’Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned, Undominated firmament. It is not for me to say what may be meant here by “undominated,” any more than to explain what Shakspeare meant by To lie in cold _obstruction_ and to rot. A poet makes his own words and his own definitions: it is for the rest of us to accept them and see to it that there is no interference by that feeble folk, the lexicographers. a dell where some mad girl hath flung A bracelet that the painted lizards fear— Red pyres of muffled light! Dull fires of dusty jewels that have bound The brows of naked Ashtaroth. she marks the seaward flight Of homing dragons dark upon the West. Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire. Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom, Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame. silent ghouls, Whose king hath digged a sombre carcanet And necklaces with fevered opals set. Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light Dip to the ocean’s phosphorescent caves. What other words could so vividly describe gleams of fire on a troubled sea? Who but a masterful poet could describe them at all? There priestesses in purple robes hold each A sultry garnet to the sea-linkt sun, Or, just before the colored morning shakes A splendor on the ruby-sanded beach, Cry unto Betelgeuze a mystic word. Faith! I would give value to know that word! Where icy philters brim with scarlet foam. Satan, yawning on his brazen seat, Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed. A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse, Beside a caldron vext with harlots’ blood, The stars of that red Sign which spells her doom. halls In which dead Merlin’s prowling ape hath spilt A vial squat whose scarlet venom crawls To ciphers bright and terrible. ere the tomb-thrown echoings have ceased, The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon. Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the imagination to Coleridge’s A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover, or Keats’s magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn— passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human thought.