Clark Ashton Smith Poems

This is enchanted ground
Whereto the nymphs are bound;
Where the hoar oaks maintain,
While seasons mount or wane,
...

The season brings but little gold,
And only rusty gules and sanguines dull
To these rude hills with darkling lava cored
And with thick, sombre rocks embossed
...

My dreams are turned to some disordered mime:
A plot that pandemonian shadows feign
Ravels half told; and dead loves live again
In settings of distorted place and time:
...

Erato and Melpomene stumble in the stews
Through purblind alleys where a soused Apollo falls;
And bards pour out upon the altars of the Muse
A sacrifice from cuspidors and urinals.
...

Who
Will heed the downy nestlings
Of the dove the hunter slew?
...

I will repeat a subtle rune—
And thronging suns of Otherwhere
Shall blaze upon the blinded air,
And spectres terrible and fair
...

Omar, within thy scented garden-close,
When passed with eventide
The starward incense of the waning rose—
Too precious to abide
...

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
...

Thou art the chalice of the sun;
Filled from the fountains of his light,
Thy rimming petals overrun
With nectar morning-pure and bright.
...

Hast heard the voices of the fen,
That softly sing a lethal rune
Where reeds have caught the fallen moon—
A song more sweet than conium is,
...