The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1918/Selenaio-Phantasma
Selenaio-Phantasma
Dedicated to the Author of "Nemesis.”
By Alfred Galpin, Jr.
In Elysium-fann’d fields of my slumber,
In the wild-tinted beauties of night,
I have feasted on sights without number,
Recreated all Heav’n with my sight:
And I wake to the sunrise at dawning, fit close to the dusk’s mad delight.
Shadow’d visions of beauties unpainted,
Shifting sights of a Heaven beyond,
Primal nature in pureness untainted,
Without Man and his slave-making wand,
Meet my sight in procession uncanny, unorder’d, and link’d without bond.
Mingling phantoms above Man’s poor notion,
Phantasmas obscure and unknown,
Undulations and waves of wild motion
Into infinite variance grown,
I behold in my slumbers of madness, from far shores of mad Cynthia blown.
I have seen things of cryptical meaning,
Hinting life far above mortal view;
Superstitions of primitive gleaning
Blend with fancy to forms strange and new;
And my fetterless brain leaps the mountain of Science and dreams ’tis not true.
All the hopes of a life are entwined
With the greed of a fancy unchain’d,
While my thoughts, by the sleep undermined,
Wander wordless, uncheck’d, uncontain’d
D’er unearthly expanses of Spiritland, haunting where once they had reign’d.
When, in midst of this immundane dreaming
Come effulgent the first rays of light,
Bringing hack my rapt soul with their beaming,
Lending splendour to all within sight:
And I wake to the sunrise at dawning, fit close to the dusk’s mad delight.