I was lying there in the grave where man feels frozen dread.
I could feel that I possessed, like a fallen oak laid dead,
My bones as hard as stone, my thoughts like embers cold,
And in my sleep it seemed, beside me someone told
A whisper in the darkness, a voice near to my ear,
Speaking words so chilling, filled with shuddering fear.
I cried: “Who is it, then, that stirs in such a night?”
Then rubbed my startled eyes and asked in sudden fright:
“How long have I been sleeping?” The voice replied: “Five hundred years;
You woke so that your poem you may finish without fears
In the year seventy-three, when the nineteenth century nears.”
And suddenly I woke; around me—no human soul;
The grave, once frozen-cold, with its blackened vaulted shoal,
Had vanished, and I stood outside of time and space,
Without a form remaining, a darkness without face;
I lingered there upright, not knowing where nor how.
At last my eyes in darkness adjusted slowly now,
And I could see a glimmer, a faint and distant ray;
Two shadowed doors appeared, as mist dissolved away—
One far ahead before me, the other down below,
Beneath a cloud of swirling elements laid low,
Like a well submerged in marshes where murky waters creep.
The first was Paradise with light profoundly deep,
A ring of fire glowing through a golden, misty veil;
With sibyls deep in Endor who with wisdom tell their tale,
To shape such radiant arches, meteors brightly cast,
Seizing beams of dawning light and binding them steadfast;
So thought I then, and waxen pale I grew.
That shining door like jewel and star in brilliance flew,
Illuminating far into the void of endless night,
Suspended in pure nothingness like a beacon bright;
The ether boiled beneath it in unbounded fiery breath,
For no mountain made by God could bear its weight beneath,
And beneath those sacred columns of that glowing astral tower,
Even Sinai would have shattered, trembling at its power.
The other door below revealed a stable grim,
Black as smoke and smoldering, cracked along its rim,
Like a wall that flickers faintly in a well of pitch-dark shade,
With its contours sinking deep where shadowed depths are made,
A cavern wrought with terror, constructed out of night;
A crater built to girdle Hell within its endless blight.
That doorway seemed the gaping mouth of yawning abyss.
The evils that we suffered in the world came back like this,
And with dread and horror gazed my trembling soul within,
Now at the blackened dome, now at the door of shining gleam.
“These are the doors of mystery!”—the thought struck in my mind,
For I recalled what mortals say of secrets left behind.
At once all vanished there, and suddenly was void.
