Copan

    Around its walls the forests of the west
    Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale
    Might lie its multifold exterior veil.
    Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed,
    Its lordly fanes and palaces attest
    A past before whose wall of darkness fail
    Reason and fancy, finding not the tale
    Erased by time from history's palimpsest.

    Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld
    Still meets the light, a people came and went
        Like whirls of dust between its columns blown -
    An alien race, whose record, shadow-held,
    Is sealed with those of others long forespent
        That died in sunless planets lost and lone.

Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and poet, best known for his contributions to the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He was a member of the Lovecraft Circle, a group of writers around H.P. Lovecraft. Smith's work was characterized by rich, fantastical imagery and vocabulary. He is considered one of the major writers of weird fiction and a key figure in early American speculative fiction.

Clark Ashton Smith

The Price

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Mad Wind

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Ode On Imagination

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

A Dead City

    The twilight reigns above the fallen noon
    Within an ancient land, whose after-time
    Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime.
    Like rising mist the night increases soon
    Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
    On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
    And touch with whiteness of sepulchral rime
    The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

    She comes at last; unburied, thick, they show
    In all the hoary nakedness of stone.
        From out a shadow like the lips of Death
    Issues a wind, that through the stillness blown,
        Cries like a prophet's ghost with wailing breath
    The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

Clark Ashton Smith

Dead Cities

Out of it all but this remains:
I was with one who crossed wide chains
Of the Cordilleras, whose peaks
Lock in the wilds of Yucatan,
Chiapas and Honduras. Weeks
And then a city that no man
Had ever seen; so dim and old,
No chronicle has ever told
The history of men who piled
Its temples and huge teocallis
Among mimosa-blooming valleys;
Or how its altars were defiled
With human blood; whose idols there
With eyes of stone still stand and stare.
So old the moon can only know
How old, since ancient forests grow
On mighty wall and pyramid.
Huge ceïbas, whose trunks were scarred
With ages, and dense yuccas, hid
Fanes 'mid the cacti, scarlet-starred.
I looked upon its paven ways,
And saw it in its kingliest days;
When from the lordly pal...

Madison Julius Cawein

The Balance

    The world upheld their pillars for awhile -
    Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood,
    The hot wind sifts across the solitude
    The sand that once was wall and peristyle,
    Or furrows like the main each desert mile,
    Where ocean-deep above its ancient food
    Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude,
    Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.

    Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last,
    When the devouring earth, in ruin one
    With royal walls and palaces undone,
    And sunk within the desolated past,
    Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast
    Immingle it with ashes of the sun.

Clark Ashton Smith

Finis

    It seemed that from the west
    The live red flame of sunset,
    Eating the dead blue sky
    And cold insensate peaks,
    Was loosened slowly, and fell.
    Above it, a few red stars
    Burned down like low candle-flames
    Into the gaunt black sockets
    Of the chill insensible mountains.
    But in the ascendant skies
    (Cloudless, like some vast corpse
    Unfeatured, cerementless)
    Succeeded nor star nor planet.
    It may have been that black,
    Pulseless, dead stars arose
    And crossed as of old the heavens.
    But came no living orb,
    Nor comet seeming the ghost,
    Homeless, of an outcast world,
    Seeking its former place
    That is no more nor shall be
    In all the Cosmos again.
    Null, bla...

Clark Ashton Smith

To The Darkness

    Thou hast taken the light of many suns,
    And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom.
    Even as candle-flames
    Hast thou taken the souls of men,
    With winds from out a hollow place;
    They are hid in the abyss as in a sea,
    And the gulfs are over them
    As the weight of many peaks,
    As the depth of many seas;
    Thy shields are between them and the light;
    They are past its burden and bitterness;
    The spears of the day shall not touch them,
    The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.

    Many men there were,
    In the days that are now of thy realm,
    That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps;
    Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth -
    Aye, mightily they desired her face,...

Clark Ashton Smith

Atlantis

    Above its domes the gulfs accumulate
    To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;
    But here the buried waters take no heed -
    Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight
    Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,
    On temples of an unremembered creed
    Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,
    The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.

    From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,
    A clouded light is questionably shed
    On altars of a goddess garlanded
    With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
    And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
    Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

Clark Ashton Smith