Album: Flowers In Formaldehyde (2004)

The Conqueror Worm

[by Edgar Allan Poe]

Lo! 'Tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An Angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears.
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumbe low,
And hither and thither fly
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley dram ? oh be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With it s phantom cheased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
The self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! It writhes! With mortal pangs
The mimic become it s food,
And the angels sob ar virmin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out-out are the lights-out all!
And, over each quevering form,
The curtain, the funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all palid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
And the play is the tragedy, "Man"
And it s hero is the Conqueror Worm.