The Star-Treader and Other Poems

I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height,

A mountain's utmost eminence of snow,

Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below

To a far sea-horizon, dim and white.

Beneath the sun's expiring, ghastly light,

The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow;

Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low;

The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright.

I watched, and lo! the pale and flickering sun,

In agony and fierce despair, flamed high,

And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom.

Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won,

Impended for a breath on wings of doom,

And through the air fell like a falling sky.