Clark Ashton Smith

    All night the pool held mysteries,
    Vague depths of night that lay in dream,
    Where phantoms of the pale-white stars
    Wandered, with darkness-tangled gleam.

    And now it holds the limpid light
    And shadeless azure of the skies,
    Wherein, like some enclaspèd gem,
    The morning's golden glamour lies.

    Alas! that we are deaf and blind
    To meanings all about us hid!
    What secrets lurk the woods amid?
    What prophecies are on the wind?

    What tidings do the billows bring
    And cry in vain upon the strand?
    If we might only understand
    The brooklet's cryptic murmuring!

    The tongues of earth and air are strange.
    And yet (who knows?) one little word
    Learned from the language of the bird
    Might make us lords of Fate and Change!

    Lo, what are these, the gyres of sun and world,
    Fulfilled with daylight by each toiling sun -
    Lo, what are these but webs of radiance spun
    Beneath the roof of Night, and torn or furled
    By Night at will? All opposite powers upwhirled
    Are less than chaff to this imperious one -
    As wind-tossed chaff, until its sport be done,
    Scattered, and lifted up, and downward hurled.

    All gyres are held within the path unspanned
    Of Night's aeonian compass - loosely pent
        As with the embrace of lethal-tightening weight;
    All suns are grasped within the hollow hand
    Of Night, the godhead sole, omnipotent,
        Whose other names are Nemesis and Fate.

    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    Withdrawn in what darker web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

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

    Old Egypt's gods, Osiris, Ammon, Thoth,
    Came on my dream in thunder, and their feet
    Revealed, were as the levin's fire and heat.
    The hosts of Rome, the Arab and the Goth
    Have left their altars dark, yet stern and wroth
    In olden power they stood, whose wings were fleet,
    And mighty as with strength of storms that meet
    In mingled foam of clouds and ocean-froth.

    Above my dream, with arch of dreaded wings,
    In judgement and in sentence of what crime
    I knew not, sate the gods outcast of time.
        They passed, and lo, a plague of darkness fell,
    Unsleeping, and accurst with nameless things,
        And dreams that stood the ministers of Hell!

    The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus
    Are just beyond yon mountain-girdle,
    Whose mass is bound around the bulk
    Of the dark, unstirred, unmoving East.
    Alike on the mountains and the plain,
    The night is as some terrific dream,
    That closes the soul in a crypt of dread
    Apart from touch or sense of earth,
    As in the space of Eternity.

    What light unseen perturbs the darkness?
    Behold! it stirs and fluctuates
    Between the mountains and the stars
    That are set as guards above the prison
    Of the captive Titan-god. I know
    That in the deeps beneath, Hyperion
    Divides the pillared vault of dark,
    And stands a space upon its ruin.
    Then light is laid upon the peaks,
    As the hand of one who climbs b...

    But yestereve the winter trees
    Reared leafless, blackly bare,
    Their twigs and branches poignant-marked
    Upon the sunset-flare.

    White-petaled, opens now the dawn,
    And in its pallid glow,
    Revealed, each leaf-lorn, barren tree
    Stands white with flowers of snow.

    A plummet of the changing universe,
    Far-cast, I flare
    Through gulfs the sun's uncharted orbits bind,
    And spaces bare
    That intermediate darks immerse
    By road of sun nor world confined.
    Upon my star-undominated gyre
    I mark the systems vanish one by one;
    Among the swarming worlds I lunge,
    And sudden plunge
    Close to the zones of solar fire;
    Or 'mid the mighty wrack of stars undone,
    Flash, and with momentary rays
    Compel the dark to yield
    Their aimless forms, whose once far-potent blaze
    In ashes chill is now inurned.
    A space revealed,
    I see their planets turned,
    Where holders of the heritage of breath
    Exultant rose, and sank to barren death
    Beneath the stars' unhe...

    From the final reach of the upper night
    To the nether darks where the comets die,
    From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light
    To the central gloom of the midmost sky,
    In our mazeful gyres we fly.
    And our flight is a choral chant of flame,
    That ceaseless fares to the outer void,
    With the undersong of the peopled spheres,
    The voices of comet and asteroid,
    And the wail of the spheres destroyed.
    Forever we sing to a god unseen -
    In the dark shall our voices fail?
    The void is his robe inviolate,
    The night is his awful veil -
    How our fires grow dim and pale!

    From the ordered gyres goes ever afar
    Our song of flame o'er the void unknown,
    Where circles nor world, nor comet, nor star.

    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.

    I

    A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,
    Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth
    Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth
    Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams
    Thine ancient pathway of the suns,
    Whose flame is part of thee;
    And deeps outreach immutably
    Whose largeness runs
    Through all thy spirit's mystery.
    Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze
    Of stars where through thou camest in old days;
    Pierce without fear each vast
    Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.
    A hand strikes off the chains of Time,
    A hand swings back the door of years;
    Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,
    And opens the strait dream to space sublime."


    II...

    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?

    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?

    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 ...

    To me the winds that die and start,
    And strive in wars that never cease,
    Are dearer than the level peace
    That lies unstirred at summer's heart;

    More dear to me the shadowed wold,
    Where, with report of tempest rife,
    The air intensifies with life,
    Than quiet fields of summer's gold.

    I am the winds' admitted friend:
    They seal our linked fellowships
    With speech of warm or icy lips,
    With touch of west and east that blend.

    And when my spirit listless stands,
    With folded wings that do not live,
    Their own assuageless wings they give
    To lift her from the stirless lands.

            *        *        *        *        *

    Within the place unmanifest
    Where centra...

    Thou hast taken the light of many suns,
    And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom.
    Even as candle-flames
    Hast thou taken the souls of men,
    With winds from out a hollow place;
    They are hid in the abyss as in a sea,
    And the gulfs are over them
    As the weight of many peaks,
    As the depth of many seas;
    Thy shields are between them and the light;
    They are past its burden and bitterness;
    The spears of the day shall not touch them,
    The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.

    Many men there were,
    In the days that are now of thy realm,
    That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps;
    Their feet were as eagles' wings in the quest of Truth -
    Aye, mightily they desired her face,...

    Thy light is as an eminence unto thee,
    And thou are upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
    Thy power is a foundation for the worlds;
    They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
    Whereto no enemy hath access.
    Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they hold the sky
    As in the hollow of an immense hand.
    Thou erectest thy light as four walls,
    And a roof with many beams and pillars.
    Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain;
    Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.

    The worlds are bound with the ropes of thy will;
    Like steeds are they stayed and contrained
    By the reins of invisible lightnings.
    With bands that are stouter than iron manifold,
    And stronger than the cords of the gulfs,
    Thou with...