Ebony and Crystal
Poems in Verse and Prose

BY

CLARK ASHTON SMITH

AUTHOR OF

The Star-Treader and Other Poems
Odes and Sonnets

Copyright 1922
by
CLARK ASHTON SMITH

Printed by the
AUBURN JOURNAL
Auburn, Calif.

DEDICATION

TO

SAMUEL LOVEMAN

[CONTENTS]

[PREFACE]

Who of us care to be present at the accouchment of the immortal? I think that we so attend who are first to take this book in our hands. A bold assertion, truly, and one demonstrable only in years remote from these; and—dust wages no war with dust. But it is one of those things that I should most “like to come back and see.”

Because he has lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his subconscious daemon, and because he has set those murmurs to purer and harder crystal than we others, by so much the longer will the poems of Clark Ashton Smith endure. Here indeed is loot against the forays of moth and rust. Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be glad.

GEORGE STERLING.

San Francisco, October 28, 1922.

ARABESQUE

Like arabesques of ebony,

The cypresses, in silhouette,

Fantastically cleave and fret

A moon of yellow ivory.

The coldly colored rays illume

A leafy pattern manifold,

And all the field is overscrolled

With curiously figured gloom.

Like arabesques of ebony,

Or like Arabian lattices,

Forever seem the cypresses

Before a moon of ivory.

BEYOND THE GREAT WALL

Beyond the far Cathayan wall,

A thousand leagues athwart the sky,

The scarlet stars and mornings die,

The gilded moons and sunsets fall.

Across the sulphur-colored sands

With bales of silk the camels fare,

Harnessed with vermil and with vair,

Into the blue and burning lands.

And, ah, the song the drivers sing,

To while the desert leagues away—

A song they sang in old Cathay,

Ere youth had left the eldest king,—

Ere love and beauty both grew old,

And wonder and romance were flown

On fiery wings to worlds unknown,

To stars of undiscovered gold.

And I their alien words would know,

And follow past the lonely Wall,

Where gilded moons and sunsets fall,

As in a song of long ago.

TO OMAR KHAYYAM

Omar, within thy scented garden-close,

When passed with eventide

The starward incense of the waning rose—

Too fair and dear and precious to abide

After the glad and golden death of spring—

Omar, thou heardest then,

Above the world of men,

The mournful rumour of an iron wing,

The sough and sigh of desolating years,

Whereof the wind is as the winds that blow

Out of a lonesome land of night and snow,

Where ancient winter weeps with frozen tears;

And in thy bodeful ears,

The brief and tiny lisp

Of petals curled and crisp,

Fallen at Eve in Persia’s mellow clime,

Was mingled with the mighty sound of time.

Omar, thou knewest well

How the fair days are sorrowful and strange

With time’s inexorable mystery

And terror ineluctable of change:

Upon thine eyes the bleak and bitter spell

Of vision, thou didst see,

As in a magic glass,

The moulded mists and painted shadows pass—

The ghostly pomps we name reality.

And, lo, the level field,

With broken fane and throne,

And dust of old, unfabled cities sown,

In unremembering years was made to yield,

From out the shards of Pow’r,

The pillars frail and small

That lift for capital

The blood-like bubble of the poppy-flow’r;

And crowns were crumbled for the airy gold

The crocus and the daffodil should hold

As inalienable dow’r.

Before thy gaze, the sad unvaried green

The cypresses like robes funereal wear,

Was woven on the gradual looms of air,

From threadbare silk and tattered sendaline

That clothed some ancient queen;

And from the spoilt vermilion of her mouth,

The myrtles rose, and from her ruined hair,

And eyes that held the summer’s ardent drouth

In blown, forgotten bow’rs;

And amber limbs and breast,

Through ancient nights by sleepless love oppressed,

Or by the iron flight of loveless hours.

