<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=416393" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The City of Dreadful Night</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Per me si va nella citta dolente.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">--Dante</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti<br>D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,<br>Girando senza posa,<br>Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;<br>Uso alcuno, alcun frutto<br>Indovinar non so. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volve<br>Ogni creata cosa,<br>In te, morte, si posa<br>Nostra ignuda natura;<br>Lieta no, ma sicura<br>Dell' antico dolor . . .<br>Pero ch' esser beato<br>Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">--Leopardi</div><div style="margin:10px 0">PROEM</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lo, thus, as prostrate, &quot;In the dust I write<br>My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.&quot;<br>Yet why evoke the spectres of black night<br>To blot the sunshine of exultant years?<br>Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?<br>Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,<br>And wail life's discords into careless ears?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles<br>To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth<br>Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,<br>False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;<br>Because it gives some sense of power and passion<br>In helpless innocence to try to fashion<br>Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Surely I write not for the hopeful young,<br>Or those who deem their happiness of worth,<br>Or such as pasture and grow fat among<br>The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,<br>Or pious spirits with a God above them<br>To sanctify and glorify and love them,<br>Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For none of these I write, and none of these<br>Could read the writing if they deigned to try;<br>So may they flourish in their due degrees,<br>On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.<br>If any cares for the weak words here written,<br>It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,<br>Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yes, here and there some weary wanderer<br>In that same city of tremendous night,<br>Will understand the speech and feel a stir<br>Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;<br>&quot;I suffer mute and lonely, yet another<br>Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother<br>Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O sad Fraternity, do I unfold<br>Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?<br>Nay, be assured; no secret can be told<br>To any who divined it not before:<br>None uninitiate by many a presage<br>Will comprehend the language of the message,<br>Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The City is of Night; perchance of Death<br>But certainly of Night; for never there<br>Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath<br>After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:<br>The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity<br>The sun has never visited that city,<br>For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dissolveth like a dream of night away;<br>Though present in distempered gloom of thought<br>And deadly weariness of heart all day.<br>But when a dream night after night is brought<br>Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many<br>Recur each year for several years, can any<br>Discern that dream from real life in aught?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For life is but a dream whose shapes return,<br>Some frequently, some seldom, some by night<br>And some by day, some night and day: we learn,<br>The while all change and many vanish quite,<br>In their recurrence with recurrent changes<br>A certain seeming order; where this ranges<br>We count things real; such is memory's might.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A river girds the city west and south,<br>The main north channel of a broad lagoon,<br>Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;<br>Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon<br>For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;<br>Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,<br>Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Upon an easy slope it lies at large<br>And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest<br>Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.<br>A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,<br>Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,<br>Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;<br>And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The city is not ruinous, although<br>Great ruins of an unremembered past,<br>With others of a few short years ago<br>More sad, are found within its precincts vast.<br>The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement<br>In house or palace front from roof to basement<br>Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,<br>Amidst the soundless solitudes immense<br>Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.<br>The silence which benumbs or strains the sense<br>Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:<br>Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,<br>Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet as in some necropolis you find<br>Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,<br>So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind<br>Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,<br>Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,<br>Or sit foredone and desolately ponder<br>Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,<br>A woman rarely, now and then a child:<br>A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth<br>To see a little one from birth defiled,<br>Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish<br>Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish<br>To meet one erring in that homeless wild.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They often murmur to themselves, they speak<br>To one another seldom, for their woe<br>Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak<br>Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow<br>To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,<br>Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,<br>To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;<br>There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;<br>The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,<br>A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain<br>Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,<br>Or which some moments' stupor but increases,<br>This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They leave all hope behind who enter there:<br>One certitude while sane they cannot leave,<br>One anodyne for torture and despair;<br>The certitude of Death, which no reprieve<br>Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,<br>But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render<br>That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Because he seemed to walk with an intent<br>I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,<br>Unswervingly though slowly onward went,<br>Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:<br>Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet<br>We travelled many a long dim silent street.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,<br>A tower that merged into the heavy sky;<br>Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:<br>Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:<br>He murmured to himself with dull despair,<br>Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then turning to the right went on once more<br>And travelled weary roads without suspense;<br>And reached at last a low wall's open door,<br>Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:<br>He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,<br>Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then turning to the right resumed his march,<br>And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,<br>Until on stooping through a narrow arch<br>We stood before a squalid house at length:<br>He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,<br>Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,<br>I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs<br>Of desolation I had seen and heard<br>In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:<br>Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,<br>Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As whom his one intense thought overpowers,<br>He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase<br>The signs and figures of the circling hours,<br>Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;<br>The works proceed until run down; although<br>Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then turning to the right paced on again,<br>And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms<br>Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;<br>And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;<br>And paused to murmur with the old despair,<br>Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt<br>Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:<br>He circled thus forever tracing out<br>The series of the fraction left of Life;<br>Perpetual recurrence in the scope<br>Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. [ 1]</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">LXX</div><div style="margin:10px 0">[1] Life divided by that persistent three = --- = .210.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">333</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">III<br>Although lamps burn along the silent streets,<br>Even when moonlight silvers empty squares<br>The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;<br>But when the night its sphereless mantle wears<br>The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,<br>The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,<br>The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:<br>The night remains for it as dark and dense,<br>Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns<br>As in the daylight with its natural sense;<br>Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,<br>Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,<br>Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep<br>Becomes familiar though unreconciled;<br>Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,<br>And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,<br>Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;<br>but all more dubious than the things of vision,<br>So that it knows not when it is beguiled.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No time abates the first despair and awe,<br>But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing<br>Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law<br>Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;<br>Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,<br>Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,<br>The soul is too outworn for wondering.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He stood alone within the spacious square<br>Declaiming from the central grassy mound,<br>With head uncovered and with streaming hair,<br>As if large multitudes were gathered round:<br>A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,<br>The glances burning with unnatural light:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: All was black,<br>In heaven no single star, on earth no track;<br>A brooding hush without a stir or note,<br>The air so thick it clotted in my throat;<br>And thus for hours; then some enormous things<br>Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:<br>But I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire<br>Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;<br>The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath<br>Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;<br>Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold<br>Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:<br>But I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,<br>That hillock burning with a brazen glare;<br>Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow<br>Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;<br>A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell<br>For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:<br>Yet I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: Meteors ran<br>And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;<br>The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,<br>The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;<br>The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged<br>And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:<br>Yet I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: Air once more,<br>And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;<br>Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,<br>The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;<br>White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;<br>The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:<br>Yet I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: On the left<br>The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;<br>There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,<br>A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;<br>Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,<br>And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:<br>Yet I strode on austere;<br>No hope could have no fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: From the right<br>A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;<br>A woman with a red lamp in her hand,<br>Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;<br>O desolation moving with such grace!<br>O anguish with such beauty in thy face!<br>I fell as on my bier,<br>Hope travailed with such fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: I was twain,<br>Two selves distinct that cannot join again;<br>One stood apart and knew but could not stir,<br>And watched the other stark in swoon and her;<br>And she came on, and never turned aside,<br>Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:<br>And as she came more near<br>My soul grew mad with fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: Hell is mild<br>And piteous matched with that accursed wild;<br>A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,<br>A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;<br>That lamp she held was her own burning heart,<br>Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:<br>The mystery was clear;<br>Mad rage had swallowed fear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: By the sea<br>She knelt and bent above that senseless me;<br>Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,<br>She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;<br>She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,<br>Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:<br>And mad with rage and fear,<br>I stood stonebound so near.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I came through the desert thus it was,<br>As I came through the desert: When the tide<br>Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,<br>She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne<br>Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;<br>I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,<br>Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:<br>They love; their doom is drear,<br>Yet they nor hope nor fear;<br>But I, what do I here?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">V</div><div style="margin:10px 0">How he arrives there none can clearly know;<br>Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,<br>Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,<br>Or down the river's boiling cataracts:<br>To reach it is as dying fever-stricken<br>To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;<br>And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But being there one feels a citizen;<br>Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:<br>Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?<br>And yet release does come; there comes a morn<br>When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly<br>That all the world is changed for him completely,<br>And he is verily as if new-born.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He scarcely can believe the blissful change,<br>He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;<br>Never again will he approach the range<br>Infected by that evil spell now burst:<br>Poor wretch! who once hath paced that dolent city<br>Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,<br>With horror ever deepening from the first.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,<br>A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,<br>And love them more than death or happy life,<br>They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;<br>Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,<br>Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,<br>Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">VI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I sat forlornly by the river-side,<br>And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars<br>Above the blackness of the swelling tide,<br>Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;<br>And heard the heave and plashing of the flow<br>Against the wall a dozen feet below.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;<br>And under one, a few steps from my seat,<br>I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,<br>Although I had not heard approaching feet:<br>These bodiless voices in my waking dream<br>Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you have after all come back; come back.<br>I was about to follow on your track.<br>And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That I have failed is proved by my return:<br>The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,<br>But listen; and the story you shall learn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I reached the portal common spirits fear,<br>And read the words above it, dark yet clear,<br>&quot;Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And would have passed in, gratified to gain<br>That positive eternity of pain<br>Instead of this insufferable inane.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;<br>First leave your hopes behind!--But years have passed<br>Since I left all behind me, to the last:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,<br>This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:<br>How could I seek to enter void of it?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,<br>And would find entrance to our gulf of dole<br>Without the payment of the settled toll?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Outside the gate he showed an open chest:<br>Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;<br>Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,<br>And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but<br>They are so thin that it will never glut.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;<br>And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,<br>And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When one casts off a load he springs upright,<br>Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,<br>And briskly paces forward strong and light:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;<br>The whole frame sank; however strong and proud<br>Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And as they passed me, earnestly from each<br>A morsel of his hope I did beseech,<br>To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No one would cede a little of his store,<br>Though knowing that in instants three or four<br>He must resign the whole for evermore.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So I returned. Our destiny is fell;<br>For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,<br>Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope<br>With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,<br>We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And sharing it between us, entrance win,<br>In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:<br>Let us without delay our search begin.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">VII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,<br>And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;<br>And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,<br>And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:<br>But others think them visions of illusion,<br>Or even men gone far in self-confusion;<br>No man there being wholly sane in mind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And yet a man who raves, however mad,<br>Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,<br>Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:<br>The phantoms have no reticence at all:<br>The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless<br>The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,<br>The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I have seen phantoms there that were as men<br>And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;<br>Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,<br>Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:<br>The City rests for man so weird and awful,<br>That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,<br>And phantoms there may have their proper home.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">VIII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">While I still lingered on that river-walk,<br>And watched the tide as black as our black doom,<br>I heard another couple join in talk,<br>And saw them to the left hand in the gloom<br>Seated against an elm bole on the ground,<br>Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;I never knew another man on earth<br>But had some joy and solace in his life,<br>Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:<br>My doom has been unmitigated dearth.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;We gaze upon the river, and we note<br>The various vessels large and small that float,<br>Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil<br>Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;<br>But homely love with common food and health,<br>And nightly sleep to balance daily toil.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;This all-too-humble soul would arrogate<br>Unto itself some signalising hate<br>From the supreme indifference of Fate!&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?<br>I think myself; yet I would rather be<br>My miserable self than He, than He<br>Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou<br>From whom it had its being, God and Lord!<br>Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred<br>Malignant and implacable! I vow</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,<br>For all the temples to Thy glory built,<br>Would I assume the ignominious guilt<br>Of having made such men in such a world.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,<br>At once so wicked, foolish and insane,<br>As to produce men when He might refrain!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;The world rolls round for ever like a mill;<br>It grinds out death and life and good and ill;<br>It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;While air of Space and Time's full river flow<br>The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:<br>It may be wearing out, but who can know?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;<br>That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,<br>That it is quite indifferent to him.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?<br>It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,<br>Then grinds him back into eternal death.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">IX</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It is full strange to him who hears and feels,<br>When wandering there in some deserted street,<br>The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,<br>The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:<br>Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?<br>Who in this city of the stars abideth<br>To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky<br>As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,<br>The harness jingles, as it passes by;<br>The hugeness of an overburthened wain:<br>A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges<br>Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:<br>And so it rolls into the night again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What merchandise? whence, whither, and for whom?