From the King of Bohemia

Moloch

By George Sterling

I said, "The dark has come too soon."
 I gazed across the marshy waste
 To where, by vapors half-effaced,
Sank the southwestern, slender moon.

The vapors brooded on the land,
 Too big to sink, too foul to float,
 Upcast like poison from the throat
Of one great chimney near at hand.

The factory about its base
 Droned to the darkness, hour on hour—
 Squat dungeons, huddled at its tow'r,
As fearful of the night's dim face.

As fearful of the outraged night,
 It glowered with unblinking eyes
 On marshy waste, on tainted skies
Shamed by the desecrating light.

I said, "Within those roaring walls,
 What engines gleam, what toils await?
 There strength and power serve their fate,
And there a Titan's hammer falls.

"And surely there the fire reveals
 What giants at their service bend,—
 What thewed endurances attend
The sleepless shuttles and the wheels . . . . "

In meadow-dews an irised flame
 Stirred as the lucid morning broke,
 And from those portals, black with smoke,
A thousand weary children came!

In November of 1926, Sterling committed suicide by swallowing cyanide at his residence at the San Francisco Bohemian Club.
Kevin Starr wrote that "When George Sterling's corpse was discovered in his room at the Bohemian Club... the golden age of San Francisco's bohemia had definitely come to a miserable end."