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Twilight had changed into night;
Now the room was filled with shadows.
Shadow-men threw stygian mantles
Over fluted flasks and beakers
Softly whispered “leave oh mortal,
Night time is the time for spirits,
Cease your dull and endless labor.”
In the flask a thousand faces
Peered from out the ebullition
Gazing sternly, disappearing
Into steam, with popping noises.
Forced to climb a great glass stairway
Seethed and foamed the frantic liquid
Heated by the bunsen burner.
Then I saw that sitting near me
Gazing mute at flask and cauldron
Was an Ancient, ragged, filthy
With the grime of laboratory;
Running nervous fingers gently
Through the tangled mass of whiteness,
From which poked a great red hawknose.
Flames leaped higher from the burners.
Turned from pencilled blue to yellow.
To the sound of spinning stirrer
There was added now a rasping
As my visitor spoke softly,
Partly to the bubbling liquid,
Partly to its wondering master.
“Sir,” he spoke like frenzied metal,
Tortured by a tearing toothed file,
“Do you practice here, spegyrics?
Are you waiting for the midnight?
Let me watch your machinations.
On the wall I see alembics.
Have you made a transformation?”
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Waiting not to hear my answer
Rose the stranger, tall and stately.
Hurried over to the fire,
Sprinkled on the flames a powder.
Puff, the room was filled with vapor,
Sulfurous, and through the dense cloud
Glowed and roared a mighty funace!
“Zosimus, I am.” He shouted,
“Work, oh slave, this pair of bellows;
We shall wrest from base quicksilver
Virgin Gold.” Now like a demon,
Danced the man, before his fire
Sprinkling Lapis Philsophorum
As he called it, from a packet.
Now from out the flaming furnace
Roaring streams of yellow metal
Lighted up the mad alchemist
With a molten, dazzling brilliance.
But the wind unloosed a window
Blew in gusts of fragrant night air
Woke me from my semi-sleeping.
Searching on the floor before me,
Bright with rays of silv’ry moonlight,
Soon I spied the little packet
Sure this was not simple dreaming.
But the night was velvet quiet,
Only crickets, brightly singing.
Now the time was come for leaving.
Zosimus, I sat there musing.
Zosimus, the Arab chemist
Who had spent his life attempting
To transform base things to gold.
Never more will I be happy
Until I have learned the secret.
Far into the night I labor.
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