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

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

Ode To Music

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Atlantis

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

To The Sun

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Dream-Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

To The Sun

    Thy light is as an eminence unto thee,
    And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
    Thy power is a foundation for the worlds;
    They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
    Whereto no enemy hath access.
    Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky
    As in the hollow of an immense hand.
    Thou erectest thy light as four walls,
    And a roof with many beams and pillars.
    Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain;
    Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.

    The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will;
    Like steeds are they stayed and contrained
    By the reins of invisible lightnings.
    With bands that are stouter than iron manifold,
    And stronger than the cords of the gulfs,
    Thou with...

Clark Ashton Smith