Clark Ashton Smith Poems

I am the spectre who returns
Unto some desolate world in min borne afar
On the black flowing of Lethean skies:
Ever I search, in cryptic galleries,
...

The memory of this dread demesne
Unknown, unsought by mortal eyes,
That morning, like some glad surprise,
Returns insistent, dimly seen.
...

The dungeon-clefts of Tartarus
Are close beyond the mountains
That are bound like a giant's girdle
About the unstirred, unbreathing east.
...

Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast
The Breast that fed thee-Death, disguiseless, stern:
Even now, within my mouth, from tomb and urn,
The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
...

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
...

Sorceress and sorcerer,
Risen from the sepulcher,
From the deep, unhallowed ground,
We have found and we have bound
...

White iris on thy bier,
With the white rose, we strew,
And lotus pale or blue
As moonlight on the orient mountain-snows.
...

Lost from those archangelic thrones that star,
Fadeless and fixed, heaven's light of azure bliss;
Forbanned of all His splendor and depressed
Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower
...

Upon thy separate road
(Thou, who hast chosen the world's appointed way)
My songs shall be as the perfume of sandalwood
Borne by a secret wind from form-lost irretrievable islands,
...

My dreams were nests of horror, whimsey-wrought
With orts and shreds from old abysses brought;
Were eyries built by condor-wingèd awe,
Enskied on somber pinnacles of thought.
...