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diff --git a/38410-8.txt b/38410-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e492a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/38410-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2982 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Star-Treader and other poems, by Clark Ashton Smith + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Star-Treader and other poems + +Author: Clark Ashton Smith + +Release Date: December 25, 2011 [EBook #38410] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS + + BY + + CLARK ASHTON SMITH + + + A. M. ROBERTSON + + STOCKTON STREET AT UNION SQUARE + SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA + + MCMXII + + + COPYRIGHT 1912 + BY + A. M. ROBERTSON + + + Philopolis Press + San Francisco + + + TO MY MOTHER + + + + + CONTENTS + + + NERO + CHANT TO SIRIUS + THE STAR-TREADER + THE MORNING POOL + THE NIGHT FOREST + THE MAD WIND + SONG TO OBLIVION + MEDUSA + ODE TO THE ABYSS + THE SOUL OF THE SEA + THE BUTTERFLY + THE PRICE + THE MYSTIC MEANING + ODE TO MUSIC + THE LAST NIGHT + ODE ON IMAGINATION + THE WIND AND THE MOON + LAMENT OF THE STARS + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + THE WINDS + THE MASK OF FORSAKEN GODS + A SUNSET + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + THE SUMMER MOON + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + LETHE + ATLANTIS + THE UNREVEALED + THE ELDRITCH DARK + THE CHERRY SNOWS + FAIRY LANTERNS + NIRVANA + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + WHITE DEATH + RETROSPECT AND FORECAST + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + THE SONG OF A COMET + THE RETRIBUTION + TO THE DARKNESS + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + THE DREAM BRIDGE + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + PINE NEEDLES + TO THE SUN + THE FUGITIVES + AVERTED MALEFICE + THE MEDUSA OF THE SKIES + A DEAD CITY + THE SONG OF THE STARS + COPAN + A SONG OF DREAMS + THE BALANCE + SATURN + FINIS + + + + + NERO + + + 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 men. + Destruction hastens and intensifies + The process that is Beauty, manifests + Ranges of form unknown before, and gives + Motion and voice and hue where otherwise + Bleak inexpressiveness had leveled all. + + If one create, there is the lengthy toil; + The laboured years and days league tow'rd an end + Less than the measure of desire, mayhap, + After the sure consuming of all strength, + And strain of faculties that otherwhere + Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last + Remains to one capacity nor power + For pleasure in the thing that he hath made. + But on destruction hangs but little use + Of time or faculty, but all is turned + To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure, + Of sensuous rapture and observant joy; + And from the intensities of death and ruin, + One draws a heightened and completer life, + And both extends and vindicates himself. + + I would I were a god, with all the scope + Of attributes that are the essential core + Of godhead, and its visibility. + I am but emperor, and hold awhile + The power to hasten Death upon his way, + And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life + For others, but for mine own self may not + Delay the one, nor bid the other speed. + There have been many kings, and they are dead, + And have no power in death save what the wind + Confers upon their blown and brainless dust + To vex the eyeballs of posterity. + But were I god, I would be overlord + Of many kings, and were as breath to guide + Their dust of destiny. And were I god, + Exempt from this mortality which clogs + Perception, and clear exercise of will, + What rapture it would be, if but to watch + Destruction crouching at the back of Time, + The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns; + The vampire Silence at the breast of worlds, + Fire without light that gnaws the base of things, + And Lethe's mounting tide, that rots the stone + Of fundamental spheres. This were enough + Till such time as the dazzled wings of will + Came up with power's accession, scarcely felt + For very suddenness. Then would I urge + The strong contention and conflicting might + Of chaos and creation, matching them, + Those immemorial powers inimical, + And all their stars and gulfs subservient-- + Dynasts of Time, and anarchs of the dark-- + In closer war reverseless; and would set + New discord at the universal core, + A Samson-principle to bring it down + In one magnificence of ruin. Yea, + The monster Chaos were mine unleashed hound, + And all my power Destruction's own right arm! + + I would exult to mark the smouldering stars + Renew beneath my breath their elder fire, + And feed upon themselves to nothingness. + The might of suns, slow-paced with swinging weight + Of myriad worlds, were made at my desire + One long rapidity of roaring light, + Through which the voice of Life were audible, + And singing of the immemorial dead + Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings + With soaring wrack of systems ruinous. + And were I weary of the glare of these, + I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand + Above a chaos of extinguished suns, + That crowd, and grind, and shiver thunderously, + Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray + To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs. + Thus would I give my godhead space and speech + For its assertion, and thus pleasure it, + Hastening the feet of Time with casts of worlds + Like careless pebbles, or with shattered suns + Brightening the aspect of Eternity. + + + + + CHANT TO SIRIUS + + + 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. + Thou furrowest space, + Even as an husbandman, + And sowest it with alien seed; + It beareth alien fruits, + And these are thy testimony, + Even as the crops of his fields + Are the testimony of an husbandman. + + + + + THE STAR-TREADER + + + 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 + + Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay! + What eye shall note or measure mete + His passage on a purpose fleet, + The thread and weaving of his way! + It caught me from the clasping world, + And swept beyond the brink of Sense, + My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled, + Like to a planet chained and hurled + With solar lightning strong and tense. + Swift as communicated rays + That leap from severed suns a gloom + Within whose waste no suns illume, + The wingèd dream fulfilled its ways. + Through years reversed and lit again + I followed that unending chain + Wherein the suns are links of light; + Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres + The twisting of the threads of years + In weavings wrought of noon and night; + Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll, + Those folds that form the raiment of the soul. + + + III + + Enkindling dawns of memory, + Each sun had radiance to relume + A sealed, disused, and darkened room + Within the soul's immensity. + Their alien ciphers shown and lit, + I understood what each had writ + Upon my spirit's scroll; + Again I wore mine ancient lives, + And knew the freedom and the gyves + That formed and marked my soul. + + + IV + + I delved in each forgotten mind, + The units that had builded me, + Whose deepnesses before were blind + And formless as infinity-- + Knowing again each former world-- + From planet unto planet whirled + Through gulfs that mightily divide + Like to an intervital sleep. + One world I found, where souls abide + Like winds that rest upon a rose; + Thereto they creep + To loose all burden of old woes. + And one I knew, where warp of pain + Is woven in the soul's attire; + And one, where with new loveliness + Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain-- + Soft as a sound, and keen as fire-- + In light no darkness may depress. + + + V + + Where no terrestrial dreams had trod + My vision entered undismayed, + And Life her hidden realms displayed + To me as to a curious god. + Where colored suns of systems triplicate + Bestow on planets weird, ineffable, + Green light that orbs them like an outer sea, + And large auroral noons that alternate + With skies like sunset held without abate, + Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly + The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell. + Dead passions like to stars relit + Shone in the gloom of ways forgot; + Where crownless gods in darkness sit + The day was full on altars hot. + I heard--once more a part of it-- + The central music of the Pleiades, + And to Alcyone my soul + Swayed with the stars that own her song's control. + Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant + In worlds Edenic longly lost; + Or walked in spheres that sing to these, + O'er space no light has crossed, + Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed + To Heaven's angelic chant. + + + VI + + What vasts the dream went out to find! + I seemed beyond the world's recall + In gulfs where darkness is a wall + To render strong Antares blind! + In unimagined spheres I found + The sequence of my being's round-- + Some life where firstling meed of Song, + The strange imperishable leaf, + Was placed on brows that starry Grief + Had crowned, and Pain anointed long; + Some avatar where Love + Sang like the last great star at morn + Ere Death filled all its sky; + Some life in fresher years unworn + Upon a world whereof + Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie + On pools aglow with latter spring: + There Life's pellucid surface took + Clear image of all things, nor shook + Till touch of Death's obscuring wing; + Some earlier awakening + In pristine years, when giant strife + Of forces darkly whirled + First forged the thing called Life-- + Hot from the furnace of the suns-- + Upon the anvil of a world. + + + VII + + Thus knew I those anterior ones + Whose lives in mine were blent; + Till, lo! my dream, that held a night + Where Rigel sends no word of might, + Was emptied of the trodden stars, + And dwindled to the sun's extent-- + The brain's familiar prison-bars, + And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth + Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth. + + + + + THE MORNING POOL + + + 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. + + + + + 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 + I stand, and the burden of dusk + Dull, but at times made keen + With tingle of fragrances, + Falls on me as a veil + Between my soul and the world. + + What veil of trance, O pines, + Divides you from my soul, + That I feel but enter not + Your distances of dream? + Ah! strange, imperative sense + Of world-deep mystery + That shakes from out your boughs-- + A fragrance yet more keen, + Pressing upon the mind. + + The wind shall question you + Of the dream I may not gain, + And all its sombreness + And depth immeasurable, + Shall tremble away in sound + Of speech not understood + That my heart must break to hear. + + + + + 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? + + + + + SONG TO OBLIVION + + + 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. + + + + + 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, + The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift, + Those levins wait. As 'round an altar-base + Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms + Of postured horror smitten into stone,-- + Time caught in meshes of Eternity-- + Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years, + And given to all the future of the world. + The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes + Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud + That unseen spiders of bewildered winds + Weave and unweave across the lurid sun + In upper air. Below, no zephyr comes + To break with life the circling spell of death. + Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon, + And in the windy murkness of the sky, + The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames + That near the socket. + + Thus the land shall be, + And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes. + Till, in the irremeable webs of night + The sun is snared, and the corroded moon + A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars + Rotted and fall'n like rivets from the sky, + Letting the darkness down upon all things. + + + + + ODE TO THE ABYSS + + + 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 stars; + In aeon-implicating wars + Thou tearest planets from their place; + Worlds granite-spined + To thine erodents yield + Their treasures centrally confined + In crypts by continental pillars sealed. + What suns and worlds have been thy prey + Through unhorizoned stretches of the Past! + What spheres that now essay + Time's undimensioned vast, + Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length, + With life that cried its query of the Night + To ears with silence