Chapter II: Preface

Who of us care to be present at the accouchment of the immortal? I think that we so attend who are first to take this book in our hands. A bold assertion, truly, and one demonstrable only in years remote from these; and—dust wages no war with dust. But it is one of those things that I should most “like to come back and see.”

Because he has lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his subconscious daemon, and because he has set those murmurs to purer and harder crystal than we others, by so much the longer will the poems of Clark Ashton Smith endure. Here indeed is loot against the forays of moth and rust. Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be glad.

GEORGE STERLING.

San Francisco, October 28, 1922.

ARABESQUE

Like arabesques of ebony,
The cypresses, in silhouette,
Fantastically cleave and fret
A moon of yellow ivory.

The coldly colored rays illume
A leafy pattern manifold,
And all the field is overscrolled
With curiously figured gloom.

Like arabesques of ebony,
Or like Arabian lattices,
Forever seem the cypresses
Before a moon of ivory.

BEYOND THE GREAT WALL

Beyond the far Cathayan wall,
A thousand leagues athwart the sky,
The scarlet stars and mornings die,
The gilded moons and sunsets fall.

Across the sulphur-colored sands
With bales of silk the camels fare,
Harnessed with vermil and with vair,
Into the blue and burning lands.

And, ah, the song the drivers sing,
To while the desert leagues away—
A song they sang in old Cathay,
Ere youth had left the eldest king,—

Ere love and beauty both grew old,
And wonder and romance were flown
On fiery wings to worlds unknown,
To stars of undiscovered gold.

And I their alien words would know,
And follow past the lonely Wall,
Where gilded moons and sunsets fall,
As in a song of long ago.

TO OMAR KHAYYAM

Omar, within thy scented garden-close,
When passed with eventide
The starward incense of the waning rose—
Too fair and dear and precious to abide
After the glad and golden death of spring—
Omar, thou heardest then,
Above the world of men,
The mournful rumour of an iron wing,
The sough and sigh of desolating years,
Whereof the wind is as the winds that blow
Out of a lonesome land of night and snow,
Where ancient winter weeps with frozen tears;
And in thy bodeful ears,
The brief and tiny lisp
Of petals curled and crisp,
Fallen at Eve in Persia’s mellow clime,
Was mingled with the mighty sound of time.

Omar, thou knewest well
How the fair days are sorrowful and strange
With time’s inexorable mystery
And terror ineluctable of change:
Upon thine eyes the bleak and bitter spell
Of vision, thou didst see,
As in a magic glass,
The moulded mists and painted shadows pass—
The ghostly pomps we name reality.
And, lo, the level field,
With broken fane and throne,
And dust of old, unfabled cities sown,
In unremembering years was made to yield,
From out the shards of Pow’r,
The pillars frail and small
That lift for capital
The blood-like bubble of the poppy-flow’r;
And crowns were crumbled for the airy gold
The crocus and the daffodil should hold
As inalienable dow’r.
Before thy gaze, the sad unvaried green
The cypresses like robes funereal wear,
Was woven on the gradual looms of air,
From threadbare silk and tattered sendaline
That clothed some ancient queen;
And from the spoilt vermilion of her mouth,
The myrtles rose, and from her ruined hair,
And eyes that held the summer’s ardent drouth
In blown, forgotten bow’rs;
And amber limbs and breast,
Through ancient nights by sleepless love oppressed,
Or by the iron flight of loveless hours.

Knowing the weary wisdom of the years,
The empty truth of tears;
The suns of June, that with some great excess
Of ardour slay the unabiding rose,
And grey-haired winter, wan and fervourless
For whom no flower grows;
Seeing the scarlet and the gold that pales,
On Orient snows untrod,
In magic morns that grant,
Across a land of common green and gray,
The disenchanted day;
Knowing the iron veils
And walls of adamant,
That ward the flaming verities of God—
Knowing these things, ah, surely thou wert wise,
Beneath the warm and thunder-dreaming skies,
To kiss on ardent breast and avid mouth,
Some girl whose sultry eyes
Were golden with the sun-beloved south—
To pluck the rose and drain the rose-red wine,
In gardens half-divine;
Before the broken cup
Be filled and covered up
In dusty seas of everlasting drouth.

