Clark Ashton Smith Poems

In what winter shrewd, morose,
Did he cower close
To the manzanita-blaze?
...

Though love had dreamt of soft eternities
For never-flagging pulses still to mete,
Those minutes of our bliss were few and fleet.
Breast-pillowed in their aftermath of ease,
...

O wonderful and wingèd flower,
That hoverest in the garden-close,
Finding, in mazes of the rose,
The rapture of a summer hour !
...

To find with you the earliest
Willow-buds before their silver turns to gold,
And the first previous buttercup and cyclamen that blossom
Ere the leaflets of the vernal trees unfold;
...

Rathe summer had sered the grass in which he lay
Under the little shade
The live-oak made,
While things remembered and foregone,
...

I hear the west wind's call through the window open flung:
'Oh, come ye forth the budding woods and fields among.
Your cares and worries fling like a worn-out cloak aside;
And come ye swiftly forth where the vernal day is wide;
...

I am that spawn of witch and demon
By time's mad prophets long foretold:
The unnamed fear of king and freeman,
I roam the lawless outland wold,
...

In my heart a wizard book,
Only love shall ever look:
Darling, when thou readest there,
Wisely falter and forbear
...

This is the fire of Hestia's careful hearth;
The flame that fed on many-towered Troy;
Selene's light about the Latmian boy;
The all-consuming ardor of Melkarth.
...

O Love, thou Judas of the martyred soul!
Thou pandar to the painted harlot, Life !
The rankest lies wherewith thy heart is rife
Too fulsomely illume thy lips' red scroll,
...