filled! + What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength, + Girt by a sun's unwearied might, + And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled! + + O incontestable Abyss, + What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps-- + What blaze of a sidereal multitude + No peopled world is left to miss! + What motion is at rest within thy deeps-- + What gyres of planets long become thy food-- + Worlds unconstrainable, + That plunged therein to peace, + Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships; + And suns that fell + To huge and ultimate eclipse, + And lasting gyre-release! + What sound thy gulfs of silence hold! + Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars, + And crash of orbits that diverged, + With Life's thin song are merged; + Thy quietudes enfold + Paean and threnody as one, + And battle-blare of unremembered wars + With festal songs + Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres, + And music that belongs + To younger, undiscoverable years + With words of yesterday. + Ah, who may stay + Thy soundless world-devouring tide? + O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars, + Are worlds grown but as fruit for thee? + May no sufficient bars, + Nor marks inveterate abide + To baffle thy persistency? + Still and unstriving now, + What plottest thou, + Within thy universe-ulterior deeps, + Dark as the final lull of suns? + What new advancement of the night + On citadels of stars around whose might + Thy slow encroachment runs, + And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps? + + + + + 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. + + + + + THE BUTTERFLY + + + 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 multitudinous store-- + Imperfect were the melody! + + + II + + O Beauty, why so sad my heart? + Why stirs in me a nameless pain + Which seems like some remembered strain, + As on this product of thine art + + Enraptured, marvelling I gaze, + And note how airily 'tis wrought-- + A wingèd dream, a bodied thought, + The spirit of the summer days? + + Thy beauty opes, O Butterfly, + The doors of being, with subtle sense + Of Beauty's frail impermanence, + And grief of knowing it must die. + + Again I seem to know the tears + Of other lives, the woe and pain + Of days that died; resurgent wane + The moons of countless bygone years. + + + III + + On other worlds, on other stars, + To us but tiny points of light, + Or lost in distances of night + Beyond our system's farthest bars, + + A priest to Beauty's service sworn, + I sought and served her all my days, + With music and with hymns of praise. + In sunset and the fires of morn, + + With thrilling heart her form I knew, + And in the stars she whitely gleamed, + And all the face of Nature seemed + Expression of her shape and hue. + + I grieved to watch the summers pass + With all their gorgeous shows of bloom, + And sterner autumn months assume + Their realm with withered leaves and grass. + + Mine was the grief of Change and Death, + Of fair things gone beyond recall, + The paling light of dawns, and all + The flowers' vanished hues and breath. + + + IV + + From out the web of former lives, + The ancient catenated chain + Of joy and sorrow, loss and gain, + One certain truth my heart derives:-- + + Though Beauty passes, this I know, + From Change and Death, this verity: + Her spirit lives eternally-- + 'Tis but her forms that come and go. + + + V + + Lo! I am Beauty's constant thrall, + Must ever on her voice await, + And follow through the maze of Fate + Her luring, strange and mystical. + + Obedient to her summonings, + Forever must my soul aspire, + And seek, on wings of lyric fire, + To penetrate the Heart of Things, + + Wherein she sits, augustly throned, + In loveliness that renders dumb-- + The Essence and the final Sum-- + With peril and with wonder zoned + + What though I fail, my duller sense + Baffled as by a wall of stone? + The high desire, the search alone + Are their own prize and recompense. + + + + + THE PRICE + + + Behind each thing a shadow lies; + Beauty hath e'er its cost: + Within the moonlight-flooded skies + How many stars are lost! + + + + + THE MYSTIC MEANING + + + 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! + + + + + ODE TO MUSIC + + + 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-implicated and unsure, + Where all seems strange as visions in a glass; + And wonder-haunted hills, + Where Beauty is an echo and a dream + In sighing pines, and rills + Clouded and deep with imaged tree and sky; + And where bright rivers gleam + Past cities towering high, + Each wonderful as some cloud-fantasy. + + Thou loosenest the bondage of the years, + Making the spirit free + Of all sublunar joys and fears. + Who mounts on thine imperious wings shall see + The ways of life as threads of day and night; + Serene above their change, + His eyes shall know but far transcendent things, + His ears shall hark but voices free and strange; + Vast seas of outer light + Shall beat upon his sight, + Eternal winds shall touch him with their wings; + His heart shall thrill + To larger, purer joy, and grief more deep + Than earth may know; + And e'en as dews of morning fill + The opened flower, into his soul shall flow + High melodies, like tears that angels weep. + Then shall he penetrate + The veils and outer barriers of sound, + And near the soul of melody, + Where, rapt in aural splendors ultimate, + His soul shall see + The marvel and the glory that surround + Eternal Beauty's shrine; + And catch afar the glint divine + Of her moon-colored robe, or haply hear, + With world-oblivious ear, + Some echo of her voice's mystery. + + Thou hast Love's power to find + The soul's most secret chords, that else were still, + And stir'st them till they thrill + Disclosed to least, faint movements of thy wind. + Thine aural sorcery + O'erwhelms the heart as sunset storms the sight, + For thou art Beauty bodied forth in sound-- + Her colors bright + And diverse forms expressed in harmony: + Within thy bound, + The flare of morning is become a song, + And tree and flower a music sweet and long. + And in thy speech + The power and majesty that swing + Planet and sun, and each + Dim atom of the system manifest, + Become articulate, expressed + Like ocean in the brooklet's whispering. + Beyond the woof of finite things, + Thy threads of wonder deep-entangled lie-- + Time's intertexturings + Within Eternity-- + With Song, mayhap, to be