"The City In The Sea"

Oratorical Piece

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good, the bad, and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not)
Resemble nothing that is ours
Around, by lifting winds forgot
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free –
Up domes – up spires – up kingly halls –
Up fanes – up Babylon – like walls –
Up shadowy long – forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers –
Up many and many marvelous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadow there
That seem pendulous in the air
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves:
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye –
Not the gaily-jeweled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed:
For no ripple curl, alas!
Along the wilderness of glass –
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea –
No heaving hints that winds have been
No seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave – there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide –
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow –
The hours are breathing faint and low –
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.