<br>Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,<br>Bearing away to some mysterious tomb<br>Or Limbo of the scornful universe<br>The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions<br>Of all things good which should have been our portions,<br>But have been strangled by that City's curse.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">X</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The mansion stood apart in its own ground;<br>In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,<br>High trees about it, and the whole walled round:<br>The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;<br>And every window of its front shed light,<br>Portentous in that City of the Night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But though thus lighted it was deadly still<br>As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;<br>Perchance a congregation to fulfil<br>Solemnities of silence in this doom,<br>Mysterious rites of dolour and despair<br>Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad<br>Whereon lay still light from the open door;<br>The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,<br>Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;<br>And ample stairways rose to left and right<br>Whose balustrades were also draped with night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,<br>Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;<br>But each was hung with its funereal pall,<br>And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,<br>With picture or with statue or with bust,<br>all copied from the same fair form of dust:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A woman very young and very fair;<br>Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,<br>And loving these sweet lovers, so that care<br>And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:<br>Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,<br>these shapes lit up that mausolean night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At length I heard a murmur as of lips,<br>And reached an open oratory hung<br>With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;<br>Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;<br>And one lay there upon a low white bed,<br>With tapers burning at the foot and head:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Lady of the images, supine,<br>Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:<br>And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine<br>A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:<br>A crucifix of dim and ghostly white<br>Surmounted the large altar left in night:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The chambers of the mansion of my heart,<br>In every one whereof thine image dwells,<br>Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The inmost oratory of my soul,<br>Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,<br>Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,<br>With eyes forever fixed upon that face,<br>So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I kneel here patient as thou liest there;<br>As patient as a statue carved in stone,<br>Of adoration and eternal grief.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">While thou dost not awake I cannot move;<br>And something tells me thou wilt never wake,<br>And I alive feel turning into stone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,<br>Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,<br>Dear vision better than all death or life.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But I renounce all choice of life or death,<br>For either shall be ever at thy side,<br>And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He murmured thus and thus in monotone,<br>Intent upon that uncorrupted face,<br>Entranced except his moving lips alone:<br>I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.<br>This was the festival that filled with light<br>That palace in the City of the Night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,<br>And fill their living mouths with dust of death,<br>And make their habitations in the tombs,<br>And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,<br>And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error<br>To reach that void of darkness and old terror<br>Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,<br>They have much goodness yet they do not well,<br>(The fools we know have their own paradise,<br>The wicked also have their proper Hell);<br>They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,<br>Much patience but their time endureth longer,<br>Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They are most rational and yet insane:<br>And outward madness not to be controlled;<br>A perfect reason in the central brain,<br>Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,<br>And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly<br>The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly<br>To cheat itself refusing to behold.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And some are great in rank and wealth and power,<br>And some renowned for genius and for worth;<br>And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower<br>And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth<br>Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others<br>All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,<br>The saddest and the weariest men on earth.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Our isolated units could be brought<br>To act together for some common end?<br>For one by one, each silent with his thought,<br>I marked a long loose line approach and wend<br>Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,<br>And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then I would follow in among the last:<br>And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,<br>Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,<br>With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:<br>Whence come you in the world of life and light<br>To this our City of Tremendous Night?--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From pleading in a senate of rich lords<br>For some scant justice to our countless hordes<br>Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From wandering through many a solemn scene<br>Of opium visions, with a heart serene<br>And intellect miraculously bright:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee<br>By my transcendent feats of mimicry,<br>And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,<br>Which brought an ecstasy ineffable<br>Of love and adoration and delight:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From ruling on a splendid kingly throne<br>A nation which beneath my rule has grown<br>Year after year in wealth and arts and might:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From preaching to an audience fired with faith<br>The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,<br>Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From drinking fiery poison in a den<br>Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,<br>Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From picturing with all beauty and all grace<br>First Eden and the parents of our race,<br>A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From writing a great work with patient plan<br>To justify the ways of God to man,<br>And show how ill must fade and perish quite:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From desperate fighting with a little band<br>Against the powerful tyrants of our land,<br>To free our brethren in their own despite:<br>I wake from daydreams to this real night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,<br>Each one responded with his countersign,<br>Then entered the cathedral; and in turn<br>I entered also, having given mine;<br>But lingered near until I heard no more,<br>And marked the closing of the massive door.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XIII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of all things human which are strange and wild<br>This is perchance the wildest and most strange,<br>And showeth man most utterly beguiled,<br>To those who haunt that sunless City's range;<br>That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating<br>How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,<br>How naught is constant on the earth but change.