A VISION OF DOOM

by: Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

stood upon a hill. The setting sun

Was crimson with a curse and a portent,

And scarce his angry ray lit up the land

That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared

Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up

From dim tarns hateful with some horrid ban,

Took shapes forbidden and without a name.

Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds

With cries discordant, startled all the air,

And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom—

The ghosts of blasphemies long ages stilled,

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."




"Was the prophecy fulfilled?"

The sullen disc of the declining sun

Was crimson with a curse and a portent,

And scarce his angry ray lit up the land

That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared

Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up

From dim tarns hateful with a horrid ban,

Took shapes forbidden and without a name.

Gigantic night-birds, rising from the reeds

With cries discordant, startled all the air,

And bodiless voices babbled in the gloom.

But not to me came any voice again;

And, covering my face with thin, dead hands,

I wept, and woke, and cried aloud to God!

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