Clark Ashton Smith

    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.

    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.

    How marvellous this bit of green
    I hold, and soon shall throw away!
    Its subtile veins, its vivid sheen,
    Seem fragment of a god's array.

    In all the hidden toil of earth,
    Which is the more laborious part -
    To rear the oak's enormous girth,
    Or shape its leaves with poignant art?

    A voice came to me from the night, and said,
    What profit hast thou in thy dreaming
    Of the years that are set
    And the years yet unrisen?
    Hast thou found them tillable lands?
    Is there fruit that thou canst pluck therein,
    Or any harvest to be mown?
    Shalt thou dig aught of gold from the mines of the past,
    Or trade for merchandise
    In the years where all is rotten?
    Are they a sea that will bring thee to any shore,
    Or a desert that vergeth upon aught but the waste?
    Shalt thou drink from the springs that are emptied,
    Or find sustenance in shadows?
    What value hath the future given thee?
    Is there aught in the days yet dark
    That thou canst hold with thy hands?
    Are they a fortress
    That w...

    As blood from some enormous hurt
    The sanguine sunset leapt;
    Across it, like a dabbled skirt,
    The hurrying tempest swept.

    Above its domes the gulfs accumulate
    To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;
    But here the buried waters take no heed -
    Deaf, and with closèd lips from press of weight
    Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,
    On temples of an unremembered creed
    Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,
    The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.

    From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,
    A clouded light is questionably shed
    On altars of a goddess garlanded
    With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
    And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
    Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

    Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,
    Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat
    Found, and each root malevolently fat
    Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken
    Upstole, escaping to the world of men,
    A vapor as of some infernal vat;
    Against the stars it clomb, and caught thereat
    As if their bright regard to veil again.

    Despite the web, methought they saw, appalled,
    The stealthier weft in which all sound was still ...
        Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew,
    A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled ...
    Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill -
        A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.

    What nights retard thee, O Sirius!
    Thy light is as a spear,
    And thou penetratest them
    As a warrior that stabbeth his foe
    Even to the center of his life.
    Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs;
    They form a bridge thereover,
    That shall endure till the links of the universe
    Are unfastened, and drop apart,
    And all the gulfs are one,
    Dissevered by suns no longer.

    How strong art thou in thy place!
    Thou stridest thine orbit,
    And the darkness shakes beneath thee,
    As a road that is trodden by an army.
    Thou art a god,
    In thy temple that is hollowed with light
    In the night of infinitude,
    And whose floor is the lower void;
    Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein.

    Around its walls the forests of the west
    Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale
    Might lie its multifold exterior veil.
    Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed,
    Its lordly fanes and palaces attest
    A past before whose wall of darkness fail
    Reason and fancy, finding not the tale
    Erased by time from history's palimpsest.

    Within this place, that from the gloom of Eld
    Still meets the light, a people came and went
        Like whirls of dust between its columns blown -
    An alien race, whose record, shadow-held,
    Is sealed with those of others long forespent
        That died in sunless planets lost and lone.

    '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.

    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...

    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, ...

    I flow beneath the columns that upbear
    The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell;
    Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell
    My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare
    Gives each to each the shapes that, unaware,
    Commingle at my verge, to test the spell
    Of waves intense with night, whose deeps compel
    One face from pain, and rapture, and despair.

    The fruitless earth's denied and cheated sons
    Meet here, where fruitful and unfruitful cease.
    And when their lords, the mightier, hidden Ones,
    Have drained all worlds till being's wine is low,
    Shall they not come, and from the oblivious flow
    Drink at one draught a universe of peace?

    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,

    This Rome, that was the toil of many men,
    The consummation of laborious years -
    Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead,
    And image of the wide desire of kings -
    Is made my darkling dream's effulgency,
    Fuel of vision, brief embodiment
    Of wandering will, and wastage of the strong
    Fierce ecstacy of one tremendous hour,
    When ages piled on ages were a flame
    To all the years behind, and years to be.

    Yet any sunset were as much as this,
    Save for the music forced by hands of fire
    From out the hard strait silences which bind
    Dull Matter's tongueless mouth - a music pierced
    With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry
    Its agony - and save that I believed
    The radiance redder for the blood of m...

    Poised as a god whose lone, detachèd post,
    An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks
    Of finite years, and those unvaried darks
    That veil Eternity, I saw the host
    Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost
    Of night - confusion as of dust with sparks -
    Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks
    Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost,
    Fled with them; disunited orbs that late
    Were atoms of the universal frame,
        They passed to some eternal fragment-heap.
    And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate,
    Who were its life and vital spirit, came,
        Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep!

    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...

    O woven fabric and bright web of sound,
    Whose threads are magical,
    And with swift weaving thrall
    And hold the spirit bound!
    We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall -
    Whether they be Earth's voices wild and strong,
    Her high and perfect song.
    Or broken dreams of higher worlds unfound.
    For, lo, thou art as dreams.
    And to thy realm all hidden things belong -
    All fugitive and evanescent gleams
    The soul hath vainly sought;
    All mystic immanence;
    All visions of ungrasped magnificence,
    And great ideals pinnacled in thought;
    All paths with marvel fraught
    That lead to lands obscure:
    For, lo, upon thy road of sound we pass,
    Seeking thy magic lure,
    To vales mist-implica...