STRANGENESS

O love, thy lips are bright and cold,
Like jewels carven curiously
To symbols of a mystery,
A secret dim, forgotten, old.

Like woven amber, finely spun,
Thy hair, enwoofed with golden light,
Remembers yet the flaming flight
Of some unknown, archaic sun.

Thine eyes are crystals green and chill,
Wherein, as in a shifting sea,
Wan fires and drowning splendours flee
To stealthy deeps forever still.

Fallen across thy dreaming face,
The dawn is made a secret thing,
Like flame of crimson lamps that swing
At midnight, in a cavern-space.

Thy smile is like the furtive gleam
Of fleeing moons a traveller sees
Through closing arms of cypress-trees,
In secret realms of night and dream.

Sphinx-like, unsolved eternally,
Thy beauty’s riddle doth abide,
And love hath come, and love hath died,
Striving to read the mystery.

THE INFINITE QUEST

In years no vision shall aver,
In lands no dream may name,
Tow’rd alien things what longings were,
And thence what languors came!

For each horizon straightly sought,
With fealty to the stars,
What death and weariness were bought,
What bitterness, what bars!

* * * * *

I waken unto years afar,
And find the quest made new
In Earth, that was perchance a star
Unto my former view.

ROSA MYSTICA

The secret rose we vainly dream to find,
Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago,
Or in old summers of the realms of snow,
Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind;
Or once its broad and breathless petals pined
In gardens of Persepolis, aglow
With desert sunlight, and the fiery, slow
Red waves of sand, invincible and blind.

On orient isles, or isles hesperian,
Through mythic days ere mortal time began,
It flowered above the ever-flowering foam;
Or, legendless, in lands of yesteryear,
It flamed among the violets—near, how near,
To unenchanted fields and hills of home!

THE NEREID

Her face the sinking stars desire.
Unto her place the slow deeps bring
Shadow of errant winds that wing
O’er sterile gulfs of foam and fire.

Her beauty is the light of pearls.
All stars and dreams and sunsets die
To make the fluctuant glooms that lie
Around her, and low noonlight swirls

Down ocean’s firmamental deep,
To weave for her who glimmers there,
Elusive visions, vague and fair;
And night is as a dreamless sleep:

She has not known the night’s unrest,
Nor the white curse of clearer day;
The tremors of the tempest play
Like slow delight about her breast.

Serene, an immanence of fire,
She dwells forever, ocean-thralled,
Soul of the sea’s vast emerald;
Her face the sinking stars desire.

IN SATURN

Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed
To isles of high, primeval amarant,
Where the flame-tongued sonorous flow’rs enchant
The hanging surf to silence: All engrailed

With ruby-colored pearls, the golden shore
Allured me; but as one whom spells restrain,
For blind horizons of the sombre main,
And harbors never known, my singing prore

I set forthrightly: Formed of fire and brass,
Immenser skies divided, deep on deep
Before me,—till, above the darkling foam,

With dome on cloudless adamantine dome,
Black peaks no peering seraph deems to pass,
Rose up from realms ineffable as Sleep!

IMPRESSION

The silver silence of the moon
Upon the sleeping garden lies;
The wind of evening dies,
As in forgetful dreams a ghostly tune.

How white, how still, the flowers are,
As carved of pearl and ivory!
The pines are ebony,
A sombre frieze on heavens pale and far.

Like mirrors made of lucid stone,
The pools lie calm, and bright, and cold,
Where moon and stars behold,
In some eternal trance, themselves alone.

TRIPLE ASPECT

Lo, for Earth’s manifest monotony
Of ordered aspect unto sun and star,
And single moon, I turn to years afar,
And ampler worlds ensphered in memory.

