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

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

Averted Malefice

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

Shadow Of Nightmare

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Winds

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Star-Treader

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.

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

Retrospect And Forecast

    Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast
    The breast that fed thee - Death, disguiseless, stern;
    Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn,
    The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
    Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast
    On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.
    Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn,
    All are but ghouls that batten on the past.

    Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide,
    This unescapable alternity?
        Must loveliness find root within decay,
        And night devour its flaming hues alway?
    Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,
    Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?

Clark Ashton Smith

Medusa

    As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,
    It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,
    Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills
    That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,
    And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep
    With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.
    The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,
    Where for his token visible, the Head
    Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks,
    Grotesque in everlasting ugliness,
    Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart
    Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar.
    Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes
    That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns.
    Her eyes are clouds wherein Death's lightnings lurk,
    Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life,

Clark Ashton Smith

Lament Of The Stars

    One tone is mute within the starry singing,
    The unison fulfilled, complete before;
    One chord within the music sounds no more,
    And from the stir of flames forever winging
    The pinions of our sister, motionless
    In pits of indefinable duress,
    Are fallen beyond all recovery
    By exultation of the flying dance,
    Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance
    The maze of stars that only death may free -
    Flung through the void's expanse.

    In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted
    Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;
    In space that litten orbits gird around,
    Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted
    Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.
    Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight
    Shall find, ...

Clark Ashton Smith

The Medusa Of The Skies

    Haggard as if resurgent from a tomb,
    The moon uprears her ghastly, shrunken head,
    Crowned with such light as flares upon the dead
    From pallid skies more death-like than the gloom.
    Now fall her beams till slope and plain assume
    The whiteness of a land whence life is fled;
    And shadows that a sepulcher might shed
    Move livid as the stealthy hands of doom.

    O'er rigid hills and valleys locked and mute,
    A pallor steals as of a world made still
    When Death, that erst had crept, stands absolute -
        An earth now frozen fast by power of eyes
    That malefice and purposed silence fill,
        The gaze of that Medusa of the skies.

Clark Ashton Smith

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