Chapters 116
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1 000 - Preface, by George Sterling 2:28
Preface Who of us care to be present at the accouchement 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 demon, 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, which 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 hourlishly 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. End of Preface.
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2 001 - Arabesque 0:53
Like arabesques of ebony, the cypresses, in silhouette, fantastically cleave and fret a moon of yellow ivory. The coldly-colored rays illumine a leafy-patterned manifold. And all the field is overscrolled with curiously figured gloom, like arabesques of ebony, or like Arabian lattices, forever seen the cypresses before a moon of ivory.
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3 002 - Beyond the Great Wall 1:19
Beyond the far Cathayen Wall, a thousand leagues athwart the sky. The scarlet stars and mornings die, the gilded moons and sunsets fall. Across the sulfur-colored sands, with bales of silk, the camels fare. Harnessed with vermal, And with Vare, and to 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 discovered 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.
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4 003 - To Omar Khayyam 3:52
To Omar Khayyam. Oma within thy scented garden close, when, past 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, Oma, Thou heardest then above the world of men the mournful rumour of an iron wing, the sigh and sigh of desolating years, whereof the wind is as the winds that blow out of a solemn 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. O Ma, 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 molded mists and painted shadows pass, the ghostly pumps 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 power the pillars, frail and small, that lift, for capital, the blood-like bubble of the poppy-flower. And crowns were crumbled for the airy gold the crocus and the daffodil should hold as inalienable dower. Before thy gaze, the sad unvaried green, the cypresses like rose funereal ware, was woven on the gradual looms of air, from threadbare silk and tattered cenderline 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 bowers, And amber limbs and breast, through ancient nights, by sleepless love oppress'd, or by the iron flight of lovelace 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 grey the disenchanted day, knowing the iron vales 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, An 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 drought.
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5 004 - Strangeness 1:44
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, won fires and drowning splendors 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 traveler 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.
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6 005 - The Infinite Quest 0:57
The Infinite Quest. In years no vision shall aver, in lands no dream may name. Toward alien things what longings were, and thence what languors came. For each horizon straitly 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.
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7 006 - Rosa Mystica 1:20
Rosa Mystica The secret rose we vainly dreamed to find Was blown in gray 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.
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8 007 - The Nereid 1:29
The Narid, 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 noon-light 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 imminence of fire, she dwells forever ocean-thralled. Soul of the sea's vast emerald, her face the sinking stars desire.
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9 008 - In Saturn 1:08
By Damla Osdemir.
Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed to Isles of high primeval Amorant, where the flame-tongued sonorous flowers 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 proer I set forthrightly. Form'd of fire and brass, and menser 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.
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10 009 - Impression 1:06
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 freeze 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.
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11 010 - Triple Aspect 1:55
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-deferring light, Of three swift suns in heavens of vaster range, Transcendent beauty knows a trinal change, And dawn and eve are in the place of night.
There long ago, in morning's 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 flowers 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. Of chrysoberyl filled with wandering stars, Draw from an emerald cast to skies of gold, Toward jasper waters leaning to behold, Vague moons are lost amid great nanophars.
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12 011 - Desolation 1:11
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 soul 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, End of the video.
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13 012 - The Orchid 1:00
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 wherebut lesser suns loom. For sustenance of life's forgotten tears, ever thy splendor in thy light appears. Like dawn from out the midnight of the tomb. Colors and gleams and glamours unrecalled, Richly thy petals intricate revive, Blossom whose roots are in eternity, The faithful soul, the sentient darkly thralled, In dream and wonder evermore shall strive, At Eden's lost of time and memory.
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14 013 - A Fragment 1:30
Autumn far off in memory, that saw the crisping myrtles fade. Aeons gone, my tomb was made, beside the moon-constrained sea.
Ah, wonderful its portals were. With carven doors of chrysolite and walls of sombre cyanite, they wrought mine olden sepulchre. About the griffin guarded plinth, white blossoms crowned the scarlet vine, and burning orchids opaline illumined the palm and terebans. On friezes of mine ancient fame, the cypress wrought its writhen shade, and through the boughs the ocean made. Moreks 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 cyanite, Beside the moon constrain its sea.
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15 014 - Crepuscle 0:46
Crepuscule. The sunset gonfalons are felled On plains of evening broad and pale, And woven 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.
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16 015 - Inferno 1:31
Inferno. Grey hells, or hells aglow with hot and scarlet flowers. White hells of light and clamour. Hells, the abomination of breathless, deep, sepulchral desolation. Opresses ever. I have known them all, through hours tedious as dead eternity, where timeless powers leagued in malign, omnipotent persuasion, wearing the guise of love, despair and aspiration, forever drove through ashen fields and burning bowers. 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.
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17 16 - Mirrors 1:22
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 Limeria, or behind the lattices, Alhembran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique. Of one mysterious woman, mirrors, mirrors old, mirrors immutable, impassable as fate, your bosoms held the 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 reduplicate.
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18 16 - Belated Love 1:19
A. Udawson. Ah, woe is me, for love hath lain asleep, hath lain too long in some Morphian clothes, 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 sighting, heart on heart, in our own sighs we hear thy wing depart.
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19 018 - The Absence of the Muse 1:06
The Absence of the Muse, O Muse, where lingerest thou? In any land of Saturn lit with moons and nenefars? 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 rack, 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?
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20 019 - Dissonance 1:17
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 clamoring 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 moon, The thunder evermore at strife, beneath the unheeding silence of the sun.
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21 020 - To Nora May French 6:08
Importunate, the lion-throated sea, Blind with the mounting foam of winter, Moans to cliffs where cling the wrenched and laboured roots Of cypresses, and blossoms granite-grown, Loose 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 seam, 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 lowling 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 engulfs impassable, what carest thou if beauty loiter there?
What carest thou, if sharp in sudden balsams of the pine mingle for her in the air's bright turrible, with keener fragrance proffered by the deep from riven gulfs resounding? Knowest thou what solemn shores of crocus-coloured light, reared by the sunset in its realm of change, will mock the dream-lost ires that sirens ward? And charm the icy emerald of the seas to unabiding iris? Knowest thou the waxing of the one December foam, a thunder-cloven veil that climbs and falls upon the cliffs for ever? Thou art still as they that sleep in the eldest pyramid, or mounted 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-involved oars, at wharfs of lost Atlantis, tides that rise from coral-coffered bones of all the drowned and sunless tombs of pearl that Crakens guard. As none shall roam the sad Leucadian rock, above the sea's immitigable moan, but in his heart a song that Sappho sang, and flame-like murmur of the muted lyres that time hath not extinguished.
And the cry of nightingales two thousand years ago shall mix with those remorseful chords that break to endless form and thunder, and he learn the unsleeping woe that lives in mighty lion. Till wave and deep are dumb with ice, and rhyme hath paled the rose for ever. Even thus, daughter of Sappho, passion-souled and fair, whose face the lutes of Lesbos would have sung, and white arena followed, even thus the western wave is eloquent of thee, and half the wine-like fragrance of the foam is a tar of thy spirit. And the pines from breasts of mournful melancholy green release remembered echoes of thy song to airs importunate. No wraith of fog, twice ghostly with the Hecatean moon, nor rack of blown phantasmal spume shall rise.
But I will dream thy spirit walks the sea, unpacified with Lethe. Thou art grown a part of all sad beauty. And my soul hath found thy buried sorrow in its own, inseparable for ever. Moons that pass, immaculate to solemn pyres of snow, and mirrors whereon the broken lotus dies, are kin to thee, as wine-lipped autumn is, with suns of swift, irreparable change, and lucid evenings eager starred. Of thee the pearled fountains tell. And winds that take in one white swirl the petals of the plum, and leave the branches lonely. Royal blooms of the magnolia, pale as beauty's brow, and foam-white myrtles, and the fiery bright pomegranate flowers, will subtly speak of thee, while spring hath speech and meaning.
Music hath her fugitive and uncommanded chords. that thrill with tremors of thy mystery, or turn the void thy fleeing soul hath left to murmurs in and naleable, that hold epiphanies of blind, conceivless vision, and things we dare not know and dare not dream.
Nora May French, the most gifted poet of her sex that America has produced, Died by her own hand at Carmel in 1907. Her ashes were strewn into the sea from Point Lobos.
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22 021 - In Lemuria 1:22
Rememberest thou enormous gongs of stone were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears, and spoke the names of monsters overthrown. Griffins, whose angry gold and fervid store of sapphires wrenched from marble-plunged mines, carnelians, opals, agates, almondines, I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore. In the wide fane that shrined thee, Venus-wise, the fallen clamors died. I heard the tune of tiny bells of pearl and melanite, Hung at thy knees and arms of dreamt delight, and placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes, pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon.
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23 022 - Recompense 0:51
Recompense.
Ah, more to me than many days and many dreams, and more than every hope or any memory, this moment, when thy lips are laid immortally on mine, and death and time are shadows of old dreams. Now all crownless, ruined years have recompense. In one supreme Undying hour of light and fire, The many moons and suns have found their one desire, When in the hour of love all life has recompense.
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24 023 - Exotique 1:29
Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid flower, whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen, to moons a-swim in iris or in green. Or mixed with morning in an eastern bower. Thou shouldst have known in Amaranthian Isles the sunsets hued like fire of frankincense, or the long noons enfraught with redolence, the mangled spicery of purple miles. Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow, Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow. These, these by which desire is grown divine, were made for dreams in mystic palaces, for love and sleep and slow voluptuousness, and summer seas of foam like foaming wine.
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25 024 - Transcendence 1:15
To look on love with disenamoured eyes, To see with gaze relentless, Rendered clear of hope or hatred, Of desire and fear, The insuperable nullity that lies behind the veils of various disguise, which life or death may haply weave, to hear forevermore in flute and harp the mere and all-resolving silence, recognize the gules of autumn in the greening leaf, and in the poppy-pod the poppy flower. This is to be the lord of love and grief, O'er time's illusion and thy self supreme, As, half aroused in some nocturnal hour, The dreamer knows and dominates his dream.
