The City of Dreadful Night

James Thomson

The City of Dreadful Night

Per me si va nella citta dolente.—DantePoi di tanto adoprar, di tanti motiD'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,Girando senza posa,Per tornar sempre la donde son mosse;Uso alcuno, alcun fruttoIndovinar non so.Sola nel mondo eterna, a cui si volveOgni creata cosa,In te, morte, si posaNostra ignuda natura;Lieta no, ma sicuraDell' antico dolor . . .Pero ch' esser beatoNega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato.—Leopardi

PROEM

  Lo, thus, as prostrate, "In the dust I write    My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears."  Yet why evoke the spectres of black night    To blot the sunshine of exultant years?  Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?  Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,    And wail life's discords into careless ears?  Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles    To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth  Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,    False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;  Because it gives some sense of power and passion  In helpless innocence to try to fashion    Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth.  Surely I write not for the hopeful young,    Or those who deem their happiness of worth,  Or such as pasture and grow fat among    The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,  Or pious spirits with a God above them  To sanctify and glorify and love them,    Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.  For none of these I write, and none of these    Could read the writing if they deigned to try;  So may they flourish in their due degrees,    On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.  If any cares for the weak words here written,  It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,    Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die.  Yes, here and there some weary wanderer    In that same city of tremendous night,  Will understand the speech and feel a stir    Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;  "I suffer mute and lonely, yet another  Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother    Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."  O sad Fraternity, do I unfold    Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore?  Nay, be assured; no secret can be told    To any who divined it not before:  None uninitiate by many a presage  Will comprehend the language of the message,    Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.

I

  The City is of Night; perchance of Death    But certainly of Night; for never there  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity  The sun has never visited that city,    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;    Though present in distempered gloom of thought  And deadly weariness of heart all day.    But when a dream night after night is brought  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many  Recur each year for several years, can any    Discern that dream from real life in aught?  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,    The while all change and many vanish quite,  In their recurrence with recurrent changes  A certain seeming order; where this ranges    We count things real; such is memory's might.  A river girds the city west and south,    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.  Upon an easy slope it lies at large    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.  The city is not ruinous, although    Great ruins of an unremembered past,  With others of a few short years ago    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement  In house or palace front from roof to basement    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!  Yet as in some necropolis you find    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,    A woman rarely, now and then a child:  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth    To see a little one from birth defiled,  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.  They often murmur to themselves, they speak    To one another seldom, for their woe  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.  They leave all hope behind who enter there:    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,  One anodyne for torture and despair;    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave1

II

  Because he seemed to walk with an intent    I followed him; who, shadowlike and frail,  Unswervingly though slowly onward went,    Regardless, wrapt in thought as in a veil:  Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet  We travelled many a long dim silent street.  At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,    A tower that merged into the heavy sky;  Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:    Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:  He murmured to himself with dull despair,  Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.  Then turning to the right went on once more    And travelled weary roads without suspense;  And reached at last a low wall's open door,    Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:  He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,  Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.  Then turning to the right resumed his march,    And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,  Until on stooping through a narrow arch    We stood before a squalid house at length:  He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,  Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.  When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,    I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs  Of desolation I had seen and heard    In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:  Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,  Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?  As whom his one intense thought overpowers,    He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase  The signs and figures of the circling hours,    Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;  The works proceed until run down; although  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.  Then turning to the right paced on again,    And traversed squares and travelled streets whose glooms  Seemed more and more familiar to my ken;    And reached that sullen temple of the tombs;  And paused to murmur with the old despair,  Hear Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.  I ceased to follow, for the knot of doubt    Was severed sharply with a cruel knife:  He circled thus forever tracing out    The series of the fraction left of Life;  Perpetual recurrence in the scope  Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.2

III

  Although lamps burn along the silent streets,    Even when moonlight silvers empty squares  The dark holds countless lanes and close retreats;    But when the night its sphereless mantle wears  The open spaces yawn with gloom abysmal,  The sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,    The lanes are black as subterranean lairs.  And soon the eye a strange new vision learns:    The night remains for it as dark and dense,  Yet clearly in this darkness it discerns    As in the daylight with its natural sense;  Perceives a shade in shadow not obscurely,  Pursues a stir of black in blackness surely,    Sees spectres also in the gloom intense.  The ear, too, with the silence vast and deep    Becomes familiar though unreconciled;  Hears breathings as of hidden life asleep,    And muffled throbs as of pent passions wild,  Far murmurs, speech of pity or derision;  but all more dubious than the things of vision,    So that it knows not when it is beguiled.  No time abates the first despair and awe,    But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing  Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law    Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king;  Crushed impotent beneath this reign of terror,  Dazed with mysteries of woe and error,    The soul is too outworn for wondering.