his memories; + For Beauty borders nigh + The ultimate, eternal Verities. + + + + + THE LAST NIGHT + + + 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. + + + + + ODE ON IMAGINATION + + + 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 exact + From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows + In wastes celestial, alien dreams + Brought down on wings of fleetest beams. + Adown the clefts of under-space + She rides, her steed a falling star, + To seek, where void and vagueness are, + Some mark or certainty of place. + Upon their heavenly precipice + The gathered suns shrink back aghast + From that interminate abyss, + And threat of sightless anarchs vast. + + She stands endued + With supermundane crown, and vestitures + Of emperies that include + All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream-- + Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme + Where moon-transcending light endures. + She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow + In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind, + Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons; + Or roves in forests where all sound is low: + Each voice that shuns + The noiseful day, and enters there to find + Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves, + Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves. + + Upon some supersensual eminence + She hears the fragments of a thunder loud, + Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense + Flame through the walls of hollow cloud. + But these she may not wholly grasp + With incomplete terrestrial clasp. + Her eyes inevitably see, + 'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things, + The movements of Essentiality-- + Of ageless principles--that alter not + To temporal alterings-- + Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more. + And stars no longer hot; + Or broken constellations strewn + Like coals about the heavenly floor, + And rush of night upon the noon + Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly + In icy deserts of the sky. + From the beginning of the spheres, + When systems nebulous out-thrown + Drove back the brinks + Of nullity with limitary marks, + Till end of suns, and sunless death of years, + To her are known + The unevident inseparable links + That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks. + + + + + 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. + + + + + 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, and with its venturous ray return + From gloom of undiscoverable scope, + One ray of her to gladden into hope + The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn, + The faltering feet that grope. + + Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing + All luminous horizons limited, + The substance and the light of her have fed + Ruin and silence of the night's amassing: + Abandoned worlds forever morningless; + Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness + Girt for the longer gyre funereal; + Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking + That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking + Where motion's many ways in oneness fall + Of sleep beyond forsaking. + + Circled with limitation unexceeded + Our eyes behold exterior mysteries + And gods unascertainable as these-- + Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded; + Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known. + Our sister knows all mysteries one alone, + One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies; + Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar + All others nameless or familiar, + Filling with night all former lips and eyes + Of god, and ghost, and star: + + For her all shapes have fed the shape of night; + All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid, + Are met and reconciled where none is valid. + But unto us solution nor respite + Of mystery's multiform incessancy + From unexplored or system-trodden sky + Shall come; but as a load importunate, + Enigma past and mystery foreseen + Weigh mightily upon us, and between + Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate + In cadences of threne. + + A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely, + And quiet centering darkness at its heart; + But from the certitude of night depart + Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly; + But stronger grown with strength obtained from light + That failed, and power lent by the stronger night, + Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt + If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall + Be festal lights or lights funereal + For mightier gods within the gulfs without, + Phantoms more cryptical. + + New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding + Across the depth and eminence of years, + Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears. + Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding + The night take form upon the face of suns, + We see (thus grief's vaticination runs-- + Presageful sorrow for our sister slain) + A night wherein all sorrow shall be past, + One with night's single mystery at last; + Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain + As Time's elegiast. + + + + + THE MAZE OF SLEEP + + + 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. + + + + + THE WINDS + + + 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 central Truth is immanent, + Lies there a vast, entire content + Of sound and movement one in rest? + + I know not this. Yet in my heart, + I feel that where all truths concur, + The shrine is peaceless with the stir + Of winds that enter and depart. + + + + + THE MASQUE OF FORSAKEN GODS + + 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 years, + Might now befall. