Clark Ashton Smith Poems

A crownless king who reigns alone,
I live within this ashen land,
Where winds rebuild from wandering sand
My columns and my crumbled throne.
...

How marvellous this bit of green
I hold, and soon shall throw away!
Its subtle veins, its vivid sheen,
Seem fragments of a god's array.
...

I was a midge
With broken wing,
Crawling some colossal ridge
Underneath the world
...

O tissued fabric of the frame of things,
Thou art an alternating tide,
And Life a moment's foam
Thy shifting wave upflings.
...

What sky beheld thy primal birth,
When ageless night's dimensionless extent
First knew division, and the girth
Of formless heavens constraint and measurement;
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Imagination's eyes
Outreach and distance far
The vision of the greatest star
That measures instantaneously—
...

Your name is like the opening of a flow'r,
The forest's brief and pensive-petalled rose,
Unfolding in a land of larch and pine,
Where shadowy snows
...

O young and dear and tender sorceress!
Your delicate, slim hands
Reweave the glamors of Hellenic lands
To enchant the noon or night—
...

The blood of wounded love is on your leaves, October,
And in your seaward wind the sigh of love foredone:
Though I should fold them round me, cerement-like and sober,
In all your mist and rain is no oblivion,
...

We found, we knew it dimly
Within a dead life grimly
By guarding time inurned—
A glamour far and olden,
...