There, to the zoned and iris-differing light
Of three swift suns in heavens of vaster range,
Transcendant Beauty knows a trinal change,
And dawn and eve are in the place of night.

There, long ago, in mornings ocean-green,
I saw bright deserts dusky with the sky,
Or under yellow noons, wide waters lie
Like wrinkled bronze made hot with fires unseen.

Strange flow’rs that bloom but to an azure sun,
I saw; and all complexities of light
That work fantastic magic on the sight,
Wrought unimagined marvels one by one.

There, swifter shadows suffer gorgeous dooms—
Lost in an orange noon, an azure morn;
At twofold eve, large, winged lights are born,
Towering to meet the dawn, or briefest glooms

Of chrysoberyl filled with wondering stars,
Draw from an emerald east to skies of gold.
Tow’rd jasper waters leaning to behold,
Vague moons are lost amid great nenuphars.

DESOLATION

It seems to me that I have lived alone—
Alone, as one that liveth in a dream:
As light on coldest marble, or the gleam
Of moons eternal on a land of stone,
The dawns have been to me. I have but known
The silence of a frozen land extreme—
A sole attending silence, all supreme
As is the sea’s enormous monotone.

Upon the icy desert of my days,
No bright mirages are, but iron rays
Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light
Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave
The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save
My spirit from the ravening Infinite.

THE ORCHID

Beauty, thou orchid of immortal bloom,
Sprung from the fire and dust of perished spheres,
How art thou tall in these autumnal years
With the red rain of immemorial doom,
And fragrant where but lesser suns illume,
For sustenance of Life’s forgotten tears!
Ever thy splendour and thy light appears
Like dawn from out the midnight of the tomb.

Colours, and gleams, and glamours unrecalled,
Richly thy petals intricate revive:
Blossom, whose roots are in Eternity,
The faithful soul, the sentience darkly thralled,
In dream and wonder evermore shall strive
At Edens lost of time and memory.

A FRAGMENT

Autumn far-off in memory,
That saw the crisping myrtles fade!****
Aeons agone, my tomb was made,
Beside the moon-constrainèd sea.

Ah, wonderful its portals were!
With carven doors of chrysolite,
And walls of sombre syenite,
They wrought mine olden sepulchre!

About the griffin-guarded plinth,
White blossoms crowned the scarlet vine;
And burning orchids opaline
Illumed the palm and terebinth.

On friezes of mine ancient fame,
The cypress wrought its writhen shade;
And through the boughs the ocean made
Moresques of blue and fretted flame.

Poet or prince, I may not know
My perished name, nor bring to mind
Years that are one with dust and wind,
Nor songless love, and tongueless woe—:

Only the tomb they made for me,
With carven doors of chrysolite,
And walls of sombre syenite,
Beside the moon-constrainèd sea.

CREPUSCLE

The sunset-gonfalons are furled
On plains of evening, broad and pale,
And, wov’n athwart the waning world,
The air is like a silver veil.

Into the thin and trembling gloom,
That holds a hueless warp of light,
The murmuring wind on a slow loom,
Weaves the rich purples of the night.

INFERNO

Grey hells, or hells aglow with hot and scarlet flow’rs;
White hells of light and clamour; hells the abomination
Of breathless, deep sepulchral desolation
Oppresses ever—I have known them all, through hours
Tedious as dead eternity; where timeless pow’rs,
Leagued in malign, omnipotent persuasion—
Wearing the guise of love, despair and aspiration,
Forever drove, through ashen fields and burning bow’rs,

My soul that found no sanctuary.**** For Lucifer,
And all the weary, proud, imperious, baffled ones
Made in his image, hell is anywhere: The ice
Of hyperboreal deserts, or the blowing spice
In winds from off Sumatra, for each wanderer
Preserves the jealous flame of sad, infernal suns.