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + The Huntress rides no more + Across the upturned faces of the stars: + 'Tis but the dead shell of a frozen world, + Glittering with desolation. Earth's old gods-- + The gods that haunt like dreams each planet's youth-- + Are fled from years incredulous, and tired + With penetrating of successive masks, + That give but emptiness they served to hide. + Remains not faith enough to bring them back-- + Pan to his wood, Diana to her moon, + And all the visions that made populous + An eager world where Time grows weary now. + Yet Youth, that lives, might for a little claim + The pantheon of dream, on such a night, + When 'neath the growing marvel of the moon + The films of time wear perilously thin, + And thought looks backward to the simpler years, + Till all the vision seems but just beyond. + If one have faith, it may be that he shall + Behold the gods--once only, and no more, + Because of Time's inhospitality, + For which they may not stay. + + + THE POET + + Within the marvel of the light, what flower + Of active wonder from quiescence springs! + Is it a throng of luminous white clouds, + Phantoms of some old storm's death-driven Titans, + That float beneath the moon, and speak with voices + Like the last echoes of a thunder spent? + 'Tis the forsaken gods, that win a foothold + About the magic circle which the moon + Draws like some old enchantress round the glade. + + + THE PHILOSOPHER + + I see them not: the vision is addressed + Only to thine acute and eager youth. + + + JOVE + + All heaven and earth were once my throne; + Now I have but the wind alone + For shifting judgment-seat. + The pillared world supported me: + Yet man's old incredulity + Left nothing for my feet. + + + PAN + + Man hath forgotten me: + Yet seems it that my memory + Saddens the wistful voices of the wood; + Within each erst-frequented spot + Echo forgets my music not, + Nor Earth my tread where trampling years have stood. + + + ARTEMIS + + Time hath grown cold + Toward beauty loved of old. + The gods must quake + When dreams and hopes forsake + The heart of man, + And disillusion's ban + More chill than stone, + Rears till the former throne + Of loveliness + Is dark and tenantless. + Now must I weep-- + Homeless within the deep + Where once of old + Mine orbèd chariot rolled,-- + And mourn in vain + Man's immemorial pain + Uncomforted + Of light and beauty fled. + + + APOLLO + + Time wearied of my song-- + A satiate and capricious king + Who for his pleasure bade me sing, + First of his minstrel throng. + Till, cloyed with melody, + His ear grew faint to voice and lyre; + Forgotten then of Time's desire, + His thought was void of me. + + + APHRODITE + + I, born of sound and foam, + Child of the sea and wind, + Was fire upon mankind-- + Fuelled with Syria, and with Greece and Rome. + Time fanned me with his breath; + Love found new warmth in me, + And Life its ecstasy, + Till I grew deadly with the wind of death. + + + A NYMPH + + How can the world be still so beautiful + When beauty's self is fled? Tis like the mute + And marble loveliness of some dead girl; + And we that hover here, are as the spirit + Of former voice and motion, and live color + In that which shall not stir nor speak again. + + + ANOTHER NYMPH + + Nay, rather say this lovely, lifeless world + Is but a rigid semblance, counterfeiting + The world which was. Nor have the gods retained + Such power as once informed and rendered vital + The cryptic irresponsiveness of stone,-- + That statue which Pygmalion made and loved. + + + ATÈ + + I, who was discord among men, + Alone of all Time's hierarchy + Find that Time hath no need of me, + No lack that I might fill again. + + + THE POET + + Tell me, O gods, are ye forever doomed + To fall and flutter among spacial winds, + Finding release nor foothold anywhere-- + Debarred from doors of all the suns, like spirits + Whose names are blotted from the lists of Time, + Though they themselves yet wander undestroyed? + + + THE GODS TOGETHER + + Throneless, discrowned, and impotent, + In man's sad disillusionment, + We passed with Earth's returnless youth, + Who were the semblances of truth, + The veils that hid the vacantness + Infinite, naked, meaningless, + The blank and universal Sphinx + Each world beholds at last--and sinks. + New gods protect awhile the gaze + Of man--each one a veil that stays-- + Till the new gods, discredited, + Like mist that melts with noon, are fled-- + That power oppressive, limitless, + The tyranny of nothingness. + Our power is dead upon the earth + With the first dews and dawns of Time; + But in the far and younger clime + Of other worlds, it hath re-birth. + Yea, though we find not entrance here-- + Astray like feathers on the wind, + To neither earth nor heaven consigned-- + Fresh altars in a distant sphere + Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire, + New hearths to warm us from the night, + Till, banished thence, we pass in flight + While all the flames of dream expire. + + + + + A SUNSET + + + As blood from some enormous hurt + The sanguine sunset leapt; + Across it, like a dabbled skirt, + The hurrying tempest swept. + + + + + THE CLOUD-ISLANDS + + + 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 opal-flame is every hall. + + Alas! how quickly dims their glow! + What veils their dreamy splendours mar! + Like broken dreams the islands go, + As down from strands of cloud and star, + The sinking tides of daylight flow. + + + + + THE SNOW-BLOSSOMS + + + 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. + + + + + THE SUMMER MOON + + + 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? + + + + + THE RETURN OF HYPERION + + + 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 beyond; + And, lo! the Sun! The sentinel stars + Are dead with overpotent flame, + And in their place Hyperion stands. + The night is loosened from the land, + As a dream from the mind of the dreamer. + A great wind blows across the dawn, + Like the wind of the motion of the world. + + + + + LETHE + + + 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? + + + + + ATLANTIS + + + 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. + + + + + 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? + + + + + 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. + + + + + THE CHERRY-SNOWS + + + 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. + + + + + FAIRY LANTERNS + + + '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. + + + + + NIRVANA + + + 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! + + + + + THE NEMESIS OF SUNS + + + 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. + + + + + 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. + + + + + 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? + + + + + SHADOW OF NIGHTMARE + + + 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. + + + + + THE SONG OF A COMET + + + 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' unheeding eyes. + Adown contiguous skies + I pass the thickening brume + Of systems yet unshaped, that hang immense + Along mysterious shores of gloom; + Or see--unimplicated in their doom-- + The final and