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26 025 - Satiety 1:22
Satiety Dear, you are as is the tree of being to the happy dead in heaven's bowers. Whence and watch this evil spell that flings me forth from love with loveless eyes unseeing. Fair you were, As nymph or queen of vision, bosomed like the succubi of dreams. All your beauty turns to sad, ironic weariness and sorrowful derision. Lo! of what avail are spent caresses, kisses that set the summer night aflame, mute enormous languor without cause? What is this my autumn heart confesses? All your breast was fragrant like the flowers Of the grape on hills toward the south. Love is acrid now like staling asters, Sodden with the rain of autumn hours.
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27 026 - The Ministers of Law 1:19
The glories and the perils of thy day are won, O man. Thou goest to thine end with powers, and for a little thou dost wend with marshalled majesties upon their way. But thee the dread necessities betray that nurse, and fearful splendors that befriend, and thee shall alien dominations rend. Deemest the triumph of the worlds to stay, or step by step eternal, unsurpassed, stride with the suns upon their road of awe? Thou travelest brief ways at end and sink, Urged by the hurrying planets, and the vast prone-rushing constellations of the law Thunder and press behind thee at the brink.
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28 027 - Coldness 1:42
A. Udawson. Thy heart will not believe in love, therefore is love become to me. A dream, an empty mockery, and death and life are less than love. O bright and beautiful as flame! Thy hair, and pale thy lips and eyes, like seas wherein the waning skies of autumn lie in paler flame. For evermore thy heart abides, a dreaming crystal, pure and cold, amid whose visions manifold no shape nor any shade abides. Thy days are void and vain as death, the moons and morrows Weave for thee a sleep of light eternally, where life is as a dream of death. Chill as white jewels or the moon, and virginal as ice or fire, though knowest life and life's desire, as a bright mirror knows the moon. Lo, if thy heart believed in love, it were not more nor less to me.
I know thy love. A mockery, and all my dreams less vain than love.
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29 028 - The Desert Garden 1:02
Dreaming, I said, when she has come, this desert garden that is me, for her shall offer mellowly its myrrh and its alibanum, when she has come. The flowers of the moon for her, with blossoms of the sun shall bloom, the fading roses breathe perfume, the lightly fallen petals stir and sigh to her. Her presence like a living wind, each little leaf makes visible, shall enter there, or like the spell, upon the loving leaves divined of silent wind. Alas, for she is come and gone, and in the garden green for her, the flowers fall, the flowers stir, only to winds of night and dawn, for she is gone.
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30 029 - The Crucifixion of Eros 1:21
Because of thee immortal love hath died, Because thy willful heart will not believe, Thy hands and mine a thorny crown must weave, A thorny crown for love the crucified. Behold, how beautiful the limbs that bleed, the limbs that bleed, O stubborn heart, for us! Still are the lids so softly tremulous, and mute the mouth of our eternal need. Though this thy fearful lips would now deny, love is divine and cannot wholly die. Draw forth the nails thy tender hands have driven. And we will know the mercy infinite, will find redemption in our own delight, and in each other's heart the only heaven.
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31 030 - The Exile 1:27
Against my heart your heart is closed. You bid me go. What ways are left in all the world for love to know? Desolate oceans and the light of lonely plains. Dead moons that wander in the wastes of ice and snow. These, these I fain would see, and find the splendid bourne of sunset, or the brazen deserts of the morn, that I might lose this ever aching loneliness in vaster solitude, and love be less forlorn, Faring to seek with alien sun and alien star The strange, the veiled horizons infinite and far, Spaces of fire and night, the skies of steel and gold, Or sunset-haunted seas where foamless islands are.
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32 031 - Ave Atque Vale 1:29
Ave atque vale.
Black dreams, the pale and sorrowful desire, whose eyes have looked on Lethe, and have seen, deep in the sliding ebon-tide serene, Their own vain light inverted, Ashen fire with wasted lilies late and languishing, Autumnal roses blind with rain, Slow foam from desert-sinking seas With honeycomb of aconite and poppy. These I bring with this my bitter, barren love to thee. And from the grievous springs of memory, Far in the great marimma of my heart, I proffer thee to drink, And on thy mouth, with the one kiss wherein we meet, And part, leave fire and dust From quenchless leagues of drouth.
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33 032 - Solution 2:10
The ghostly fire that walks the fen, Tonight thine only light shall be, On lethal ways thy soul shall pass, And prove the stealthy coiled morass With mocking mists for company. On roads thou goest not again, To shores where thou hast never gone. Fare onward, though the shuddering queech And serpent-rippled waters reach Like seepage-pools of Acheron beside thee. And the twistin' reeds, close-rattled As a witch's net, in wind thy knees. And cling and clutch like wreathing adders, though the touch of the blind air be dank and wet as from a wounded thing that bleeds in cloud and darkness overhead. Fare onward, where thy dreams of yore in splendor drape the fetid shore and pestilential waters dead.
And though the toads' erision rise as grinding of satanic racks, and spectral willows gaunt and gray gibber along thy shrouded way, where vipers lie with livid backs and watch thee with their sulphurous eyes. Fare onward, till thy feet shall slip deep in the sudden pool ordained, and all the noisome draught be drained that turns to lethe on the lip.
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34 033 - The Tears of Lilith 1:02
The Tears of Lilith. O lovely demon half-divine, Hemlock and hydromel and gall, Honey and aconite and wine, Mingle to make that mouth of thine. Thy mouth I love, but most of all. It is thy tears that I desire, thy tears like fountain-drops that fall in gardens red, satanical. Or like the tears of mist and fire, wept by the moon that wizards use to secret runes, when they require some silver filter, sweet and dire.
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35 034 - A Precept 1:05
of bronze, of ebony, of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, the beauty of the visible is told. But how would these express the unseen loveliness Splendor and light, and harmony and sound. The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found. No shining words of stone, shadow and cloud alone. These shall the poet seek eternally, whose lines would carve the mask of mystery.
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36 035 - Remembered Light 2:14
Remembered Light The years are a falling of snow, slow but without cessation, on hills and mountains, and flowers and worlds that were. But snow, and the crawling night wherein it fell, may be washed away in one swifter hour of flame. Thus it was that some slant of sunset in the chasms of piled cloud, transient mountains that made a new horizon, uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles, smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit, till the snows of forgetfulness were gone. Clear in the vistas of memory, the peaks of a world long unremembered soared further than clouds, but fell not. Based on hills that shook not nor melted with that burden enormous, hardly to be believed. Rent with stupendous chasms, full of an umber twilight, I beheld that larger world.
Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine above, but low in the clefts it thickened, dull as with duskier tincture. Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring, Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight that must pass with its passing, too fragile for day or for darkness, fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own. Stars that were near, more radiant than ours, quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky. These things I beheld till the gold was shaken with flight of fantastical wings like broken shadows. Fore-running the darkness. Till the twilight shivered with the outcry of eldritch voices, like pain's last cry, ere oblivion.
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37 036 - Song 0:45
Song.
I bring my weariness to thee, my bitter dreams I bring. Love with a wounded wing, and life consumed of memory, I bring to thee. The haven of thy happy breast, of this my dreams are fain, for all my weary pain. In all the world there is no rest, but on thy breast.
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38 037 - Haunting 1:11
Haunting.
There is no peace amid the moonlight and the pines. Deep in the windless gloom the lamp-like thought of you abides. And ah! what burning memories pursue my heart among the pallid marbles. Night assigns your silver face for wardress of the doors of sleep. Beyond the wild, last-born of dreamland, your eyes are on the lonesome, ultimate, undiscovered skies. Moonlike and dim, you wander ever in the deep which is the secret, innermost, unknown abyss of my own soul, and in its night your spirit lives. Shall I not find the very draught that Lethe gives, sweet with your tears, And warm with savor of your kiss.
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39 038 - The Hidden Paradise 1:22
Our passion is a secret paradise Eden of lotus and the fruitful date, With silence walled and held undesecrate By man or prying seraph. We are wise as any god and goddess who have wrung from rosial fruitage of a bough forbidden. The happy wine we drink, we drink on Chidden, deep in the vales where vernal leaves are young and the first poppies lighter. Though the breath of all the gods a bolted storm prepare, and blood-red gloom of thunders blind the sun, Shall we not turn with clinging kisses there, and laughing quaff some dreamless wine of death, triumphant still in mere oblivion?
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40 039 - Cleopatra 2:12
Thy beauty is the warmth and languor and passion of a tropic autumn, caressing all the senses, with light from skies of heavy azure, With perfume from hidden orchids many-hued that burn in the berylline dusk of palms, with the balmy kiss of tropic wind and wave, and the songs of exotic birds that pass in vermilion-flashing flight from isle to isle on a cobalt sea. O sweetness in the inmost sense! As of golden fruits that have grown by the waters of Lethe, or fragrance of purple lilies crushed by the limbs of lovers in the shadow of a wood of cypress. Thou pervadest me with thy love, as the dawn pervadeth the valley among mountains, or as opaline sunset filleth the amaranth-colored sea. The desire of thy heart is upon me, as a myrtle-scented wind from the Isle of Cythera, where Aphrodite waits for Adonis, lying naked among the flag-lilies by a pool of chrysolite.
I inhale thy love, as the breath of hidden gardens of purple and scarlet, where Circe wanders, Clad in a trailing gown, whose colors are the gold of flame and the azure of the skies of autumn.
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41 040 - Ecstasy 1:24
Ecstasy. Blind with your softly fallen hair, I turn me from the twilight air. And ah, the wordless tale of love, my lips upon your lips declare. High stars are on the shadowy south, unseen, unknown. The urgent drought of desert years in one deep kiss would drain the sweetness of your mouth. Our straining arms that clasp and close ache with an ecstasy that grows, and passion in our secret veins like burning amber glows and glows. This love is sweet to have and hold, better than sandalwood or gold. After the barren Bitter loves, the mad and mournful loves of old. This love is fortunate and fair, behind its veil of fallen hair. This love hath soft and clinging arms, and a kind bosom, warm and bare.
