THE HOUSE OF DEATH
(A Dream)
I
Starless and still and lustreless
And sombre black, it seemed to me,
The heaven hung in hideousness
Of Hell’s serenity:
Indefinite and vague and old
As nothing that is ours,
It rose turrets, dark with mould,
And dark, colossal towers.
II
Infernal monsters crumbled ’mid
The trefoils of its dim façade,
And, hideous as murder, hid
Gnarled in the pillared shade.
And all below and overhead,
In cancerous blotches, grew
The gray gangrene of lichens dead,
And fungus, sickly blue.
III
Beneath the black, impending skies,
Like Death’s dead countenance it stood,
Hollow, with cavernous window-eyes
Staring on solitude.
The grass was black, and in it, white
The tombstones rose; and gray,
Long league on league, adown the night,
Like phantoms, stretched away.
IV
And I, who entered in, could hear
No organ notes resound and roll,
But silence, like an awful fear,
Made tumult in my soul.
And, lo! I saw, like Hell’s wild songs,
The vast interior carved
With shapes of stone, vague woman throngs,
Naked, obscene, and starved.