IV

  He stood alone within the spacious square    Declaiming from the central grassy mound,  With head uncovered and with streaming hair,    As if large multitudes were gathered round:  A stalwart shape, the gestures full of might,  The glances burning with unnatural light:—  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: All was black,  In heaven no single star, on earth no track;  A brooding hush without a stir or note,  The air so thick it clotted in my throat;  And thus for hours; then some enormous things  Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:    But I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire  Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;  The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath  Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;  Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold  Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:    But I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: Lo you, there,  That hillock burning with a brazen glare;  Those myriad dusky flames with points a-glow  Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;  A Sabbath of the Serpents, heaped pell-mell  For Devil's roll-call and some fete of Hell:    Yet I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: Meteors ran  And crossed their javelins on the black sky-span;  The zenith opened to a gulf of flame,  The dreadful thunderbolts jarred earth's fixed frame;  The ground all heaved in waves of fire that surged  And weltered round me sole there unsubmerged:    Yet I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: Air once more,  And I was close upon a wild sea-shore;  Enormous cliffs arose on either hand,  The deep tide thundered up a league-broad strand;  White foambelts seethed there, wan spray swept and flew;  The sky broke, moon and stars and clouds and blue:    Yet I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: On the left  The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft;  There stopped and burned out black, except a rim,  A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim;  Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west,  And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest:    Yet I strode on austere;    No hope could have no fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: From the right  A shape came slowly with a ruddy light;  A woman with a red lamp in her hand,  Bareheaded and barefooted on that strand;  O desolation moving with such grace!  O anguish with such beauty in thy face!    I fell as on my bier,    Hope travailed with such fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: I was twain,  Two selves distinct that cannot join again;  One stood apart and knew but could not stir,  And watched the other stark in swoon and her;  And she came on, and never turned aside,  Between such sun and moon and roaring tide:    And as she came more near    My soul grew mad with fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: Hell is mild  And piteous matched with that accursed wild;  A large black sign was on her breast that bowed,  A broad black band ran down her snow-white shroud;  That lamp she held was her own burning heart,  Whose blood-drops trickled step by step apart:    The mystery was clear;    Mad rage had swallowed fear.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: By the sea  She knelt and bent above that senseless me;  Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there,  She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair;  She murmured words of pity, love, and woe,  Shee heeded not the level rushing flow:    And mad with rage and fear,    I stood stonebound so near.  As I came through the desert thus it was,  As I came through the desert: When the tide  Swept up to her there kneeling by my side,  She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne  Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;  I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,  Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:    They love; their doom is drear,    Yet they nor hope nor fear;    But I, what do I here?

V

  How he arrives there none can clearly know;    Athwart the mountains and immense wild tracts,  Or flung a waif upon that vast sea-flow,    Or down the river's boiling cataracts:  To reach it is as dying fever-stricken  To leave it, slow faint birth intense pangs quicken;    And memory swoons in both the tragic acts.  But being there one feels a citizen;    Escape seems hopeless to the heart forlorn:  Can Death-in-Life be brought to life again?    And yet release does come; there comes a morn  When he awakes from slumbering so sweetly  That all the world is changed for him completely,    And he is verily as if new-born.  He scarcely can believe the blissful change,    He weeps perchance who wept not while accurst;  Never again will he approach the range    Infected by that evil spell now burst:  Poor wretch!  who once hath paced that dolent city  Shall pace it often, doomed beyond all pity,    With horror ever deepening from the first.  Though he possess sweet babes and loving wife,    A home of peace by loyal friendships cheered,  And love them more than death or happy life,    They shall avail not; he must dree his weird;  Renounce all blessings for that imprecation,  Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation,    Of woe and terrors and thick darkness reared.

VI

  I sat forlornly by the river-side,    And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars  Above the blackness of the swelling tide,    Down which they struck rough gold in ruddier bars;  And heard the heave and plashing of the flow  Against the wall a dozen feet below.  Large elm-trees stood along that river-walk;    And under one, a few steps from my seat,  I heard strange voices join in stranger talk,    Although I had not heard approaching feet:  These bodiless voices in my waking dream  Flowed dark words blending with sombre stream:—  And you have after all come back; come back.  I was about to follow on your track.  And you have failed: our spark of hope is black.  That I have failed is proved by my return:  The spark is quenched, nor ever more will burn,  But listen; and the story you shall learn.  I reached the portal common spirits fear,  And read the words above it, dark yet clear,  "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:"  And would have passed in, gratified to gain  That positive eternity of pain  Instead of this insufferable inane.  A demon warder clutched me, Not so fast;  First leave your hopes behind!—But years have passed  Since I left all behind me, to the last:  You cannot count for hope, with all your wit,  This bleak despair that drives me to the Pit:  How could I seek to enter void of it?  He snarled, What thing is this which apes a soul,  And would find entrance to our gulf of dole  Without the payment of the settled toll?  Outside the gate he showed an open chest:  Here pay their entrance fees the souls unblest;  Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.  This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,  And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but  They are so thin that it will never glut.  I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;  And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,  And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.  When one casts off a load he springs upright,  Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,  And briskly paces forward strong and light:  But these, as if they took some burden, bowed;  The whole frame sank; however strong and proud  Before, they crept in quite infirm and cowed.  And as they passed me, earnestly from each  A morsel of his hope I did beseech,  To pay my entrance; but all mocked my speech.  No one would cede a little of his store,  Though knowing that in instants three or four  He must resign the whole for evermore.  So I returned.  Our destiny is fell;  For in this Limbo we must ever dwell,  Shut out alike from heaven and Earth and Hell.  The other sighed back, Yea; but if we grope  With care through all this Limbo's dreary scope,  We yet may pick up some minute lost hope;  And sharing it between us, entrance win,  In spite of fiends so jealous for gross sin:  Let us without delay our search begin.