disastrous gyre + Of blinded suns that meet, + And from their mingled heat, + And battle-clouds intense, + O'erspread the deep with fire. + + Through stellar labyrinths I thrid + Mine orbit placed amid + The multiple and irised stars, or hid, + Unsolved and intricate, + In many a planet-swinging sun's estate. + Ofttimes I steal in solitary flight + Along the rim of the exterior night + That grips the universe; + And then return, + Past outer footholds of sidereal light, + To where the systems gather and disperse; + And dip again into the web of things, + To watch it shift and burn, + Hearted with stars. On peaceless wings + I pierce, where deep-outstripping all surmise, + The nether heavens drop unsunned, + By stars and planets shunned. + And then I rise + Through vaulting gloom, to watch the dark + Snatch at the flame of failing suns; + Or mark + The heavy-dusked and silent skies, + Strewn thick with wrecked and broken stars, + Where many a fated orbit runs. + An arrow sped from some eternal bow, + Through change of firmaments and systems sent, + And finding bourn nor bars, + I flee, nor know + For what eternal mark my flight is meant. + + + + + THE RETRIBUTION + + + 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! + + + + + TO THE DARKNESS + + + 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, + Hunting her through the lands of life, + As men in the blankness of the waste + That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings. + But against them were the veils + That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce; + And Truth was withheld from them, + As a water that is seen afar at dawn, + And at noon is lost in the sand + Before the feet of the traveller. + The world was a barrenness, + And the gardens were as the waste. + And they turned them to the adventure of the dark, + To the travelling of the land without roads, + To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons. + Why have they not returned? + Their quest hath found end in thee, + Or surely they had fared + Once more to the place whence they came, + As men that have travelled to a fruitless land. + They have looked on thy face, + And to them it is the countenance of Truth. + Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love, + Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved. + They are fed with the emptiness past the veil, + And their hunger is filled; + They have found the waters of peace, + And are athirst no more. + They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs, + And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void; + They sleep the sleep of the suns, + And the vast is a garment unto them. + + + + + A DREAM OF BEAUTY + + + 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. + + + + + THE DREAM-BRIDGE + + + 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. + + + + + A LIVE-OAK LEAF + + + 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? + + + + + PINE NEEDLES + + + 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! + + + + + TO THE SUN + + + 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 withholdest them from the brink + Of outward and perilous deeps, + Lest they perish in the desolations of the night, + Or be stricken of strange suns; + Lest they be caught in the pitfalls of the abyss, + Or fall into the furnace of Arcturus. + Thy law is as a shore unto them, + And they are restrained thereby as the sea. + + Thou art food and drink to the worlds; + Yea, by thy toil are they sustained, + That they fail not upon the road of space, + Whose goal is Hercules. + When thy pillars of force are withdrawn, + And the walls of thy light fall inward, + Borne down by the sundering night, + And thy head is covered with the Shadow, + The worlds shall wander as men bewildered + In the sterile and lifeless waste. + Athirst and unfed shall they be, + When the springs of thy strength are dust, + And thy fields of light are black with dearth. + They shall perish from the ways + That thou showest no longer, + And emptiness shall close above them. + + + + + THE FUGITIVES + + + 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. + + + + + AVERTED MALEFICE + + + 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. + + + + + 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. + + + + + A DEAD CITY + + + 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. + + + + + THE SONG OF THE STARS + + + 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. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom + Sailing, we venture afar and wide, + Where ever await the tempests of doom, + Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide, + And the darkling reefs abide. + And the change and ruin of stars is a song + That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire-- + A music whose notes are of dreadful flame, + Whose harmonies ever leap high'r + Where the suns and the worlds expire. + Is such music not fit for a god? + Yet ever the deep is a dark, + And ever the night is a void, + Nor brightens a word nor a mark + To show if our God may hark. + + From the gyres of change goes ever afar + Our flaming chant o'er the deep unknown, + The song of the death of planet and star. + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + In our shadows of light the planets sweep, + And endure for the span of our prime-- + Globed atoms that hazard the termless deep + With races that bow to the law of Time, + And yet cherish a dream sublime. + And they cry to the god behind the veil. + Yet how should their voices pass the night, + The silence that waits in the rayless void, + If he hear not our music of light, + And the thundrous song of our might? + And they strive in the gloom for truth-- + Yet how should they pierce the veil, + When we, with our splendors of flame, + In the darkness faint and fail, + Our fires how feeble 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, + Shall it die ere it reach His throne? + + + + + COPAN + + + 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. + + + + + A SONG OF DREAMS + + + 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 will afford thee protection + Against the swords of the world? + Is there justice in them + To balance the world's inequity, + Or benefit to outweigh its loss? + + Then spake I in answer, saying, + Of my dreams I have made a road, + And my soul goeth out thereon + To that unto which no eye hath opened, + Nor ear become keen to hearken-- + To the glories that are shut past all