NEMESIS
(H.P.Lovecraft)

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being
driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without
knowledge or lustre or name.

I have drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of
the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primordial grove,
Where the oaks feels the presence that marches
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers
through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-riddled mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the frog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not
to gaze on again

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot
endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen
intently for sound.

I have haunted tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear;
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes
what it never can cheer.
I was old the Pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was in old those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was while;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss
on the far Arctic isle.

Oh great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb;
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of
unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being
driven to madness with fright.