The Price

    Behind each thing a shadow lies;
    Beauty hath e'er its cost:
    Within the moonlight-flooded skies
    How many stars are lost!

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 Masque Of Forsaken Gods

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Retribution

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Cloud-Islands

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

A Sunset

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

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The Butterfly

    I

    O wonderful and wingèd flow'r,
    That hoverest in the garden-close,
    Finding in mazes of the rose,
    The beauty of a Summer hour!

    O symbol of Impermanence,
    Thou art a word of Beauty's tongue,
    A word that in her song is sung,
    Appealing to the inner sense!

    Of that great mystic harmony,
    All lovely things are notes and words -
    The trees, the flow'rs, the songful birds,
    The flame-white stars, the surging sea,

    The aureate light of sudden dawn,
    The sunset's crimson afterglow,
    The summer clouds, the dazzling snow,
    The brooks, the moonlight chaste and wan.

    Lacking (who knows?) a cloud, a tree,
    A streamlet's purl, the ocean's roar
    From Nature's multi...

Clark Ashton Smith

A Dream Of Beauty

    I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing
    That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue -
    The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew,
    The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;
    Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm
        Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame
    Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came,
    And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.

    Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills
    Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills,
    And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.
        Like some descended star she hovered o'er,
    But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,
        Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.

Clark Ashton Smith

The Eldritch Dark

    Now as the twilight's doubtful interval
    Closes with night's accomplished certainty,
    A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
    And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
    Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall
    As with some dreadful witches' ecstasy,
    Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free
    The crooked moon, impendent over all.

    Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown
    Across the movement and the sound of things,
        Make blank the night, till in the broken west
    The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
        The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest,
    Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.

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 Unrevealed

    How dense the glooms of Death, impervious
    To aught of old memorial light! How strait
    The sunless road, suspended, separate,
    That leads to later birth! Untremulous
    With any secret morn of stars, to us
    The Past is closed as with division great
    Of planet-girdling seas - unknown its gate,
    Beyond the mouths of shadows cavernous.

    Oh! may it be that Death in kindness strips
    The soul of memory's raiment, rendering blind
        Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal,
    As when on mountain peaks a glance behind
    Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips
        Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall?

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