The City of Darkness

Wide-walled it stands in heathen lands
Beside a mystic sea,
Its streets strange-trod of many a god
And templed blasphemy.

Far through the night, with light on light,
It flames beside the sea;
While overhead an unseen dread
Impends eternally.

There is a sound above, around,
Of music by the sea;
And weird and wide the torches glide
Of pagan revelry.

There is a noise as of a voice
That calls beneath the sea;
And all the deep heaves, as in sleep,
With vague expectancy.

Then slowly up--as in a cup
Seethes poison--swells the sea;
As through black glass, wild mass on mass,
The town glows fiery.

Red-lit it glowers, like Hell's dark towers,
Closed in the iron sea;
And monster forms in awful swarms
Wing round it cloudily.

Still overhead the unseen dread,
Whose shadow dyes the sea,
At wrath-winged wait behind its gate
Till God shall set it free.

An earthquake crash; a taloned flash--
And, lo! from sky to sea
A sworded Doom that stalks the gloom,
Crowned with Death's agony.

And where it burned, a flame inurned,
Blood-red within the sea,
The phantasm of the dread above
Sits in immensity.