Poetry and the Gods

by H. P. Lovecraft

The story begins in a drawing room on an April evening "just after the Great War". A young woman, Marcia, is there alone, feeling an "immeasurable gulf that [separates] her soul" from her uninspiring surroundings: 20th-century life and the "strange home" in which she lives. She wonders whether she was born in the wrong age. She leafs through a magazine to look for some soothing poetry, and lands on an atmospheric free verse poem. With its sensually rich images, the poem sends her into a reverie. Marcia believes it to herald a new age. She repeats its words to herself as she drifts off to sleep. Hermes appears before her sleeping body, and confirms that a new age is indeed coming: one in which the gods wake from their own dream-filled sleep, and take action.

Hermes carries her to the court of Zeus, where Apollo, Dionysus, the Muses, and the Bacchae also wait. "Long have we… spoken only through our dreams," Zeus tells her, "but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awakening and change." He says that the gods have chosen a poet "to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past." This consummate poet is to be the harbinger of the gods' awakening. He was chosen not only by the gods themselves, but by select poets whom Zeus and Apollo granted immortality and honor. In turn, these six poets come forth and contribute lines of verse: Homer, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. They continue until just before dawn, and Hermes carries Marcia back to her house.

Years later, Marcia is with the poet foretold by Zeus. When she tells him that his poetry is "fit for the gods", Zeus sends her a vision and declares: "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."