| |
| BESIDE the pounding cataracts | |
| Of midnight streams unknown to us, | |
| ’T is builded in the dismal tracts | |
| And valleys huge of Tartarus. | |
| Lurid and lofty and vast it seems; | 5 |
| It hath no rounded name that rings, | |
| But I have heard it called in dreams | |
| The City of the End of Things. | |
| |
| Its roofs and iron towers have grown | |
| None knoweth how high within the night, | 10 |
| But in its murky streets far down | |
| A flaming terrible and bright | |
| Shakes all the stalking shadows there, | |
| Across the walls, across the floors, | |
| And shifts upon the upper air | 15 |
| From out a thousand furnace doors; | |
| And all the while an awful sound | |
| Keeps roaring on continually, | |
| And crashes in the ceaseless round | |
| Of a gigantic harmony. | 20 |
| Through its grim depths reëchoing, | |
| And all its weary height of walls, | |
| With measured roar and iron ring, | |
| The inhuman music lifts and falls. | |
| Where no thing rests and no man is, | 25 |
| And only fire and night hold sway, | |
| The beat, the thunder, and the hiss | |
| Cease not, and change not, night nor day. | |
| |
| And moving at unheard commands, | |
| The abysses and vast fires between, | 30 |
| Flit figures that, with clanking hands, | |
| Obey a hideous routine. | |
| They are not flesh, they are not bone, | |
| They see not with the human eye, | |
| And from their iron lips is blown | 35 |
| A dreadful and monotonous cry. | |
| And whoso of our mortal race | |
| Should find that city unaware, | |
| Lean Death would smite him face to face, | |
| And blanch him with its venomed air; | 40 |
| Or, caught by the terrific spell, | |
| Each thread of memory snapped and cut, | |
| His soul would shrivel, and its shell | |
| Go rattling like an empty nut. | |
| |
| It was not always so, but once, | 45 |
| In days that no man thinks upon, | |
| Fair voices echoed from its stones, | |
| The light above it leaped and shone. | |
| Once there were multitudes of men | |
| That built that city in their pride, | 50 |
| Until its might was made, and then | |
| They withered, age by age, and died; | |
| And now of that prodigious race | |
| Three only in an iron tower, | |
| Set like carved idols face to face, | 55 |
| Remain the masters of its power; | |
| And at the city gate a fourth, | |
| Gigantic and with dreadful eyes, | |
| Sits looking toward the lightless north, | |
| Beyond the reach of memories: | 60 |
| Fast-rooted to the lurid floor, | |
| A bulk that never moves a jot, | |
| In his pale body dwells no more | |
| Or mind or soul,—an idiot! | |
| |
| But some time in the end those three | 65 |
| Shall perish and their hands be still, | |
| And with the masters’ touch shall flee | |
| Their incommunicable skill. | |
| A stillness, absolute as death, | |
| Along the slacking wheels shall lie, | 70 |
| And, flagging at a single breath, | |
| The fires shall smoulder out and die. | |
| The roar shall vanish at its height, | |
| And over that tremendous town | |
| The silence of eternal night | 75 |
| Shall gather close and settle down. | |
| All its grim grandeur, tower and hall, | |
| Shall be abandoned utterly, | |
| And into rust and dust shall fall | |
| From century to century. | 80 |
| Nor ever living thing shall grow, | |
| Or trunk of tree or blade of grass; | |
| No drop shall fall, no wind shall blow, | |
| Nor sound of any foot shall pass. | |
| Alone of its accurséd state | 85 |
| One thing the hand of Time shall spare, | |
| For the grim Idiot at the gate | |
| Is deathless and eternal there! | |
| |
