Thirteen Autumns and a Widow Songtext
von Cradle of Filth

Spawned wanton like blight on an auspicious night
Her eyes betrayed spells of the moon′s eerie light
A disquieting gaze forever ghosting far seas

Bled white and dead, her true mother was fed
To the ravenous wolves that the elements led
From crag-jagged mountains that seemingly grew in unease

Through the maw of the woods, a black carriage was drawn
Flanked by barbed lightning that hissed of the storm
(Gilded in crests of Carpathian breed)

Bringing slaves to the sodomite for the new-born
On that eve when the Countess' own came deformed
(A tragedy crept to the name Bathory)

Elizabeth christened, no paler a rose
Grew so dark as this sylph
None more cold in repose yet her beauty spun webs
Round hearts a glance would betroth


She feared the light
So when She fell like a sinner to vice
Under austere, puritanical rule
She sacrificed Mandragora like virgins to rats in the wall

But after whipangels licked prisoners, thralled
Never were her dreams so maniacally cruel
(And possessed of such delights)
For ravens winged Her nightly flights of erotica

Half spurned from the pulpit
Torments to occur
Half learnt from the cabal of demons
In her, her walk went to voodoo

To see her own shadow adored
At mass without flaw
Though inwards she abhored
Not her coven of suitors but the stare of their Lord

(I must avert mine eyes to hymns)
(For his gaze brings dogmas to my skin)
(He knows that I dreamt of carnal rites)
(With him undead for three long nights)

Elizabeth listened
No sermons intoned
Dragged such guilt to her door


Tombed her soul with such stone
For she swore the priest sighed
When she knelt down to atone...

She feared the light
So when she fell
Like a sinner to vice
Under austere, puritanical rule

She sacrificed
Her decorum as chaste
To this wolf of the cloth
Pouncing to haunt

Her confessional box
Forgiveness would come
When her sins were washed off
By rebaptism in white...

The looking glass cast Belladonna wreaths
′Pon the grave of her innocence
Her hidden face spat murder
From a whisper to a scream

All sleep seemed cursed
In Faustian verse
But there in orgiastic Hell

No horrors were worse than the mirrored revelation
That she kissed the Devil's phallus
By her own decree...

So with windows flung wide to the menstrual sky
Solstice Eve she fled the castle in secret
A daughter of the storm, astride her favourite nightmare
On winds without prayer

Stigmata still wept between her legs
A cold bloodedness which impressed new hatreds
She sought the sorceress
Through the snow and dank woods to the sodomite's lair

Nine twisted fates threw hewn bone die
For the throat of Elizabeth
Damnation won and urged the moon
In soliloquy to gleam

Twixt the trees in shafts to ghost a path
Past the howl of buggered nymphs
In the sodomite′s grasp

To the forest′s vulva
Where the witch scholared her
In even darker themes

(Amongst philtres and melissas)
(Midst the grease of strangled men)
(And eldritch truths, elder ill-omen)
(Elizabeth came to life again)

And under lacerations of dawn she returned
Like a flame unto a deathshead
With a promise to burn secrets brooded as she rode

Through the mist and marsh to where they showed
Her castle walls wherein the restless
Counted carrion crows

She awoke from a fable to mourning
Church bells wringing her madly from sleep
Tolled by a priest, self castrated and hung
Like a crimson bat 'neath the belfry

The biblical prattled their mantras
Hexes six-tripled their fees
But Elizabeth laughed, thirteen Autumns had passed
And she was a widow from God and his wrath finally...