And shrieks of women, and men’s curses.  All
  These visible shapes, and sounds no mortal ear
  Had ever heard, some spiritual sense
  Interpreted, though brokenly; for I
  Was haunted by a consciousness of crime,
  Some giant guilt, but whose I knew not.  All
  These things malign, by sight and sound revealed,
  Were sin-begotten; that I knew—­no more—­
  And that but dimly, as in dreadful dreams
  The sleepy senses babble to the brain
  Imperfect witness.  As I stood a voice,
  But whence it came I knew not, cried aloud
  Some words to me in a forgotten tongue,
  Yet straight I knew me for a ghost forlorn,
  Returned from the illimited inane. 
  Again, but in a language that I knew,
  As in reply to something which in me
  Had shaped itself a thought, but found no words,
  It spake from the dread mystery about: 
  “Immortal shadow of a mortal soul
  That perished with eternity, attend. 
  What thou beholdest is as void as thou: 
  The shadow of a poet’s dream—­himself
  As thou, his soul as thine, long dead,
  But not like thine outlasted by its shade. 
  His dreams alone survive eternity
  As pictures in the unsubstantial void. 
  Excepting thee and me (and we because
  The poet wove us in his thought) remains
  Of nature and the universe no part
  Or vestige but the poet’s dreams.  This dread,
  Unspeakable land about thy feet, with all
  Its desolation and its terrors—­lo! 
  ’T is but a phantom world.  So long ago
  That God and all the angels since have died
  That poet lived—­yourself long dead—­his mind
  Filled with the light of a prophetic fire,
  And standing by the Western sea, above
  The youngest, fairest city in the world,
  Named in another tongue than his for one
  Ensainted, saw its populous domain
  Plague-smitten with a nameless shame.  For there
  Red-handed murder rioted; and there
  The people gathered gold, nor cared to loose
  The assassin’s fingers from the victim’s throat,
  But said, each in his vile pursuit engrossed: 
  ’Am I my brother’s keeper?  Let the Law
  Look to the matter.’  But the Law did not. 
  And there, O pitiful! the babe was slain
  Within its mother’s breast and the same grave
  Held babe and mother; and the people smiled,
  Still gathering gold, and said:  ‘The Law, the Law,’
  Then the great poet, touched upon the lips
  With a live coal from Truth’s high altar, raised
  His arms to heaven and sang a song of doom—­
  Sang of the time to be, when God should lean
  Indignant from the Throne and lift his hand,
  And that foul city be no more!—­a tale,
  A dream, a desolation and a curse! 
  No vestige of its glory should survive
  In fact or memory:  its people dead,
  Its site forgotten, and its very name
  Disputed.”