The Star-Treader and Other Poems

Around its walls the forests of the west

Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale

Might lie its multifold exterior veil.

Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed,

Its lordly fanes and palaces attest

A past before whose wall of darkness fail

Reason and fancy, finding not the tale

Erased by time from history's palimpsest.

Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld

Still meets the light, a people came and went

Like whirls of dust between its columns blown—

An alien race, whose record, shadow-held,

Is sealed with those of others long forespent

That died in sunless planets lost and lone.