Carol and Cadence :: :: University of Virginia Library

Death-white,
The gas-lamps glimmer, ghosts of radiance only,
Like wild-fires flickering o'er some marish lonely,
To lure the traveller with their treacherous light.

As trees
Walking, sparse passers-by, successive looming
Forth of the haze, like ghosts that wander, glooming,
In limboes of the underworld, one sees.

Their way
Portentous urging through the rolling curtain,
Motors and tramcars thunder, vast, uncertain,
Peace-poisoning dragons of our restless day.

The gloom,
Even as I watch it, waxes grimmer, thicker;
The tongues of gas no longer through it flicker;
The day is drowned in Night Primaeval's womb.

Each street,
Each road is strangled with funeral fleeces;
Even the thunder of the traffic ceases;
The pavements echo to no passing feet.

All cowers,
Still-sepulchred in nothingness abysmal:
No light, no sound-ray breaks the silence dismal;
The world is voiceless; voiceless are the hours.

What strange
Vague portents harbour in this brumal ocean?
What monsters haunt its billows without motion,
What phantoms through its deeps Tartarian range,

Who knows?
Midst prehistoric wars and ancient slaughters
Thought strays. Beneath its dull diluvian waters
A tide of dreams delirious ebbs and flows.

Life lies,
Inert, beneath the sable pall, and stirless:
Its altars idle; frankincense and myrrhless,
They smoke no longer tow'rd the extinguished skies.

But lo!
Where on the horizon, in rhe Westward distance,
Like fires funereal for a past existence,
A dull red shimmer waxes, dim and slow.

The sun
It is, behind the shroud of darkness setting,
That to the world, the difference forgetting
'Twixt noon and night, gives token of day done.

In this
Unluminous glow the lurid city slumbers,
Like that grim fortress, that, in Dante's numbers,
Tremendous towers from the deeps of Dis.

The face
Of the far orb ere long grows overclouded
With hovering Night, and 'neath the horizon shrouded,
His last rays vanish from the fields of space.

Day's pyres
Outburned are; not a glimmer in their ashes
Bides; o'er the eye of heaven fall Night's lashes,
Obscurer for the late-extinguished fires.

Again
The swart Cimmerian ocean o'er the city
Its strangling billows closes, without pity,
And Night and Fog, twin anarchs, jointly reign.

Once more
Antaeval Chaos comes and Dark discordial:
Whelmed in their wave of Nothingness primordial,
The whirling looms of Time no longer roar.

Not dead
Alone it seems, but having ne'er existed,
Thought from remembrance blotted, over-misted,
Of all that may have been in days forsped,

In gloom,
For grave-clothes lapped, the world-all drowses, scorning
The hope of any Resurrection morning,
As in the grip of fore-appointed doom.