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The hours are heavy on him and the days;<br>The burden of the months he scarce can bear;<br>And often in his secret soul he prays<br>To sleep through barren periods unaware,<br>Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;<br>Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,<br>He would outsleep another term of care.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make<br>Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;<br>This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,<br>Wounded and slow and very venomous;<br>Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,<br>Distilling poison at each painful motion,<br>And seems condemned to circle ever thus.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And since he cannot spend and use aright<br>The little time here given him in trust,<br>But wasteth it in weary undelight<br>Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,<br>He naturally claimeth to inherit<br>The everlasting Future, that his merit<br>May have full scope; as surely is most just.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O length of the intolerable hours,<br>O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,<br>O Time, too ample for our vital powers,<br>O Life, whose woeful vanities remain<br>Immutable for all of all our legions<br>Through all the centuries and in all the regions,<br>Not of your speed and variance WE complain.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">WE do not ask a longer term of strife,<br>Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;<br>We do not claim renewed and endless life<br>When this which is our torment here shall close,<br>An everlasting conscious inanition!<br>We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,<br>Dateless oblivion and divine repose.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XIV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,<br>With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;<br>And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,<br>No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;<br>No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,<br>And the high altar space was unillumed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Around the pillars and against the walls<br>Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood<br>Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.<br>Perchance they were not a great multitude<br>Save in that city of so lonely streets<br>Where one may count up every face he meets.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All patiently awaited the event<br>Without a stir or sound, as if no less<br>Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.<br>And then we heard a voice of solemn stress<br>From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met<br>Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Two steadfast and intolerable eyes<br>Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;<br>The head behind it of enormous size.<br>And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,<br>Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,<br>By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!<br>O battling in black floods without an ark!<br>O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!<br>My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,<br>With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:<br>Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;<br>Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail<br>And perish in your perishing unblest.<br>And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope<br>Of all our universe, with desperate hope<br>To find some solace for your wild unrest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now at last authentic word I bring,<br>Witnessed by every dead and living thing;<br>Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:<br>There is no God; no Fiend with names divine<br>Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,<br>It is to satiate no Being's gall.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It was the dark delusion of a dream,<br>That living Person conscious and supreme,<br>Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;<br>Whom we must curse because the life he gave<br>Could not be buried in the quiet grave,<br>Could not be killed by poison or the knife.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This little life is all we must endure,<br>The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,<br>We fall asleep and never wake again;<br>Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,<br>Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh<br>In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We finish thus; and all our wretched race<br>Shall finish with its cycle, and give place<br>To other beings with their own time-doom:<br>Infinite aeons ere our kind began;<br>Infinite aeons after the last man<br>Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We bow down to the universal laws,<br>Which never had for man a special clause<br>Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:<br>If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,<br>If tigers burn with beauty and with might,<br>Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All substance lives and struggles evermore<br>Through countless shapes continually at war,<br>By countless interactions interknit:<br>If one is born a certain day on earth,<br>All times and forces tended to that birth,<br>Not all the world could change or hinder it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I find no hint throughout the Universe<br>Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;<br>I find alone Necessity Supreme;<br>With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,<br>Unlighted ever by the faintest spark<br>For us the flitting shadows of a dream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;<br>A few short years must bring us all relief:<br>Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?<br>But if you would not this poor life fulfil,<br>Lo, you are free to end it when you will,<br>Without the fear of waking after death.--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The organ-like vibrations of his voice<br>Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;<br>The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice<br>Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:<br>Our shadowy congregation rested still<br>As brooding on that &quot;End it when you will.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wherever men are gathered, all the air<br>Is charged with human feeling, human thought;<br>Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,<br>Are into its vibrations surely wrought;<br>Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,<br>Are breathed into it with our respiration<br>It is with our life fraught and overfraught.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,<br>As if alone on mountains or wide seas;<br>But nourishes warm life or hastens death<br>With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,<br>Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,<br>Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;<br>He in his turn affecting all of these.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,<br>Although not many exiles wander there,<br>With many a potent evil influence,<br>Each adding poison to the poisoned air;<br>Infections of unutterable sadness,<br>Infections of incalculable madness,<br>Infections of incurable despair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XVI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Our shadowy congregation rested still,<br>As musing on that message we had heard<br>And brooding on that &quot;End it when you will;&quot;<br>Perchance awaiting yet some other word;<br>When keen as lightning through a muffled sky<br>Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:<br>We have no personal life beyond the grave;<br>There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:<br>Can I find here the comfort which I crave?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In all eternity I had one chance,<br>One few years' term of gracious human life:<br>The splendours of the intellect's advance,<br>The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The social pleasures with their genial wit:<br>The fascination of the worlds of art,<br>The glories of the worlds of nature, lit<br>By large imagination's glowing heart;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The rapture of mere being, full of health;<br>The careless childhood and the ardent youth,<br>The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,<br>The reverend age serene with life's long truth:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All the sublime prerogatives of Man;<br>The storied memories of the times of old,<br>The patient tracking of the world's great plan<br>Through sequences and changes myriadfold.