Nemesis

Nemesis By H. P. Lovecraft

   I have whirl’d 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-fork’d lightning is rending,

          That resound with hysterical cries;

With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches

          Of the hoary primordial grove,

     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches

          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;

And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains

          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,

     I have drunk of the fog-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 scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,

          I have trod its untenanted hall,

     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys

          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;

Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer’d from the casement in wonder

          At the mouldering meadows around,

     At the many-roof’d 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 loom snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted

          The jewel-deck’d 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.

     Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

          Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,

     I have liv’d 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.