Text: Charles W. Kent (notes) Robert A. Stewart (variants) (ed. J. A. Harrison), “Notes to The City in the Sea,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Vol. VII: Poems (1902), 7:175-178

Lo! Death hath rear’d himself a throne

In a strange city, all alone,

Far down within the dim west —

And the good, and the bad, and the worst, and the best,

Have gone to their eternal rest.

 

There shrines and palaces and towers

Are — not like anything of ours —

O! no — O! no — ours never loom [page 176:]

To heaven with that ungodly gloom!

Time-eaten towers that tremble not!

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

A heaven that God doth not contemn

With stars is like a diadem —

We liken our ladies’ eyes to them —

But there! That everlasting pall!

It would be mockery to call

Such dreariness a heaven at all.

 

Yet tho’ no holy rays come down

On the long night-time of that town,

Light from the lurid, deep sea

Streams up the turrets silently —

Up thrones — up long-forgotten bowers

Of sculptur’d ivy and stone flowers —

Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls

Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —

Up many a melancholy shrine

Whose entablatures intertwine

The mask — the viol — and the vine.

 

There open temples — open graves

Are on a level with the waves —

But not the riches there that lie

In each idol's diamond eye,

Not the gayly-jewell’d dead

Tempt the waters from their bed:

For no ripples curl, alas!

Along that wilderness of glass —

No swellings hint that winds may be

Upon a far-off happier sea:

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While from the high towers of the town

Death looks gigantically down. [page 177:]

 

But lo! a stir is in the air!

The wave! there is a ripple there!

As if the towers had thrown aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide —

As if the turret-tops had given

A vacuum in the filmy heaven:

The waves have now a redder glow —

The very hours are breathing low —

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell rising from a thousand thrones

Shall do it reverence,

And Death to some more happy clime

Shall give his undivided time.