhead
The muddy drippings oft bedew them,
Then creep in lazy streamlets through them
To sink within a fennel-bed.

Along the roof o'ergrown with moss
Has many a tuft of thatch projected,
A spider-web is built across
The window-jamb, else unprotected;
The wing of a gleaming dragon-fly
Hangs in it like some petal tender,
The body armed in golden splendor
Lies headless on the sill near-by.

A butterfly sometimes may chance
In heedless play to flutter hither
And stop in momentary trance
Where the narcissus blossoms wither;
A dove that through the grove has flown
Above this dell no more will utter
Her coo, one can but hear her flutter
And see her shadow on the stone.

And in the fireplace where the snow
Each winter down the chimney dashes
A mass of bell-capped toad-stools grow
On viscid heaps of moldering ashes.
High on a peg above the rest
A hank of rope-yarn limply dangles
Like rotted hair, and in the tangles
The swallow built her last year's nest.

An old dog-collar set with bells
Swings from a hook by clasp and tether,
With rude embroidery that spells
"Diana" worked upon the leather.
A flute too, when the woodsman died,
The men who dug his grave forgot here;
The dog, his only friend, they shot here
And laid her by her master's side.

But while I sit in reverie,
A field-mouse near me shrilly crying,
The squirrel barking from his tree,
And from the marsh the frogs replying—
Then eerie shudders o'er me shoot,
As if I caught from out the dingle
Diana's bells once more a-jingle
And echoes of the dead man's flute.





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