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This chance was never offered me before;<br>For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:<br>This chance recurreth never, nevermore;<br>Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,<br>A mockery, a delusion; and my breath<br>Of noble human life upon this earth<br>So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,<br>My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,<br>I worse than lose the years which are my all:<br>What can console me for the loss supreme?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,<br>Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?<br>Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:<br>Hush and be mute envisaging despair.--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This vehement voice came from the northern aisle<br>Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;<br>And none gave answer for a certain while,<br>For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;<br>At last the pulpit speaker simply said,<br>With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:--</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;<br>This life itself holds nothing good for us,<br>But ends soon and nevermore can be;<br>And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,<br>And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:<br>I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XVII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!<br>How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel<br>Their thick processions of supernal lights<br>Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!<br>And men regard with passionate awe and yearning<br>The mighty marching and the golden burning,<br>And think the heavens respond to what they feel.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream<br>Are glorified from vision as they pass<br>The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;<br>Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass<br>To restless crystals; cornice dome and column<br>Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;<br>Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">With such a living light these dead eyes shine,<br>These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze<br>We read a pity, tremulous, divine,<br>Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:<br>Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;<br>There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,<br>They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">If we could near them with the flight unflown,<br>We should but find them worlds as sad as this,<br>Or suns all self-consuming like our own<br>Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:<br>They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;<br>The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,<br>The empyrean is a void abyss.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XVIII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I wandered in a suburb of the north,<br>And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,<br>Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth<br>Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:<br>The air above was wan with misty light,<br>The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I took the left-hand path and slowly trod<br>Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went<br>The humid leafage; and my feet were shod<br>With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,<br>With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,<br>So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">After a hundred steps I grew aware<br>Of something crawling in the lane below;<br>It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there<br>That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,<br>The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then<br>To drag; for it would die in its own den.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But coming level with it I discerned<br>That it had been a man; for at my tread<br>It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,<br>Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,<br>And with the left hand twitched back as in ire<br>Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,<br>An infamy for manhood to behold.<br>He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?<br>You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold<br>And all that men go mad upon, since you<br>Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You think that I am weak and must submit<br>Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,<br>And you are dead as if I clove with it<br>That false fierce greedy heart. Betrayed! betrayed!<br>I fling this phial if you seek to pass,<br>And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then with sudden change, Take thought! take thought!<br>Have pity on me! it is mine alone.<br>If you could find, it would avail you naught;<br>Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:<br>For who of mortal or immortal race<br>The lifetrack of another can retrace?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Did you but know my agony and toil!<br>Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;<br>My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;<br>Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:<br>My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;<br>I cannot move but with continual moan.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But I am in the very way at last<br>To find the long-lost broken golden thread<br>Which unites my present with my past,<br>If you but go your own way. And I said,<br>I will retire as soon as you have told<br>Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And so you know it not! he hissed with scorn;<br>I feared you, imbecile! It leads me back<br>From this accursed night without a morn,<br>And through the deserts which have else no track,<br>And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,<br>To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I become a nursling soft and pure,<br>An infant cradled on its mother's knee,<br>Without a past, love-cherished and secure;<br>Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,<br>Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,<br>And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed<br>Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,<br>And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;<br>He should to antenatal night retrace,<br>And hide his elements in that large womb<br>Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And even thus, what weary way were planned,<br>To seek oblivion through the far-off gate<br>Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!<br>For this is law, if law there be in Fate:<br>What never has been, yet may have its when;<br>The thing which has been, never is again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XIX</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The mighty river flowing dark and deep,<br>With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides<br>Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,<br>Is named the River of the Suicides;<br>For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,<br>And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,<br>Within its cold secure oblivion hides.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">One plunges from a bridge's parapet,<br>As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;<br>Another wades in slow with purpose set<br>Until the waters are above him furled;<br>Another in a boat with dreamlike motion<br>Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,<br>To starve or sink from out the desert world.