



Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
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    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 <DW44> 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 winged 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  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 enclasped 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 <DW72>
    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 winged 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 winged 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- 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-discerned 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  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,
    Edged 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 orbed 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.


    ATE

    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 closed 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 winged, 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, detached 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- 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 <DW72> 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 strained 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 <DW72>s 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 disturbed 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,  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

*** 