Lethe

    I flow beneath the columns that upbear
    The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell;
    Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell
    My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare
    Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware,
    Commingle at my verge, to test the spell
    Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel
    One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.

    The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons
    Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.
    And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones,
    Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low,
    Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow
    Drink at one draught a universe of peace?

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 Summer Moon

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Balance

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Medusa Of The Skies

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Lament Of The Stars

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

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Ode To The Abyss

    O many-gulfed, unalterable one,
    Whose deep sustains
    Far-drifting world and sun,
    Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;
    And thou shalt be
    When never world remains;
    When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride
    Is sunk in voidness absolute,
    And their majestic music wide
    In vaster silence rendered mute.
    And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,
    And law to cancel and disperse
    The tangled tissues of the universe,
    And mould the suns anew,
    His might were impotent to conquer thee,
    O invisible infinity!
    Thy darks subdue
    All light that treads thee down a space,
    Exulting o'er thy deeps.
    The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps
    The flame of mightiest sta...

Clark Ashton Smith

The Masque Of Forsaken Gods

    SCENE: A moonlit glade on a summer midnight


    THE POET

    What consummation of the toiling moon
    O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet,
    Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green,
    Edgèd and strong by day, is dull and faint
    Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood,
    That in this absence of the impassioned sun,
    Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color
    The live and vivid aspect of the world -
    Subdued as with the great expectancy
    Which blurs beginning features of a dream,
    Things and events lost 'neath an omening
    Of central and oppressive bulk to come.
    Here were the theatre of a miracle,
    If such, within a world long alienate
    From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic yea...

Clark Ashton Smith

Ode On Imagination

    Imagination's eyes
    Outreach and distance far
    The vision of the greatest star
    That measures instantaneously -
    Enisled therein as in a sea -
    Its cincture of the system-laden skies.
    Abysses closed about with night
    A tribute yield
    To her retardless sight;
    And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores
    Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.
    She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,
    And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,
    Pierces the centermost sublimity
    Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire
    Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,
    And inly riven by Titanic throes,
    Fills all his frame with outward cataract
    Of separate and immingling torrent streams.
    Her eyes e...

Clark Ashton Smith

The Star-Treader

    I

    A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,
    Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth
    Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth
    Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams
    Thine ancient pathway of the suns,
    Whose flame is part of thee;
    And deeps outreach immutably
    Whose largeness runs
    Through all thy spirit's mystery.
    Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze
    Of stars where through thou camest in old days;
    Pierce without fear each vast
    Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.
    A hand strikes off the chains of Time,
    A hand swings back the door of years;
    Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,
    And opens the strait dream to space sublime."


    II...

Clark Ashton Smith

Lament Of The Stars

    One tone is mute within the starry singing,
    The unison fulfilled, complete before;
    One chord within the music sounds no more,
    And from the stir of flames forever winging
    The pinions of our sister, motionless
    In pits of indefinable duress,
    Are fallen beyond all recovery
    By exultation of the flying dance,
    Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance
    The maze of stars that only death may free -
    Flung through the void's expanse.

    In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted
    Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;
    In space that litten orbits gird around,
    Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted
    Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.
    Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight
    Shall find, ...

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