Summary: H.P. Lovecraft’s Birthday Special:<br> A great, dark poem.<br> ⁓The Voice before the Void<br> “Nemesis”<br> H.P. Lovecraft<br> Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,<br> Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,<br> I have lived o’er my lives without number,<br> I have sounded all things with my sight;<br> And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.<br> I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,<br> When the sky was a vaporous flame;<br> I have seen the dark universe yawning<br> Where the black planets roll without aim,<br> Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.<br> I had drifted o’er seas without ending,<br> Under sinister grey-clouded skies,<br> That the many-forked lightning is rending,<br> That resound with hysterical cries;<br> With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.<br> I have plunged like a deer through the arches<br> Of the hoary primordial grove,<br> Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,<br> And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,<br> And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.<br> I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains<br> That rise barren and bleak from the plain,<br> I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains<br> That ooze down to the marsh and the main;<br> And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.<br> I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,<br> I have trod its untenanted hall,<br> Where the moon rising up from the valleys<br> Shows the tapestried things on the wall;<br> Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.<br> I have peered from the casements in wonder<br> At the mouldering meadows around,<br> At the many-roofed village laid under<br> The curse of a grave-girdled ground;<br> And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.<br> I have haunted the tombs of the ages,<br> I have flown on the pinions of fear,<br> Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;<br> Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:<br> And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.<br> I was old when the pharaohs first mounted<br> The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;<br> I was old in those epochs uncounted<br> When I, and I only, was vile;<br> And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.<br> Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,<br> And great is the reach of its doom;<br> Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,<br> Nor can respite be found in the tomb:<br> Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.<br> Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,<br> Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,<br> I have lived o’er my lives without number,<br> I have sounded all things with my sight;<br> And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.<br>
