The City of Dreadful Night

“Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quailAnd perish in your perishing unblest.And I have searched the highths and depths, the scopeOf all our universe, with desperate hopeTo find some solace for your wild unrest.””

— James Thomson

“Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?I think myself; yet I would rather beMy miserable self than He, than HeWho formed such creatures to His own disgrace.The vilest thing must be less vile than ThouFrom whom it had its being, God and Lord!Creator of all woe and sin! abhorredMalignant and implacable! I vowThat not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,For all the temples to Thy glory built,Would I assume the ignominious guiltOf having made such men in such a world.As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,At once so wicked, foolish and insane,As to produce men when He might refrain!The world rolls round for ever like a mill;It grinds out death and life and good and ill;It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.While air of Space and Time's full river flowThe mill must blindly whirl unresting so:It may be wearing out, but who can know?Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,That it is quite indifferent to him.Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,Then grinds him back into eternal death.””

— James Thomson

“How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!How the stars throb and glitter as they wheelTheir thick processions of supernal lightsAround the blue vault obdurate as steel!And men regard with passionate awe and yearningThe mighty marching and the golden burning,And think the heavens respond to what they feel.Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dreamAre glorified from vision as they passThe quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glassTo restless crystals; cornice dome and columnEmerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.With such a living light these dead eyes shine,These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gazeWe read a pity, tremulous, divine,Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.””

— James Thomson

“And now at last authentic word I bring,Witnessed by every dead and living thing;Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:There is no God; no Fiend with names divineMade us and tortures us; if we must pine,It is to satiate no Being's gall.It was the dark delusion of a dream,That living Person conscious and supreme,Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;Whom we must curse because the life he gaveCould not be buried in the quiet grave,Could not be killed by poison or the knife.This little life is all we must endure,The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,We fall asleep and never wake again;Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,Whose elements dissolve and merge afreshIn earth, air, water, plants, and other men.We finish thus; and all our wretched raceShall finish with its cycle, and give placeTo other beings with their own time-doom:Infinite aeons ere our kind began;Infinite aeons after the last manHas joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.””

— James Thomson

“Surely I write not for the hopeful young, Or those who deem their happiness of worth, Or such as pasture and grow fat among The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,Or pious spirits with a God above themTo sanctify and glorify and love them, Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.For none of these I write, and none of these Could read the writing if they deigned to try;So may they flourish, in their due degrees, On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.If any cares for the weak words here written,It must be someone desolate, fate-smitten, Whose hope and faith are dead, and who would die.””

— James Thomson

“And since he cannot spend and use aright The little time here given him in trust,But wasteth it in weary undelight Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,He naturally claimeth to inheritThe everlasting Future, that his merit May have full scope; as surely is most just.””

— James Thomson

“As I came through the desert, thus it was...””

— James Thomson