The sullen sunsets burn my senses with their flames
And all their changing colours mixed with my desires
Turn into writhing serpents whose intolerable shames
Poison one's innocent blood, shoot shafts of fires
Out of the Seven Hells' regions where knights and dames
Hold converse, dance and mime, and string their lyres,
And hear, in glittering cages, sinister birds that call their names.
And as I wake and wander always these are woven
With my most feverish dreams, the heat of midnight cloven
With feet of fire, hell's lightning and hell's thunder
That mix and mingle in a perilous confusion;
And over and above me, mists of disillusion,
That, as the heart of darkness opens, are rent asunder.