Knowing the weary wisdom of the years,

The empty truth of tears;

The suns of June, that with some great excess

Of ardour slay the unabiding rose,

And grey-haired winter, wan and fervourless

For whom no flower grows;

Seeing the scarlet and the gold that pales,

On Orient snows untrod,

In magic morns that grant,

Across a land of common green and gray,

The disenchanted day;

Knowing the iron veils

And walls of adamant,

That ward the flaming verities of God—

Knowing these things, ah, surely thou wert wise,

Beneath the warm and thunder-dreaming skies,

To kiss on ardent breast and avid mouth,

Some girl whose sultry eyes

Were golden with the sun-beloved south—

To pluck the rose and drain the rose-red wine,

In gardens half-divine;

Before the broken cup

Be filled and covered up

In dusty seas of everlasting drouth.

STRANGENESS

O love, thy lips are bright and cold,

Like jewels carven curiously

To symbols of a mystery,

A secret dim, forgotten, old.

Like woven amber, finely spun,

Thy hair, enwoofed with golden light,

Remembers yet the flaming flight

Of some unknown, archaic sun.

Thine eyes are crystals green and chill,

Wherein, as in a shifting sea,

Wan fires and drowning splendours flee

To stealthy deeps forever still.

Fallen across thy dreaming face,

The dawn is made a secret thing,

Like flame of crimson lamps that swing

At midnight, in a cavern-space.

Thy smile is like the furtive gleam

Of fleeing moons a traveller sees

Through closing arms of cypress-trees,

In secret realms of night and dream.

Sphinx-like, unsolved eternally,

Thy beauty’s riddle doth abide,

And love hath come, and love hath died,

Striving to read the mystery.

THE INFINITE QUEST

In years no vision shall aver,

In lands no dream may name,

Tow’rd alien things what longings were,

And thence what languors came!

For each horizon straightly sought,

With fealty to the stars,

What death and weariness were bought,

What bitterness, what bars!

I waken unto years afar,

And find the quest made new

In Earth, that was perchance a star

Unto my former view.

ROSA MYSTICA

The secret rose we vainly dream to find,

Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago,

Or in old summers of the realms of snow,

Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind;

Or once its broad and breathless petals pined

In gardens of Persepolis, aglow

With desert sunlight, and the fiery, slow

Red waves of sand, invincible and blind.

On orient isles, or isles hesperian,

Through mythic days ere mortal time began,

It flowered above the ever-flowering foam;

Or, legendless, in lands of yesteryear,

It flamed among the violets—near, how near,

To unenchanted fields and hills of home!

THE NEREID

Her face the sinking stars desire.

Unto her place the slow deeps bring

Shadow of errant winds that wing

O’er sterile gulfs of foam and fire.

Her beauty is the light of pearls.

All stars and dreams and sunsets die

To make the fluctuant glooms that lie

Around her, and low noonlight swirls

Down ocean’s firmamental deep,

To weave for her who glimmers there,

Elusive visions, vague and fair;

And night is as a dreamless sleep:

She has not known the night’s unrest,

Nor the white curse of clearer day;

The tremors of the tempest play

Like slow delight about her breast.

Serene, an immanence of fire,

She dwells forever, ocean-thralled,

Soul of the sea’s vast emerald;

Her face the sinking stars desire.

IN SATURN

Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed

To isles of high, primeval amarant,

Where the flame-tongued sonorous flow’rs enchant

The hanging surf to silence: All engrailed

With ruby-colored pearls, the golden shore

Allured me; but as one whom spells restrain,

For blind horizons of the sombre main,

And harbors never known, my singing prore

I set forthrightly: Formed of fire and brass,

Immenser skies divided, deep on deep

Before me,—till, above the darkling foam,

With dome on cloudless adamantine dome,

Black peaks no peering seraph deems to pass,

Rose up from realms ineffable as Sleep!

IMPRESSION

The silver silence of the moon

Upon the sleeping garden lies;

The wind of evening dies,

As in forgetful dreams a ghostly tune.

How white, how still, the flowers are,

As carved of pearl and ivory!

The pines are ebony,

A sombre frieze on heavens pale and far.

Like mirrors made of lucid stone,

The pools lie calm, and bright, and cold,

Where moon and stars behold,

In some eternal trance, themselves alone.

TRIPLE ASPECT

Lo, for Earth’s manifest monotony

Of ordered aspect unto sun and star,

And single moon, I turn to years afar,

And ampler worlds ensphered in memory.

There, to the zoned and iris-differing light

Of three swift suns in heavens of vaster range,

Transcendant Beauty knows a trinal change,

And dawn and eve are in the place of night.