VII

  Some say that phantoms haunt those shadowy streets,    And mingle freely there with sparse mankind;  And tell of ancient woes and black defeats,    And murmur mysteries in the grave enshrined:  But others think them visions of illusion,  Or even men gone far in self-confusion;    No man there being wholly sane in mind.  And yet a man who raves, however mad,    Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall,  Reserves some inmost secret good or bad:    The phantoms have no reticence at all:  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,    The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.  I have seen phantoms there that were as men    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;  Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,    Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:  The City rests for man so weird and awful,  That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,    And phantoms there may have their proper home.

VIII

  While I still lingered on that river-walk,    And watched the tide as black as our black doom,  I heard another couple join in talk,    And saw them to the left hand in the gloom  Seated against an elm bole on the ground,  Their eyes intent upon the stream profound.  "I never knew another man on earth    But had some joy and solace in his life,    Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife:  My doom has been unmitigated dearth."  "We gaze upon the river, and we note  The various vessels large and small that float,  Ignoring every wrecked and sunken boat."  "And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil    Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth;    But homely love with common food and health,  And nightly sleep to balance daily toil."  "This all-too-humble soul would arrogate  Unto itself some signalising hate  From the supreme indifference of Fate!"  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?    I think myself; yet I would rather be    My miserable self than He, than He  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!    Creator of all woe and sin!  abhorred  Malignant and implacable!  I vow  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,    For all the temples to Thy glory built,    Would I assume the ignominious guilt  Of having made such men in such a world."  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,  As to produce men when He might refrain!  "The world rolls round for ever like a mill;  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.  "While air of Space and Time's full river flow  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:  It may be wearing out, but who can know?  "Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;  That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,  That it is quite indifferent to him.  "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?  It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,  Then grinds him back into eternal death."

IX

  It is full strange to him who hears and feels,    When wandering there in some deserted street,  The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels,    The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet:  Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth?  Who in this city of the stars abideth    To buy or sell as those in daylight sweet?  The rolling thunder seems to fill the sky    As it comes on; the horses snort and strain,  The harness jingles, as it passes by;    The hugeness of an overburthened wain:  A man sits nodding on the shaft or trudges  Three parts asleep beside his fellow-drudges:    And so it rolls into the night again.  What merchandise?  whence, whither, and for whom?    Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse,  Bearing away to some mysterious tomb    Or Limbo of the scornful universe  The joy, the peace, the life-hope, the abortions  Of all things good which should have been our portions,    But have been strangled by that City's curse.

X

  The mansion stood apart in its own ground;    In front thereof a fragrant garden-lawn,  High trees about it, and the whole walled round:    The massy iron gates were both withdrawn;  And every window of its front shed light,  Portentous in that City of the Night.  But though thus lighted it was deadly still    As all the countless bulks of solid gloom;  Perchance a congregation to fulfil    Solemnities of silence in this doom,  Mysterious rites of dolour and despair  Permitting not a breath or chant of prayer?  Broad steps ascended to a terrace broad    Whereon lay still light from the open door;  The hall was noble, and its aspect awed,    Hung round with heavy black from dome to floor;  And ample stairways rose to left and right  Whose balustrades were also draped with night.  I paced from room to room, from hall to hall,    Nor any life throughout the maze discerned;  But each was hung with its funereal pall,    And held a shrine, around which tapers burned,  With picture or with statue or with bust,  all copied from the same fair form of dust:  A woman very young and very fair;    Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth,  And loving these sweet lovers, so that care    And age and death seemed not for her in sooth:  Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright,  these shapes lit up that mausolean night.  At length I heard a murmur as of lips,    And reached an open oratory hung  With heaviest blackness of the whole eclipse;    Beneath the dome a fuming censer swung;  And one lay there upon a low white bed,  With tapers burning at the foot and head:  The Lady of the images, supine,    Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay:  And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine    A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray:  A crucifix of dim and ghostly white  Surmounted the large altar left in night:—  The chambers of the mansion of my heart,    In every one whereof thine image dwells,  Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.  The inmost oratory of my soul,  Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,  Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.  I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,  With eyes forever fixed upon that face,  So beautiful and dreadful in its calm.  I kneel here patient as thou liest there;  As patient as a statue carved in stone,  Of adoration and eternal grief.  While thou dost not awake I cannot move;  And something tells me thou wilt never wake,  And I alive feel turning into stone.  Most beautiful were Death to end my grief,  Most hateful to destroy the sight of thee,  Dear vision better than all death or life.  But I renounce all choice of life or death,  For either shall be ever at thy side,  And thus in bliss or woe be ever well.—  He murmured thus and thus in monotone,    Intent upon that uncorrupted face,  Entranced except his moving lips alone:    I glided with hushed footsteps from the place.  This was the festival that filled with light  That palace in the City of the Night.