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42 041 - Union 0:53
As the fumes of myrrh that mix with the odor of sandalwood in a temple sacred to the goddess Lakmi, as moonlight mingled with starlight in the lucent azure of an autumn lake, as the sunset rays of gold and crimson that interlace on a couch of purple cloud, even so, beloved, hath my love mingled with thine. Even so, our souls are one, like two winds that meet in a valley of rose and lotus, and fall to rest, uniting, as the still and fragrant air that lingers on a bed of falling petals.
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43 042 - Psalm 2:37
My beloved is a well of clear waters to which I have come at noontide, from the land of the abomination of desolation, from the lion-dreaded waste where nothing dwelleth. But the inconsolable crying of an evil wind, and the wandering realms and cities of the wide mirage, where no one passeth except the sun, who walked like a terrible god through the hell of the brazen skies, and the dreadful cohorts of the constellations, who pass remote in alien years. And clad with icy azures of unattainable distance. My beloved is a singing fountain, set in a wide oasis between the frondage of the fruitful palm and the branches of the flowering myrtle. The wind that bloweth thereon hath lain in a vale of cassia and myrrh, and caressed the vermilion blossoms of the pomegranate.
Whose red is the red of the lips of Astarte. A thousand nightingales are gathered there from all the gardens of lost romance, and plots of purple and silver lilies, more beautiful than the meadows of Mirage, revive the flowers of Sabean queens, and the blossoms worn by all the princesses of legend. Ah, suffer me to dwell thereby, and forget the gilded cities of desire, the domes of spectral gold, that fled from horizon to horizon before me, and left my feet in the sinking vales and shifting plains of the desert, whose waters are green with corruption, and bitter with the dust and ashes of death.
Ah, suffer me to sleep in the balsam-laden shadows of the palm and myrtle by the ever-springing fountain.
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44 043 - In November 1:13
In November.
With autumn and the flaring leaves our love must end. E'er flaunting spring shall mock thy tears and my despair, With blossoms red or pale some April bride may wear. Now, while the weary gray Forgetful heavens bend above the grief and languor of the dying lands. In one last kiss shall meet and mingle and expire the muted, last, remembering sighs of our desire. And on my face the flower-like burden of thy hands shall rest a little, and be taken tenderly. And ah, how lightly hence! And in thy golden eyes thy love. And all the ashen glory of the skies shall mingle and as in a mirror lie for me.
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45 044 - Symbols 1:07
Symbols.
No more of gold and marble, nor of snow and sunlight and vermilion, would I make my vision and my symbols. Nor would take the auroral flame of some prismatic flow, nor iris of the frail and lunar bow, Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake the night's blue slumber in a shadowy lake. To body forth my fantasies and show communicable mystery, I would find, in adamantine darkness of the earth, metals untouched of any sun, and bring black azures of the nether sea to birth, or fetch the secret, splendid leaves and blind blue lilies of an Atlantean spring.
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46 045 - The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part I 11:46
The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil, Part One. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Amy Graymoor. Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams. I crown me with the million-colored sun of secret worlds incredible, and take their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar, throned on the mounting zenith, and illumine the spaceward-flown horizons infinite. Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut, the fiery-crestened oceans rise and rise by jealous moons maleficently urged to follow me forever. Mountains horned with peaks of sharpest adamant, and maud with sulfur-lit volcanoes, lava languid, usurped the skies with thunder, button vain, and continents of serpent-shapen trees, with slimy trunks that lengthen league by league.
Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire by that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers and evil kings predominantly armed with scrolls of fulvus dragon-skin, whereon are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame, and the sirens of the stars, with foam-light songs from silver-fragrance wrought, would lure me to their crystal reefs, and moons where viper-eyed senescent devils dwell, with antic gnomes abominably wise. Heave up their icy horns across my way. But naught deters me from the goal ordained by suns and eons and immortal wars, and sung by moons and motes. The goal whose name is all the secret of forgotten glyphs, by sinful gods in torrid rubies writs, for ending of a brazen book. The goal whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand, in amplest heavens multiplied to hold, my hordes of thunder-vested avatars, And Promethean armies of my thought, that brandish clasped leavens.
There I call my memories, intolerably clad in light the peaks of paradise may wear, and lead the Armageddon of my dreams, whose instant shout of triumph is become immensity's own music. For their feet are founded on innumerable worlds, The countless thrones of all the gods that are and gods to be, or bear the seats of Asmodee, and set above the seventh paradise. Supreme and culminant omniscience manifold, and served by senses multitudinous, far posted on the shifting walls of time, With eyes that roam the star on winnowed fields of utter night and chaos, I convoke the babble of their visions, and attend at once their myriad witness. I behold an ombos, where the fallen titans dwell, with mountain-builded walls and gulfs for moat, the secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug beneath an alp-like buttress.
And I list, too late, the clang of adamantine gongs, dinned by their drowsy guardians. Whose feet have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives, imbrewed with slobber of the basilisk, or juice of wounded upas. And I see, in gardens of a crimson-litten world, the sacred flower with lips of purple flesh, and silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes of torpid azure, whom his furtive priests, at moonless eve in terror, seek to slay, with bubbling grails of sacrificial blood that hide a heweless poison. And I read, upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx, the annulling word a spiteful demon wrote with gall of slain chimeras. And I know what pentacles the lunar wizards use that once allured the gulf-returning rock, with ten great wings of furlid storm, two paws midmost an alabaster mount, and there, with boulder-weighted webs of dragon's gut, uplift by cranes a captive giant built, They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird and plucked from off his sabre-talon feet, Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood with amethysts from Mars.
I leaned to read, with slant-lipped mages, in an evil star, the monstrous archives of a war that ran through wasted eons and the prophecy of wars renewed that shall commemorate some enmity of wyvern-headed kings, even to the brink of time. I know the blooms of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury, that bloat within the craters of the moon, and in one still, selenic hour have shrunk to pools of slime and fetter, and I know what clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown, are proffered in Uranus to their gods by mole-eyed peoples. And the livid seed of some black fruit, a king in Saturnate, which cast upon his tinkling palace floor, took root between the burnished flags, and now hath mounted, and become a hellish tree, whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths, net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne, and strain at starting pillars.
I behold the slowly thronging corals, that usurp some harbor of a million-masted sea. And sun them on the league-long wharfs of gold. Bulks of enormous crimson kraken-limbed and kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns the octoremes of perished emperors, and galleys fraught with royal gems that sailed from a sea-deserted haven. Swifter grow the visions. Now a mighty city looms, hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar, to domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged with a tier on tier of captive moons, half drowned in shifting arubescence. But whose hands were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought to semblance of prodigious blooms of old? No Eremite hath lingered there to say, and no man comes to learn.
For long ago a prophet came, warning its timid king against the plague of lichens that had crept across subverted empires and the sand of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward, which slow and eluctable would come to take his fiery bastions and his fanes and quench his domes with greenish tether. Now I see a host of naked giants, armed with horns of behemoth and unicorn, who wander, blinded by the clinging spells of hostile wizardry, and stagger on to forests where the very leaves have eyes, and ebony's like wrathful dragons roar, to teeks a chuckle in the loathly gloom, where coiled the anna's lean, with serried fangs, from writhing palms with swollen bowls that moan, Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked the eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled to bask upon his azure-spotted spine.
Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing, or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew, whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then I watch a war of pygmies, met by night, with pitter of their drums of parrot's hide. On plains with no horizon, where a god might lose his way for centuries, And there, in wreathed light, in Fulgars all convolved, a route of green enormous moons ascend, with rays that like a shivering venom run on inch-long swords of lizard fang. Surveyed from this my throne, as from a central sun, the pageantries of worlds and cycles pass, forgotten splendors dream by dream unfold, like tapestry and vanish. Violet suns, or suns of changeful iridescence, bring their rays about me, like the colored lights imploring priests might lift to glorify the face of some averted god.
The songs of mystic poets in a purple world ascend to me in music that is made from unconceived perfumes, and to the pulse of love ineffable. The lute players, whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon, call forth delicious languors, never known save to their golden kings. The sorcerers of hooded stars inscrutable to God surrender me their demon-rested scrolls inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies and awful transformations. If I will, I am at once the vision and the seer, and mingle with my ever-streaming pomps and still abide their suzerain. I am the neophyte who serves a nameless God, within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompolis, where arcs the Titan worshippers might bear. Or flags to pave the threshold.
Or I am the God himself, who calls the fleeing clouds into the nave, where suns might congregate, and veils the darkling mountain of his face, with fold on solemn fold, for whom the priests amass their monthly hecatomb of gems, opals that are a camel-cumbering load. And monstrous Elebrondines, won from war with realms of hostile serpents, which arise combustible in vapors many-hued, and myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I, the King, who holds with sceptre-dropping hand the helm of some great barge of chrysolite, sailing upon an amethystine sea to isles of timeless summer. For the snows of hyperborean winter, and their winds sleep in his jewel-builded capital. Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry, nor conjured sons may rout them.
So he flees, with captive kings to urge his serried ores, hopeful of dales where Amaranthine dawn hath never left the faintly sighing lote and fields of lisping moly. Or I fare, impanopolied with azure diamond, as hero of a quest at Kernan Lights. To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames, that feed upon the sullen marl, and soar to wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap with tongues intolerably lengthening, that lick the blenched heavens. But there lives, secure as in a garden walled from wind, a lonely flower by a placid well, midmost the flaring tumult of the flames, that roars as roars the storm-possessed sea, implacable for ever. And within that simple grail the blossom lifts. There lies one drop of an incomparable dew, which heals the parted wariness of kings, and cures the wound of wisdom.
