Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly Of the black cone amid the polar waste; Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly, By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced. Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses, And only pale auroras and faint suns Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.
If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder What tricky mound of Nature's build they spied; But the bird told of vaster parts, that under The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide. God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!