The Fire-Fiend

Ages and ages ago the universe was mine,
One billowing whirl of flames to the firmament's farthest line:
The stars of your Milky Way, huge suns to many a world 
Are only the drops of fluid fire from its swift equator hurled.

Off, in the roar and flare of that infinite vortex, slung.
To the least of these sparkling spheres, to your own red sun I clung :
For ages of ages rocked in the send of its burning surge, 
As a halcyon swings, with folded wings, on a breaker's curling verge.

Nine times the measureless aeons ran off a flaming tire
That thinned and burst, and globed itself in a planet of dull fire,
The seventh, behold your tiny globe, its lamp one silver spark, 
From the weltering core, with sullen roar, dashed into the flame sent Dark.

Ah me! I was caught, alone, in a whirl of its meteor trail, 
And dragged away to the cold abyss, till I saw the sun grow pale.
A million years of your molten globe I swung on its tides of fire, 
Till curdled into continents, I saw its gulfs expire.

Backward, and backward still, I slunk to its burning deeps, 
As cycle on freezing cycle chilled down the shuddering steeps;
But ha! there was joy for me yet, and I pealed my thunder-shout, 
Then Fire sprang into wild revolt, and his mountain flag flung out.

How the old plains rolled again in billows of granite rock! 
and their lava-spray shot seething where the roaring ridges broke! 
Behemoth and Leviathan were steeped in the scalding brine, 
His ocean boiled like a cauldron, and the world once more was mine!

Ah, nothing avails me now the thought of my realms gone by!
The old earth, shrinking and freezing, in a little while will die!
I may laugh at a burning city, or dance in the forest flare, 
And the feeble sound of my gurgled mirth some human heart may scare.

I weary of grinding on in the mills of the baby, Man, 
Turning his iron engines, and warming his chafing-pan!
With only the transient toy of a town gone up in fire,—
I, who have seen the vast abyss one universal pyre!

One hope! I have heard a whisper which the fading stars repeat, 
That earth, and every element, shall dissolve in fervent heat;—
The sky cast down, as a tree its fruit, red suns and asteroids, 
Then crispily roll, a flaming scroll, dropped crumbling to the voids!

Wearily shivering here in the dull volcano's throat, 
Freezing, I long and wait for the doom-trump's thrilling note, 
Again to see my old domain in a lurid maelström whirled, 
Again to pour my stifled roar through the flare of a burning world!