Nobody Escapes the Hounds of Time
Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penn’d,
For the hounds of Time to rend.
The final stanza brings everything together with some wonderfully grotesque imagery.
The darkness is filled with strange creatures.
The landscape becomes increasingly horrifying.
Old and new are brought together under the same shadow of horror and death.
And then Lovecraft gives us the hounds of Time.
It's an appropriately bleak image with which to finish.
Time doesn't care whether something is ancient or modern.
It doesn't care whether something is natural or man-made.
Eventually, everything is consumed.
The old.
The new.
The beautiful.
The ugly.
The living.
The dead.
Everything ends up in the same cosmic machinery.
And that makes the poem considerably more than a simple Halloween poem.
It's a miniature example of Lovecraft's larger worldview.
The universe is enormous.
Humanity is temporary.
The past is deeper than we understand.
And whatever comes next isn't necessarily going to ask our permission.
Happy Halloween!
