Clark Ashton Smith Poems

The incognizable kings of Night, within their unrevealed abyss,
Have built them a metropolis against the kingdoms of the light.

Its mountain-passing ramparts climb exalted from the nadir flats
...

I saw a city in a lonely land:
Foursquare, it fronted upon gulfs of fire;
Behind, the night of Erebus hung entire;
And deserts gloomed or glimmered on each hand.
...

The herd of goats for us
Turns the hillside to a scene
From Theocritus.
...

Because of thee immortal Love hath died:
Because thy wilful heart will not believe,
Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave,
And build a cross for Love the crucified.
...

They seem the enfolding mountains of some fairer land
That lies beyond the world,
With vales of purpling rose in hills eburnean furled
And halcyonian flowers unplucked of any hand
...

The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
...

O dancer with the dove-swift feet and hands,
So palely swaying
Against the moon's replenished rondure,
Thou treadest not this autumn ground alone:
...

Is it a dream, is it a memory -
That, underneath some warmer moon of yore,
We dreamt of love, we dreamt forevermore
To make of Love our immortality?
...

Not as a tyrant cruel, hard and cold,
A monarch unrelenting and severe,
Think I of Death, whom all the many fear
And walk in daily terror of; I hold
...