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 primordial grove,

Where the oaks feel the presense 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-riddled mountains

That rise barren and bleak from the plain,

I have drunk of the frog-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 walls;

Strange figures dischordantly 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 look snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes

what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharoahs 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.