Where flames of purgatory twist, and Earth's transgressors dwell.
She dances swathed in heated mist, before the gates of Hell.
Her gleaming naked body flees before the Demon fires,
Along the shores of molten seas -- ridged high by fuming pyres.
Her hair, a liquid cape of flame, whips hot about her breasts,
A strumpet in the Devil's name, which he alone invests,
Gives power to a woman born of brimstone, steam and smoke,
Her soul, a spark in early morn, flares up to share the yoke
Of evil Mephistopheles upon his throne of death,
Unheeding shrieks and doleful pleas choked out by dying breath.
The Devil's Mistress dances down thru dungeons carved from bone,
Upon her head the sinner's crown, each jewel a sigh, a moan.
Before the wailing souls in caves, tossed down from earthly things
To charred and cindered minds of slaves her dancing passion brings
Then, tired of her evil joke, and laughing at her games.
She draws about her fiery cloak to vanish in the flames.
From far across the desolate moor I heard
The echo of a wild and anguished cry--
A tortured voice that sh rioted aloud a word,
A name, that shivered 'cross the leaden sky.
I stopped - stared 'round - I knew that voice did sound
A faint, familiar note within my brain.
I fled across that dark and desolate ground
Seeking out the direction whence it came.
Forebodingly, that voice kept echoing
Within a brain that did not seem my own . . .
A vague remembrance of a recent thing
I could not grasp . . .I was a lost and lone
Forsaken soul that sped I knew not where,
Wondering frightenedly what I did seek. . .
At last I found it, there beside a bare
And lonely road, when trembling and weak,
I gazed upon a gallows-tree where hung
A corpse, the very site of which did freeze
The blood within my veins; a corpse that swung
Grotesquely to and fro upon the breeze.
And then, through rising panic, closer still
I peered -- then saw! -- and knew! Again that cry
That shrieked a name -- the cry that issued shrill
From my own throat, and shivered to the sky!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The name I shried beneath the gallows-tree
Was mine. The dead thing swinging there was me!
