Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith Poems
Thy light is an eminence unto thee
And thou art upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
Thy power is a foundation for the worlds:
They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
...
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
...
In Averoigne the enchantress weaves
Weird spells that call a changeling sun,
Or hale the moon of Hecate
Down to the ivy-hooded towers.
...
No more of gold and marble, nor of snow
And sunlight and vemilion, would I make
My vision and my symbols, nor would take
The auroral flame of some prismatic floe.
...
Now were the Titans gathered round their king
In a waste region slipping toward the verge
Of drear extremities that clasp the world—
A land half-moulded by the hasty gods,
...
Dearest, today I found
A lonely spot, such as we two have loved,
Where two might lie upon Favonian ground
Peering to faint horizons far-removed:
...
O perfect love, unhoped-for, past despair!
I had not thought to find
Your face betwixt the terrene earth and air:
But deemed you lost in fabulous old lands
...
Walled with far azures of the wintering year,
Late autumn on a windless altar burns;
Splendid as rubies from Sabean urns,
A holocaust of hues is gathered here.
...
I met her mirrored stare:
The cycles of stone glories
Locked in the Gorgon's glare.
...
Thy beauty is the warmth and languor of an orient autumn,
Caressing all the senses—
With light from skies of heavy azure,
With perfume from blossoms large as thuribles,
...
By what digit of the moon
Shall I question, late or soon,
Your shoal-green eyes?
...
Twilight ascends the abandoned ramps of noon
Within an ancient land, whose after-time
Unfathomably shadows its ruined prime.
Like rising mist the night increases soon
...
I saw a shape with human form and face,
If such should in apotheosis stand:
Deep in the shadows of a desolate land
His burning feet obtained colossal base,
...
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
...
At the storm's decline,
A vulture seeks its nest
In the bolt-cloven pine.
...
Black are the berries
Laden with slumber
Of nights that have no number.
...
Sweet Lesbia,when our love is done,
Leave no reproachful shade or blot,
No least reproof, on all or aught
That made us twain, that made us one.
...
Close above the snow-scene,
Blue, purple, yellow-green
Clouds ring the moon.
...
The old constraint of an essential bond
Hath linkt them in my mind: opposed they stare,
Twin silences, that through Time's Otherwhere,
The ruinous past, thus each to each respond,
...
Sleep is a pathless labyrinth,
Dark to the gaze of moons and suns,
Through which the exile clue of dreams,
A gossamer thread, obscurely runs.
...
Clark Ashton Smith Biography
Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Sterling, Nora May French, and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith was one of "the big three of Weird Tales, along with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft", where some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. It has been said of him that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse." He was a member of the Lovecraft circle, and Smith's literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. His work is marked chiefly by an extraordinarily wide and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.)
The Best Poem Of Clark Ashton Smith
To The Sun
Thy light is an eminence unto thee
And thou art 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 constrained
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 the sustenance are they sustained,
That they falter 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,
And thy head is covered with the Shadow,
The worlds shall wander as men bewildered
In the wasteness void of life and barren.
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.
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