The City of Dreadful Night

XI

  What men are they who haunt these fatal glooms,    And fill their living mouths with dust of death,  And make their habitations in the tombs,    And breathe eternal sighs with mortal breath,  And pierce life's pleasant veil of various error  To reach that void of darkness and old terror    Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith?  They have much wisdom yet they are not wise,    They have much goodness yet they do not well,  (The fools we know have their own paradise,    The wicked also have their proper Hell);  They have much strength but still their doom is stronger,  Much patience but their time endureth longer,    Much valour but life mocks it with some spell.  They are most rational and yet insane:    And outward madness not to be controlled;  A perfect reason in the central brain,    Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,  And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly  The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly    To cheat itself refusing to behold.  And some are great in rank and wealth and power,    And some renowned for genius and for worth;  And some are poor and mean, who brood and cower    And shrink from notice, and accept all dearth  Of body, heart and soul, and leave to others  All boons of life: yet these and those are brothers,    The saddest and the weariest men on earth.

XII

  Our isolated units could be brought    To act together for some common end?  For one by one, each silent with his thought,    I marked a long loose line approach and wend  Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,  And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.  Then I would follow in among the last:    And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,  Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,    With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:  Whence come you in the world of life and light  To this our City of Tremendous Night?—  From pleading in a senate of rich lords  For some scant justice to our countless hordes  Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From wandering through many a solemn scene  Of opium visions, with a heart serene  And intellect miraculously bright:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From making hundreds laugh and roar with glee  By my transcendent feats of mimicry,  And humour wanton as an elvish sprite:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From prayer and fasting in a lonely cell,  Which brought an ecstasy ineffable  Of love and adoration and delight:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From ruling on a splendid kingly throne  A nation which beneath my rule has grown  Year after year in wealth and arts and might:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From preaching to an audience fired with faith  The Lamb who died to save our souls from death,  Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From drinking fiery poison in a den  Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men,  Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From picturing with all beauty and all grace  First Eden and the parents of our race,  A luminous rapture unto all men's sight:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From writing a great work with patient plan  To justify the ways of God to man,  And show how ill must fade and perish quite:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  From desperate fighting with a little band  Against the powerful tyrants of our land,  To free our brethren in their own despite:  I wake from daydreams to this real night.  Thus, challenged by that warder sad and stern,  Each one responded with his countersign,  Then entered the cathedral; and in turn  I entered also, having given mine;  But lingered near until I heard no more,  And marked the closing of the massive door.

XIII

  Of all things human which are strange and wild    This is perchance the wildest and most strange,  And showeth man most utterly beguiled,    To those who haunt that sunless City's range;  That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating  How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,    How naught is constant on the earth but change.  The hours are heavy on him and the days;    The burden of the months he scarce can bear;  And often in his secret soul he prays    To sleep through barren periods unaware,  Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure;  Which having passed and yielded him small treasure,    He would outsleep another term of care.  Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make    Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us;  This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake,    Wounded and slow and very venomous;  Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,  Distilling poison at each painful motion,    And seems condemned to circle ever thus.  And since he cannot spend and use aright    The little time here given him in trust,  But wasteth it in weary undelight    Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,  He naturally claimeth to inherit  The everlasting Future, that his merit    May have full scope; as surely is most just.  O length of the intolerable hours,    O nights that are as aeons of slow pain,  O Time, too ample for our vital powers,    O Life, whose woeful vanities remain  Immutable for all of all our legions  Through all the centuries and in all the regions,    Not of your speed and variance WE complain.  WE do not ask a longer term of strife,    Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;  We do not claim renewed and endless life    When this which is our torment here shall close,  An everlasting conscious inanition!  We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,    Dateless oblivion and divine repose.

