In the silent depth of space,

Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,

Glittering with a silver flame

Through eternity,

Rolls a great and burning star,

With a noble name,

Alcyone!

In the glorious chart of heaven

It is marked the first of seven;

'Tis a Pleiad:

And a hundred years of earth

With their long-forgotten deeds have come and gone,

Since that tiny point of light,

Once a splendour fierce and bright,

Had its birth

In the star we gaze upon.

It has travelled all that time—

Thought has not a swifter flight—

Through a region where no faintest gust

Of life comes ever, but the power of night

Dwells stupendous and sublime,

Limitless and void and lonely,

A region mute with age, and peopled only

With the dead and ruined dust

Of worlds that lived eternities ago.

Man! when thou dost think of this,

And what our earth and its existence is,

The half-blind toils since life began,

The little aims, the little span,

With what passion and what pride,

And what hunger fierce and wide,

Thou dost break beyond it all,

Seeking for the spirit unconfined

In the clear abyss of mind

A shelter and a peace majestical.

For what is life to thee,

Turning toward the primal light,

With that stern and silent face,

If thou canst not be

Something radiant and august as night,

Something wide as space?

Therefore with a love and gratitude divine

Thou shalt cherish in thine heart for sign

A vision of the great and burning star,

Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,

Surging forth its silver flame

Through eternity;

And thine inner heart shall ring and cry

With the music strange and high,

The grandeur of its name

Alcyone!

The sun falls warm: the southern winds awake:

The air seethes upward with a steamy shiver:

Each dip of the road is now a crystal lake,

And every rut a little dancing river.

Through great soft clouds that sunder overhead

The deep sky breaks as pearly blue as summer:

Out of a cleft beside the river's bed

Flaps the black crow, the first demure newcomer.

The last seared drifts are eating fast away

With glassy tinkle into glittering laces:

Dogs lie asleep, and little children play

With tops and marbles in the sunbare places;

And I that stroll with many a thoughtful pause

Almost forget that winter ever was.

Beside the pounding cataracts

Of midnight streams unknown to us

'Tis builded in the leafless tracts

And valleys huge of Tartarus.

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;

It hath no rounded name that rings,

But I have heard it called in dreams

The City of the End of Things.

Its roofs and iron towers have grown

None knoweth how high within the night,

But in its murky streets far down

A flaming terrible and bright

Shakes all the stalking shadows there,

Across the walls, across the floors,

And shifts upon the upper air

From out a thousand furnace doors;

And all the while an awful sound

Keeps roaring on continually,

And crashes in the ceaseless round

Of a gigantic harmony.

Through its grim depths re-echoing

And all its weary height of walls,

With measured roar and iron ring,

The inhuman music lifts and falls.

Where no thing rests and no man is,

And only fire and night hold sway;

The beat, the thunder and the hiss

Cease not, and change not, night nor day.

And moving at unheard commands,

The abysses and vast fires between,

Flit figures that with clanking hands

Obey a hideous routine;

They are not flesh, they are not bone,

They see not with the human eye,

And from their iron lips is blown

A dreadful and monotonous cry;

And whoso of our mortal race

Should find that city unaware,

Lean Death would smite him face to face,

And blanch him with its venomed air:

Or caught by the terrific spell,

Each thread of memory snapt and cut,

His soul would shrivel and its shell

Go rattling like an empty nut.

It was not always so, but once,

In days that no man thinks upon,

Fair voices echoed from its stones,

The light above it leaped and shone:

Once there were multitudes of men,

That built that city in their pride,

Until its might was made, and then

They withered age by age and died.

But now of that prodigious race,

Three only in an iron tower,

Set like carved idols face to face,

Remain the masters of its power;

And at the city gate a fourth,

Gigantic and with dreadful eyes,

Sits looking toward the lightless north,

Beyond the reach of memories;

Fast rooted to the lurid floor,

A bulk that never moves a jot,

In his pale body dwells no more,

Or mind, or soul,—an idiot!

But sometime in the end those three

Shall perish and their hands be still,

And with the master's touch shall flee

Their incommunicable skill.

A stillness absolute as death

Along the slacking wheels shall lie,

And, flagging at a single breath,

The fires shall moulder out and die.

The roar shall vanish at its height,

And over that tremendous town

The silence of eternal night

Shall gather close and settle down.

All its grim grandeur, tower and hall,

Shall be abandoned utterly,

And into rust and dust shall fall

From century to century;

Nor ever living thing shall grow,

Or trunk of tree, or blade of grass;

No drop shall fall, no wind shall blow,

Nor sound of any foot shall pass:

Alone of its accursèd state,

One thing the hand of Time shall spare,

For the grim Idiot at the gate

Is deathless and eternal there.

Fair little scout, that when the iron year

Changes, and the first fleecy clouds deploy,

Comest with such a sudden burst of joy,

Lifting on winter's doomed and broken rear

That song of silvery triumph blithe and clear;

Not yet quite conscious of the happy glow,