The City in the Sea

Use Tab to move through poem lines. Press Enter or Space to select a line. Hold Shift while selecting a second line to create a shared range.

1. Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
2. In a strange city lying alone
3. Far down within the dim West,
4. Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
5. Have gone to their eternal rest.
6. There shrines and palaces and towers
7. (Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
8. Resemble nothing that is ours.
9. Around, by lifting winds forgot,
10. Resignedly beneath the sky
11. The melancholy waters lie.
12.  
13. No rays from the holy Heaven come down
14. On the long night-time of that town;
15. But light from out the lurid sea
16. Streams up the turrets silently--
17. Gleams up the pinnacles far and free--
18. Up domes--up spires--up kingly halls--
19. Up fanes--up Babylon-like walls--
20. Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
21. Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers--
22. Up many and many a marvellous shrine
23. Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
24. The viol, the violet, and the vine.
25.  
26. Resignedly beneath the sky
27. The melancholy waters lie.
28. So blend the turrets and shadows there
29. That all seem pendulous in air,
30. While from a proud tower in the town
31. Death looks gigantically down.
32.  
33. There open fanes and gaping graves
34. Yawn level with the luminous waves;
35. But not the riches there that lie
36. In each idol's diamond eye--
37. Not the gaily-jewelled dead
38. Tempt the waters from their bed;
39. For no ripples curl, alas!
40. Along that wilderness of glass--
41. No swellings tell that winds may be
42. Upon some far-off happier sea--
43. No heavings hint that winds have been
44. On seas less hideously serene.
45.  
46. But lo, a stir is in the air!
47. The wave--there is a movement there!
48. As if the towers had thrust aside,
49. In slightly sinking, the dull tide--
50. As if their tops had feebly given
51. A void within the filmy Heaven.
52. The waves have now a redder glow--
53. The hours are breathing faint and low--
54. And when, amid no earthly moans,
55. Down, down that town shall settle hence,
56. Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
57. Shall do it reverence.
58.  
59.  
60. 1835?