When he bs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he stand as still as a tree, when he wants the doves to flutter softly, ing as they e, down upon his shouders, those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings round their necks. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air -- all the birds e; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. The wind stirs the dark wood; it blows through the bushes. A little of the cold air that blows raveyards always goes with him, it crisps the hairs on the bay neck but I am not afraid of him; only afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with which he seizes me. Afraid of falling down. Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and khe ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving currents of the air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further. The earth with its fragile fleece of last summers dying leaves and grasses supports me only out of plicity with him, because his flesh is of the same substance as those leaves that are slowly turning ih.
He could thrust me into the seed-bed of years geion and I would have to wait until he whistled me up from my darkness before I could e back again.
Yet, when he shakes out those two clear notes from his bird call, I e, like any other trusting thing that perches on the crook of his wrist. I found the Erl-King sitting on an ivy-covered stump winding all the birds in the wood to him on a diatonic spool of sound, one rising note, one falling note; such a sweet pierg call that down there came a soft, chirruping jostle of birds. The clearing was cluttered with dead leaves, some the colour of honey, some the colour of ders, some the colour of earth. He seemed so much the spirit of the place I saw without surprise how the fox laid its muzzle fearlessly upon his khe brown light of the end of the day drained into the moist, heavy earth; all silent, all still and the ell of night ing. The first drops of rain fell. In the wood, no shelter but his cottage.
That was the way I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King, who keeps his feathered things in little cages he has woven out of osier twigs and there they sit and sing for him.
Goats milk to drink, from a chipped tin mug; we shall eat the oatcakes he has baked on the hearthstone. Rattle of the rain on the roof. The latch ks on the door; we are shut up ih one another, in the brown room crisp with the st of burning logs that shiver with tiny flame, and I lie down on the Erl-Kings creaking palliasse of straw. His skin is the tint aure of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely.
And now -- ach! I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. The equinotical gales seize the bare elms and make them whizz and whirl like dervishes; you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream.
The white moon above the clearing coldly illumihe still tableaux of our embrats. How sweet I roamed, or, rather, used to roam; once I was the perfect child of the meadows of summer, but then the yea