Beside a deep and mossy well
In the dark starless night I lay;
And dropping water like a bell,
Like a bell ringing far away,
Struck liquid notes in monotone,—­
An echo of a distant bell
Tolling the knell of yesterday. 
Deep down beneath the mossy ground
The liquid notes in monotone
Kept dropping, dropping endlessly,
And as I listened, over me
Crept like a mist a filmy spell;
My spirit’s waving wings were bound,
And dreams came that were not my own. 
Half-sleeping, half-awake, I heard
The drowsy chirp of a forest bird,
And the wind came up and the grasses stirred
And the curtaining woods that cluster round
That resonantly-echoing well
Shook all their leaves with silver sound
Like voices murmuring in a shell. 
Was it the past that lived again
In that nocturnal murmuring,
Waking a hidden voice to sing
Deep in my heart of other times
Whose memory long entombed had lain
Covered with all the dust of the years?... 
Falling in splashing tears
The wet notes drop in liquid chimes,
And the white fingers of the breeze
Gather a song from the melodious trees....

There is a hand whiter than pearl
That plucks a lute’s monotonous strings;
O starlight phantom of a girl
What lyric soul around thee sings,
And what divine companionship
Taught that entwining music to thy fingers,
And that unearthly music to thy lips? 
She pauses, and the echo lingers
Hovering like wings upon the air. 
I see more clearly now, her hair
Ripples like a black water-fall
About the pallor of her face. 
She sits beside a mossy well
Amid some dim marmoreal place,
Some fragrant Moorish hall
Set all about with arabesques of stone
And intricate mosaics of gem and shell. 
She sings again, she plays a monotone,
Perpetual rhythm like a far-off bell,
And someone dances, in a dancing river
The white ecstatic limbs flutter and quiver
Against the shadow.  In the odorous flowers
That grow about the well, still forms are lying,
A group of statues, an eternal throng,
Watching the dance and listening to the song;
So shall they lie, innumerable hours,
Silent and motionless for ever. 
The wind comes up, the flowers shiver,
The dancer vanishes, the songs are dying;
Night sickens into day. 
The wind comes up and blows the dust away....

Between two clouds a sullen flame
Expands, and lo, the crescent moon
Rides like a warrior through the sky. 
Thus long ago the warning came
When midnight towns lay all in swoon,
That the great gods were coming nigh
To crush the rebellious earth. 
Now beneath the crescent moon
No spirits stir, no wind makes mirth,
Only a rhythmic monotone
Of waters dropping in a well....