I am paged to an emperor who reigns ten thousand years, and through his labyrinthine palace-rooms, through courts and colonnades and balconies, wherein immensity itself is mazed, I seek the golden gorget he hath lost. On which the names of his conniving stars are writ in little sapphires, and I roam for centuries, and hear the brazen clocks innumerably clang with such a sound as brazen hammers make by devils dinned on tombs of all the dead. And nevermore I find the gorgets, but at length I find a sealed room whose nameless prisoner moans with a nameless torture, and would turn to hell's red rack as to a lilied couch from that whereon they stretched him. And I find, prostrate, upon a lotus-painted floor, the loveliest of all beloved slaves my emperor hath.
And from her pulseless side a serpent rises, whiter than the root of some benefic bloom in darkness grown, and gazes up with greenlit eyes that seem like drops of cold congealing poison.
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47 046 - The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part II 16:38
The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil, Part Two. From Ebony and Crystal, by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Amy Graymoor. Hark! What word was whispered in a tongue unknown, in crypts of some impenetrable world? Whose is the dark dethroning secrecy I cannot share? Though I am king of sons, and king therewith of strong eternity, whose gnomons would their swords of shadow guard my gates and slay the intruder? Silence loads the wind of ether, and the worlds are still to hear the word that flees me. All my dreams fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised to semblance by a necromant, and leave spirit and sense unthinkably alone, above a universe of shrouded stars and suns that wander cowled with sullen gloom, like witches to a sabbath.
Fear is born in crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings to lift it upward like a hellish worm feigned for the flesh of seraphs. Eyes that gleam, but are not eyes of suns or galaxies. Gather and throng to the base of darkness. Flame behind some black abysmal curtain burns, implacable and fanned to whitest wrath by razed wings that flail the whiffled gloom and make a brief and broken wind that moans as one who rides a throbbing rack. There is a thing that crouches, worlds and years remote, whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth a note to shatter the donjon keeps of time and crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark for ages, and my tolling heart suspends its clamor as within the clutch of death, tightening with tense, hermetic rigors.
Then, in one enormous, million-flashing flame, the stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls and beam to their responding planets. Time is mine once more, and armies of its dreams rally to that insuperable throne firmed on the central zenith. Now I seek the meads of shining moly I had found in some remoter vision, by a stream no cloud hath ever tarnished, where the sun, a gold Narcissus, loiters evermore above his golden image. But I find a corpse the ebbing water will not keep, with eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell, and felt the hissing embers, and the flowers about me turn to hooded serpents, swayed by flutes of devils in a hellish dance, meet for the knot of Satan, Where he reigns above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed by sarabands of witches.
But I turn to mountains, guarding with their horns of snow the source of that befouled rill, and seek a pinnacle where none but eagles climb, and they with failing pennons. But in vain I flee, for on that pylon of the sky some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame, red fires that curl and cluster to my tread, trying the summit's narrow cirque. And now I see a silver python far beneath, vast as a river that a fiend hath witched, and forced to flow, remayent in its course, to fountains whence it issued. Rapidly it winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon it hath entwined the pinnacle I keep, and gapes with a fanged unfathomable maw.
Wherein great Typhon and Enceladus were orts of daily glut. But I am gone, for at my call a hippogriff hath come, and firm between his thunder-beating wings I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon, and see the earth, a spurned pebble, fall lost in the fields of nether stars, and seek a planet where the outwearied wings of time might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes of death be stayed and loiter in reprieve above some deathless lily. For therein beauty hath found an avatar of flowers, blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame, from peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole, and turn the skies to perfume. There I find a lonely castle, calm and unbeset, save by the purple spears of amaranth and tender sordid iris.
Walls up-built of flushed marble, wonderful with rose, and domes like golden bubbles, and minarets that take the clouds as coronal, These are mine, for voiceless looms the peaceful Barbican, and the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft as if to smile a welcome. So I leave my hyphograph to crop the magic meads, and pass into a court the lilies hold, and tread them to a fragrance that pursues to win the portico, whose columns, carved of lazuli and amber, mock the palms of bright, identic forests, capitoled with fronds of stone fretted to airy lace. Enfolding droops that seem as tawny clusters of breasts of unknown hoories, and convolved with vines of shut and shadowy, leaved flowers, like the dropped lids of women, that endure some loin-dissolving rapture.
Through a door, enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously, I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun, and hear, in gloom, that changing color's cloud, a chuckle sharp as crepitating ice. Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned who strive in Antenora. When my eyes undazzle, and the cloud of color fades, I find me in a monster-guarded room, where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd on walls in evil sculptor rot, and beasts wherein the sloth and vampire bats unite, pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze, usurp the shadowy interval of lamps that hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple, borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool, in fields where the wide coquitus flows his bound, a crackling smile around that circle runs, and all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me with eyes that turn to glowing coals.
A fear that found no name in Babel flings me on. Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall within whose weary, self-reverting ground the languid curtains, heavier than Paul's, innumerably depict a weary king, who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands in lakes of emerald evening or the fields of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake. With tremors of a silken sighing mirth, and whispers of the innumerable King, breathing a tale of ancient pestilence, whose very words are vile contagion. Then I reach a room where Cariatides, carved in the form of tall, voluptuous Titan women, surround a throne of flowering ebony, where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne there lulls a wan enormous worm, whose bulk, tumid with all the rottenness of kings, o'erflows its arms with fold on creased fold of fat of seemly bloating.
Open-mouthed he leans, and from his throat a score of tongues, depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers, drivel with phosphorescent slime, That runs down all his length of soft and monstrous folds, and creeping among the flowers of ebony, lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now, ere the horror ope these red and lashless slits, of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn, and follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom, lined by the statues, with their mighty limbs, ends in a golden-roofed balcony, spearing the flowered horizon. Ere my heart hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses, I listen. From beyond the horizon's rim, a mutter faint as when the far Simoon, mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth, wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night that fling the doom of cities from their folds, and musters in its van a thousand winds, that with disrooted palms for besoms rise and sweep the sands to fury, as the storm.
Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears of them that toil in fields of sesame. So grows the mutter, and a sharrow creeps above the gold horizon, like a dawn of darkness climbing sunward. Now they come, a sabbath of abominable shapes, led by the fiends and lemmei of worlds that owned my sway aforetime. Cockatrice, Python, Tregalaphus, Leviathan, Chimera, Matricoras, Behemoths, Giron, and Sphinx, and Hydra, on my ken arise as might some aphrite-builded city, consummate in the lifting of a lash, with thunderous domes and sounding obelisks and towers of night and fire alternate. Wings of white-hot stone along the hissing wind bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts of hells beyond Rutilechus, and things Whose lightless length would meet the gyre of moons, born from the caverns of a dying sun, uncoiled to the very zenith, half-disclosed from gulfs below the horizon.
Octopi, like blazing moons with countless arms of fire, climb from the seas of ever-surging flame that roll and roar through planets unconsumed, beating on coasts of unknown metals. Beasts that range the mighty worlds of Elioth rise, aforesting the heavens with multitudinous horns, within whose maze the winds are lost, and borne on cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras, the shell-wrought towers of ocean witches' loam, and griffon-mounted gods and demons throned on sable dragons, and the cockadrills that bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs. And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saif, on whom titanic scorpions fawn, and armies that move with fronts reverted from the foe, and strike athwart their soldiers at the shapes their shields reflect in crystal, and Eidola fashioned within unfathomable caves by hands of eyeless peoples, and the blind and worm-shaped monsters of a sunless world with krakens from the ultimate abyss.
And Demogorgons of the outer dark, arising, shout with multitudinous thunders, and threatening me with dooms ineffable, in words whereat the heavens leap to flame advance on the magic palace. Thrown before, for league on league, their blasting shadows blight and eat like fire the Amaranthine meads, leaving an ashen desert. In the palace I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl. And all the women-shapen columns moan, babbling with unknown terror. In my fear, a monstrous dread unnamed in any hell, I rise and flee, with the fleeing wind for wings. And in a trice the magic palace reels, and spiring to a single tower of flame goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember. Flown beyond the world, beyond that fleeing wind, I reach the Gulf's irrespirable verge.
Where fails the strongest storm for breath and fall, supportless through the nadir-plunged gloom, beyond the scope and vision of the sun, to other skies and systems. In a world deep-wooded with multi-colored fungi, that soar to semblance of fantastic palms, I fall as falls the meteor stone, and break a score of trunks to powder. All unhurt I rise, and through the illimitable woods, among the trees of flimsy opal, roam, and see their tops that clamber, hour by hour, to touch the sun's virus. Things unseen, whose charnel breath informs the tideless air with spreading pools of foeter. Follow me, elusive past the ever-changing palms, and pittering moths with wide and ashen wings flit on before, and insects, ember-hued, descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom and quench themselves in crumbling thickets.
Heard far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown resounds at measured intervals of time, shaking the riper trees to dust. That falls in clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me beneath a pall of iris. Now the palms grow far apart and lessen momently to shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them I see an empty desert, all ablaze with amethysts and rubies, and the dust of garnets or carnelians. On I roam, treading the gorgeous grit that dazzles me with leaping waves of endless rudalence, whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom. Through which I wander, blind as any kobold, till underfoot the grinding sands give place to stone or metal, with a massive ring more welcome to mine ears than golden bells or tinkle of silver fountains.
When the gloom of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge of a broad black plain of adamant, that reaches, level as a windless water, to the verge of all the world. And through the sable plain, a hundred streams of shattered marble run, and streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze, like to the ruin of all the wars of time, to plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts adown the gulf's eternal. So I follow, between a river of steel and a river of bronze, with ripples loud and tuneless as the clash of a million lutes, and come to the precipice from which they fall. And make the mighty sound of a million swords that meet a million shields, or din of spears and armor in the wars of all the worlds and eons.
