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

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 Balance

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Dream-Bridge

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Ode To Music

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Atlantis

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

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The Snow-Blossoms

    But yestereve the winter trees
    Reared leafless, blackly bare,
    Their twigs and branches poignant-marked
    Upon the sunset-flare.

    White-petaled, opens now the dawn,
    And in its pallid glow,
    Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree
    Stands white with flowers of snow.

Clark Ashton Smith

Snow-Drops

Dimly and dumbly under the ground,
Groping the walls of their prison round,
The roots of the aged and garrulous trees
Are sending electrical messages
    From the under-world to the world without
And quickening pulses that course in each
    Fettered and bound and frozen thing,
Rootlets that tremble, and fibres that reach
    Are pushing inanimate fingers out,
To ask further inarticulate speech
        For tidings of Spring

And the fine invisible sprite which dwells
In cups and discs, in blossoms and bells,
Fleeter than Ariel's wing hath flown
Beyond this cloudy and frozen zone,
    To the summer land of the South,
Beyond those rugged sentinels
Which winter seta in the snow-capped hills,
    From the breath of whose cruel mouth,
Sighing, t...

Kate Seymour Maclean

Cherry-Time

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
        Merry, merry,
        Take a cherry;
        Mine are sounder,
        Mine are rounder,
        Mine are sweeter
        For the eater
        Under the moon.
And you'll be fairies soon.

In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There's a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling.
        Merry, merry,
        Take a cherry;
        Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder
        Mine are sweeter
        For the eater
        In the moonlight.
And you'll be fairies quite.

When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin ...

Robert von Ranke Graves

Fairy Lanterns

    'Tis said these blossom-lanterns light
    The elves upon their midnight way;
    That fairy toil and elfin play
    Receive their beams of magic white.

    I marvel not if it be true;
    I know this flower has lighted me
    Nearer to Beauty's mystery,
    And past the veils of secrets new.

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 First Frost Of Autumn.

At evening it rose in the hollow glade,
Where wild-flowers blushed 'mid silence and shade;
Where, hid from the gaze of the garish noon,
They were slily wooed by the trembling moon.
It rose for the guardian zephyrs had flown,
And left the valley that night alone.
No sigh was borne from the leafy hill,
No murmur came from the lapsing rill;
The boughs of the willow in silence wept,
And the aspen leaves in that sabbath slept.
The valley dreamed, and the fairy lute
Of the whispering reed by the brook was mute.
The slender rush o'er the glassy rill,
As a marble shaft, was erect and still,
And no airy sylph on the mirror wave,
A dimpling trace of its footstep gave.
The moon shone down, but the shadows deep
Of the pensile flowers, were hushed in sleep.
The p...

Samuel Griswold Goodrich