XIV

  Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,    With tinted moongleams slanting here and there;  And all was hush: no swelling organ-strain,    No chant, no voice or murmuring of prayer;  No priests came forth, no tinkling censers fumed,  And the high altar space was unillumed.  Around the pillars and against the walls    Leaned men and shadows; others seemed to brood  Bent or recumbent in secluded stalls.    Perchance they were not a great multitude  Save in that city of so lonely streets  Where one may count up every face he meets.  All patiently awaited the event    Without a stir or sound, as if no less  Self-occupied, doomstricken while attent.    And then we heard a voice of solemn stress  From the dark pulpit, and our gaze there met  Two eyes which burned as never eyes burned yet:  Two steadfast and intolerable eyes    Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow;  The head behind it of enormous size.    And as black fir-groves in a large wind bow,  Our rooted congregation, gloom-arrayed,  By that great sad voice deep and full were swayed:—  O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!  O battling in black floods without an ark!    O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!  My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,  With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:    Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!  My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;  Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail    And perish in your perishing unblest.  And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope  Of all our universe, with desperate hope    To find some solace for your wild unrest.  And now at last authentic word I bring,  Witnessed by every dead and living thing;    Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:  There is no God; no Fiend with names divine  Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,    It is to satiate no Being's gall.  It was the dark delusion of a dream,  That living Person conscious and supreme,    Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;  Whom we must curse because the life he gave  Could not be buried in the quiet grave,    Could not be killed by poison or the knife.  This little life is all we must endure,  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,    We fall asleep and never wake again;  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.  We finish thus; and all our wretched race  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place    To other beings with their own time-doom:  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;  Infinite aeons after the last man    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.  We bow down to the universal laws,  Which never had for man a special clause    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?  All substance lives and struggles evermore  Through countless shapes continually at war,    By countless interactions interknit:  If one is born a certain day on earth,  All times and forces tended to that birth,    Not all the world could change or hinder it.  I find no hint throughout the Universe  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;    I find alone Necessity Supreme;  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.  O Brothers of sad lives!  they are so brief;  A few short years must bring us all relief:    Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,    Without the fear of waking after death.—  The organ-like vibrations of his voice    Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice    Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:  Our shadowy congregation rested still  As brooding on that "End it when you will."

XV

  Wherever men are gathered, all the air    Is charged with human feeling, human thought;  Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,  Are into its vibrations surely wrought;  Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,  Are breathed into it with our respiration    It is with our life fraught and overfraught.  So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,    As if alone on mountains or wide seas;  But nourishes warm life or hastens death    With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,  Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,  Incessant of his multitudinous neighbors;    He in his turn affecting all of  these.  That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,    Although not many exiles wander there,  With many a potent evil influence,    Each adding poison to the poisoned air;  Infections of unutterable sadness,  Infections of incalculable madness,    Infections of incurable despair.

XVI

  Our shadowy congregation rested still,    As musing on that message we had heard  And brooding on that "End it when you will;"    Perchance awaiting yet some other word;  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:—  The man speaks sooth, alas!  the man speaks sooth:    We have no personal life beyond the grave;  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:    Can I find here the comfort which I crave?  In all eternity I had one chance,    One few years' term of gracious human life:  The splendours of the intellect's advance,    The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;  The social pleasures with their genial wit:    The fascination of the worlds of art,  The glories of the worlds of nature, lit    By large imagination's glowing heart;  The rapture of mere being, full of health;    The careless childhood and the ardent youth,  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,    The reverend age serene with life's long truth:  All the sublime prerogatives of Man;    The storied memories of the times of old,  The patient tracking of the world's great plan    Through sequences and changes myriadfold.  This chance was never offered me before;    For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;  Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.  And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,    A mockery, a delusion; and my breath  Of noble human life upon this earth    So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.  My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,    My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,  I worse than lose the years which are my all:    What can console me for the loss supreme?  Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,    Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?  Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:    Hush and be mute envisaging despair.—  This vehement voice came from the northern aisle    Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;  And none gave answer for a certain while,    For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,  With humid eyes and thoughtful drooping head:—  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;  This life itself holds nothing good for us,    But ends soon and nevermore can be;  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.

