C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

From ‘The City of Dreadful Night’

By James Thomson (1834–1882)

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 moldering 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 impotence 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 hope 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 forevermore.

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 gray 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?…

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,

Savannas, 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 amidst the baleful glooms,

Amidst the soundless solitudes immense

Of rangèd mansions dark and still as tombs.

The silence which benumbs or strains the sense

Fulfills 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 clamor,

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 bereave.

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 marvelous 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 blindworm-like 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 æons 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.

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