Jotunheim by Madison Cawein

I. Beyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted / Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted, / And pale as Loki in his cavern when / The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones, / I saw the phantasms of gigantic men, / The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones; / Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's / And evening's colors, -- wild prismatic tones / Of boreal beauty. -- Like the three gray Norns, / Silence and solitude and terror loomed / Around them where they labored. Walls arose, / Vast as the Andes when creation boomed / Insurgent fire; and through the rushing snows / Enormous battlements of tremendous ice, / Bastioned and turreted, I saw arise.

II. But who can sing the workmanship gigantic / That reared within its coruscating dome / The roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic / Of streaming ice that flashed with flame and foam? / An opal spirit, various and many formed, -- / In whose clear heart reverberant fire stormed, -- / Seemed its inhabitant; and through pale halls, / And deep diaphanous walls, / And corridors of whiteness. / Auroral colors swarmed, / As rosy-flickering stains, / Or lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed / The pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins / With ever-changing brightness. / And through the Arctic night there went a voice, / As if the ancient Earth cried out, "Rejoice! / My heart is full of lightness!"