Part 3

Supreme In culminant omniscience manifold, And served by senses multitudinous, Far-posted on the shifting walls of time, With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields Of utter night and chaos, I convoke The Babel of their visions, and attend At once their myriad witness: I behold, In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell, With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat, The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list, Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs, Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives, Embrued with slobber of the basilisk, Or juice of wounded upas. And I see, In gardens of a crimson-litten world The sacred flow’r with lips of purple flesh, And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests At moonless eve in terror seek to slay, With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood That hide a hueless poison. And I read, Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, The annuling word a spiteful demon wrote With gall of slain chimeras; and I know What pentacles the lunar wizards use, That once allured the gulf-returning roc, With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause Midmost an alabaster mount; and there, With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’-gut, Uplift by cranes a captive giant built, They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird, And plucked, from off his sabre-taloned feet, Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood, With amethysts from Mars. I lean to read, With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star, The monstrous archives of a war that ran Through wasted aeons, and the prophecy Of wars renewed, that shall commemorate Some enmity of wivern-headed kings, Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury, That bloat within the craters of the moon, And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk To pools of slime and fetor; and I know What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, Are proffered in Uranus to their gods By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate, Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor, Took root between the burnished flags, and now Hath mounted, and become a hellish tree, Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths, Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne, And strain at starting pillars. I behold The slowly-thronging corals, that usurp Some harbour of a million-masted sea, And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold— Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns The octiremes of perished emperors, And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed From a sea-deserted haven. Swifter grow The visions: Now a mighty city looms, Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar, To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned In shifting erubescence. But whose hands Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought To semblance of prodigious blooms of old, No eremite hath lingered there to say, And no man comes to learn: For long ago A prophet came, warning its timid king Against the plague of lichens that had crept Across subverted empires, and the sand Of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward; Which, slow and ineluctable, would come, To take his fiery bastions and his fanes, And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now I see a host of naked giants, armed With horns of behemoth and unicorn, Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells Of hostile wizardry, and stagger on To forests where the very leaves have eyes, And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom; Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs, From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan; Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled To bask upon his azure-spotted spine; Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing, Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew, Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then, I watch a war of pigmies, met by night, With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide, On plains with no horizon, where a god Might lose his way for centuries; and there, In wreathèd light, and fulgors all convolved, A rout of green, enormous moons ascend, With rays that like a shivering venom run On inch-long swords of lizard-fang. Surveyed From this my throne, as from a central sun, The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass; Forgotten splendours, dream by dream unfold, Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns, Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring Their rays about me, like the coloured lights Imploring priests might lift to glorify The face of some averted god; the songs Of mystic poets in a purple world, Ascend to me in music that is made From unconceivèd perfumes, and the pulse Of love ineffable; the lute-players Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon, Call forth delicious languors, never known Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers Of hooded stars inscrutable to God, Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls, Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies, And awful transformations.*** If I will, I am at once the vision and the seer, And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps, And still abide their suzerain: I am The neophyte who serves a nameless god, Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear, Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds Into the nave where suns might congregate, And veils the darkling mountain of his face With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems— Opals that are a camel-cumbering load, And monstrous alabraundines, won from war With realms of hostile serpents; which arise, Combustible, in vapours many-hued, And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I, The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand The helm of some great barge of chrysolite, Sailing upon an amethystine sea To isles of timeless summer: For the snows Of hyperborean winter, and their winds, Sleep in his jewel-builded capital, Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry, Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he flees, With captive kings to urge his serried oars, Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn Hath never left the faintly sighing lote And fields of lisping moly. Or I fare, Impanoplied with azure diamond, As hero of a quest Achernar lights, To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames, That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap, With tongues intolerably lengthening, That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives (Secure as in a garden walled from wind) A lonely flower by a placid well, Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames, That roar as roars the storm-possessèd sea, Implacable forever: And within That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies One drop of an incomparable dew, Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings, And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years, And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms, Through courts and colonnades and balconies Wherein immensity itself is mazed, I seek the golden gorget he hath lost, On which the names of his conniving stars Are writ in little sapphires; and I roam For centuries, and hear the brazen clocks Innumerably clang with such a sound As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore I find the gorget, but at length I find A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch From that whereon they stretched him; and I find, Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor, The loveliest of all beloved slaves My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side A serpent rises, whiter than the root Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown, And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem Like drops of cold, congealing poison.***

Hark! What word was whispered in a tongue unknown, In crypts of some impenetrable world? Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy I cannot share, though I am king of suns And king therewith of strong eternity, Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads The wind of ether, and the worlds are still To hear the word that flees me. All my dreams Fall like a rack of fuming vapours raised To semblance by a necromant, and leave Spirit and sense unthinkably alone, Above a universe of shrouded stars, And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom, Like witches to a Sabbath.*** Fear is born In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled Reaching the floor of space and waits for wings To lift it upward, like a hellish worm Fain for the flesh of seraphs. Eyes that gleam, But are not eyes of suns or galaxies, Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns, Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom, And make a brief and broken wind that moans, As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote, Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time, And crack the sphere of crystal.*** All is dark For ages, and my tolling heart suspends Its clamour, as within the clutch of death, Tightening with tense, hermetic rigours. Then, In one enormous, million-flashing flame, The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls, And beam to their responding planets; time Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams Rally to that insuperable throne, Firmed on the central zenith.