Thro' the ghoul-guarded
Gateways of slumber
Past the wan-moon'd
Abysses of night
I have liv'd 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 whirl'd 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-fork'd lightning
Is rending
That resound
With hysterical cries
With the moans of invisible daemons
That out of the green waters rise
I have plung'd like a deer
Thro' 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 thro' 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 scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace
I have trod its untenanted hall
Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
Shews the tapestried things on the wall
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall
I have peer'd from the casement in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around
At the many-roof'd 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-deck'd 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
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