The Doomed City by Edgar Allan Poe (Poem)

Occasionally republished as “The City in the Sea”, “The Doomed City” was first published in 1831, in Poe’s poetry anthology Poems. It has since been republished numerous times in various other Edgar Allan Poe anthologies including The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1938) and Ghostly Tales and Eerie Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1993).

About Edgar Allan Poe

Although Edgar Allan Poe is best remembered for his short tales of the macabre, he was also an editor, literary critic, and poet. Poe was born in Boston in 1809. His father abandoned him and his mother the following year. When his mother died in 1811, Poe went to live in Richmond, Virginia with John and Frances Allan. He stayed with them until he reached early adulthood, but the couple never legally adopted him.

Much of Poe’s work was inspired by the traumatic events he experienced during his life. His dark tales completely transformed the genre of the horror story and his work continues to be an inspiration for many writers. However, Poe was also an early pioneer of the science fiction genre and is credited with being the inventor of the modern detective story. Poe died under mysterious circumstances in 1849.

 

The Doomed City

by Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 — 1849)