The Spirit of the Void

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.