Sundown to-night
Is not like something out in the world,
But like a memory
Seen in vague pictures of the mind ...

Ashes of sunset,
And mournful remembrances in grey
In some west beyond the west,
And the sickle moon
Like the sun's ghost remaining behind,
Tinted with the transient colors of the changing dusk,
And Earth
Mourning, not really, but in echoes
Through the windy darkness of phantom trees
And night
Closing cold on the heart ...

Closing cold
On the chill tomb of the shrouded memories ...
No moon-memories
Of beautiful dancers bathed by moonlight,
Wild loves by wilder seas,
And youth singing on the gleaming housetops,
But the damp cellar-ghosts,
The ugly insane spirits,
Death's-head revellers ...
Evil is evil, throbs the heart,
Evil is evil ...
From their gigantic graves in man
The titanic powers
Break, and with steps of earthquake, stalk,
Proclaiming war ...

The multitudes of the Earth are gathered in a jungle,
The torches flare under the new moon,
In the phantom forest the naked millions
Hold orgy,
Calling on Mumbo-Jumbo and Satan,
Breaking the taboo of blood,
And in dionysian fury
Doing massive murder ...

Let not the murderer call
His trade by a noble name,
But let us look on the dead
And see the naked evil ...

For Doomsday is upon us, and this is the great harvesting of human evil,
Now we reveal what we are
Though we say what we are is the enemy,
We lay bare the buried,
Ourselves the harvesters and the harvest,
We are cut down in our ripe evil
And are done to death, self-slaughtered ...

No God overlooks the battle,
There are no Valkyries to bear the heroes to bliss,
No Jove and no Jehovah
Blend this vengeance with pity,
No Jesus walks through the mangled corn of No Man's Land ...
We that have slain our gods
Gaze at empty skies,
But robed with their unslayable power
We would be gods are demons ...

It is madness
That dooms the world,
For we have been far too sane to behold
The irrational glory beyond our powers,
Far too sane
To conquer our machinery
With senseless pity and love,
Far too sane
For meditation and self-conquest ...
But the heart has a power in it
Which becomes a devastation
If it is not released in splendour,
And the universe
Is forever unconquerable and its majesty
Forever awful ...

Dreaming we have slain mystery
We are toys of a mysterious doom,
And dreaming that we are gods of intelligence,
Look, we are slaves of murderous passion ...
We aimed at a garden
And wrought a shambles,
We dreamed of a Golden City
And made a Land of Graves ...

The midnight passes
But the madness does not pass ...
It burns itself out like a conflagration,
And in the wild light
The orgy continues,
And shall continue
Till the ashes of a civilization
Become the tomb of a race.