Storm and Darkness

The unwearying winds are abroad in the upper abysses,
Their vast, hollow murmur fills all the wide chambers of heaven.
The sea, rolling restless, moans over the nether abysses,
As it were the long wail of the widows that numbered its merciless ages!
The loon — wild storm prophet, pealing his maniac laughter,
Drives past and away in the drifts of the gathering vapor;
While sheltered aloft on the breast of a granite giant,
With his beetling brow for a roof, and his arm for defender.
I wait in the deepening shadows the prophecy’s fulfillment.
‘Tis a lover’s assignation with the Gloom of stormy Neptune!
She makes no long delaying, for out of the boding noises
I hear the mysterious whisper of her weird, unseen attendants.

The Spirit of Darkness comes down on the weltering waters,
Vast, formless, and awful, with wings that are black as the raven’s;
Their shadow is ponderous and weighs on the breast like a burden;
The heavens and the earth are involved in her smothering mantle,
And Ocean is buried beneath as when brooded by huge Demogorgon.
From the fathomless gloom, with a roar like the rushing of chariots,
The mad billows leap, & they whiten the starless abysses
With pale phosphorescence that renders the darkness more dismal,
As crushed into atoms they flash from the petrified glooms of the granite.
Far off, where ye know that the shoreline is stretched in the midnight.
Ye hear the long boom of the billows that charge of the sand-dunes,
Till it dies to a seething hiss through the tremulous other,
Like the singeing of flame when the thunder comes prompt as the lightning.

There is neither depth nor height; nor the visible glimpse of a Yonder,
Only there, created and lost in dim, intermittent pallors.
The night and the noise are one, and one with the winds and the waters,
The rock is a crag of the darkness, the darkness itself is petrean,
And the billows that break from its bosom are black avalanches
That, ground on the crags, for a moment are faintly coruscant.

Ah! thus might have seemed the abysses when Chaos, reluctant,
Obeyed with a shudder the voice of the fiat-primeval,
Resisting and yielding by turns in his impotent anger and terror
When over the face of the deep moved the breath of Jehovah,
And infinite darkness was strewn in fragments eternally sundered.

Now let there be light for the lives that are tossed on the billows!
Good Angels be near with your guidance, if caught in the gales rushing landward,
The mariner drives in this darkness too close to the house of his loved ones,
Though he brandish the torch of the lightning to show him his peril!
So let there be light to souls in the darkness of error,
Though the blot of the stalwart iconoclast searches their idols!