Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

Sonnets of Travel (Author: Patrick Augustine Sheehan)

p.180

A Thunderstorm at Bingen

1. The dying sun had sucked his last red beam
   From the drunk vine, whose long, dishevelled tress
   Leaned as in maudlin madness to caress
   The child-like waves of the great, haunted stream.
   Then through the sudden darkness tore the scream
   And snarl of thunder; and the choking stress
   Made of the midnight all a wilderness,
   Lit by the torches of the lightning's gleam.
2. And lo! o'er slumb'ring village rose the crest
   Of shattered keeps, that in the magic flash
   Assumed the might and mien of ancient power.
   And from their walls by leaguering hosts opprest,
   The mailed and vanquished knights did leap and dash
   Into the Lethe of the storm and hour.

At the Rhine Falls (Schaffhausen)

1. O stately river! winding to the sea,
   Deep-bayed and solemn for the centuries,
   That gaze upon thee with their dreaming eyes
   From shattered keep and empty hostelry;
   Here in thy riot of lusty infancy,
   Heedless and unrebuked by the wise,
   Who cast the dark, gray shadows of surmise
   Of what a turbid future stores for thee,
2. Ay! leap and dance and curvet o'er these stones,
   That dare to thwart thy progress and thy pride;
   Stately and slow and solemn shalt thou move,
   Thy high song lowered to the dread monotones
   Of war's loud clangour, or the rippling tide
   Of music breathed from harps of wine and love.

p.181

An Organ Recital (Lucerne)

1. I have beheld Nature and Art at war,
   For on this summer eve the thunder pealed,
   Where the Pilatus threat'ning raised his steeled
   And crested helmet o'er the smoking bar,
   That wreathed its rival column from afar,
   And in its snowy crevices revealed
   The glowing emulation, field on field,
   Of thick mists, lighted by the lightning's star.
2. And here the mighty building rocked and heaved
   Under the organ's thunders that awoke
   Beneath the fingers of the Silent One.
   And the rain hissed, as we had fain believed,
   And the pines crashed beneath the lightning's stroke,
   And the fear-stricken hunters shriek and run.

The 'Vox Humana' (Lucerne)

1. We tired of surging cataracts of sound,
   That broke from loosened stop and fretted keys,
   And poured their cadences without surcease,
   And made the mountain thunders peal around.
   When 'mid the hissing of the deluge drowned,
   Lo! from the depths of Alpine crevices,
   Came the faint cry of horror and distress,
   Of lonely chamois-hunter, tempest-bound.
2. O great interpreter! Nature hast thou shamed;
   We woke, 'mid horrors of thy Erebus,
   To that one cry that ever touches us.
   In the vast organ music she has framed,
   Her noblest stops for us are idly stirred,
   Until she wakes the one great human chord.
P. A. SHEEHAN