THE ELDER THING

Oh, have you seen the Elder Thing That creeps upon the hill— A fearsome Thing with lurid eyes At night when all is still; A horror wrought of withered moss And foul primordial slime, Wherein there fester monstrously The evils of all time? With phosphorescent glow like naught That Nature might devise, All the fell ancient lore of earth Gleams hellish in its eyes. As night by night this Elder Thing Upon the hill doth creep, Awakened by men's blasphemies From out its age-long sleep. By monolith and haunted fen Down to the mandrake mere It prowls to meet the sheeted dead That squeak and gibber there; And nameless things, not beasts nor men, With bat-like creatures vie, And loathsome reptiles writhe and hiss Till daybreak pales the sky. A thousand shapes the Things— A thousand shapes or none— All forms of Fear since Earth was born It mirrors as its own; It apes each rhythmic Elder Sign As it doth onward creep, Awakened by man's blasphemies From out its age-long sleep.