Space and dread and the dark -
Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train Of huge, primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;
While in the haunting loneliness The far sea waits and wanders with a sound As of the trailing skirts of Destiny, Passing unseen To some immitigable end With her grey henchman, Death.
What larve, what spectre is this Thrilling the wilderness to life As with the bodily shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense, A strong foreboding of those dim Interminable continents, forlorn And many-silenced, in a dusk Inviolable utterly, and dead As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity?
Life--life--let there be life!
Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!
Life--give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.
