Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft(771)

Of man’s mortality,

A rotting wharf where gambrel roofs

Keep watch above the sea.



Square and parade, whose walls have tower’d

Full fifteen decades long

By cobbled ways ‘mid trees embower’d,

And slighted by the throng.



Stone bridges spanning languid streams,

Houses perch’d on the hill,

And courts where mysteries and dreams

The brooding spirit fill.



Steep alley steps by vines conceal’d,

Where small-pan’d windows glow

At twilight on a bit of field

That chance has left below.



My Providence! What airy hosts

Turn still thy gilded vanes;

What winds of elf that with grey ghosts

People thine ancient lanes!



The chimes of evening as of old

Above thy valleys sound,

While thy stern fathers ‘neath the mould

Make blest thy sacred ground.



Thou dream’st beside the waters there,

Unchang’d by cruel years;

A spirit from an age more fair

That shines behind our tears.



Thy twinkling lights each night I see,

Tho’ time and space divide;

For thou art of the soul of me,

And always at my side!





The Cats



Babels of blocks to the high heavens tow’ring,

Flames of futility swirling below;

Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flow’ring,

Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.



Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,

Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;

Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers

Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun.



Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,

Shrieking and ringing and scrambling insane,

Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,

Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.



Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal,

Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,

Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,

Yelling the burden of Pluto’s red rune.



Tall tow’rs and pyramids ivy’d and crumbling,

Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber’d streets;

Bleak broken bridges o’er rivers whose rumbling

Joins with no voice as the thick tide retreats.



Belfries that blackly against the moon totter,

Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac’d,

And living to answer the wind and the water,

Only the lean cats that howl in the waste!





Festival



There is snow on the ground,

And the valleys are cold,

And a midnight profound

Blackly squats o’er the wold;

But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallow’d and old.



There is death in the clouds,

There is fear in the night,

For the dead in their shrouds

Hail the sun’s turning flight,

And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule-altar fungous and white.



To no gale of earth’s kind

Sways the forest of oak,

Where the sick boughs entwin’d

By mad mistletoes choke,

For these pow’rs are the pow’rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.



And mayst thou to such deeds

Be an abbot and priest,

Singing cannibal greeds

At each devil-wrought feast,

And to all the incredulous world shewing dimly the sign of the beast.





Hallowe’en in a Suburb



The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,

And the trees have a silver glare;

Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,

And the harpies of upper air,

That flutter and laugh and stare.



For the village dead to the moon outspread

Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,

But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep

Where the rivers of madness stream

Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.



A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves

In the meadows that shimmer pale,

And comes to twine where the headstones shine

And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

For harvests that fly and fail.



Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change

That tore from the past its own

Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r

Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne

And looses the vast unknown.



So here again stretch the vale and plain

That moons long-forgotten saw,

And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,

Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw

To shake all the world with awe.



And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,

The ugliness and the pest

Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,

Shall some day be with the rest,

And brood with the shades unblest.



Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,

And the leprous spires ascend;

For new and old alike in the fold

Of horror and death are penn’d,

For the hounds of Time to rend.





The Wood



They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles

Of forest night had hid eternal things,

They scal’d the sky with tow’rs and marble piles

To make a city for their revellings.