Shapes of Clay. Ambrose Bierce

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A VISION OF DOOM.

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      I stood upon a hill. The setting sun

       Was crimson with a curse and a portent,

       And scarce his angry ray lit up the land

       That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared

       Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up

       From dim tarns hateful with some horrid ban,

       Took shapes forbidden and without a name.

       Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds

       With cries discordant, startled all the air,

       And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom—

       The ghosts of blasphemies long ages stilled,

       And shrieks of women, and men's curses. All

       These visible shapes, and sounds no mortal ear

       Had ever heard, some spiritual sense

       Interpreted, though brokenly; for I

       Was haunted by a consciousness of crime,

       Some giant guilt, but whose I knew not. All

       These things malign, by sight and sound revealed,

       Were sin-begotten; that I knew—no more—

       And that but dimly, as in dreadful dreams

       The sleepy senses babble to the brain

       Imperfect witness. As I stood a voice,

       But whence it came I knew not, cried aloud

       Some words to me in a forgotten tongue,

       Yet straight I knew me for a ghost forlorn,

       Returned from the illimited inane.

       Again, but in a language that I knew,

       As in reply to something which in me

       Had shaped itself a thought, but found no words,

       It spake from the dread mystery about:

       "Immortal shadow of a mortal soul

       That perished with eternity, attend.

       What thou beholdest is as void as thou:

       The shadow of a poet's dream—himself

       As thou, his soul as thine, long dead,

       But not like thine outlasted by its shade.

       His dreams alone survive eternity

       As pictures in the unsubstantial void.

       Excepting thee and me (and we because

       The poet wove us in his thought) remains

       Of nature and the universe no part

       Or vestige but the poet's dreams. This dread,

       Unspeakable land about thy feet, with all

       Its desolation and its terrors—lo!

       'T is but a phantom world. So long ago

       That God and all the angels since have died

       That poet lived—yourself long dead—his mind

       Filled with the light of a prophetic fire,

       And standing by the Western sea, above

       The youngest, fairest city in the world,

       Named in another tongue than his for one

       Ensainted, saw its populous domain

       Plague-smitten with a nameless shame. For there

       Red-handed murder rioted; and there

       The people gathered gold, nor cared to loose

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