Is it a banished soul

 Dredging the dark like a distracted mole

 Under a knoll?

 Like some invisible henchman old and gray,

 Day after day

 I hear it come and go,

 With stealthy swift unmeaning to and fro,

 Muttering low,

8

 Ceaseless and daft and terrible and blind,

 Like a lost mind.

 I often chill with fear

 When I bethink me, What if it should peer

 At my shoulder here!

 Perchance he drives the merry-go-round whose track

 Is the zodiac;

 His name is No-man’s-friend;

 And his gabbling parrot-talk has neither trend,

 Beginning, nor end.

 A prince of madness too, I’d cry, “A rat!”

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