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The Tower is of Night; perchance of Death
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the elven morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold gray air:
The ash and plains about may scorch and glower,
The trees have never visited that tower,
For it dissolveth everything that's fair.
Dissolveth like dreams of twilight lands of yore;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought
And deadly weariness from rings we wore.
But when a dream night after night is brought
Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern that dream in dooms that we have wrought?
For elves are but a dream: their ships returned,
Once frequently, now seldom, in the night
Beside the bay, the twilight bay; we learned,
The while Men changed and ages vanished quite,
In their recurrence by recurrent changers
A former Westron order; and these Rangers
We raised to kings; such is bloodline's might.
---L.
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the elven morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold gray air:
The ash and plains about may scorch and glower,
The trees have never visited that tower,
For it dissolveth everything that's fair.
Dissolveth like dreams of twilight lands of yore;
Though present in distempered gloom of thought
And deadly weariness from rings we wore.
But when a dream night after night is brought
Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern that dream in dooms that we have wrought?
For elves are but a dream: their ships returned,
Once frequently, now seldom, in the night
Beside the bay, the twilight bay; we learned,
The while Men changed and ages vanished quite,
In their recurrence by recurrent changers
A former Westron order; and these Rangers
We raised to kings; such is bloodline's might.
—16 June 2004
One last parody, this one a pastiche of the opening of James "B.V." Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, once deeply influential on early fantasy (its geography and teleology lies behind Lanhkmar, among other cities) but now not very well known. Which is a pity, as in the hands of the right sort of teens, the quality of goth poetry could only go up.---L.