XVII

  How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel  Their thick processions of supernal lights    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!  And men regard with passionate awe and yearning  The mighty marching and the golden burning,    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.  Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream    Are glorified from vision as they pass  The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass  To restless crystals; cornice dome and column  Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.  With such a living light these dead eyes shine,    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze  We read a pity, tremulous, divine,    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:  Fond man!  they are not haughty, are not tender;  There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.  If we could near them with the flight unflown,    We should but find them worlds as sad as this,  Or suns all self-consuming like our own    Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:  They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;  The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,    The empyrean is a void abyss.

XVIII

  I wandered in a suburb of the north,    And reached a spot whence three close lanes led down,  Beneath thick trees and hedgerows winding forth    Like deep brook channels, deep and dark and lown:  The air above was wan with misty light,  The dull grey south showed one vague blur of white.  I took the left-hand path and slowly trod    Its earthen footpath, brushing as I went  The humid leafage; and my feet were shod    With heavy languor, and my frame downbent,  With infinite sleepless weariness outworn,  So many nights I thus had paced forlorn.  After a hundred steps I grew aware    Of something crawling in the lane below;  It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there    That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,  The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then  To drag; for it would die in its own den.  But coming level with it I discerned    That it had been a man; for at my tread  It stopped in its sore travail and half-turned,    Leaning upon its right, and raised its head,  And with the left hand twitched back as in ire  Long grey unreverend locks befouled with mire.  A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,    An infamy for manhood to behold.  He gasped all trembling, What, you want my prize?    You leave, to rob me, wine and lust and gold  And all that men go mad upon, since you  Have traced my sacred secret of the clue?  You think that I am weak and must submit    Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,  And you are dead as if I clove with it    That false fierce greedy heart.  Betrayed!  betrayed!  I fling this phial if you seek to pass,  And you are forthwith shrivelled up like grass.  And then with sudden change, Take thought!  take thought!    Have pity on me!  it is mine alone.  If you could find, it would avail you naught;    Seek elsewhere on the pathway of your own:  For who of mortal or immortal race  The lifetrack of another can retrace?  Did you but know my agony and toil!    Two lanes diverge up yonder from this lane;  My thin blood marks the long length of their soil;    Such clue I left, who sought my clue in vain:  My hands and knees are worn both flesh and bone;  I cannot move but with continual moan.  But I am in the very way at last    To find the long-lost broken golden thread  Which unites my present with my past,    If you but go your own way.  And I said,  I will retire as soon as you have told  Whereunto leadeth this lost thread of gold.  And so you know it not!  he hissed with scorn;    I feared you, imbecile!  It leads me back  From this accursed night without a morn,    And through the deserts which have else no track,  And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,  To Eden innocence in Eden's clime:  And I become a nursling soft and pure,    An infant cradled on its mother's knee,  Without a past, love-cherished and secure;    Which if it saw this loathsome present Me,  Would plunge its face into the pillowing breast,  And scream abhorrence hard to lull to rest.  He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed    Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,  And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;    He should to antenatal night retrace,  And hide his elements in that large womb  Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.  And even thus, what weary way were planned,    To seek oblivion through the far-off gate  Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!    For this is law, if law there be in Fate:  What never has been, yet may have its when;  The thing which has been, never is again.

XIX

  The mighty river flowing dark and deep,    With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides  Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,    Is named the River of the Suicides;  For night by night some lorn wretch overweary,  And shuddering from the future yet more dreary,    Within its cold secure oblivion hides.  One plunges from a bridge's parapet,    As if by some blind and sudden frenzy hurled;  Another wades in slow with purpose set    Until the waters are above him furled;  Another in a boat with dreamlike motion  Glides drifting down into the desert ocean,    To starve or sink from out the desert world.  They perish from their suffering surely thus,    For none beholding them attempts to save,  The while thinks how soon, solicitous,    He may seek refuge in the self-same wave;  Some hour when tired of ever-vain endurance  Impatience will forerun the sweet assurance    Of perfect peace eventual in the grave.  When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,    Why actors and spectators do we stay?—  To fill our so-short roles out right or wrong;    To see what shifts are yet in the dull play  For our illusion; to refrain from grieving  Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving:    But those asleep at home, how blest are they!  Yet it is but for one night after all:    What matters one brief night of dreary pain?  When after it the weary eyelids fall    Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain;  And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish  In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish,    That one best sleep which never wakes again.

