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Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

Story copied from the Wikisource.


Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
  Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
  I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
  When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
  Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
  Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
  That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
  Of the hoary primordial grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
  And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
  That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
  That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
  I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
  Shows the tapestries things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
  At the moldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
  The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
  I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
  Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
  The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
  When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
  And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
  Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
  Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
  I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.



Public domain Nemesis is currently in the Public Domain. This text can now be legally distributed as the work was published before 1923 and the author died in 1937 therefore the 70 year extension has expired.
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