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 primordial 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.



Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,

And great is the reach of its doom;

Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,

Nor can respite be found in the tomb:

Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.



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.