access + Of the keys of sense; + Whose walls are hidden by the air, + And whose doors are concealed with clarity. + And the road is travelled of secret things, + Coming to me from far-- + Of bodiless powers, + And beauties without colour or form + Holden by any loveliness seen of earth. + And of my dreams have I builded an inn + Wherein these are as guests. + And unto it come the dead + For a little rest and refuge + From the hollowness of the unharvestable wind, + And the burden of too great space. + + The fields of the past are not void to me, + Who harvest with the scythe of thought; + Nor the orchards of future years unfruitful + To the hands of visionings. + I have retrieved from the darkness + The years and the things that were lost, + And they are held in the light of my dreams, + With the spirits of years unborn, + And of things yet bodiless. + As in an hospitable house, + They shall live while the dreams abide. + + + + + THE BALANCE + + + 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. + + + + + SATURN + + + 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-voice + Of phantom hosts--hurried, importunate, + And intermittent with a tightening fear. + Far off the sunset leapt, and the hard clouds, + Molten among the peaks, seemed furnaces + In which to make the fetters of the world. + + Seared by the lightning of the younger gods, + They saw, beyond the grim and crouching hills, + Those levins thrust like spears into the heart + Of swollen clouds, or tearing through the sky + Like severing swords. Then, as the Titans watched, + The night rose like a black, enormous mist + Around them, wherein naught was visible + Save the sharp levin leaping in the north; + And no sound came, except of seas remote, + That seemed like Chaos ravening past the verge + Of all the world, fed with the crumbling coasts + Of Matter. + + Till the moon, discovering + That harsh swart wilderness of sand and stone + Tissued and twisted in chaotic weld, + Lit with illusory fire each Titan's form, + They sate in silence, mute as stranded orbs-- + The wrack of Time, upcast on ruinous coasts, + And in the slow withdrawal of the tide + Safe for awhile. Small solace did they take + From that frore radiance glistering on the dull + Black desert gripped in iron silences, + Like a false triumph o'er contestless fates, + Or a mirage of life in wastes of Death. + Yet were they moved to speak, and Saturn's voice + Seeming the soul of that tremendous land + Set free in sound, startled the haughty stars. + + "O Titans, gods, sustainers of the world, + Is this the end? Must Earth go down to Chaos, + Lacking our strength, beneath the unpracticed sway + Of godlings vain, precipitate with youth, + Who think, unrecking of disastrous chance, + To bind their will as reins upon the sun, + Or stand as columns to the ponderous heavens? + Must we behold, with eyes of impotence + That universal wrack, even though it whelm + These our usurpers in impartial doom + Beneath the shards and fragments of the world? + Were it not preferable to return, + And meeting them in fight unswervable, + Drag down the earth, ourselves, and these our foes, + One sacrifice unto the gods of Chaos? + Why should we stay, and live the tragedy + Of power that survives its use?" + + Now spake + Enceladus, when that the echoings + Of Saturn's voice had fled remote, and seemed + Dead thunders caught and flung from star to star; + "Wouldst hurl thy kingdom down the nightward gulf, + Like to a stone a curious child might cast + To test the fall of some dark precipice? + Patience and caution should we take as mail, + Not rashness for a weapon--too keen sword + That cuts the strainèd knot of destiny, + Ne'er to be tied again. Were it not best + To watch the slow procedure of the days, + That we may grasp a time more opportune, + When desperation is not all our strength, + Nor the foe newly filled with victory? + Then may we hope to conquer back thy realm + For thee, not for the gods of nothingness." + + He ceased, and after him no lesser god + Gave voice upon the shaken silences, + None venturing to risk comparison, + Inevitable then, of eloquence + With his; but silence like the ambiguousness + Of signal and of lesser stars o'ercast + And merged in one confusion by the moon, + Possessed that multitude, till Saturn rose. + Around his form the light intensified, + And strengthened with addition wild and strange, + Investing him as with a phantom robe, + And gathering like a crown about his brow. + His sword, whereon the shadows lay like rust + He took, and dipping it within the moon, + Made clean its length of blade, and from it cast + Swift flickerings at the stars. And then his voice + Came like a torrent, and from out his eyes + Streamed wilder power that mingled with the sound. + + * * * * * + + And his resurgent power, in glance and word, + Poured through the Titans' souls, and was become + The fountains of their own, and at his flame + Their fires were lit once more, whose restlessness + Leapt and aspired against the steadfast stars. + And now they turned, majestic with resolve, + Where, red upon the forefront of the north, + Arcturus was a beacon to the winds. + And with the flickering winds, that lightly struck + The desert dust, then sprang again in air, + They passed athwart the foreland of the north. + + Against their march they saw the shrunken waste, + A rivelled region like a world grown old + Whose sterile breast knew not the lips of Life + In all its epoch; or a world that was + The nurse of infant Death, ere he became + Too large, too strong for its restraining arms, + And towered athwart the suns. + + And there they crossed + Metallic slopes that rang like monstrous shields, + But gave not to their tread, and clanging plains + Like body-mail of greater, vaster gods. + Where hills made gibbous shadows in the moon, + They heard the eldritch laughters of the wind, + Seeming the mirth of death; and 'neath their gaze + Gaunt valleys deepened like an old despair. + Yet strode they on, through the moon's fantasies, + Bold with resolve, across a land like doubt. + + And now they passed among huge mountain-bulks, + Themselves like peaks detached, and moving slow + 'Mid fettered brethren, adding weight and gloom + To that mute conclave great against the stars. + Emerging thence, the Titans marched where still + Their own portentous shadows went before + Like night that fled but shrunk not, dusking all + That desert way. + + And thus they came where Sleep, + The sleep of weary victory, had seized + The younger gods as captives, borne beyond + All flight of mounting battle-ecstasies + In that high triumph of forgetfulness. + And on that sleep the striding Titans broke, + Vague and immense at first like forming dreams + To those disturbèd gods, in mist of drowse + Purblind and doubtful yet, though soon they knew + Their erst-defeated foes, and rising stood + In silent ranks expectant, that appeared + To move, with shaking of astonished fires + That bristled forth, or were displayed like plumes + Late folded close, now trembling terribly, + Pending between the desert and the stars. + Then, sudden as the waking from a dream, + The battle leapt, where striving shapes of gods + Moved brightly through the whirled and stricken air, + Sweeping it to a froth of fire; and all + That ancient, deep-established desert rocked, + Shaken as by an onset of the gulfs + Of gathered and impatient Chaos, while, + Above the place where central battle burned + The stars drew back in fright or dazzlement, + Paling to more secluded distances. + Lo, where the moon had wrought illusive dreams + That clothed the wild in doubt and fantasy, + Hiding its hideousness with bright mirage, + Or deepening it with gulfs and glooms of Hell, + Mightier confusion, chaos absolute + Upon the imperilled sky and trembling world, + Now made a certainty within itself, + The one thing sure in shaken sky or world. + Maelstroms of battle caught in storms of fire, + Torn and involved by weaponry of gods-- + Crescented blades that met with rounds of shields; + Grappling of shapes, seen through the riven blaze + An instant, then once more obscure, and known + Only by giant heavings of that war + Of furious gods and roused elements, + Divided, leagued, contending evermore + Along the desert--these, augmentative + Round one thick center, stunned the faltering night. + + So huge that chaos, complicate within + With movements of gigantic legionry, + Antagonistic streams, impetuous-hurled + Where Jove and Saturn thunder-crested, led + In fight unswervable--so wide the strife + Of differing impulse, that Decision found + No foothold, till that first confusion should + In ordered conflict re-arrange, and stand + With its true forces known. This seemed remote, + With that wide struggle pending terribly, + As if all-various, colored Time had made + A truce with white Eternity, and both + Stood watching from afar. + + Through drifts of haze + The broadening moon, made ominous with red, + Glared from the westering night. And now that war + Built for itself, far up, a cope of cloud, + And drew it down, far off, upon all sides, + Impervious to the moon and sworded stars. + And by their own wild light the gods fought on + 'Neath that stupendous concave like a sky + Filled and illumed with glare of bursting suns. + And cast by their own light, upon that sky + The gods' own shadows moved like shapen gloom, + Phantasmagoric, changed and amplified, + A shifting frieze that flickered dreadfully + In spectral battle indecisive. Then, + Swift, as it had begun, the contest turned, + And on the heaving Titans' massive front + It seemed that all the motion and the strength + Self-thwarting and confounded, of that strife, + Was flung in centered impact terrible, + With rush of all that fire, tempestuous-blown + As if before some wind of further space, + Striking the earth. Lo, all the Titans' flame + Bent back upon themselves, and they were hurled + In vaster disarray, with vanguard piled + On rear and center. Saturn could not stem + The loosened torrents of long-pent defeat; + He, with his host, was but as drift thereon, + Borne wildly down the whelmed and reeling world. + + Hurling like slanted rain, the lurid levin + Fell o'er that flight of Titans, and behind, + In striding menace, all-victorious Jove + Loomed like some craggy cloud with thunders crowned + And footed with the winds. In that defeat, + With Jove's pursuit involved and manifold, + Few found escape unscathed, and some went down + Like senile suns that grapple with the dark, + And reel in flame tremendous, and are still. + + Ebbing, the battle left those elder gods + Upcast once more on coasts of black defeat-- + Gripped in despair, a vaster Tartarus. + The victor gods, their storms and thunders spent, + Went dwindling northward like embattled clouds, + And where the lingering haze of fight dissolved, + The pallor of the dawn began to spread + On darkness purple like the pain of Death. + Ringed with that desolation, Saturn stood + Mute, and the Titans answered unto him + With brother silence. Motionless, they seemed + Some peristyle or range of columns great, + Alone enduring of a fallen fane + In deserts of some vaster world whence Life + And Faith have vanished long, that vaguely slips + To an immemoried end. And twilight slow + Crept round those lofty shapes august, and seemed + Such as might be the faltering ghostly noon + Of mightier suns that totter down to death. + + Then turned they, passing from that dismal place + Blasted anew with battle, ere the swift + Striding of light athwart stupendous chasms + And wasteful plains, should overtake them there, + Bowed with too heavy a burden of defeat. + Slowly they turned, and passed upon the west + Where, like a weariness immovable + In menace huge, the plain its monstrous bulk, + The peaks its hydra heads, the whole world crouched + Against their march with the diminished stars. + + + + + FINIS + + + 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, blank, and meaningless + As a burnt scroll that blackens + With the passing of the fire, + Lay the dead infinite sky. + Lo! in the halls of Time, + I thought, the torches are out-- + The revelry of the gods, + Or lamentation of demons + For which their flames were lit, + Over and quiet at last + With the closing peace of night, + Whose dumb, dead, passionless skies + Enfold the living world + As the sea a sinking pebble. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Star-Treader and other poems, by +Clark Ashton Smith + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-TREADER AND OTHER POEMS *** + +***** This file should be named 38410-8.txt or 38410-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/4/1/38410/ + +Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This +file was produced from images generously made available +by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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