Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
of the black cone amid the polar waste
pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
by storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
and only pale auroras and faint suns
glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
what tricky mound of Nature's build they spied
but the bird told of vaster parts, that under
the mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!