Nemesis

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

I have lived o'er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

and I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,

when the sky was a vaporous flame;

I have seen the dark universe yawning

where the black planets roll without aim,

where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,

under sinister grey-clouded skies,

that the many-forked lightning is rending,

that resound with hysterical cries;

with the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches

of the hoary primoridal grove,

where the oaks feel the presence that marches,

and stalks on where no spirit dares rove,

and I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains

that rise barren and bleak from the plain,

I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains

that ooze down to the marsh and the main;

and in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,

I have trod its untenanted hall,

Where the moon rising up from the valleys

Shows the tapestried things on the wall;

Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder

At the mouldering meadows around,

At the many-roofed village laid under

The curse of a grave-girdled ground;

And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,

I have flown on the pinions of fear,

Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;

Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted

The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;

I was old in those epochs uncounted

When I, and I only, was vile;

And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,

And great is the reach of its doom;

Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,

Nor can respite be found in the tomb:

Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

I have lived o'er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.