There, long ago, in mornings ocean-green,

I saw bright deserts dusky with the sky,

Or under yellow noons, wide waters lie

Like wrinkled bronze made hot with fires unseen.

Strange flow’rs that bloom but to an azure sun,

I saw; and all complexities of light

That work fantastic magic on the sight,

Wrought unimagined marvels one by one.

There, swifter shadows suffer gorgeous dooms—

Lost in an orange noon, an azure morn;

At twofold eve, large, winged lights are born,

Towering to meet the dawn, or briefest glooms

Of chrysoberyl filled with wondering stars,

Draw from an emerald east to skies of gold.

Tow’rd jasper waters leaning to behold,

Vague moons are lost amid great nenuphars.

DESOLATION

It seems to me that I have lived alone—

Alone, as one that liveth in a dream:

As light on coldest marble, or the gleam

Of moons eternal on a land of stone,

The dawns have been to me. I have but known

The silence of a frozen land extreme—

A sole attending silence, all supreme

As is the sea’s enormous monotone.

Upon the icy desert of my days,

No bright mirages are, but iron rays

Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light

Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave

The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save

My spirit from the ravening Infinite.

THE ORCHID

Beauty, thou orchid of immortal bloom,

Sprung from the fire and dust of perished spheres,

How art thou tall in these autumnal years

With the red rain of immemorial doom,

And fragrant where but lesser suns illume,

For sustenance of Life’s forgotten tears!

Ever thy splendour and thy light appears

Like dawn from out the midnight of the tomb.

Colours, and gleams, and glamours unrecalled,

Richly thy petals intricate revive:

Blossom, whose roots are in Eternity,

The faithful soul, the sentience darkly thralled,

In dream and wonder evermore shall strive

At Edens lost of time and memory.

A FRAGMENT

Autumn far-off in memory,

That saw the crisping myrtles fade!****

Aeons agone, my tomb was made,

Beside the moon-constrainèd sea.

Ah, wonderful its portals were!

With carven doors of chrysolite,

And walls of sombre syenite,

They wrought mine olden sepulchre!

About the griffin-guarded plinth,

White blossoms crowned the scarlet vine;

And burning orchids opaline

Illumed the palm and terebinth.

On friezes of mine ancient fame,

The cypress wrought its writhen shade;

And through the boughs the ocean made

Moresques of blue and fretted flame.

Poet or prince, I may not know

My perished name, nor bring to mind

Years that are one with dust and wind,

Nor songless love, and tongueless woe—:

Only the tomb they made for me,

With carven doors of chrysolite,

And walls of sombre syenite,

Beside the moon-constrainèd sea.

CREPUSCLE

The sunset-gonfalons are furled

On plains of evening, broad and pale,

And, wov’n athwart the waning world,

The air is like a silver veil.

Into the thin and trembling gloom,

That holds a hueless warp of light,

The murmuring wind on a slow loom,

Weaves the rich purples of the night.

INFERNO

Grey hells, or hells aglow with hot and scarlet flow’rs;

White hells of light and clamour; hells the abomination

Of breathless, deep sepulchral desolation

Oppresses ever—I have known them all, through hours

Tedious as dead eternity; where timeless pow’rs,

Leagued in malign, omnipotent persuasion—

Wearing the guise of love, despair and aspiration,

Forever drove, through ashen fields and burning bow’rs,

My soul that found no sanctuary.**** For Lucifer,

And all the weary, proud, imperious, baffled ones

Made in his image, hell is anywhere: The ice

Of hyperboreal deserts, or the blowing spice

In winds from off Sumatra, for each wanderer

Preserves the jealous flame of sad, infernal suns.

MIRRORS

Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique!

Whether in melancholy marble palaces

In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness

Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek;

Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak

Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses

Of lost Lemuria; or behind the lattices

Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique

Of wan, mysterious women!—Mirrors, mirrors old,

Mirrors immutable, impassable as Fate,

Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past

Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold;

And fleeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last,

Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate.

BELATED LOVE

Ah, woe is me, for Love hath lain asleep,

Hath lain too long in some Morphean close,—

Till on his dreaming wings the ruined rose

Fell lightly, and the rose-red leaves were deep.

