THE INN OF THE FIVE CHIMNEYS
by: Clinton Scollard (1860-1932)
- T had
five chimneys, had that Inn,
- (As every man has senses five,
- The while upon earth he bides alive)
- And rumor said it was soiled with sin!
-
- The clapboards, warped and gray, showed stains
- Of more than an hundred autumn rains;
- No birds sang about the eaves,
- Only the leaves, only the leaves,
- Murmured in a minor weird
- As though they shrank, as though they feared,--
- Feared some blind, inscrutable thing,
- And ever they kept on murmuring.
- Upon the window-panes the dust
- Was caked and cracked like a wizened crust,--
- A grimy crust that none would touch
- Unless he felt gaunt famine's clutch.
- Mould made dank and dark each door,
- And every lintel and every floor
- With the drifting silt of the years was deep;
- And shapes that crawl and writhe and creep
- Traced strange arabesques over all.
-
- It had five chimneys, had that Inn,
- And rumor said it was soiled with sin!
-
- Above, in the long low dancing-hall,
- You could hear the death-watch in the wall,
- A sound that seemed to jibe and mock
- Like the eerie tick of a ghostly clock.
- In every corner and crevice hung
- Spider-tapestries that clung
- To the crumbling mortar,--grim festoons;
- And the wraith of ancient rigadoons
- Floated faintly, as though unseen
- Fiddlers fingered the chorded bow,
- And maskers, antic of garb and mien,
- Flitted in sinuous to and fro.
-
- It had five chimneys, had that Inn,
- And rumor said it was soiled with sin!
-
- And every chamber, wide and bare,
- Breathed on the dim and moated air
- Spectral echoings,--doubts and fears,
- Hates and loves of the parted years;
- And every hallway and every stair
- Creaked and groaned with the gruesome tread
- Of those long silent, of those long dead,--
- Youth, in its radiant rainbow guise;
- Wrinkled Age, with its shrunken eyes;
- Honor, garbed in the mail of Trust;
- Poverty, Riches and slinking Lust;
- Oh, what a motley!--vanished quite
- Into the vastnesses of night!
-
- It had five chimneys, had that Inn,
- And rumor said it was soiled with sin!
-
- And so I left it standing still
- And stark by the crossroads under the hill,
- With its sagging roof and its rotting beams,
- And all of its tangled maze of dreams.
- But it holds me, aye, it haunts me yet,
- Like a hooded vision of Regret,
- Though I fain would say to it, "Be gone!"
- As to the night mists saith the dawn.
- And yet I needs must let it dwell
- In memory till some happy spell
- Shall bid it be invisible!
- Come, healing spirit, and touch my soul,
- And make it sweet and sane and whole!
-
- It had five chimneys, had that Inn,
- (As every man has senses five,
- The while upon earth he bides alive)
- And rumor said it was soiled with sin!
"The Inn of the Five Chimneys"
is reprinted from Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916.
Ed. William Stanley Braithwaite. New York: Laurence J. Gomme,
1916. |
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POEMS BY CLINTON SCOLLARD |
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