When Soldans clasp dank Vellum old, And carcants shine like scarlet foam, With hiss of snakes and burning oils As dirges sway both imps and damn'd, A beacon's light that cleft Doom's fold, Peers at the Cyclopean home Of furnace-heat and writhing coils Of immewed depths as cyphers red Proclaim each gyving monster's deed. And woful runes rake this giant gloom, Phantastic coals lurk in the dust, Blind whelps lie in an onyx bed And ponder words as thumb-screws bleed (Unto the music of king Doom) Each gangrel villains heart of lust. Beyond the halls of numberéd dead Where lambent lights and crystal dews Invoke the ghouls to guard each tomb That vandals of the sobbing night, When hell-winds stir the conquered dead, And thunder shook the mourner's pews, Giant cavalcades of marshalléd Doom March thro' the phosphorescent light Unto the headland of the West, Where pageantries of warriors bold Scyle crafty sins and purple lusts Until the peaks and portals bright, Where buried kings are tombed at rest, Sweat odours dank with Torpor's cold; Infernal pæons shake the busts Of idols planted in the light. And, ere immewed gyres froth black mists Unto all ghauts and splinter'd domes That cypher signs of dungeoned dell, A turgid dawn arrays this vale, Each dysodile scavenger sits On a tomb and fondles gray bones; An eyeless toad croaks from a well. Then cosmic force forsakes each dale: 'Mis Cyclopean pulse of hell Giant cauldrons vomit vapours green And skirr thro' bristling lanes and halls: Whilst beacons die and shrood each soul, Dank tears drop on a fatal bell, Wrought by a Titan's sombre queen, Where graven vypers soop the walls With blood from maidens scourged as toll. Sentinel silence then holds gloom! Vile squats curse roaring pools inflame, A swarthy gump leers at the damn'd, A sultry storm invades each realm. Reared in incondite depths of doom As shadows spell each sinner's name, A Necromancer mounts a stand That storms and sleet struck with their helm, And smites the weird elements. A cesspool stunn'd with offal's stench, And ulexite--Each mattoid's curse! Set in twin ridges black and red, Obtest the foam-sprayed battlements To count the blood-drops on a bench That the coals of Tartarus nurse-- Disastrous, imbosked Torture's bed! Make viscous this grim philster's hold.