Alas, alas, for Love is overlate!

Far-wandering, alone, we know not where,

He found the white and purple poppies fair,

Nor heard the Summer pass importunate.

Ah, Love, can we forgive thy loitering?

The golden Summer, as a dream foregone

Is changed—till in our eyes the ashen dawn

Of Autumn kindles.**** We have heard thy wing

But with a sound of sighing; heart on heart,

In our own sighs we hear thy wing depart.

THE ABSENCE OF THE MUSE

O, Muse, where lingerest thou? In any land

Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars?

Or in what high metropolis of Mars—

Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command,

And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand

Of continents embattled in old wars

That primal kings began? Or on the bars

Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand

Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues,

Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack

And roses of blue coral for thy hair?

Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac,

Translatest thou the tale of earthly news

And earthly songs to singers of Altair?

DISSONANCE

The harsh, brief sob of broken horns; the sound

Of hammers, on some echoing sepulchre;

Lutes in a thunderstorm; a dulcimer

By sudden drums and clamouring bugles drowned;

Crackle of pearls, and gritting rubies, ground

Beneath an iron heel; the heavy whirr

Of battle wheels; a hungry leopard’s purr,

And sigh of swords withdrawing from the wound—:

All, all are in thy dreadful fugue, O Life,

Thy dark, malign and monstrous music, spun

In hell, from a delirious Satan’s dream!***

O! dissonance primordial and supreme—

The moan, the thunder, evermore at strife,

Beneath the unheeding silence of the sun!

TO NORA MAY FRENCH

Importunate, the lion-throated sea,

Blind with the mounting foam of winter, mourns

To cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots

Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown

Lose in the gale their tattered petals, cast

On bleak, tumultuous cauldrons of the tide,

Where fell thy molten ashes.**** Past the bay,

The morning dunes a dust of marble seem—

Wrought from primeval fanes to Beauty reared,

And shattered by some vandal Titan’s mace

To more than Time’s own ruin. Woods of pine,

Above the dunes in Gothic gloom recede,

And climb the ridge that arches to the north

Long as a lolling dragon’s chine. The gulls,

Like ashen leaves far-off upon the wind,

Flutter above the broad and smouldering sea,

That lightens with the fire-white foam: But thou,

Of whom the sea is urn and sepulcher,

Who hast thereof a blown, tumultuous sleep,

And stormy peace in gulfs impacable—

What carest thou if Beauty loiter there,

Clad with the crystal noon? What carest thou

If sharp and sudden balsams of the pine

Mingle for her in the air’s bright thurible

With keener fragrance proffered by the deep

From riven gulfs resounding?*** Knowest thou

What solemn shores of crocus-colored light,

Reared by the sunset in its realm of change,

Will mock the dream-lost isles that sirens ward,

And charm the icy emerald of the seas

To unabiding iris? Knowest thou

The waxing of the wan December foam—

A thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls

Upon the cliffs forever?

Thou art still

As they that sleep in the eldest pyramid—

Or mounded with Mesopotamia

And immemorial deserts! Thou hast part

In the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death—

Silence wherein the warrior kings accord,

And all the wrangling sages! If thy voice

In any wise return, and word of thee,

It is a lost, incognizable sigh,

Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown,

Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave

In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main,

On tides that lave the city-laden shores

Of lands wherein the eternal vanities

Are served at many altars; tides that wash

Lemuria’s unfathomable walls,

And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars

At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise

From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned,

And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard.

II.

