Clark Ashton Smith Poems

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
...

In Averoigne the enchantress weaves
Weird spells that call a changeling sun,
Or hale the moon of Hecate
Down to the ivy-hooded towers.
...

Thy light is an eminence unto thee
And thou art upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
Thy power is a foundation for the worlds:
They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
...

No more of gold and marble, nor of snow
And sunlight and vemilion, would I make
My vision and my symbols, nor would take
The auroral flame of some prismatic floe.
...

Now were the Titans gathered round their king
In a waste region slipping toward the verge
Of drear extremities that clasp the world—
A land half-moulded by the hasty gods,
...

The old constraint of an essential bond
Hath linkt them in my mind: opposed they stare,
Twin silences, that through Time's Otherwhere,
The ruinous past, thus each to each respond,
...

Dearest, today I found
A lonely spot, such as we two have loved,
Where two might lie upon Favonian ground
Peering to faint horizons far-removed:
...

O perfect love, unhoped-for, past despair!
I had not thought to find
Your face betwixt the terrene earth and air:
But deemed you lost in fabulous old lands
...

Walled with far azures of the wintering year,
Late autumn on a windless altar burns;
Splendid as rubies from Sabean urns,
A holocaust of hues is gathered here.
...

I met her mirrored stare:
The cycles of stone glories
Locked in the Gorgon's glare.
...