| In a strange city
|
| Alone
|
| Death has reared himself a throne
|
| In a strange city
|
| Alone
|
| Their shrines and palaces are not like ours
|
| They do not tremble and rot
|
| Eaten with time
|
| Death has reared himself a throne
|
| Lifted by forgotten winds
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| Resignedly beneath the sky
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| The melancholy waters lie
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| A crown of stars
|
| In a strange city
|
| Alone
|
| A heaven God does not condemn
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| But the everlasting shadow
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| Makes mockery of it all
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| No holy rays come down
|
| Lights from the lurid deep sea
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| Stream up the turrets silently
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| Up thrones, up arbors
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| Of sculpted ivy and stone flowers
|
| Up domes, up spires
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| Kingly halls all are melancholy shrines
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| The columns, frieze and entablature
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| Chokingly shockingly intertwined
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| The mast the viol and the vine
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| Twisted
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| There amid no earthly moans
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| Hell rises from a thousand thrones
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| Does reverence to death
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| And death does give his undivided time
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| There are open temples
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| And graves on a level with the waves
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| Death looms and looks
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| Huge
|
| Gigantic
|
| There is a ripple
|
| Now a wave
|
| Towers thrown aside
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| Sinking in the dull tide
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| The waves glowing redder
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| The very hours losing their breath
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| All the cunning stars
|
| Watching fitfully over night after night of
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| Matchless … sleep
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| Matched only with the whole of dream …
|
| The tell-tale beating of the heart
|
| The … breath
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| The desire, the pose
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| One poses upon the precipice
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| To fall to run to dive to tumble to fall down
|
| Down into the spiral down and then
|
| One sees one’s own death
|
| One sees one committing murder or atrocious violent acts
|
| And then across the shadow
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| Not of man or God
|
| But the shadow resting upon the brazen doorway
|
| There were seven of us there
|
| Who saw the shadow as it came out from among the draperies
|
| But we did not dare behold it
|
| We looked down into the depths of the mirror of ebony
|
| And the apparition spoke
|
| «I am a shadow
|
| And I dwell in the catacombs
|
| Which border
|
| The country of illusion
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| Hard by the dim plains of wishing»
|
| And then did we start shuddering
|
| Starting from our seats
|
| Trembling
|
| For the tones in the voice of the shadow
|
| Were not the tones of any one man
|
| But of a multitude of beings
|
| And varying in their cadences
|
| From syllable to syllable
|
| Fell duskily upon our ears in the well
|
| Remembered and familiar accents
|
| Of a thousand departed friends |