As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock,

Above the sea’s immitigable moan,

But in his heart a song that Sappho sang,

And flame-like murmur of the muted lyres

That time hath not extinguished, and the cry

Of nightingales two thousand years ago,

Shall mix with those remorseful chords that break

To endless foam and thunder; and he learn

The unsleeping woe that lives in Mytelene

Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rime

Hath paled the rose forever—even thus,

Daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair,

Whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung,

And white Errina followed—even thus,

The western wave is eloquent of thee,

And half the wine-like fragrance of the foam

Is attar of thy spirit, and the pines

From breasts of mournful, melancholy green,

Release remembered echoes of thy song

To airs importunate. No wraith of fog,

Twice-ghostly with the Hecatean moon,

Nor rack of blown, fantasmal spume shall rise,

But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea,

Unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown

A part of all sad beauty, and my soul

Hath found thy buried sorrow in its own,

Inseparable forever. Moons that pass,

Immaculate, to solemn pyres of snow,

And meres whereon the broken lotus dies,

Are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is,

With suns of swift, irreparable change,

And lucid evenings eager-starred. Of thee,

The pearlèd fountains tell, and winds that take

In one white swirl the petals of the plum,

And leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms

Of the magnolia, pale as Beauty’s brow,

And foam-white myrtles, and the fiery, bright

Pome-granate flow’rs, will subtly speak of thee

While spring hath speech and meaning. Music hath

Her fugitive and uncommanded chords,

That thrill with tremors of thy mystery,

Or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left

To murmurs inenarrable, that hold

Epiphanies of blind, conceiveless vision,

And things we dare not know, and dare not dream.

Note: Nora May French, the most gifted poet of her sex that America has produced, died by her own hand at Carmel in 1907. Her ashes were strewn into the sea from Point Lobos.

IN LEMURIA

Rememberest thou? Enormous gongs of stone

Were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers

Acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears,

And spoke the names of monsters overthrown—

Griffins whose angry gold, and fervid store

Of sapphires wrenched from marble-plungèd mines—

Carnelians, opals, agates, almandines,

I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore.

In the wide fane that shrined thee, Venus-wise,

The fallen clamours died.**** I heard the tune

Of tiny bells of pearl and melanite,

Hung at thy knees, and arms of dreamt delight;

And placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes,

Pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon.

RECOMPENSE

Ah, more to me than many days and many dreams

And more than every hope, or any memory,

This moment, when thy lips are laid immortally

On mine, and death and time are shadows of old dreams.

Now all the crownless, ruined years have recompense:

In one supreme, undying hour of light and fire,

The many moons and suns have found their one desire—

When in the hour of love, all life has recompense.

EXOTIQUE

Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flow’r,

Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen

To moons aswim in iris or in green,

Or mix with morning in an eastern bow’r.

Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles,

The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense,

Or the long noons enfraught with redolence,

The mingled spicery of purple miles.

Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow,

Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow—

These, these, by which desire is grown divine,

Were made for dreams in mystic palaces,

For love, and sleep, and slow voluptuousness,

And summer seas a-foam like foaming wine.

TRANSCENDENCE

To look on love with disenamoured eyes;

To see with gaze relentless, rendered clear

Of hope or hatred, of desire and fear,

The insuperable nullity that lies

Behind the veils of various disguise

Which life or death may haply weave; to hear

Forevermore in flute and harp the mere

And all-resolving silence; recognize

The gules of autumn in the greening leaf,

And in the poppy-pod the poppy-flow’r—

This is to be the lord of love and grief,

O’er Time’s illusion and thyself supreme,

As, half-aroused in some nocturnal hour,

The dreamer knows and dominates his dream.

SATIETY

Dear you were as is the tree of Being

To the happy dead in heaven’s bow’rs.****

Whence and what, this evil spell that flings me

Forth from love with loveless eyes unseeing?

Fair you were as nymph or queen of vision—

Bosomed like the succubi of dreams.****

All your beauty turns to sad, ironic

Weariness, and sorrowful derision.

Lo, of what avail our spent caresses,—

Kisses that set the summer night aflame?****

Mute, enormous languor without cause—

What is this my autumn heart confesses?

All your breast was fragrant like the flowers

Of the grape on hills toward the south.****

Love is acrid now like staling asters,

Sodden with the rain of autumn hours.

THE MINISTERS OF LAW

The glories and the perils of thy day

Are one, O Man! Thou goest to thine end

With Pow’rs, and for a little thou dost wend

With marshalled Majesties upon their way:

But thee the dread Necessities betray

That nurse, and fearful Splendours that befriend;

And thee shall alien Dominations rend.****

Deemest the triumph of the worlds to stay,

Or step by step eternal, unsurpassed,

Stride with the suns upon their road of awe?

