Clark Ashton Smith

    O many-gulfed, unalterable one,
    Whose deep sustains
    Far-drifting world and sun,
    Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;
    And thou shalt be
    When never world remains;
    When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride
    Is sunk in voidness absolute,
    And their majestic music wide
    In vaster silence rendered mute.
    And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,
    And law to cancel and disperse
    The tangled tissues of the universe,
    And mould the suns anew,
    His might were impotent to conquer thee,
    O invisible infinity!
    Thy darks subdue
    All light that treads thee down a space,
    Exulting o'er thy deeps.
    The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps
    The flame of mightiest sta...

    O little lances, dipped in grey,
    And set in order straight and clean,
    How delicately clear and keen
    Your points against the sapphire day!

    Attesting Nature's perfect art
    Ye fringe the limpid firmament,
    O little lances, keenly sent
    To pierce with beauty to the heart!

    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?

    Now were the Titans gathered round their king,
    In a waste region slipping tow'rd the verge
    Of drear extremities that clasp the world -
    A land half-moulded by the hasty gods,
    And left beneath the bright scorn of the stars,
    Grotesque, misfeatured, blackly gnarled with stone;
    Or worn and marred from conflict with the deep
    Conterminate, of Chaos. Here they stood,
    Old Saturn midmost, like a central peak
    Among the lesser hills that guard its base.
    Defeat, that gloamed within each countenance
    Like the first tinge of death, upon a sun
    Gathering like some dusk vapor, found them cold,
    Clumsy of limb, and halting as with weight
    Of threatened worlds and trembling firmaments.
    A wind cried round them like a trumpet-...

    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.

    Art thou more fair
    For all the beauty gathered up in thee,
    As gold and gems within some lightless sea?
    For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,
    Art thou more fair?

    Art thou more strong
    For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?
    For world and star that find thy ways more deep
    Than light may tread, too wearisome for song
    Art thou more strong?

    Nay! thou art bare
    For power and beauty on thine impotence
    Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence;
    For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair,
    Thou still art bare.

    The world upheld their pillars for awhile -
    Now, where imperial On and Memphis stood,
    The hot wind sifts across the solitude
    The sand that once was wall and peristyle,
    Or furrows like the main each desert mile,
    Where ocean-deep above its ancient food
    Of cities fame-forgot, the waste is nude,
    Traceless as billows of each sunken pile.

    Lo! for that wrong shall vengeance come at last,
    When the devouring earth, in ruin one
    With royal walls and palaces undone,
    And sunk within the desolated past,
    Shall drift, and winds that wrangle through the vast
    Immingle it with ashes of the sun.

    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...

    The cherry-snows are falling now;
    Down from the blossom-clouded sky
    Of zephyr-troubled twig and bough,
    In widely settling whirls they fly.

    The orchard earth, unclothed and brown,
    Is wintry-hued with petals bright;
    E'en as the snow they glimmer down;
    Brief as the snow's their stainless white.

    What islands marvellous are these,
    That gem the sunset's tides of light -
    Opals aglow in saffron seas?
    How beautiful they lie, and bright,
    Like some new-found Hesperides!

    What varied, changing magic hues
    Tint gorgeously each shore and hill!
    What blazing, vivid golds and blues
    Their seaward winding valleys fill!
    What amethysts their peaks suffuse!

    Close held by curving arms of land
    That out within the ocean reach,
    I mark a faery city stand,
    Set high upon a sloping beach
    That burns with fire of shimmering sand.

    Of sunset-light is formed each wall;
    Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems;
    And every spire that towers tall
    A ray of golden moonlight gleams;
    Of o...

    All drear and barren seemed the hours,
    That passed rain-swept and tempest-blown.
    The dead leaves fell like brownish notes
    Within the rain's grey monotone.

    There came a lapse between the showers;
    The clouds grew rich with sunset gleams;
    Then o'er the sky a rainbow sprang -
    A bridge unto the Land of Dreams.

    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.

    O fugitive fragrances
    That tremble heavenward
    Unceasing, or if ye linger,
    Halt but as memories
    On the verge of forgetfulness,
    Why must ye pass so fleetly
    On wings that are less than wind,
    To a death unknowable?
    Soon ye are gone, and the air
    Forgets your faint unrest
    In the garden's breathlessness,
    Where fall the snows of silence.

    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.

    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?

    SCENE: A moonlit glade on a summer midnight


    THE POET

    What consummation of the toiling moon
    O'ercomes the midnight blue with violet,
    Wherein the stars turn grey! The summer's green,
    Edgèd and strong by day, is dull and faint
    Beneath the moon's all-dominating mood,
    That in this absence of the impassioned sun,
    Sways to a sleep of sound and calm of color
    The live and vivid aspect of the world -
    Subdued as with the great expectancy
    Which blurs beginning features of a dream,
    Things and events lost 'neath an omening
    Of central and oppressive bulk to come.
    Here were the theatre of a miracle,
    If such, within a world long alienate
    From its first dreams, and shut with skeptic yea...

    Sleep is a pathless labyrinth,
    Dark to the gaze of moons and suns,
    Through which the colored clue of dreams,
    A gossamer thread, obscurely runs.

    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.