The Last Night

    I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height,
    A mountain's utmost eminence of snow,
    Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below
    To a far sea-horizon, dim and white.
    Beneath the sun's expiring, ghastly light,
    The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow;
    Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low;
    The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright.

    I watched, and lo! the pale and flickering sun,
    In agony and fierce despair, flamed high,
        And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom.
    Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won,
        Impended for a breath on wings of doom,
    And through the air fell like a falling sky.

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 Snow-Blossoms

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Ode On Imagination

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Price

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Fairy Lanterns

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

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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

Last Night - And This.

    Last night - how deep the darkness was!
    And well I knew its depths, because
    I waded it from shore to shore,
    Thinking to reach the light no more.

    She would not even touch my hand. -
    The winds rose and the cedars fanned
    The moon out, and the stars fled back
    In heaven and hid - and all was black!

    But ah!    To-night a summons came,
    Signed with a teardrop for a name, -
    For as I wondering kissed it, lo,
    A line beneath it told me so.

    And now - the moon hangs over me
    A disk of dazzling brilliancy,
    And every star-tip stabs my sight
    With splintered glitterings of light!

James Whitcomb Riley

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

White Death

    Methought the world was bound with final frost;
    The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe,
    Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.
    Then on my road, with instant evening crost,
    Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound,
    Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came
    Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame
    Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.

    Death lay revealed in all its haggardness -
    Immitigable wastes horizonless;
    Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;
    All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed
    In light invariable nullified;
    All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.

Clark Ashton Smith

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 07: Midnight; Bells Toll, And Along The Cloud-High Towers

Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls.
A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers,
A vortex of soundless hours.

The bells have just struck twelve: I should be sleeping.
But I cannot delay any longer to write and tell you.
The woman is dead.
She died, you know the way. Just as we planned.
Smiling, with open sunlit eyes.
Smiling upon the outstretched fatal hand . . .

He folds his letter, steps softly down the stairs.
The doors...

Conrad Aiken

Shadow Of Nightmare

    What hand is this, that unresisted grips
    My spirit as with chains, and from the sound
    And light of dreams, compels me to the bound
    Where darkness waits with wide, expectant lips?
    Albeit thereat my footing holds, nor slips,
    The threats of that Omnipotence confound
    All days and hours of gladness, girt around
    With sense of near, unswervable eclipse.

    So lies a land whose noon is plagued with whirr
    Of bats, than their own shadows swarthier,
    Whose flight is traced on roofs of white abodes,
    Wherein from court to court, from room to room,
    In hieroglyphics of abhorrent doom,
    Is slowly trailed the slime of crawling toads.

Clark Ashton Smith