Thou travelest brief ways that end and sink—

Urged by the hurrying planets; and the vast,

Prone-rushing constellations of the Law,

Thunder and press behind thee at the brink.

COLDNESS

Thy heart will not believe in love:

Therefore is love become to me

A dream, an empty mockery,

And death and life are less than love.

O, bright and beautiful as flame

Thy hair, and pale thy lips, and eyes

Like seas wherein the waning skies

Of autumn lie in paler flame.

Forevermore thy heart abides,

A dreaming crystal, pure and cold,

Amid whose visions manifold

No shape nor any shade abides.

Thy days are void and vain as death:

The moons and morrows weave for thee

A sleep of light eternally,

Where life is as a dream of death.

Chill as white jewels, or the moon,

And virginal as ice or fire,

Thou knowest life and life’s desire

As a bright mirror knows the moon.

Lo, if thy heart believed in love,

It were not more nor less to me:

I know THY love a mockery,

And all my dreams less vain than love.

THE DESERT GARDEN

Dreaming, I said, “When she is come,

This desert garden that is me,

For her shall offer mellowly

Its myrrh and its olibanum—

When she is come.

“The flowers of the moon for her,

With blossoms of the sun shall bloom,

The fading roses breathe perfume,

The lightly fallen petals stir,

And sigh to her.

“Her presence, like a living wind

Each little leaf makes visible,

Shall enter there, or like the spell

(Upon the lulling leaves divined)

Of silent wind.”

Alas! for she is come and gone,

And in the garden, green for her,

The flowers fall, the flowers stir

Only to winds of night and dawn:

For she is gone.

THE CRUCIFIXION OF EROS

Because of thee, immortal Love hath died:

Because thy wilful heart will not believe,

Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave,

A thorny crown for Love the crucified.

Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed—

The limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us!

Still are the lids so softly tremulous,

And mute the mouth of our eternal need.

Though this thy fearful lips would now deny,

Love is divine, and cannot wholly die:

Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven—

And we will know the mercy infinite,

Will find redemption in our own delight,

And in each other’s heart the only heaven.

THE EXILE

Against my heart your heart is closed; you bid me go:

What ways are left in all the world for Love to know?

Desolate oceans, and the light of lonely plains,

Dead moons that wander in the wastes of ice and snow—

These, these I fain would see, and find the splendid bourne

Of sunset, or the brazen deserts of the morn,

That I might lose this ever-aching loneliness

In vaster solitude; and love be less forlorn,

Faring to seek with alien sun and alien star

The strange, the veiled horizons infinite and far;

Spaces of fire and night, the skies of steel and gold,

Or sunset-haunted seas where foamless islands are.

AVE ATQUE VALE

Black dreams; the pale and sorrowful desire

Whose eyes have looked on Lethe, and have seen,

Deep in the sliding ebon tide serene,

Their own vain light inverted; ashen fire,

With wasted lilies, late and languishing;

Autumnal roses blind with rain; slow foam

From desert-sinking seas, with honeycomb

Of aconite and poppy—these I bring

With this my bitter, barren love to thee;

And from the grievous springs of memory,

Far in the great Maremma of my heart,

I proffer thee to drink; and on thy mouth,

With the one kiss wherein we meet and part,

Leave fire and dust from quenchless leagues of drouth.

SOLUTION

The ghostly fire that walks the fen,

Tonight thine only light shall be;

On lethal ways thy soul shall pass,

And prove the stealthy, coiled morass,

With mocking mists for company.

On roads thou goest not again,

To shores where thou hast never gone,—

Fare onward, though the shuddering queach

And serpent-rippled waters reach

Like seepage-pools of Acheron,

Beside thee; and the twisten reeds,

Close-raddled as a witch’s net,

Enwind thy knees, and cling and clutch

Like wreathing adders; though the touch

Of the blind air be dank and wet,

As from a wounded Thing that bleeds

In cloud and darkness overhead—

Fare onward, where thy dreams of yore

In splendour drape the fetid shore

And pestilential waters dead.

And though the toads’ irrision rise,

As grinding of Satanic racks,

And spectral willows, gaunt and grey,

Gibber along thy shrouded way,

Where vipers lie with livid backs,

And watch thee with their sulphurous eyes,—

Fare onward, till thy feet shall slip

Deep in the sudden pool ordained,

And all the noisome draught be drained,

That turns to Lethe on the lip.

