“GET up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning-wheel;
For your father’s on the hill, and your mother is asleep;
Come up above the crags, and we’ll dance a Highland reel
Around the Fairy Thorn on the steep.”
At Anna Grace’s door ’twas thus the maidens cried,
Three merry maidens fair in kirtles of the green;
And Anna laid the rock and the weary wheel aside,
The fairest of the four, I ween.
They’re glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve,
Away in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare;
The heavy-sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave,
And the crags in the ghostly air.
And linking hand-in-hand, and singing as they go,
The maids along the hillside have ta’en their fearless way,
Till they come to where the rowan trees in lonely beauty grow
Beside the Fairy Hawthorn grey.
The Hawthorn stands between the ashes tall and slim,
Like matron with her twin grand-daughters at her knee;
The rowan berries cluster o’er her low head grey and dim
In ruddy kisses sweet to see.
The merry maidens four have ranged them in a row,
Between each lovely couple a stately rowan stem,
And away in mazes wavy, like skimming birds they go,
Oh, never carolled bird like them!
Pt. II
But solemn is the silence upon the silvery haze
That drinks away their voices in echoless repose,
And dreamily the evening has stilled the haunted braes,
And dreamier the gloaming grows.
For from the air above and the grassy ground beneath,
And from the mountain-ashes and the old white-thorn between,
A power of faint enchantment doth through their beings breathe,
And they sink down together on the green.
Thus clasped and prostrate all, with their heads together bowed,
Soft o’er their bosoms beating—the only human sound—
They hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd,
Like a river in the air gliding round.
Nor scream can any raise, nor prayer can any say,
For they feel fair Anna Grace drawn silently away,
Tears form in terror.
Tears shed in terror.
They feel their tresses twine with her parting locks of gold,
They feel her sliding arms from their trancèd arms unfold,
For heavy on their senses the faint enchantment lies
Through all that night of anguish and perilous amaze
And neither fear nor wonder can ope their quivering eyes,
Or their limbs from the cold ground raise;
Till out of night the earth has rolled her dewy side,
With every haunted mountain and streamy vale below;
When, as the mist dissolves in the yellow morningtide,
The maiden’s trance dissolveth so
supported by 7 fans who also own “The Fairy Thorn”
Borrowing to different saturated metal sub-genres does not guarantee quality.
But when a band manages to leverage said sub-genres, the humble yet hilarious listener is turned to a silent witness of a thrilling work of art. unidual
Featuring founding vocalist Jesse Zaraska for the first time since 2004, the Milwaukee veterans' seventh album is a metalcore monster. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 12, 2020
