Penny Dreadfuls, 1812 · page 58 of 258
Psyche, and other poems — page 58: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page 40: Running Prose Poetry This is a page of running verse (page 40 of what appears to be a serialized narrative). The text recounts Psyche's catastrophic moment when she accidentally extinguishes a lamp while gazing at a deity, triggering thunder and ruin. After fainting and awakening, she finds herself abandoned in a barren desert landscape—desolate, featureless, with no shelter, water, or human presence, only threatening sky above. The verse employs Gothic melodrama typical of penny dreadful sensation fiction, emphasizing her terror, despair, and physical isolation through elaborate poetic language and emotional excess.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
40 N- Speechless with awe, in transport'strangely lost Long Psyche stood with fixed adoring eye; Her limbs immovable, her senses tost ) Between amazement, fear, and ecstacy, She hangs enamoured o’er the Deity. Till from her trembling hand extinguished falls The fatal lamp—He starts—and suddenly Tremendous thunders echo through the halls, While ruin’s hideous crash bursts o’er the affrighted walls. Dread horror seizes on her sinking heart, A mortal chillness shudders at her breast, Her soul shrinks fainting from death’s icy dart, The groan scarce uttered dies but half exprest, I And down she sinks in deadly swoon opprest : But when at length, awaking from her trance, The terrors of her fate stand all confest, In vain she casts around her timid glance, The rudely frowning scenes her former joys enhance. No traces of those joys, alas, remain! A desert solitude alone appears. No verdant shade relieves the sandy plain, The wide spread waste no gentle fountain cheers, One barren face the dreary prospect wears; Nought through the vast horizon meets her eye To calm the dismal tumult of her fears, No trace of human habitation nigh, : A sandy wild beneath, above a threatening sky. , ™~ en $ Comichbooks.com