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They perish from their suffering surely thus,<br>For none beholding them attempts to save,<br>The while thinks how soon, solicitous,<br>He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;<br>Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance<br>Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance<br>Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,<br>Why actors and spectators do we stay?--<br>To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;<br>To see what shifts are yet in the dull play<br>For our illusion; to refrain from grieving<br>Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:<br>But those asleep at home, how blest are they!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet it is but for one night after all:<br>What matters one brief night of dreary pain?<br>When after it the weary eyelids fall<br>Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;<br>And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish<br>In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,<br>That one best sleep which never wakes again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XX</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I sat me weary on a pillar's base,<br>And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight<br>O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,<br>A shore of shadow slanting from the right:<br>The great cathedral's western front stood there,<br>A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Before it, opposite my place of rest,<br>Two figures faced each other, large, austere;<br>A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,<br>An angel standing in the moonlight clear;<br>So mighty by magnificence of form,<br>They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword<br>The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;<br>His vigilant intense regard was poured<br>Upon the creature placidly unquelled,<br>Whose front was set at level gaze which took<br>No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And as I pondered these opposed shapes<br>My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon<br>Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes<br>The outworn to worse weariness. But soon<br>A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,<br>And from the evil lethargy I woke.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,<br>And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:<br>A warrior leaning on his sword alone<br>Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;<br>The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware<br>Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Again I sank in that repose unsweet,<br>Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;<br>The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:<br>An unarmed man with raised hands impotent<br>Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept<br>Such mien as if open eyes it slept.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;<br>A louder crash upstartled me in dread:<br>The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,<br>And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head<br>Between the monster's large quiescent paws,<br>Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The moon had circled westward full and bright,<br>And made the temple-front a mystic dream,<br>And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,<br>The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:<br>I pondered long that cold majestic face<br>Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">XXI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Anear the centre of that northern crest<br>Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,<br>From which the city east and south and west<br>Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there<br>An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,<br>The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,<br>Upon a graded granite base foursquare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Low-seated she leans forward massively,<br>With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might<br>Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;<br>Across a clasped book in her lap the right<br>Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes<br>With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes<br>Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Words cannot picture her; but all men know<br>That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought<br>Three centuries and threescore years ago,<br>With phantasies of his peculiar thought:<br>The instruments of carpentry and science<br>Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance<br>With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;<br>The grave and solid infant perched beside,<br>With open winglets that might bear a dove,<br>Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;<br>Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,<br>But all too impotent to lift the regal<br>Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems<br>To mock her grand head and the knotted frown<br>Of forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,<br>The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown<br>Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid<br>As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,<br>The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,<br>The massy rainbow curved in front of it<br>Beyond the village with the masts and trees;<br>The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,<br>Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions<br>Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,<br>The &quot;MELENCOLIA&quot; that transcends all wit.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thus has the artist copied her, and thus<br>Surrounded to expound her form sublime,<br>Her fate heroic and calamitous;<br>Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,<br>Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,<br>Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration<br>Of the day setting on her baffled prime.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Baffled and beaten back she works on still,<br>Weary and sick of soul she works the more,<br>Sustained by her indomitable will:<br>The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,<br>And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,<br>Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre<br>That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But as if blacker night could dawn on night,<br>With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,<br>A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,<br>More desperate than strife with hope debarred,<br>More fatal than the adamantine Never<br>Encompassing her passionate endeavour,<br>Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To sense that every struggle brings defeat<br>Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;<br>That all the oracles are dumb or cheat<br>Because they have no secret to express;<br>That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain<br>Because there is no light beyond the curtain;<br>That all is vanity and nothingness.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Titanic from her high throne in the north,<br>That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,<br>In bronze sublimity she gazes forth<br>Over her Capital of teen and threne,<br>Over the river with its isles and bridges,<br>The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-ridges,<br>Confronting them with a coeval mien.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The moving moon and stars from east to west<br>Circle before her in the sea of air;<br>Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.<br>Her subjects often gaze up to her there:<br>The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,<br>The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance<br>And confirmation of the old despair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=James+Thomson">James Thomson</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=416393" data-title="The City of Dreadful Night de James Thomson" data-description="Per me si va nella citta dolente. --Dante Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa, Girando senza posa, Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse; Uso alcuno, alcun frutto Indovinar non so. Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui ..."></div> </div> </div>

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