ONE! an iron core, shock’d and dispers’d

in throbs of sound that ebb across the bay:

I shudder: the one clang smites disarray

thro’ all my sense, that starts awake, inhears’d

in the whole lifeless world: and some accurs’d

miasma steals, resumed from all decay,

where the dead tide lies flat round the green quay,

hinting what self-fordone despairs it nurs’d.

The corpse of time is stark upon the night:

my soul is coffin’d, staring, grave-bedight,

upon some dance of death that reels and feasts

around its living tomb, with vampire grin,

inverted sacraments of Satan’s priests —

and, mask’d no more, the maniac face of sin.

 

[1896] 1913