Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly

of the black cone amid the polar waste;

pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,

by storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.

Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,

and only pale auroras and faint suns

glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources

are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder

what tricky mound of Nature's build they spied;

but the bird told of vaster parts, that under

the mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.

God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew

those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!