His fire, dull with death, wavers across their dim faces, even unto dusky Uranus and lowering Neptune in the cold, outermost rings.
In the dark, all-surrounding void new constellations gleam on the thrones of the heavens. The old are changed, deposed or dead.
Their figures, unfixed in the abyss, have been shifted like errant sands of Earth.
The spirit of Chaos, from her uncharted tracts, summons her ministrant powers of Death and Change. She beholds them blight the worlds. Her presence enfolds destroyers and destroyed as with a cloak.
The dusks and damps of dissolution spread out their lethal and invisible wings.
The voice of the Spirit, like spheral music, flows out of the darkness.
The orbs listen and are filled with a miraculous consciousness and the soft lassitude of Death.
SONG OF THE SPIRIT OF CHAOS
THE staring vessels of these worlds no wine
Of Life refills, no seeds of potent change.
So may Death's pale and lingering weeds entwine
These hollow globes that still unhindered range
Through Heaven. O famished Time! thy jaws devour
The suns and slumbers of the broken spheres,
Whose knell young stars have heard, whose rounded hour
Strikes, and is buried in thy bourneless years.
They glow like fevered jewels in the deeps,
Like sullen embers in remorseless Night,
Like flowers with'ring when the Winter creeps
With iron dews their little lives to blight.
Since recordless immensities of Time
I stand whose ne'er-sealed eyes the birth behold
Of worlds dream-born,--their fiery infant clime,
Their teeming life, their epochs gray and cold,
Peace kiss and blot their tarnished light and close
Their leaden urns with gentleness. I shed
The ashes of my silence on their snows,--
Then waft them to my kingdoms of the dead.