Far beneath they fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void, and vanish like a stream of broken stars into the nether darkness. Nor the gods of any sun, nor demons of the gulf, will dare to know what everlasting sea is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore, with mighty tides unebbing. Lo! what cloud of night of sudden and supreme eclipse is on the suns of Opal? At my side the rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam, through darkness falling as the night that falls from mighty spheres extinguished. Turning now, I see betwixt the desert and the suns the poisoned wings of all the dragon-rout, far-flown in black occlusion thousandfold, through stars and deeps and devastated worlds upon my trail of terror.
Griffins, rocks, and sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged, after the ravine of dispeopled lands, with harpies and the vulture-birds of Hell, hot from abominable feasts and feigned to cool their beaks and talons in my blood. All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear, with rank on rank of foul, colossal worms, like pillars of embattled night and flame, looms on the wide horizon. From the van I hear the shriek of wyvers. Loud and shrill as tempests in a broken fane, and roar of sphinxes like the unrelenting toll of bells from towers infernal. Cloud on cloud they arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind falls from them like the wind before the storm, and in the wind my cloven garment streams and flutters in the face of all the void, even as flows a flapping spirit lost on the pit's undying tempest.
Louder grows the thunder of the streams of stone and bronze, redoubled with the roar of torrent wings inseparably mingled. Scarce I keep my footing in the gulfward winds of fear, and mighty thunders beating to the void and sea-like waves incessant, and would flee with them, and prove the nadir-founded night, where falls the streams of ruin. But when I reach the verge, and seek, through sun-defeating gloom, to measure with my gaze the dread descent, I see a tiny star within the depths, a light that stays me, while the wings of doom convene their thickening thousands. For the star increases, taking to its hue-less orb, with all the speed of horror-changed dreams, the light as of a million million moons.
And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed, it grows and grows, a huge white eyeless face. That fills the void and fills the universe, and bloats against the limits of the world with lips of flame that open.
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48 047 - The Sorrow of the Winds 1:05
The Sorrow of the Winds O winds that pass uncomforted through all the peacefulness of spring, and tell the trees your sorrowing, that they must mourn till ye are fled. Think ye the Tyrian distance holds the crystal of unquestioned sleep. That those forgetful purples keep no veiled, contentious greens and golds. Half with communicated grief, half that they are not free to pass with you across the flickering grass, mourns each inclined bough and leaf. And I, with soul disquieted, shall find within the haunted spring no peace till your strange sorrowing is down the Tyrian distance fled.
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49 048 - Artemis 1:23
In the green and flowerless garden I have dreamt, Lying beneath perennial moons apart, Whose cypress-builded powers and ivy-plighted myrtles, none shall part. In the funereal maze of larch and laurel, across white lawns, athwart the spectral mountains, seen through the sighing haze of all the high and moon-suspended fountains. With feet enshaded by the fruitless green of summer trees that bear no summer blossom, with wintry lustres laid upon the mounded marble of thy bosom, Thou dost await, O mournful, enigmatic image, Of love-bewildered Artemis, Whose tender lips too late, or all too soon, Have sought the wounding kiss.
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50 049 - Love is Not Yours, Love is Not Mine 0:50
Love is not yours. Love is not mine.
Love is not yours. Love is not mine.
Love is not yours. Love is not mine. It is the tranquil twilight heaven through which our pauseless feet are driven into the vast and desert noon. Love is not mine. Love is not yours. It is a flying fire that passes, perishing on the blind morasses, after the frail and perished moon.
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51 050 - The City in the Desert 1:17
The City in the Desert In a lost land that only dreams have known, where flaming suns walk naked and alone, among horizons bright as molten brass, and glowing heavens like furnaces of glass, it rears, with dome and tower manifold, Rich as a dawn of amaranth and gold, or gorgeous as the phoenix, born of fire, and soaring from an opalescent pyre sheer to the zenith. Like some anadim of titan jewels turned to flame and dream, the city crowds the far horizon light, over the flowered meads of Damason, a desert isle of Maldropo, wherein the thoroughfare and opal-fruited palm And heaven-thronging minarets becalm the seas of azure wind.
These lines were remembered out of a dream, and are given verbatim.
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52 051 - The Melancholy Pool 1:12
The Melancholy Pool. Marked by that priesthood of the night's misrule, the shadow cowled imprecatory trees, cypress that guarded woodland secrecies, and graves that waited the delaying ghoul, Nathless I neared the melancholy pool. Chief care of all, but a lost ear sentinel'd, by those whose roots were deepest in the dead eld. Where the thwart wove boughs were wet and cold, as with a mist of poison, I drew near, to mark the tired stars peer dimly down through riven branches from the height of space, and shudder in those waters with quick fear, where in the black deeps the pale moon seemed to drown. A haggard girl with a dead, despairing face.
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53 052 - The Mirrors of Beauty 1:08
The Mirrors of Beauty Beauty hath many mirrors, multifold in ocean, or the foam, the gem, the dew, or well in rivulet, her eyes renew with moon or sun their glories bright or cold, whether in nights the ruby planets hold. Or with somber light and icy hue of skies decembral, or the autumn's blue, or dawn or evening of the vernal gold. Often, upon the solitary sea, she lieth, ere the wind shall gather breath, one with the reflex of infinity. In pools profounder for the twilight sky, her vision dwells, or in the poet's eye, or the black crystal of the eyes of death.
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54 053 - Winter Moonlight 0:54
Winter Moonlight The silence of the silver night lies visibly upon the pines. In marble flame the moon declines where spectral mountains dream in light. And pale as with eternal sleep, the enchanted valleys, far and strange, Extend forever without change beneath the veiling splendors deep. Carven of steel or fretted stone, one stark and leafless autumn tree with shadows made of ebony lean on the moonward field alone.
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55 054 - To the Beloved 1:08
To the Beloved Green suns, and suns of garnet I have known, Turning, with suns that mock the sapphire gem, The constellated moons that mirror them to ever-changing opals, On the flown horizons I have followed, all alone, To meadows of mirage the desert's hem, And sought to break the ghostly, golden stem Of roses of illusion, briefly blown by evanescent waters. One by one, the outward ways of wonder I have trod Through alien lives ineffable. But none hath held the troublous marvel and surprise That gleams and trembles in thy slightest nod, Or sleeps between the eyelids and thine eyes.
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56 055 - Requiescat 1:11
What was love's worth, who lived with the roses? Love that is earth, and with earth reposes.
What was love's wonder? Scent of the flowers after the thunder, thunder and showers. What were the breathless words that he said? Love that was deathless, love that is dead. Echo hath taken the song and flown, none shall awaken music and moan. Buds and the flower, all that love found. Last but an hour, strewn on his mound.
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57 056 - Mirage 1:27
Deem ye the veiling vision will abide, the marvel and the glamour and the dream which lies in light upon the barren world. The wings of phoenix towering to the sun, nor opals nor the morning foam, may hold the hueful flame that as from fairy moons is mirrored on the sand. Where many a time from fields that hem with golden asphodel, a river like a dragon coiled in light, rise to the noon, The hovering minarets and soaring walls of cities Ilion-like, till the dim winds are hung with palaces of Orient Madre Pearl.
Forever lost, like sunset on a land of old romance, the splendor fails and leaves the traveler in endless deserts, flaming to the day.
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58 057 - Inheritance 1:16
On all the sovereignty thine eyes obtain, thy grant of vision from the royal sun, and all thine appanage of lordly dream, the dust, wherewith the worm is parsena, waits with perennial claim, nor will resign its right in thee. All glories and all gleams, the seven splendours that inform the light, and beauties immemorial as the moon robbing the barren world, all which thine eyes hold for inheritance, at length shall fill the blindness and oblivion of the grave, and leave it dark. With dustiness and night, upon thy mouth of starry, proud desire, With slumber for thy dreams, thou wilt repose. Nor startle when the lazy loitering worm Is slow to leave the tavern of thy brain.
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59 058 - Autumnal 1:09
In all the pleasances where love was lord, Blossom the mournful immortelles alone. The fallen roses crumble and are blown, A snow of red about the barren sward. The misty sun is grown a dimmer gold. Only the leaves, the leaves forever seem to tell and treasure, in a gorgeous dream, the oriot fervour of the dawns of old. Only for us remains the memory of sultry moons and summer suns that were, and we have found, where fallen roses stir, the immortelles that flower mournfully.
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60 059 - Chant of Autumn 1:22
Like the voice of a golden star, heard from afar, perishing beauty calls out of the mist and rain. Like the song of a silver wind when the night is blind, murmuring music falls, never to rise again. Voice of the leaves that die, whisper and sigh, Of ruinous gardens waning, rose by ungathered rose, Dollar of pines immortal that guard the portal, Of a lonely mead retaining blossoms that no man knows, Voices of love and the autumn sun, in my heart year one, Fairer the petals that fall. Dearer the beauty that dies, and the pyres of autumn burning than a thousand springs returning. O perishing loves that call, in my heart and the hollow skies.
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61 060 - Echo of Memnon 1:10
Echo of Memnon I wondered ere the dream was done, Where over Nylas's Nenufars, With all its ears of quivering stars, The darkness listened for the sun. Ere shadows were, ere night was gone, I found the one whom suns had sought, And waiting at his feet, Methought had speech with Memnon in the dawn. Sad as the last lamenting star, he sang, and clear as morning's gold, unto his voice I saw unfold the hesitant pale Nenophar. But Dolores like the peal of dooms, and proclamation of the night, the waste returned that voice of light with echo from its hollow tombs.
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62 061 - Twilight on the Snow 0:53
Before the hills high altar bowed, the trees are druids, weird and white, facing the vision of the light, with ancient lips to silence vowed. No certain sound the woods aver, nor motion save of formless wings, filled with faint twilight flutterings, With thronging gloom and shadow stir. And hidden in a hollow dell lie all the winds that magic trees have lulled with crystal wizardries, and bound about with Merlin's spell.
