Into the dusky coals we peer,
And musing at the luring flames,
We watch each isle of crystal green.
Anear the billows swirl with rage,
'Mid lashing waves that cope king Fear
To strands and sands where elfin games
Make rich each midnight's fleecy dream
That some Mad wand'ring, goblin sage,
Provoked from coffers of each brain,
Gleam in each tossing breast of foam,
Or shines from purple decks and domes
A ruddy carcant huge and large;
Or, when sea-linkt clouds, garbed in rain,
And behemoths sink to briny home,
A star that shines from foreign zones
Guide carvels old and Satan's barge
O'er blue profounds of the deep,
And gladden souls of men; yet, stunned,
Tho' trembling, to a roaring mouth,
A horn'd magician locked in death,
On whom two hectic harlots peep,
Sinks in abyssal depths unsummed,
Whilst him he fought hastes to the South,--
A hoary fiend of rasping breath!
And now we watch a maiden flee,
Past seas and ice-mounts oriflammed
With crystal diamonds red and bright,
Where Persephonê hath breathed a jem,
And frozen jazels that we see,
Alife with lusts of curst and damn'd,
Tho' windblown, thro' the moonless night,
She wanders with her anadem
On golden hair; nor doth she haste
When scarlet eyes peer thro' the snow,
But cavernéd mouths of grottoes black,
And storm-swept flight of dragons bold,
She passes as she treads the waste,
Off to the haunts of ghoullish show,
Where fires writhe and whispers track
Her wake unto the peaks of cold,
Above whose tower'd dome she sees
The tombs of father, mother, all;
Ay, now weeps she as the head-stones
Letter large, her unburied kin.
Now with her trembling arms and knees,
And back against the slimmy wall,
She vents her tears and choking moans,
A daughter cursed within this Inn.
And witches long for ease, so,
Erelong they peer at waters green
That pour in forges dank and cold,
Whence glare the eyes of Hell in lust
As Cyclops stem the pyre's glow,
'Mid haunts of sin and purple sheen
Of shales and husks of monsters told
As vultures to both scale and dust.
Then wing they for the western strands
Of boweréd vales and lulling dells,
Where silence holds the winds at bay,
And myrtles stir the sylvan air.
There tow'rs and the russet sands
Make fine the tunes of ringing bells
That echo to the skies of gray,
Where phosphorescent lanterns flare.
And twilights of the lofty aisles,
Thro' silver mists and streaks of blood,
Crucifixion looms cold and white;
Oaths of prurient blasphemy
Echo to the sequesteréd isles;
An ivory pyx that rides the flood
On which fantasms spin their light,
Curse each soul's eternal enemy.
Within a pool where writhing coils
Shape cyphers bold and gorey thought,--
Two shadowed sklayres of Doom and Set!
The foam-dreams of the newly dead
Ascend. To hazards that the oils
Eschewed, haste dryades that were taught
To dance. And, whilst all souls forget
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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