The doom of a city

I
FROM out the house I crept,
The house which long had caged my homeless life:
The mighty City in vast silence slept,
Dreaming away its tumult, toil, and strife:
But sleep and sleep's rich dreams were not for me,
For me, accurst, whom terror and the pain
Of baffled longings, and starved misery,
And such remorse as sears the breast,
And hopeless doubt which gnaws the brain
Till wildest action blind and vain
Would be more welcome than supine unrest,
Drove forth as one possest
To leave my kind and dare the desert sea;
To drift alone and far,
Dubious of any port or isle to gain,
Ignorant of chart and star,
Upon that infinite and mysterious main
Which wastes in foam against our shore;
Whose moans and murmurs evermore,
Insupportably sublime,
Haunting the crowded tumult of our Time,
Suspend its hurrying breath -
Like whispers of sad ghosts and spirits free
From worlds beyond our life and death,
The unknown awful realm where broods Eternity.

II

I paced through desert streets, beneath the gleam
Of lamps that lit my trembling life alone;
Like lamps sepulchral which had slowly burned
Through sunless ages, deep and undiscerned,
Within a buried City's maze of stone;
Whose peopling corpses, while they ever dream
Of birth and death - of complicated life
Whose days and months and years
Are wild with laughters, groans, and tears,
As with themselves and Doom
They wage, with loss or gain, incessant strife,
Indeed, lie motionless within their tomb,
Lie motionless and never laugh or weep,
All still, and buried deep
For ever in death's sleep,
While burn the quiet lamps amidst the breathless gloom.

III

My boat lay waiting there,
Upon the moonless river
Whose pulse had ceased to quiver
In that unnatural hush of brooding night.
I thought, Free breezes course the billowy deep!
And rowed on panting through the feverous air,
Leaving the great main waters on in my right
For that canal which creeps into the sea
Across the livid marshes wild and bare.
So slowly faded back from sight,
As cloth a dream insensibly
Fade backward on the ebbing tide of sleep,
That city which had home nor hope for me,
That stifling tomb from which I now was free.

IV

Like some weak life whose sluggish moments creep
Diffused on worthless objects, yet whose tide
With dull reluctance hard to understand
Refrains its death-in-life from death's full sleep,
The river's shallow waters oozed out wide,
Inclosing dreary flats of barren sand;
So merged at last into the lethal waste
That bounds of sea and stream could not be traced.

V

Long languidly I rowed,
With sick and weary pain,
Between the deepest channel's bitter weeds
Whose rankness salt slime feeds;
And so out blindly through the dismal main,
Now shaken with a long hoarse-growling swell.
And soon the Tempest-as a King who had slept
The sleep of worn-out frenzy, while his slaves
Cowered still in stupor till he woke again
Refreshed for carnage-from his torpor leapt
Breathed swarthy pallor through the dense low sky,
And hurrying swift and fell
Outspeeded his own thunder-bearing glooms;
Then prone and instantaneous from on high
Plunged down in one tremendous blast,
Which crashed into white dust the heaving waves
And left the ocean level when it past....
There was a moment's respite; silence reigned;
Such shuddering silence as may once appal
The universe of tombs,
Ere the last trumpet's clangour rend them all:
And I sank down, one frail and helpless man
Alone with desolation on the sea,
To pray while any sense of prayer remained
Amidst the horrors overwhelming me.

VI

How shall I tell that tempest's thunder-story?
The soldier plunged into the Battle-stress,
Struggling and gasping in the mighty flood,
Stunned with the roar of cannon, blind with smoke,
'Midst yells and tramplings drunk and mad with blood,
What knows he of the Battle's spheric glory?
Of heavenly laws that all its evil bless -
Of sacred rights of justice which invoke
Its sternest pleading - of the tranquil eye
Triumphant o'er its chaos - of the Mind
Commanding all, serene and unsubdued,
Which having first with wisest care de