The Wind And The Moon

    Oh, list to the wind of the night, oh, hark,
    How it shrieks as it goes on its hurrying quest!
    Forever its voice is a voice of the dark,
    Forever its voice is a voice of unrest.
    Oh, list to the pines as they shiver and sway
    'Neath the ceaseless beat of its myriad wings -
    How they moan and they sob like living things
    That cry in the darkness for light and day!
    Now bend they low as the wind mounts higher,
    And its eerie voice comes piercingly,
    Like the plaint of humanity's misery,
    And its burden of vain desire.
    Now to a sad, tense whisper it fails,
    Then wildly and madly it raves and it wails.

    Oh, the night is filled with its sob and its shriek,
    Its weird and its restless, yearning cry,
    As it races adown the darkened sky,
    With scurry of broken clouds that seek,
    Borne on the wings of the hastening wind,
    A place of rest that they never can find.
    And around the face of the moon they cling,
    Its fugitive face to veil they aspire;
    But ever and ever it peereth out,
    Rending the cloud-ranks that hem it about;
    And it seemeth a lost and phantom thing,
    Like a phantom of dead desire.

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

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Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

The Cloud-Islands

Clark Ashton Smith, Simple Poetry

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Ode To Music

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.

The Soul Of The Sea

    A wind comes in from the sea,
    And rolls through the hollow dark
    Like loud, tempestuous waters.
    As the swift recurrent tide,
    It pours adown the sky,
    And rears at the cliffs of night
    Uppiled against the vast.

    Like the soul of the sea -
    Hungry, unsatisfied
    With ravin of shores and of ships -
    Come forth on the land to seek
    New prey of tideless coasts,
    It raves, made hoarse with desire,
    And the sounds of the night are dumb
    With the sound of its passing.

Clark Ashton Smith

The Night-Wind

I.

I have heard the wind on a winter's night,
When the snow-cold moon looked icily through
My window's flickering firelight,
Where the frost his witchery drew:
I have heard the wind on a winter's night,
Wandering ways that were frozen white,
Wail in my chimney-flue:
And its voice was the voice, so it seemed to me,
The voice of the world's vast misery.

II.

I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
When the leaves unclasped their girdles of gold,
And the bird on the bough sang slumbering,
In the lilac's fragrant fold:
I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
Shaking the musk from its dewy wing,
Sigh in my garden old:
And it seemed that it said, as it sighed above,
"I am the voice of the Earth's great love."

III.

Madison Julius Cawein

What The Wind Said

'I muse to-day, in a listless way,
    In the gleam of a summer land;
I close my eyes as a lover may
    At the touch of his sweetheart's hand,
And I hear these things in the whisperings
    Of the zephyrs round me fanned': -

I am the Wind, and I rule mankind,
    And I hold a sovereign reign
Over the lands, as God designed,
    And the waters they contain:
Lo! the bound of the wide world round
    Falleth in my domain!

I was born on a stormy morn
    In a kingdom walled with snow,
Whose crystal cities laugh to scorn
    The proudest the world can show;
And the daylight's glare is frozen there
    In the breath of the blasts that blow.

Life to me was a jubilee
    From the first of my youthful days:
Clinking my icy toys wi...

James Whitcomb Riley

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

The Mad Wind

    What hast thou seen, O wind,
    Of beauty or of terror
    Surpassing, denied to us,
    That with precipitate wings,
    Mad and ecstatical,
    Thou spurnest the hollows and trees
    That offer thee refuge of peace,
    And findest within the sky
    No safety nor respite
    From the memory of thy vision?

Clark Ashton Smith

Storm.

Out of the grey northwest, where many a day gone by
Ye tugged and howled in your tempestuous grot,
And evermore the huge frost giants lie,
Your wizard guards in vigilance unforgot,
Out of the grey northwest, for now the bonds are riven,
On wide white wings your thongless flight is driven,
That lulls but resteth not.

And all the grey day long, and all the dense wild night
Ye wheel and hurry with the sheeted snow,
By cedared waste and many a pine-dark height,
Across white rivers frozen fast below;
Over the lonely forests, where the flowers yet sleeping
Turn in their narrow beds with dreams of weeping
In some remembered woe;

Across the unfenced wide marsh levels, where the dry
Brown ferns sigh out, and last year's sedges scold
In some drear language, ...

Archibald Lampman