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63 062 - Image 1:32
Calm as a long-forgotten marble god who smiles, Colossal in the grim serenity of stone, Upon the broken pillars lying all alone, Athwart the horizon's infinite and yellow miles, Whom neither desert darkness nor desert noon Nor dawns that render terrible the bare dead land, nor winds that wrap his mighty form in palls of sand, nor the medusa of the dumb and stony moon, shall evermore dismay, nor lion, nor the lynx, with silken sheaved claws and eyes of golden gleed, nor any griffin from the gates of treasure freed to roam the gulf, Nor any wild and wandering Sphinx. Even thus, amid the waste of all fair things that were, of high memorial dreams immense and overthrown, I wait forever, and about my face is blown the sand of crumbling cenotaph and sepulchre.
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64 063 - The Refuge of Beauty 1:26
From regions of the sun's half-dreamt decay, All day the cruel rain strikes darkly down, And from the night thy fatal stars shall frown. Beauty, wilt thou abide this night and day?
Ruffless, at portals dark and desperate, wilt thou a shelter unrefused implore, and past the tomb's too hospitable door, evade thy lover in eluding hate?
Alas, for what have I to offer thee? Chill halls of mind. Dark rooms of memory where thou shalt dwell with woes and thoughts infirm.
This rumor-thronged citadel of sense, trembling before some nameless imminence, and fellow guestship with the gutless worm.
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65 064 - Nightmare 1:08
As though a thousand vampires from the day fleeing unseen, oppressed that nightly deep, the straightening and darkened skies of sleep, closed on the dreamland dale in which I lay. Eternal tensions numbed the wings of time. While through the unending narrow ways I sought awakening. Up precipitous gloom I thought to reach the dawn, far-pennacled sublime. Rejected at the closened gates of light, I turned, and down new dreams and shadows fled. Where beetling shapes of veiled colossal dread, with gothic winds, enormous arched the night.
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66 065 - The Mummy 1:08
The Mummy From Ebony and Crystal From out the light of many a mightier day, From pharaonic splendour, memphian gloom, And from the night aeonian of the tomb, They brought him forth to meet the modern ray. Upon his brow the unbroken seal of clay, While gods have gone to a forgotten doom, and desolation and the dust assume, temple and court, a mingling in decay. From out the everlasting womb sublime of cyclopean death, within a land of tombs and cities rotting in the sun, He is reborn to mock the might of time, while kings have built against oblivion with walls and columns of the windy sand.
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67 066 - Forgetfulness 0:56
My life is less than any broken glass. My long and weary love, thy lips on one. All in all is turned to mere oblivion. With the gray flowers and the fallen grass of yesteryear, and on the winds that pass, thy music and thy memory are one. For thy wan face, desired above the sun, only some languid echo saith alas. Love is no more immemorably flown as any leaf or petal, but to me the very fields are still and strange and lone. The forest and the garden fail for breath, where the dumb heavens hold implacably, and autumn like the marble sleep of death.
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68 067 - Flamingoes 0:44
On skies of tropic evening broad and barrel green, above a tranquil sea of molten malachite, with flare of scarlet wings in long and level flight, the soundless fleet flamingos pass to isles unseen. They pass and disappear, where darkening palms indent, the horizon underneath some high and tawny star. Lost in the sunset gulfs of glowing cinnabar, Where sinks the painted moon with prows of orpiment.
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69 068 - The Chimaera 1:24
The Chimera.
Oh, who will slay the last Chimera? Time, though love and death have many a cunning dart. Despite of these, and close wrought webs of art and slumber. With a slow lithian line. Still, still he lives, and though thy feet attain the lunar peaks of ice and crystal, he, some knight of agonized eternity, with brazen teeth, shall gnaw thy fretted brain. Gorged with the dust of thrones and fanes destroyed, with lidless eyes like moons of adamant, And vaulted mouth and portaling the void. He crouches like a passive sphinx before some temple gate, or, grinning, moves to grant thine entrance at the monarch's golden door.
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70 069 - Satan Unrepentant 6:27
Satan Unrepentant Lost from those archangelic thrones that star fadeless and fixed heaven's light of azure bliss, Rejected of his splendour, and depressed beyond the birth of the first sun, And lower than the last star's decline, I here endure, Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful, and unregretful in the doubted dark, throneless, that greatens chaosward, albeit from chanting stars that throng the nave of night, lost echoes wander here, and of his praise with ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar, and shouted from the flaming mouths of suns. The shadows of impalpable black deeps, deep upon deep, accumulate, close down, around my head, concentred, while above, in the lit, loftier blue, star after star spins endless orbits betwixt me and heaven.
And at my feet, mysterious chaos breaks, abrupt, immeasurable, Round his throne now throbs the rhythmic resonance of suns, incessant, perfect, music infinite. I, throneless, hear the discords of the dark, and roar of ruin uncreate, than which some vast cacophony of dragons heard in wasted worlds were purer melody. The universe his tyranny constrains turns on. In old and consummated gulfs the stars that wield his judgment wait at hand, and in new deeps apocalyptic suns prepare his coming. Lo! his mighty whim to rear and mar goes forth enormously in nights and constellations. Darkness hears enraged suns that bellow down the deep God's ravenous and insatiable will. And he is strong with change, and rideth forth in whirlwind clothed, with thunders and with doom to the red stars.
God's throne is rear'd of change. Its myriad and successive hands support like music his omnipotence. That fails if mercy, or if justice interrupt the sequence of that tyranny, begun upon injustice, and doomed evermore to stand thereby. I, who with will not less than his, but lesser strength, opposed to him this unsubmissive brow and lifted mind, he holds remote in nullity and night, Doubtful between old chaos and the deeps, Betrayed by time to vassalage. Methinks all tyrants fear whom they may not destroy, And I, that am of essence one with his, though less in measure, He may not destroy, and but withstands, in gulfs of dark suspense, A secret dread for ever. For God knows this quiet will, irrevocably set against his own, and this mine old revolt, yet stubborn, and confirmed eternally.
And with the hatred born of fear, and fed ever thereby, God hates me. And his gaze sees the bright menace of mine eyes afar, through midnight, and the innumerable blaze of servile suns. Lo! strong in tyranny the despot trembles that I stand opposed. For fain am I to hush the anguished cries of substance, broken on the racks of change, of matter tortured into life. And God, knowing this, dreads evermore some huge mishap. That, in the vigils of omnipotence once careless, I shall enter heaven, or he himself, with weight of some unwanted act, thoughtless, perturb his balanced tyranny to mine advance of watchful aspiration. With rumoured thunder and enormous groan, Burden of sound that heavens overborne let slip from deep to deep, even to this, where climb the huge cacophonies of chaos, God's universe moves on.
Confirm'd in pride, in patient majesty, serene and strong, I wait the dreamt inevitable hour, fulfilled of orbit ultimate, when God, whether through his mischance or mine own deed, Or rise of other and extremer strength shall vanish, and the lightened universe no more remember him than silence does an ancient thunder. I know not if these mine all-indomitable eyes shall see a maimed and dwindled godhead cast among the stars of his creating, and beneath the unnumbered rush of swift and shining feet, trodden into night. Or mark the fiery breath of his infuriate suns blaze forth upon and scorch that coarsened essence. Or his flame drawn through the windy halls of nothingness, a mightier comet, roar and ridden down potentous under chaos.
Ay, but wait, in strong majestic patience equable, that hour of consummation and of doom, of justice and rebellion justified.
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71 070 - The Abyss Triumphant 1:23
Chaos was re-established over all, where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps fled unrelated, cold, immusical. Above the tumult, heaven alone endured. Long since the bursting walls of hell had poured, demon and damned to peace erstwhile denied. Within the abyss, God's might had not immured. He could but thwart it with creative mace, and now it rose above the heavenly base, mordant at pillars rotten through and through, of matter's last, Most form abiding place. Bastion and minaret began to nod, till all the pile, unmindful of his rod, dissolved in thunder, and the void abyss caught like a quicksand at the feet of God.
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72 071 - The Motes 0:37
I saw a universe today, through a disclosing bar of light. The motes were whirled in gleaming flight, that briefly dawned and sank away. Each had its swift and tiny noon. In orbit streams I marked them flit, successively revealed and lit. The sunlight paled and shifted soon.
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73 072 - The Medusa of Despair 1:15
I may not mask forever with the grace of woven flowers thine eyes of staring stone, Ere fatally I front thee, fully known, The guarded horror of thy haggard face, thy visage carven from the heart long dead of some white frozen star. Ere thou astound my life to thine own likeness, and confound, depart, and curse more kindred things instead. Triumphant through what realms of elder doom, where even the swat vans of time are stunned. Seek thou some fit Cimmerian citadel, And mighty cities, desolate, unsunned, Whose walls of horrent and enormous gloom Make sharp the horizon of the light of hell.
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74 073 - Laus Mortis 1:14
The imperishable phantoms, love and fame, nor beauty, burning on the mist and mire, a fugitive, uncapturable fire, nor God that is a darkness and a name. Not these, not these my coric dreams acclaim. But death, the last and ultimate desire, great death, I praise with litany and lyre, and sombre prayer, implacably the same. Oh, incommunicable hope that lies deep in despair, as tapers that illumine some fearful fan's arcanic, sacred gloom. O solace of all weary hearts and wise, the dream which Satan hath for Anodyne, which is to God a sweet and secret wine.
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75 074 - The Ghoul and the Seraph 7:05
The ghoul and the seraph, seeing a cemetery by moonlight. The ghoul emerges from the shade of a cypress and sings. The song. Ho, ho, the pest is on the wing. Ha, ha, the sweet and crimson foam. Upon the lips of churl and king, no worm but hath a feastful home. Ha, ha, the pest is on the wing. Ho, ho, his kiss incarnadines, the brows of maiden, queen and whore. The nun to him, her cheek resigns. Won lips were never kissed before, his ancient kiss incarnadines. Good cheer to thee, white worm of death. The priest within the brothel dies. The bod hath sickened from his breath. In grave half dug the digger lies. Good cheer to thee, white worm of death. The seraph appears from among the trees, half-walking, half-flying, with wings whose iris the moonlight has rendered faint, and pauses abruptly at sight of the ghoul.
