“A poem written by Edgar Allan Poe about toads”

In a twilight room, beneath a sullen lamp,  
Where shadows coil and eager breezes damp,  
Old Edgar mutters, ink-stained, gaunt and slow—  
He pens a verse where spectral toad-things go.  

Not muses wreathed in laurel, nor a raven’s shade,  
But warty sovereigns of the midnight glade,  
Their eyes agleam with phosphorescent light,  
Their throats alive with symphonies of night.  

“Once upon a bog so drear,” he’d start with gloom,  
Where fungi spawn and verdure fails to bloom,  
Immortal toads, by fate and moonbeams cursed,  
Sit throned on stones where cryptic secrets burst.  

He’d write of toads with vestments green and slick,  
Dream-deep in fens, where time runs slow and thick;  
Of ancient wisdom croaked with eldritch tongue,  
When midnight knells and bracken fronds are hung.  

He’d find the beauty in their bulging stare,  
The velvet hush beneath the chilling air—  
In every lump, a tale untold, unsung,  
Of hidden grief from which his poems sprung.  

So Poe, with lanterned verse, would gently trace  
The murky corners of the toad’s embrace,  
And in that gloom, where life and longing meet,  
He’d gift the lowly toad its own dark seat.

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