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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