HORROR

In the darkness of my soul,

Just as dark as the souls of men,

By the blessing of their eternal curse,

        Flashes like a bodiless ghoul,

In its rare fulness above all ken,

The sense of the sense of the universe.

And such a cowardice of thought,

Absorbing all my life and all

I have in me, more gall than gall,

Takes me, that I fear to open my eyes

And my mind to a most horrid surprise,

And I feel my being near to suppression

In a horror past Fancy's confession.

More than the cowardest of beasts

Before a gaping flash overhead,

More than the drunkard in his unrests

Who sees visions of more than dread,

More than all that fear can conceive,

More than madness can make to believe,

More than cannot be imagined,

        The sense of the mystery of all,

When it flashes on me full as can be,

Doth my maddened soul appal.

Speak it not ‑ nor can it be spoken, -

No, not the shadow of the sensation,

Of the chord of sanity that is broken

In me by that moment's distress

And intensity of negation;

Think it not, thought is powerless

This horror less than to express.

The meanest thing grows terrible

And the basest thought sublime -

All in a world more horrible

Than the sense of the soul of time,

Than the fear of the depth of death,

Than the remorse of more than crime.

‘Tis half as if its solution it brought,

That mystery that foul is as rot.

        Yet if it did so bring

        Dead were my thought

And my whole self dead as any thing:

'Tis this that coarsely men can name,

        Looking on the face of God.

And that feeling, that sense can more than maim

The spirit, more than make it a clod;

It would kill outright straight, outright,

With a shock of which hell is no mirror,

        More than is known in terror,

        More than is dreamt of fright.