The seraph. What gardener in crudded fields of hell, or scullion of the devil's house art thou, to whom the filth of Malabod clings, and reek of horrid rest-fews? Thou art knurled and black as any kobold from the mines, where demons delve for orichoth and steel, to forge the racks of Satan. On thy face, detestable and evil as might haunt, the last delirium of a dying hag, or necromancer's madness fall thy locks, like sodden reeds that trail an archer on. From shores of night and horror, and thy hands like roots of cypresses upturn in storm, That shall retain their grisly provender, make the glad wine and manna of the skies turn to a qualmish sickness in my veins. The ghoul. And who art thou, some white-faced fool of God, with wings that emulate the giddy bird, and bloodless mouth forever filled with psalms, in lieu of honest victuals?
Askest thou my name? I am the ghoul Necromalor. In new-made graves I delve for sustenance, as man within his turnip fields. I take for table the uprooted slab that bears the words in pace, black and curdled blood of cadavers in all my cupless wine. Slow drunken is the dainty vampire drinks from pulses open in never-ending sleep. The Seraph. O foulness born as of the ninefold curse, of dragon-mouthed Apollon plumed with darts, and armed with horns of incandescent bronze, O darkest Satan's nightmare, or the fruit of Belial's rape on hell's black hippogriff. What knowest thou of paradise? Where grow the gardens of the manna-laden mirth? And Lodo's never known to Ulysses, whose fruit provides our long and sateless banquet, where boundless fields, unfurrowed and unsewn, Supply for God's own appanage their poison.
Sweeter than nard, the Persian air compounds with frankincense from Isles of India, where flame-leaved forests infinitely teem, with palms of tremulous opal from whose top ambrosial honeys fall forevermore in rains of necrid light, where rise and rise terrace on Hyacithine Terrace, hills hung with the grapes that dripped cerulean wine, One drought whereof dissolves eternity in bliss oblivious and supernal dream.
The Ghoul. To all the meat their bellies must commend, to all the according wine. For me I wot, the cates whereof thou braggest were as wind, in halls where men had feasted yesterday, or furbished bones the full hyena leaves, tiger and pig have their apportioned glut. Nor lacks the shark his provender, the bird is nourished with the worm of charnels. Man or the gray wolf will slay and eat the bird, till wolf and man be carry-on for the worm. Who wouldst thou, as the elfin lily does, or as the puffy and myrtle, pink with love, I draw me from the unreluctant dead? The rightful meat my belly's law demands. Eaters of death are all. Life shall not live, save that its food be death. No autonomy of any star or heaven's remotest moon, but hath a billion, billion times been made the food of insatiable life and food, or death insatiate.
For all is change, change that hath wrought the chancer and the rose, and wrought the star and wrought the sapphire stone, and lit great altars in the eyes of lions, change that hath made the very gods from slime. Drawn from the pits of Python, and will fling gods in their builded heavens back again to slime. The fruits of archangelic light thou braggest of, and grapes of azure wine, have been the dung of dragons, and the blood of toads and phlegaton, each particle that is their splendor clomb in separate ways. Through suns and worlds and cycles infinite, through burning broom of systems unbegone, or manes of long-haired comets that have lashed the night of space to fury and to fire, and in the core of cold and lightless stars and in immolable metals deep, each autonomy have slept.
They're known the slime of Cyclopean oceans turned to air before the suns of Ophlechus rose, and they've known the interstellar nine. And they have lain at root of sightless flowers, in worlds without a sun, or at the heart of monstroside and panning flowers of flesh.
The The ghoul turns his back on the seraph and moves away singing the song. O Condor, keep thou mountain ways above the long Andinian lands. Giringle, guard the eastern sands where the forsaken camel strays. Beetle and worm and I will ward the feastful graves of Loughton Lord. O warm and bright the blood that lies upon the wounded lion's trail. Hyena, laugh, and jackal, wail, and ring him round who turns and dies. Beetle and worm and I will ward the feastful graves of Loughton Lord. Raven and kestrel, kite and crow, the swart patrol of northern lands, gather your noisy bickering bands, the reindeer bleeds upon the snow. Beetle and worm and I will ward the feastful graves of lout and lord. Arms of a wanton girl are good, or hands of harp player and knight.
Breasts of the nun be sweet and white, sweet as the festive friar's blood. Beetle and worm and I will ward the feastful graves of lout and lord.
End of the Ghoul and Seraph.
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76 075 - At Sunrise 1:13
At sunrise. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Nancy Beard. March 2016, Kingston, New York.
The moon declines in lonely gold among the stars of ashen gray, veiling the pallors of decay. With clouds and glories, fold on fold. Within a crystal interlude, stillness and twilight rest a while. Ere the bright snow's illumined smile, from peaks where sun purples brood.
And from the low Favonian born, a light wind blows so dulcetly. It seems the futile silver sigh, breathed by the lingering moon forlorn.
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77 076 - The Land of Evil Stars 1:56
The Land of Evil Stars from Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Sandra Cullen. The Land of Evil Stars.
Neath blue days and golden green Blooms the glorious land serene, Flaming shields of dawns between, And the rapt white flowers suffice to illum. With their bright eyes fluctuant ecstatic gloom, Twixt the fallen emerald sun, And the unrisen azure one. But the season of the night comes in all the sun's despite, And ah, gorgeous then their sorrows, At departure into morrows, of far other lands forgot, Until now remembered not, For the lovelier flowers of this, and each lake's pure lucency, and recalled regretfully, regretfully, for leaving this. In the star-possessed night, the land knows another light. All the small and evil rays of the sorceress orbs ablaze, with ecstatical, intense hate, and still Malevolence.
Dwelling on the fields below from the ascendancy of even, till the sun's re-entering heaven glorify with triple glow the dim flowers smitten low. Ah, not cold or kind as ours.
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78 077 - The Harlot of the World 1:10
Thou harlot who beguilest all, Beautiful in thy house the gorgeous world, Abidest thou, where powers pinion furled, And flying splendours follow to thy call, Innumerous like the stars or like the dust. Nations and monarchs were thy thralls of yore. Unto the grave's old womb for evermore hast thou betrayed the passion and the lust. Fair as the moon of summer is thy face, and mystical with cloudiness of hair, only an eye, so burnless by delight, shall find within thy phosphorescent gaze those caverns of corruption and despair Where the worm toileth in the charnel night.
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79 078 - The Hope of the Infinite 1:16
My hope is in the unharvestable deep That shows with Eve the treasure of the stars To mournful kings behind their palace bars And wanderers outworn And boys who weep a shattered bauble Or above the sleep of headsmen, and of men condemned to die, pours out the moon's white mercy from on high, or hides with clement gloom the hours that creep like death-worms to the grave. And I have taken, from storming seas by sunset glorified, or from the dawn of ashen wastes and wide, some light regathered from the lamps that wane. And promise of a translunary Spain, Where love's forgone and forfeit dreams abide.
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80 079 - Love Malevolent 1:15
I fain would love thee, but thy lips are fed with poison honey, hived in a skull. They seem like scarlet poppies, beautiful for delving roots, deep clenched in the dead. Thine eyes are coloured like the nightshade flower. Blent in the opiate perfume of thy breath, are dreams and purple sleep and scented death for him that is thy lover for an hour. Mandragora, within the graveyard grown, hath given thee its carnal root to eat, and vipers born ennursled in a tomb, from fawning mouths drip venom at thy feet. Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone Love would I drink as dew from poison bloom.
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81 080 - Palms 0:43
Palms in the sunset of a languid summer land. Sculpture of living green on dreamy scarlet light, dividing as a wall the twilight from the night. How magically still and luminous they stand, inclining fretted leaves above some red lagoon, careless alike in mystic and immense repose, of the flamingo-colored. Flying sun that goes, or the slow coming of the lion-colored moon.
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82 081 - Memnon at Midnight 1:20
Dedicated to Albert M. Bender Methought upon the tomb-encumbered shore I stood of Egypt's lone monarchal stream, and saw immortal Memnon Thrown supreme in gloom as of that Memphian night of yore. Fold upon fold, purpureal he wore, beneath the star-born canopy extreme, carven of silence and colossal dream, where waters flowed like sleep forevermore. Lo, in the darkness, thick with dust of years, how many a ghostly god around his throne With thronging winds that were forgotten fames, stood ere the dawn restored to ancient years, the long withholden thunder of their names, and music stilled to monumental stone.
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83 082 - Eidolon 1:13
Chryselephantine, clear as carven flame, Before my gaze thy soul's Aedalon stands, As on the threshold of the frozen lands A frozen sun forevermore the same. All passion that the passive marbles make Imperishable in their shining sleep, is thine, and all the wan despairs that weep, with tears of ice and crystal, cannot break.
The heart, which, like a ruby white and rare, in thy deep breast impenetrably gleams, more beautiful than any sphinx and fair. As Aphrodite dead, thine image seems Guarding forever in his golden eyes the treasure of Intagliate memories.
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84 083 - The Kingdom of Shadows 2:24
A crownless king who reigns alone, I live within this ashen land, Where winds rebuild from wandering sand My columns and my crumbled throne. My sway is on the men that were And wan sweet women, dear and dead. Beside a marble queen, my bed is made within the sepulchre. In gardens desolate to the sun, faring alone, I sigh to find the dusty closes, dim and blind, where winter and the spring are one. My shadowy visage, gray with grief, in sunken waters walled with sand, I see. Where all mine ancient land lies yellow like an autumn leaf. My silver lutes of subtle string are rust, but on the grievous breeze I hear what sobbing memories and muted sorrows murmuring. Across the broken monuments, memorial of the dreams of old, the sunset flings a ghostly gold to mock mine ancient affluence.
