A formless shade in the shadowy vast,
A moving Power that will leave no trace
Of a wingless flight on the gulf’s dark face,
I come from an endless Past.
I am Lord of the utmost realms of Space
The unbounded Void where never a beam
Of starlight, or a meteor’s gloom,
May enter my dwelling place.
Cold’s colder than human thought can dream,
And black with an unimagined gloom,
Is that infinite vault, as of Nature’s tomb,
Wherein I reign supreme;
If not that a shudder, from where or whom
I know not, shooting a mortal thrill
Through my Kingdom and me, is a mighties[sic] Will
Slow-moving to our doom!
Again and again will a vision fill
My heart with dread when a rayless star
Burns over me like a livid scar,
Lights menaces brooding still.
I’ wage on Nature an endless war
With honest weapons of night and frost,
To check ?? tide on its widening coast
With an anarch gods “thus far”
Where the new Sun comes, will this planet host
Tossing his hundred asteroid,
Like a juggler’s balls, in my ? void,
No victory shall he boast!
His pale Mate waltzing in swift cycloids
Around your globe, I have frozen stark,
In a night to come she shall wander dark
In the whorl of her vast conchoids
On the zodiac’s wheel each diamond spark
Is a living world in a mantle of flame,
My rigors shall make the wild ??-stane
That ride in that fiery ark!
This cloud of luminous dust ye name
The Milky Way, shall darken and fly
At my icy breath, and learn the sky
As musky as ere it came.
The invading world go flaming by
Driven out by a fierce centrifugal scourge
TO the black pull whose p things die.recipitous verge
Dawns down to where all.
Unseen I ride on the dismal surge
Of the refluent Dark, ad the starry peers
Besieging my kingdom these million years
Are lost in its gloomy gurge.
But ha! What vision my eyeball sees?
As the elder sums in my black frost reel
The thin fire-mist that my blasts congeal
Is curdled to burning spheres!
Though Lord of the outer voids I feel
The stress of the live Worlds’ equipoise;—
That the Maker is stronger than he would destroy,
And abashed to my gloom I steal.
George Shepard Burleigh
Creation