XX

  I sat me weary on a pillar's base,    And leaned against the shaft; for broad moonlight  O'erflowed the peacefulness of cloistered space,    A shore of shadow slanting from the right:  The great cathedral's western front stood there,  A wave-worn rock in that calm sea of air.  Before it, opposite my place of rest,    Two figures faced each other, large, austere;  A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast,    An angel standing in the moonlight clear;  So mighty by magnificence of form,  They were not dwarfed beneath that mass enorm.  Upon the cross-hilt of the naked sword    The angel's hands, as prompt to smite, were held;  His vigilant intense regard was poured    Upon the creature placidly unquelled,  Whose front was set at level gaze which took  No heed of aught, a solemn trance-like look.  And as I pondered these opposed shapes    My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon  Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes    The outworn to worse weariness.  But soon  A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke,  And from the evil lethargy I woke.  The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,    And lay there shattered; hence the sudden sound:  A warrior leaning on his sword alone    Now watched the sphinx with that regard profound;  The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware  Of nothing in the vast abyss of air.  Again I sank in that repose unsweet,    Again a clashing noise my slumber rent;  The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet:    An unarmed man with raised hands impotent  Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept  Such mien as if open eyes it slept.  My eyelids sank in spite of wonder grown;    A louder crash upstartled me in dread:  The man had fallen forward, stone on stone,    And lay there shattered, with his trunkless head  Between the monster's large quiescent paws,  Beneath its grand front changeless as life's laws.  The moon had circled westward full and bright,    And made the temple-front a mystic dream,  And bathed the whole enclosure with its light,    The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme:  I pondered long that cold majestic face  Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.

XXI

  Anear the centre of that northern crest    Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,  From which the city east and south and west    Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there  An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,  The bronze colossus of a winged Woman,    Upon a graded granite base foursquare.  Low-seated she leans forward massively,    With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might  Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;    Across a clasped book in her lap the right  Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes  With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes    Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight.  Words cannot picture her; but all men know    That solemn sketch the pure sad artist wrought  Three centuries and threescore years ago,    With phantasies of his peculiar thought:  The instruments of carpentry and science  Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance    With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught;  Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above;    The grave and solid infant perched beside,  With open winglets that might bear a dove,    Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed;  Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle,  But all too impotent to lift the regal    Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride;  And with those wings, and that light wreath which seems    To mock her grand head and the knotted frown  Of  forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams,    The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown  Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid  As if a shell of burnished metal frigid,    The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down;  The comet hanging o'er the waste dark seas,    The massy rainbow curved in front of it  Beyond the village with the masts and trees;    The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit,  Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions  Her name unfolded in the sun's dominions,    The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit.  Thus has the artist copied her, and thus    Surrounded to expound her form sublime,  Her fate heroic and calamitous;    Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,  Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,  Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration    Of the day setting on her baffled prime.  Baffled and beaten back she works on still,    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,  Sustained by her indomitable will:    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,  Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre    That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.  But as if blacker night could dawn on night,    With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,  A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,    More desperate than strife with hope debarred,  More fatal than the adamantine Never  Encompassing her passionate endeavour,    Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:  To sense that every struggle brings defeat    Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;  That all the oracles are dumb or cheat    Because they have no secret to express;  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;    That all is vanity and nothingness.  Titanic from her high throne in the north,    That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,  In bronze sublimity she gazes forth    Over her Capital of teen and threne,  Over the river with its isles and bridges,  The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-bridges,    Confronting them with a coeval mien.  The moving moon and stars from east to west    Circle before her in the sea of air;  Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.    Her subjects often gaze up to her there:  The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,  The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance    And confirmation of the old despair.