Pine Needles

    O little lances, dipped in grey,
    And set in order straight and clean,
    How delicately clear and keen
    Your points against the sapphire day!

    Attesting Nature's perfect art
    Ye fringe the limpid firmament,
    O little lances, keenly sent
    To pierce with beauty to the heart!

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

A Sunset

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Copan

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Summer Moon

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

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The Night Forest

    Incumbent seemingly
    On the jagged points of peaks
    That end the visible west,
    The rounded moon yet floods
    The valleys hitherward
    With fall of torrential light,
    Ere from the overmost
    Aggressive mountain-cusp,
    She slip to the lower dark.
    But here, on an eastward slope
    Pointed and thick with its pine,
    The forest scarcely remembers
    Her light that is gone as a vision
    Or ecstasy too poignant
    And perilous for duration.
    Withdrawn in what darker web
    Or dimension of dream I know not,
    In silence pre-occupied
    And solemnest rectitude
    The pines uprear, and no sigh
    For the rapture of moonlight past,
    Comes from their bosom of boughs.
    Far in their secrecy

Clark Ashton Smith

The Summer Moon

    How is it, O moon, that melting,
    Unstintedly, prodigally,
    On the peaks' hard majesty,
    Till they seem diaphanous
    And fluctuant as a veil,
    And pouring thy rapturous light
    Through pine, and oak, and laurel,
    Till the summer-sharpened green,
    Softening and tremulous,
    Is a lustrous miracle -
    How is it that I find,
    When I turn again to thee,
    That thy lost and wasted light
    Is regained in one magic breath?

Clark Ashton Smith

The Cherry-Snows

    The cherry-snows are falling now;
    Down from the blossom-clouded sky
    Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough,
    In widely settling whirls they fly.

    The orchard earth, unclothed and brown,
    Is wintry-hued with petals bright;
    E'en as the snow they glimmer down;
    Brief as the snow's their stainless white.

Clark Ashton Smith

Binsey Poplars felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
    Not spared, not one
    That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew -
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a ...

Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Live-Oak Leaf

    How marvellous this bit of green
    I hold, and soon shall throw away!
    Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen,
    Seem fragment of a god's array.

    In all the hidden toil of earth,
    Which is the more laborious part -
    To rear the oak's enormous girth,
    Or shape its leaves with poignant art?

Clark Ashton Smith

My Cathedral

Like two cathedral towers these stately pines
    Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;
    The arch beneath them is not built with stones,
    Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,
And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;
    No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,
    No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones.
    No marble bishop on his tomb reclines.
Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,
    Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!
    Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds,
In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,
    Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,
    And learn there may be worship with out words.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow