Space and dread and the dark - <br />Over a livid stretch of sky <br />Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train <br />Of huge, primeval presences <br />Stooping beneath the weight <br />Of some enormous, rudimentary grief; <br />While in the haunting loneliness <br />The far sea waits and wanders with a sound <br />As of the trailing skirts of Destiny, <br />Passing unseen <br />To some immitigable end <br />With her grey henchman, Death. <br /> <br />What larve, what spectre is this <br />Thrilling the wilderness to life <br />As with the bodily shape of Fear? <br />What but a desperate sense, <br />A strong foreboding of those dim <br />Interminable continents, forlorn <br />And many-silenced, in a dusk <br />Inviolable utterly, and dead <br />As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes <br />In hugger-mugger through eternity? <br /> <br />Life--life--let there be life! <br />Better a thousand times the roaring hours <br />When wave and wind, <br />Like the Arch-Murderer in flight <br />From the Avenger at his heel, <br />Storm through the desolate fastnesses <br />And wild waste places of the world! <br /> <br />Life--give me life until the end, <br />That at the very top of being, <br />The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, <br />Out of the reddest hell of the fight <br />I may be snatched and flung <br />Into the everlasting lull, <br />The immortal, incommunicable dream.<br /><br />William Ernest Henley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/space-and-dread-and-the-dark/
