The City of Dreadful Night | Page 7

fade and perish quite:?I wake from daydreams to this real night.
From desperate fighting with a little band?Against the powerful tyrants of our land, 50 To free our brethren in their own despite:?I wake from daydreams to this real night.
Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,?Each one responded with his countersign,?Then entered the cathedral; and in turn 55 I entered also, having given mine;?But lingered near until I heard no more,?And marked the closing of the massive door.
XIII
Of all things human which are strange and wild?This is perchance the wildest and most strange,?And showeth man most utterly beguiled,?To those who haunt that sunless City's range;?That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating 5 How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,?How naught is constant on the earth but change.
The hours are heavy on him and the days;?The burden of the months he scarce can bear;?And often in his secret soul he prays 10 To sleep through barren periods unaware,?Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;?Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,?He would outsleep another term of care.
Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make 15 Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;?This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,?Wounded and slow and very venomous;?Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,?Distilling poison at each painful motion, 20 And seems condemned to circle ever thus.
And since he cannot spend and use aright?The little time here given him in trust,?But wasteth it in weary undelight?Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust, 25 He naturally claimeth to inherit?The everlasting Future, that his merit?May have full scope; as surely is most just.
O length of the intolerable hours,?O nights that are as aeons of slow pain, 30 O Time, too ample for our vital powers,?O Life, whose woeful vanities remain?Immutable for all of all our legions?Through all the centuries and in all the regions,?Not of your speed and variance WE complain. 35
WE do not ask a longer term of strife,?Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;?We do not claim renewed and endless life?When this which is our torment here shall close,?An everlasting conscious inanition! 40 We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,?Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
XIV
Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,?With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;?And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,?No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;?No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed, 5 And the high altar space was unillumed.
Around the pillars and against the walls?Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood?Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.?Perchance they were not a great multitude 10 Save in that city of so lonely streets?Where one may count up every face he meets.
All patiently awaited the event?Without a stir or sound, as if no less?Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent. 15 And then we heard a voice of solemn stress?From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met?Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:
Two steadfast and intolerable eyes?Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow; 20 The head behind it of enormous size.?And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,?Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,?By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:--
O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark! 25 O battling in black floods without an ark!?O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!?My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,?With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:?Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light! 30
My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;?Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail?And perish in your perishing unblest.?And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope?Of all our universe, with desperate hope 35 To find some solace for your wild unrest.
And now at last authentic word I bring,?Witnessed by every dead and living thing;?Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:?There is no God; no Fiend with names divine 40 Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,?It is to satiate no Being's gall.
It was the dark delusion of a dream,?That living Person conscious and supreme,?Whom we must curse for cursing us with life; 45 Whom we must curse because the life he gave?Could not be buried in the quiet grave,?Could not be killed by poison or the knife.
This little life is all we must endure,?The grave's most holy peace is ever sure, 50 We fall asleep and never wake again;?Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,?Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh?In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
We finish thus; and all our wretched race 55 Shall finish with its cycle, and give place?To other beings with their own time-doom:?Infinite aeons ere our kind began;?Infinite aeons after the last man?Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb. 60
We bow down to the universal laws,?Which never had for man a special clause?Of cruelty