Insomnia.
35
Men sigh and plain and wail how life is brief:
Ah yes, our bright eternities of bliss
Are transient, rare, minute beyond belief,
Mere star-dust meteors in Time's night-abyss;
Ah no, our black eternities intense
Of bale are lasting, dominant, immense,
As Time which is their breath;
The memory of the bliss is yearning sorrow,
The memory of the bale clouds every morrow
Darkening through nights and days unto the night of Death.
Ah yes, our bright eternities of bliss
Are transient, rare, minute beyond belief,
Mere star-dust meteors in Time's night-abyss;
Ah no, our black eternities intense
Of bale are lasting, dominant, immense,
As Time which is their breath;
The memory of the bliss is yearning sorrow,
The memory of the bale clouds every morrow
Darkening through nights and days unto the night of Death.
No human words could paint my travail sore
In the thick darkness of the next ravine,
Deeper immeasurably than that before;
When hideous agonies, unheard, unseen,
In overwhelming floods of torture roll,
And horrors of great darkness drown the soul,
To be is not to be
In memory save as ghastliest impression,
And chaos of demoniacal possession. . . . .
I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Three.
In the thick darkness of the next ravine,
Deeper immeasurably than that before;
When hideous agonies, unheard, unseen,
In overwhelming floods of torture roll,
And horrors of great darkness drown the soul,
To be is not to be
In memory save as ghastliest impression,
And chaos of demoniacal possession. . . . .
I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Three.
And like a pillar of essential gloom,
Most terrible in stature and regard,
Most terrible in stature and regard,
