The City of Dreadful Night | Page 2

with torrent fountains;?And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest. 35
The city is not ruinous, although?Great ruins of an unremembered past,?With others of a few short years ago?More sad, are found within its precincts vast.?The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement 40 In house or palace front from roof to basement?Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,?Amidst the soundless solitudes immense?Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs. 45 The silence which benumbs or strains the sense?Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:?Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,?Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Yet as in some necropolis you find 50 Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,?So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind?Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,?Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,?Or sit foredone and desolately ponder 55 Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,?A woman rarely, now and then a child:?A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth?To see a little one from birth defiled, 60 Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish?Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish?To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
They often murmur to themselves, they speak?To one another seldom, for their woe 65 Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak?Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow?To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,?Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,?To rave in turn, who lends attentive show. 70
The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;?There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;?The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,?A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain?Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, 75 Or which some moments' stupor but increases,?This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
They leave all hope behind who enter there:?One certitude while sane they cannot leave,?One anodyne for torture and despair; 80 The certitude of Death, which no reprieve?Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,?But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render?That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave
[1] Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers
withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it will.
II
Because he seemed to walk with an intent?I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,?Unswervingly though slowly onward went,?Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:?Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet 5 We travelled many a long dim silent street.
At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,?A tower that merged into the heavy sky;?Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:?Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty: 10 He murmured to himself with dull despair,?Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
Then turning to the right went on once more?And travelled weary roads without suspense;?And reached at last a low wall's open door, 15 Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:?He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,?Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.
Then turning to the right resumed his march,?And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength, 20 Until on stooping through a narrow arch?We stood before a squalid house at length:?He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,?Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
When he had spoken thus, before he stirred, 25 I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs?Of desolation I had seen and heard?In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:?Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,?Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed? 30
As whom his one intense thought overpowers,?He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase?The signs and figures of the circling hours,?Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;?The works proceed until run down; although 35 Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
Then turning to the right paced on again,?And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms?Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;?And reached that sullen temple of the tombs; 40 And paused to murmur with the old despair,?Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.
I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt?Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:?He circled thus forever tracing out 45 The series of the fraction left of Life;?Perpetual recurrence in the scope?Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.[1]
LXX?[1] Life divided by that persistent three = --- = .210.
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III
Although lamps burn along the silent streets,?Even when moonlight silvers empty squares?The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;?But when the night its sphereless mantle wears?The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal, 5 The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,?The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.
And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:?The night