Robert Southey

The Maiden and the Skeleton

In Aragon there lived a maid of noble Spanish line,
Who wore a rose of crimson in her raven hair so fine;
She danced at every fiesta in her gown of velvet green,
And many a youth lay wakeful for the loveliest ever seen.
But Isabella scorned them all, and wandered forth alone
To kiss the lips of Death himself upon his throne of bone.

One night she found a charnel-house beside the convent wall,
Where skulls in rows like ivory did grin from every stall;
She chose the finest of them all, with teeth like pearls complete,
And pressed her living lips to his in sacrament most sweet.
"O Death," she sighed, "thou art my lord, my bridegroom and my king,
For mortal love is but a day, but thou art everything."

The skeleton arose that night and donned a cloak of black,
He took her hand in fingers cold that never would give back;
Through fields of golden barley and through forests dark they went,
Through Gothic halls where candles burned with incense strangely blent,
Through movie screens and daguerreotypes, through time itself they passed,
For Death's embrace knows every age, the first one and the last.

Now Isabella dances still in each and every land—
A peasant girl with flowers wild, a lady grand and grand,
A Gothic bride in velvet dark, a nymph in forest shade,
A Hollywood starlet sleek and bright, an anime-styled maid.
And every girl who feels the pull of that forbidden kiss
Becomes another Isabella, wed to Death's dark bliss.

So maidens all, take warning from this tale I tell to you:
If Death should come a-courting in the morning fresh with dew,
Or in a moonlit forest, or upon a bed of rose,
Or in a field of golden grain where summer sunlight glows—
Remember Isabella, who in every age appears,
Still kissing those cold, grinning teeth through all the passing years.