The Doomed City by Edgar Allan Poe: Death’s Throne Above a Sinking Gothic City

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One of my favorite memories of scaring
myself as a child was getting a compilation

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book of Edgar Awlan Poe stories from
my elementary school library. It brought me

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so much fear and so much excitement. I remember running home from school with

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that book in my backpack as the
sky was dark and a storm was coming.

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I was in my childhood living room, but I wasn't alone. I

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had a pizza and the books of
Poe. Every so often I'll bring you

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a tale of Poe, and I
hope it gives you that scary fun sense,

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just the same as it does for
me. When the clock strikes midnight,

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the story will begin. The Doomed
City, a prophecy by Edgar Allan

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Poe lo death half reared himself a
throne in a strange city, all alone,

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far down within the dim west.
And the good and the bad,

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and the worst and the best have
gone to their eternal rest. Their shrines

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and palaces and towers are not like
anything of ours. Oh no, oh

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no, ours never loom to heaven
with that ungodly gloom. Time eaten towers

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that tremble not around by lifting winds, forgot resignedly beneath the sky, the

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melancholy waters lie a heaven that God
doth not contemn with stars, is like

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a diadem we like in our lady's
eyes to them. But there that everlasting

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Paul, It would be mockery to
call such dreariness a heaven at all.

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Yet, though no holy rays come
down on the long night time of that

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town, light from the lurid deep
sea streams up the turrets, silently,

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up thrones, up long forgotten bowers
of sculptured ivy and stone flowers, up

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domes, upspires, up kingly halls, up fanes, up babylon like walls,

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up many a melancholy shrine, whose
entablatures intertwine the mask, thee,

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the vile, and the vine.
There are open temples, open graves,

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are on a level with the waves. But not the riches there that lie

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in each idol's diamond eye. Not
the galley jeweled dead tempt the waters from

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their bed, For no ripples curl
alas along that wilderness of glass, No

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swellings hint that winds may be upon
a far off happier sea. So blend

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the turrets and the shadows there that
all seem pendulous in the air, While

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from the high towers of the town
Death looks gigantically down. But lo a

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stir is in the air the wave. There is a ripple there, as

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if the towers had thrown aside in
slightly sinking the dull tide, as if

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the turret tops had given a vacuum
in the filmy heaven. The waves have

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now a redder glow. The very
hours are breathing low. And when amid

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no earthly moans down down that town
shall settle. Hence, Hell, rising

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from a thousand thrones, shall do
it no reverence, And death to some

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more happy climb shall give his undivided
time