My dreams were nests or horror,
Whimsey-wrought
With orts and shreds
From old abysses brought
Where eyries built by condor-winged awe
Enskied on somber pinnacles of thought
Fantastical, I saw the visions shift
Like bubbles that a titan's breath might lift
Drowning in seas more deep than his despair
Iron-colored, soon to shatter or to drift.
Or like illuminated crystals
Fallen from hands
Of gods, that cloud interiorly with lands
Of wider spheres exalted past the sun
Or burst while thought
In idle question stands
Said the dreamer
Conscious of gulfs in which I dared not gaze
I passed on faltering and imperilled ways
Through lands where hoary mountains
Danced and roared
To baleful pygmeis piping hellish lays
The flames that wait
Against the end of things
Where light and limit to my wanderings
Through deserts bleaching
Like the bones of death
Aback I fled, and faltered on spent wings
In night cimmerian, thronged with sorceries
Where lightnings flamed
On empty sands and seas
Or feared the leopard crough of pallid shapes
In saracenic arches of black trees.
Then in the dream I dreamt that time was done
Light still endured,
Whose touch I might not shun
Though at my back I heard the lips of night
Puff out the flaring flambeau of the sun
Said the dreamer
I leaned from some black precipice,
To see the pits beneath,
One came, not far from me
To hurled therein the sockets of the stars
And shells of worlds that rattled emptily.