The City is of Night; perchance of Death But certainly of Night; for never there Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity 5The sun has never visited that city, For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.
Dissolveth like a dream of night away;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought And deadly weariness of heart all day.10But when a dream night after night is brought Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many Recur each year for several years, can any Discern that dream from real life in aught?
For life is but a dream whose shapes return,15Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day, some night and day: we learn, The while all change and many vanish quite, In their recurrence with recurrent changes A certain seeming order; where this ranges 20We count things real; such is memory's might.
A river girds the city west and south, The main north channel of a broad lagoon, Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon 25For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges, Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.
Upon an easy slope it lies at large And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest 30Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.
A trackless wilderness rolls north and west, Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains, Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.35The city is not ruinous, although Great ruins of an unremembered past, With others of a few short years ago More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement 40In house or palace front from roof to basement Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.
The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.45The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping, Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Yet as in some necropolis you find 50Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind Like tragic masks of stone.With weary tread, Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, Or sit foredone and desolately ponder 55Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.
Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth, A woman rarely, now and then a child:
A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth To see a little one from birth defiled, 60Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish To meet one erring in that homeless wild.
They often murmur to themselves, they speak To one another seldom, for their woe 65Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour, Unless there waits some victim of like glamour, To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.70The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, A night seems termless hell.This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,75Or which some moments' stupor but increases, This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.
They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave, One anodyne for torture and despair;80The certitude of Death, which no reprieve Can put off long; and which, divinely tender, But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave[1] Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it will.
