Once in the sombre light of the throng’d courts of night, In a dream-haunted land only inhabited By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed, Clung to my idle hand with clenched fingers weak And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak. Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves. Then I: ’O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come? Tell me thy race and name!’ And he, with veiled face: ’I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far, A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms, Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar... Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared By ways that no men dared unto a desert land, Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand-- Older a million years: Babel was builded on That broken city’s tears; dust of her crumbled past Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel’s charioteers In whorled clouds above those shining thoroughfares Where Babel’s millions tread on her unheeding dead. Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait Parch’d with an ancient thirst that no æons can abate, Passed I, predestinate, to a thorn’d desert’s drought, Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate, Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten glass Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot. Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste, Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land, Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled; Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting, Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating Struggled my hapless soul... There, in a thousand springs, Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing, Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings, Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air That shivered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight, And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing’d egrets white Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare; But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter. Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst, The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips, To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great ships With moving towers of sail, poops throng’d with grinning crowds And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire In the green gloom beneath.