MIRRORS

Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique!
Whether in melancholy marble palaces
In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness
Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek;
Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak
Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses
Of lost Lemuria; or behind the lattices
Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique

Of wan, mysterious women!—Mirrors, mirrors old,
Mirrors immutable, impassable as Fate,
Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past
Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold;
And fleeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last,
Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate.

BELATED LOVE

Ah, woe is me, for Love hath lain asleep,
Hath lain too long in some Morphean close,—
Till on his dreaming wings the ruined rose
Fell lightly, and the rose-red leaves were deep.

Alas, alas, for Love is overlate!
Far-wandering, alone, we know not where,
He found the white and purple poppies fair,
Nor heard the Summer pass importunate.

Ah, Love, can we forgive thy loitering?
The golden Summer, as a dream foregone
Is changed—till in our eyes the ashen dawn
Of Autumn kindles.**** We have heard thy wing
But with a sound of sighing; heart on heart,
In our own sighs we hear thy wing depart.

THE ABSENCE OF THE MUSE

O, Muse, where lingerest thou? In any land
Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars?
Or in what high metropolis of Mars—
Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command,
And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand
Of continents embattled in old wars
That primal kings began? Or on the bars
Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand
Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues,
Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack
And roses of blue coral for thy hair?
Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac,
Translatest thou the tale of earthly news
And earthly songs to singers of Altair?

DISSONANCE

The harsh, brief sob of broken horns; the sound
Of hammers, on some echoing sepulchre;
Lutes in a thunderstorm; a dulcimer
By sudden drums and clamouring bugles drowned;
Crackle of pearls, and gritting rubies, ground
Beneath an iron heel; the heavy whirr
Of battle wheels; a hungry leopard’s purr,
And sigh of swords withdrawing from the wound—:

All, all are in thy dreadful fugue, O Life,
Thy dark, malign and monstrous music, spun
In hell, from a delirious Satan’s dream!***
O! dissonance primordial and supreme—
The moan, the thunder, evermore at strife,
Beneath the unheeding silence of the sun!

TO NORA MAY FRENCH

Importunate, the lion-throated sea,
Blind with the mounting foam of winter, mourns
To cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots
Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown
Lose in the gale their tattered petals, cast
On bleak, tumultuous cauldrons of the tide,
Where fell thy molten ashes.**** Past the bay,
The morning dunes a dust of marble seem—
Wrought from primeval fanes to Beauty reared,
And shattered by some vandal Titan’s mace
To more than Time’s own ruin. Woods of pine,
Above the dunes in Gothic gloom recede,
And climb the ridge that arches to the north
Long as a lolling dragon’s chine. The gulls,
Like ashen leaves far-off upon the wind,
Flutter above the broad and smouldering sea,
That lightens with the fire-white foam: But thou,
Of whom the sea is urn and sepulcher,
Who hast thereof a blown, tumultuous sleep,
And stormy peace in gulfs impacable—
What carest thou if Beauty loiter there,
Clad with the crystal noon? What carest thou
If sharp and sudden balsams of the pine
Mingle for her in the air’s bright thurible
With keener fragrance proffered by the deep
From riven gulfs resounding?*** Knowest thou
What solemn shores of crocus-colored light,
Reared by the sunset in its realm of change,
Will mock the dream-lost isles that sirens ward,
And charm the icy emerald of the seas
To unabiding iris? Knowest thou
The waxing of the wan December foam—
A thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls
Upon the cliffs forever?

Thou art still
As they that sleep in the eldest pyramid—
Or mounded with Mesopotamia
And immemorial deserts! Thou hast part
In the wordless, dumb conspiracy of death—
Silence wherein the warrior kings accord,
And all the wrangling sages! If thy voice
In any wise return, and word of thee,
It is a lost, incognizable sigh,
Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown,
Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave
In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main,
On tides that lave the city-laden shores
Of lands wherein the eternal vanities
Are served at many altars; tides that wash
Lemuria’s unfathomable walls,
And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars
At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise
From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned,
And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard.