All day, all day, round the clacking net <br />The weaver's fingers fly: <br />Gray dreams like frozen mists are set <br />In the hush of the weaver's eye; <br />A voice from the dusk is calling yet, <br />'Oh, come away, or we die!' <br /> <br />Without is a horror of hosts that fight, <br />That rest not, and cease not to kill, <br />The thunder of feet and the cry of the flight, <br />A slaughter weird and shrill; <br />Gray dreams are set in the weaver's sight, <br />The weaver is weaving still. <br /> <br />'Come away, dear soul, come away or we die; <br />Hear'st thou the moan and the rush! Come away; <br />The people are slain at the gates, and they fly; <br />The kind God hath left them this day; <br />The battle-axes cleaves, and the foemen cry, <br />And the red swords swing and slay.' <br /> <br />'Nay, wife, what boots to fly from pain, <br />When pain is wherever we fly? <br />And death is a sweeter thing than a chain: <br />'Tis sweeter to sleep than to cry, <br />The kind God giveth the days that wane; <br />If the kind God hath said it, I die.' <br /> <br />And the weaver wove, and the good wife fled, <br />And the city was made a tomb, <br />And a flame that shook from the rocks overhead <br />Shone into that silent room, <br />And touched like a wide red kiss on the dead <br />Brown weaver slain by his loom. <br /> <br />Yet I think that in some dim shadowy land, <br />Where no suns rise or set, <br />Where the ghost of a whilom loom doth stand <br />Round the dusk of its silken net, <br />Forever flyeth his shadowy hand, <br />And the weaver is weaving yet.<br /><br />Archibald Lampman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-weaver-3/
