Were you always veiled in your mystic shroud,

O, gloom-wedded Doom?

Or did you once unfold yourself

To the languid eyes of care-worn mortals

As a gentler sister of Life?

I wonder–and if at the end

Of their allotted span of life,

They also welcomed your gentle wooing,

And felt your cool touch

As a beneficent benediction.

Did they drink the cup

Of your potent poppy-seed potion

And hover in the tremulous twilight regions,

Dreaming dreams of fantastic fairy shapes?

Did they?–I wonder.

In the world of purple twilight–

The cool, purple twilight–

Which knows no intrusion of day or night–

Did they weave garlands

Of dark-red, blood-red poppies?

And then, lulled by sibillent murmurs

Of turgid waters of Lethe,

Did they obliviously fall asleep?

Under a turquoise sky fading away

In the pale haze of horizons.

Maybe, in some far, forgotten time

In a mood of wanton caprice,

You snatched a new-born babe

From its suckling mother’s breast?

Was your hand-maiden Grief born in that hour?

And was the other, Heart-Break born

When, in the folly of youth,

You snatched the young lover

From his hour-old bride,

With a jealous woman's unjust spite?

Then perchance enraged Eros cursed

That you shall be no man's love, but his fear.

That curse, maybe, shrouded for ever

Your image from mortal gaze,

O, gloom-wedded Doom!

Onwards thence, your vast twilight spaces

Were transformed into the immemorial

Gloom of countless aeons,

Haunted only by ghostly spectres

And your Lethe–a terrific, turbid torrent.

From that ill-fated moment

Your gentle nature changed;

And with frantic fearsome wrath,

You began your war on shadows of men,

Struck them remorselessly.–

The infant–but a half-furled bud;

The spring bloom of youth;

The ripening fruit of autumnal life;

In the same way as the weary, the worn;

All withered wintry souls.

And thus it came to pass:

The fire of your hideous hate

Seared, burnt, and dissolved you

Till you were but a stark skeleton

Enveloped by the gloom of buried years.