Nemesis

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