Nemesis

Written 1917

   Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

      Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

   I have lived 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 whirled 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-forked lightning is rending,

      That resound with hysterical cries;

   With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

   I have plunged like a deer through the arches

      Of the hoary primoridal 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 through 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 scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,

      I have trod its untenanted hall,

   Where the moon rising up from the valleys

      Shows the tapestried things on the wall;

   Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

   I have peered from the casements in wonder

      At the mouldering meadows around,

   At the many-roofed 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-decked 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.

   Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

      Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

   I have lived 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.