THE TEARS OF LILITH

O lovely demon, half-divine!

Hemlock, and hydromel, and gall,

Honey, and aconite, and wine,

Mingle to make that mouth of thine—

Thy mouth I love: But most of all,

It is thy tears that I desire—

Thy tears, like fountain-drops that fall

In gardens red, Satanical;

Or like the tears of mist and fire,

Wept by the moon, that wizards use

To secret runes, when they require

Some silver philtre, sweet and dire.

A PRECEPT

With words of ivory,

Of bronze, of ebony,

Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold,

The beauty of the visible is told.

But how with these express

The unseen Loveliness—

Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound,

The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found?

No shining words of stone—

Shadow and cloud alone—

These shall the poet seek eternally,

Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.

REMEMBERED LIGHT

The years are a falling of snow,

Slow, but without cessation,

On hills, and mountains, and flowers and worlds that were;

But snow, and the crawling night wherein it fell,

May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame:

Thus it was that some slant of sunset

In the chasms of pilèd cloud—

Transient mountains that made a new horizon,

Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles—

Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,

Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone.

Clear in the vistas of memory,

The peaks of a world long unremembered,

Soared further than clouds but fell not,

Based on hills that shook not nor melted

With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed.

Rent with stupendous chasms,

Full of an umber twilight,

I beheld that larger world;

Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine

Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,

Dull as with duskier tincture.

Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring,

Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight

That must pass with its passing—

Too fragile for day or for darkness,

Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own;

Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours,

Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.

These things I beheld

Till the gold was shaken with flight

Of fantastical wings like broken shadows,

Forerunning the darkness;

Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices

Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion.

SONG

I bring my weariness to thee,

My bitter dreams I bring;

Love with a wounded wing,

And life consumed of memory,

I bring to thee.

The haven of thy happy breast—

Of this my dreams are fain:

For all my weary pain,

In all the world there is no rest,

But on thy breast.

HAUNTING

There is no peace amid the moonlight and the pines;

Deep in the windless gloom the lamplike thought of you

Abides; and ah, what burning memories pursue

My heart among the pallid marbles!*** Night assigns

Your silver face for wardress of the doors of Sleep;

Beyond the wild, last bourn of dreamland, lo, your eyes

Are on the lonesome, ultimate, undiscovered skies;

Moonlike and dim, you wander ever in the deep

Which is the secret, innermost, unknown abyss

Of my own soul, and in its night your spirit lives.****

Shall I not find the very draught that Lethe gives,

Sweet with your tears, and warm with savour of your kiss?

THE HIDDEN PARADISE

Our passion is a secret Paradise—

Eden of lotos and the fruitful date,

With silence walled and held undesecrate

By man or prying seraph: We are wise

As any god and goddess, who have wrung

From roseal fruitage of a bough forbidden,

The happy wine we drink, we drink unchidden,

Deep in the vales where vernal leaves are young,

And the first poppies loiter.**** Though the breath

Of all the gods a bolted storm prepare,

And blood-red gloom of thunders blind the sun,

Shall we not turn, with clinging kisses there,

And, laughing, quaff some dreamless wine of death—

Triumphant still, in mere oblivion?

CLEOPATRA

Thy beauty is the warmth and languor and passion of a tropic autumn,

Caressing all the senses,—

With light from skies of heavy azure,

With perfume from hidden orchids many-hued

That burn in the berylline dusk of palms;

With the balmy kiss of tropic wind and wave,

And the songs of exotic birds that pass

In vermilion-flashing flight from isle to isle on a cobalt sea.***

O, sweetness in the inmost sense,

As of golden fruits that have grown by the waters of Lethe,

Or fragrance of purple lilies, crushed by the limbs of lovers,

In the shadow of a wood of cypress!***

Thou pervadest me with thy love,

As the dawn pervadeth a valley among mountains,

Or as opaline sunset filleth the amaranth-coloured sea;

The desire of thy heart is upon me,

As a myrtle-scented wind from the isle of Cythera,

Where Aphrodite waits for Adonis,

Lying naked among the flag lilies by a pool of chrysolite;

I inhale thy love

As the breath of hidden gardens of purple and scarlet,

Where Circe wanders,

Clad in a trailing gown whose colours are the gold of flame,

And the azure of the skies of autumn.

ECSTASY

Blind with your softly fallen hair,

I turn me from the twilight air;

And, ah, the wordless tale of love

My lips upon your lips declare!

High stars are on the shadowy south—

Unseen, unknown: The urgent drouth

Of desert years in one deep kiss,

Would drain the sweetness of your mouth.

Our straining arms that clasp and close,

Ache with an ecstasy that grows;

And passion in our secret veins,

Like burning amber, glows and glows.

This love is sweet to have and hold,

Better than sandalwood or gold,

After the barren, bitter loves,

The mad and mournful loves of old.

This love is fortunate and fair,

Behind its veil of fallen hair;

This love hath soft and clinging arms,

And a kind bosom, warm and bare.

UNION

As the fumes of myrrh that mix with the odour of sandalwood

In a temple sacred to the goddess Lakme;

As moonlight mingled with starlight

In the lucent azure of an autumn lake;

As the sunset-rays of gold and crimson

That interlace on a couch of purple cloud—

Even so, Beloved,

Hath my love mingled with thine—

Even so, our souls are one,

Like two winds that meet in a valley of rose and lotus,

And fall to rest, uniting

As the still and fragrant air that lingers

On a bed of falling petals.

PSALM

My beloved is a well of clear waters,

To which I have come at noontide,

From the land of the Abomination of Desolation,

From the lion-dreaded waste,

Where nothing dwelleth but the inconsolable crying of an evil wind,

And the wandering realms and cities of the wide mirage;

Where no one passeth except the sun,

Who walked like a terrible god through the hell of the brazen skies;

And the dreadful cohorts of the constellations,

Who pass remote in alien years,

And clad with icy azures of unattainable distance.

My beloved is a singing fountain,

Set in a wide oasis,

Between the frondage of the fruitful palm,

And the branches of the flowering myrtle:

The wind that bloweth thereon,

Hath lain in a vale of cassia and myrrh,

And caressed the vermilion blossoms of the pomegranate,

Whose red is the red of the lips of Astarte;

A thousand nightingales are gathered there,

From all the gardens of lost romance;

And plots of purple and silver lillies,

More beautiful than the meadows of mirage,

Revive the flowers of Sabean queens,

And the blossoms worn by all the princesses of legend.***

Ah, suffer me to dwell

Thereby, and forget the gilded cities of desire,

The domes of spectral gold,

That fled from horizon to horizon

Before me, and left my feet in the sinking vales and shifting plains of the desert,

Whose waters are green with corruption,

And bitter with the dust and ashes of death.

Ah, suffer me to sleep

In the balsam-laden shadows of the palm and myrtle,

By the ever-springing fountain!

IN NOVEMBER

With autumn and the flaring leaves our love must end—

Ere flauntful spring shall mock thy tears and my despair

With blossoms red or pale, some April bride may wear:

Now, while the weary, grey, forgetful heavens bend

Above the grief and languor of the dying lands,

In one last kiss shall meet and mingle and expire

The muted, last, remembering sighs of our desire;

And on my face the flower-like burden of thy hands

Shall rest a little, and be taken tenderly,

And, ah, how lightly hence! And in thy golden eyes,

Thy love, and all the ashen glory of the skies,

Shall mingle, and as in a mirror lie for me.

SYMBOLS

No more of gold and marble, nor of snow,

And sunlight, and vermilion, would I make

My vision and my symbols, nor would take

The auroral flame of some prismatic floe,

Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow,

Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake

The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake.***

To body forth my fantasies, and show

Communicable mystery, I would find,

In adamantine darkness of the earth,

Metals untouched of any sun; and bring

Black azures of the nether sea to birth—

Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind,

Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring.

[THE HASHISH-EATER;
or, THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL]

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-coloured sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,

The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,

By jealous moons maleficently urged

To follow me forever; mountains horned

With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed

With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,

Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;

And continents of serpent-shapen trees,

With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,

Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire

By that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers

And evil kings predominantly armed

With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin, whereon