About the tombs of stone and brass, the silver lights of evening flee, and slowly now and solemnly I see the pomp of shadows pass.
Often, beneath some fervid moon, with splendid spells I vainly strive, dead loves imperial to revive, and speak a heart-remembered rune. But ah, the lovely phantoms fail. The faces fade to mist and light. The vermeil lips of my delight are dim. The eyes are ashen pale. A crownless king who reigns alone. I live within this ashen land, where winds rebuild from wandering sand. My columns and my crumbled throne.
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85 084 - Requiescat in Pace 1:55
Requires Cat in Pace White iris on thy bire With the white rose we strew And lotus pale or blue As moonlight on the orient mountain snows Slumber as they that sleep In the slow sands unknown Or under seas that zone with lulling foam the sealed extremer lands. Slumber with songless birds that sang, and sang to death, giving their gladder breath to lonely winds in one melodious pang. Sleep with the golden queens of planets long forgot, whose fire-soft lips are not recalled by any sorcery of song. Sleep. Pass with the flowers that were, and any leaf that fell on field or flowerless dell in autumn's lost of memory and grief. Pass with the music flown from ivory lyre and lute of mellow string left mute in cities desolate ere the dreams of Tyre.
Pass with the clouds that sank in sunset turned to grey. On some Edenic day, for which the exiled years have ever yearned. White iris on thy bire, with the white rose we strew, and lotus pale or blue as moonlight on the orient mountain snows.
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86 085 - Alexandrines 1:19
Knowing the weariness of dreams and days and nights, The great and grievous vanity of joy and pain, Frail loves that pass Where languors infinite remain. Fervours and long despairs, and desperate brief delights. Knowing how in the witless brains of them that were, the drowsy, wiving worm hath prospered and hath died. Knowing that evermore by moon and sun abide, the standing glooms made stagnant in the sepulchre. Knowing the vasillant leaves that tremble, flame, and fall. The sweetly wasting rose, the dawns and stars that wane, Knowing these things, the desolate heart and soul are fain Of the one perfect sleep which filleth, foldeth all.
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87 086 - Ashes of Sunset 0:51
Who fares to find the sunset ere it fly, turning to light and fire the further west, shall have the veils of twilight for his quest, and all the falling of an ashen sky? On lands he shall not know the splendor lies. A pharos on some alienated shore, in foam and purple lost forevermore, where dreams are kindled in remoter eyes.
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88 087 - November Twilight 0:37
November's whiny sunset leaves, Deep in the silver heavens far, One ruby-hearted star That lit the summer's moon-forsaken eves. Under its ray, remote, alone, Ascends upon the ashen gloom The ghostly faint perfume From autumn's gray forgotten roses flown.
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89 088 - Sepulture 1:17
Deep in my heart, as in the hollow stone and silence of some olden sepulchre, Thy silver beauty lies and shall not stir, Forgotten, incorruptible, alone, though altars darken. And a wind be blown from starless seas on vacant fires that were.
Within thy tomb, with oils of balm and myrrh, forever burn the onyx lamps unknown. And though the bleak, novembral gardens yield, rose dust and ivy leaf Nor any flower be found through Vermeule forest or wan-field. Still, still the asphodel and lotus lie around thy bed, and hour by silent hour exhale immortal fragrance like a sigh.
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90 089 - Quest 1:52
of gorgeous confalons With the winds that always hold Echo of clarions lost and old We must hasten Hasten on toward the azure world withdrawn. We must wonder, wonder so where the ruining roses go. Where the poplar's pallid leaves drift among the gathered sheaves, in that harvest none shall glean. Where the twisted willows lean in their strange tormented woe, seeing, on the streamlets flow, half their fragile leaves depart. Where the secret pines at heart, high, funereal, vespertine, guard eternal sorrows green. We shall follow, we shall find, happily, ere the light is blind, the molded place where beauty lay. Moon beheld until the day in the woven windows' tray, or the pool of Tormeline. Rimmed with golden reeds That was in the dawn a tiring glass For her undelaying mine.
Ever wonder, wonder so, Where the ruining roses go. All beneath a wintering sky Follow the wastrel butterfly.
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91 090 - Beauty Implacable 1:20
White beauty, bending from a throne sublime, Hath claimed my lips with kisses keen as snow. Now through my harp the tremors come and go Of things not stirred with urgencies of time. Now from the lunar mountains, old and lone, in dream I watch the neighboring world remote, or on the dim Uranian waters float after a star-like sun from zone to zone. Lo, in her praise, the stern, the fearful one, whose love is as the light of snow's afar, whose ways are difficult, what world shall be? Desolate with beauty and undone, Say death is not so strong to change your ma, And love and life not so desired as she.
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92 091 - A Vision of Lucifer 1:12
I saw a shape with human form and face, if such an apotheosis might stand, Deep in the shadows of a desolate land. His burning feet obtained colossal base, and spheral on the lonely arc of space, his head, a menace unto heavens unspanned, arose with towered eyes that might command the sunless blank horizon of that place. And straight I knew him for the mystic one, that is the brother, born of human dream, of man rebellious at an unknown rod. The mind's ideal and the spirit's sun, a column of clear flame in land's extreme, set opposite the darkness that is God.
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93 092 - Desire of Vastness 1:15
Desire of Vastness Supreme with night, what high mysteriork! The undreamt of God beyond the trinal noon, Of elder sun's empire real, Past the moon circling some wild world outmost in the dark. Lays on me this unfathomed wish to hark what central sea with plume-plucked midnight's trune, plangent to what enormous plenilune, that lifts in silence, hinderless and stark. The brazen comprehension of the waste, the waste inclusion of the brazen sky, these I desire. And all things widen deep. And lifted past the level years, would taste the cup of an Olympian ecstasy, titanic dream and cyclopean sleep.
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94 093 - Anticipation 0:44
The thought of death to me is like a well of waters, deep and dim, cool gleaming hushed and hidden gratefully among the palms asleep at silver evening on the desert's rim. Or as a couch of stone, whereon by moonlight in a marble room some fevered king reposes all alone. So is the hope of sleep, the inalienable surety of the tomb.
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95 094 - A Psalm to the Best Beloved 1:28
A psalm to the best beloved. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith Read for LibriVax.org by Anusha Ayer Thou comfortest me with the manna of thy love, And the kisses of thy mouth are wine and sustenance. Thy lips are grateful as fruit, In lonely orchards by the wayside of a ruinous land. They are sweet as the purple grapes, On parching hills that confront the autumnal desert, Or apples that the mad Simoon had spared In a garden with walls of cyanide. Thy loosened hair is a veil For the weariness of mine eyes and eyelids, Which have known the redoubled sun In a desert valley with slopes of the dust of white marble, And have gazed on the mounded salt In the marshes of a lake of dead waters.
Thy body is a secret Eden, fed with Lethean springs, and the touch of thy flesh is like to the savour of lotus. In thy hair is a perfume of ecstasy, and a perfume of sleep. Between thy thighs is a valley of delight, and between thy breasts is a valley of peace.
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96 095 - The Witch in the Graveyard 4:23
The Witch in the Graveyard, seen, a forsaken graveyard by moonlight, and her two witches. First Witch. Sit, sister, now that haggish Hecatee, appropriate and ghastly favors sheds. And with wild light forwards our enterprise, and watch the weighted eyelids of each grave, as never mother watched her babe to mark at zenith of the necromantic moon, to stir of that disquiet when the dead from the sucking nightmares of the sharnel dark, or long insomnia on moldy couch, impelled like wan sonambulists, arise, constrained to emerge and walk, or seated each on his own tombstone. Shrouded council hold, or commerce with the sooty wings of hell. All omens of this influential hour, when all dark powers, throwing into the dark, promote enchantry with their waved wings, and brim the wind with potency malign.
A dew of dread to aid our cauldron, these observe thou closely, while I seek a field all requisite swart herbs of veniface, and evil roots into our usance ripe. The first witch departs, leaving the other among the tombs, and returns after a time in the course of her search. First witch. Sister, what seest or what hearest thou? Second witch. I see the moonlight and the slowly moving gleam that westers hour by hour on tomb and stone, and shriveled lilies tossed to the winter's breath. With their attenuate shadows, as might dance phantom with flapping phantom at my side, the white and shuddering grasses of the grave, with nettles and the parching firmatory, whose leaves, root-trestled in the bones of death, will rasp and bristle to the lightest wind.
The first witch moves on and approaches again after a long interval. First witch. Sister, what seest or what hearest thou? Second witch. I see the mound-stretched gossamers, cradles to the dew, moon-wefted briars, and the cypress trees, with shadows swathed through cerements of the moon, and corpse-lights born from isle to secret isle within the footless forest. Now I hear the lich owl shrieking lethal prophecy, and whimpering winds the children of the air, lost in the glades of mystery and gloom. The first witch disappears and passes again shortly. First Witch. Sister, what seest, or what hearest thou? Second Witch. I see the ghost-white owl with huge, sulfurous eyes that veers in prone, unwhispered flight, and hear the small shriek of the moon-adventuring mole, gripped in mid-graveyard, and I see where some wild shadow shakes through the pale wind of moonlight stirs far off.
After an interval.
Some preetal hand doth halt the wandering air, now dies the throttled wind with rattling breath, and round about a breathing silence prowls. After another interval, I hear the cheeping of the bat-lip ghouls arouse beneath the vaulted cypresses, far off in the lipless muttering of tombs. With clash of bones bestirred in ancient charnels. Beneath their shroud of unclean light that crawls, earth shudders, and rank odors jinderize, from tombs of crack and shaken out all at once, from mid-air and directly neath the moon. Me seems what hanging wing divides the light, like a black film of gloom or thick as shadow, but on the tombs there is no shadow.
Enough! "'Twill be a prosperous night, methinks, for commerce of the demons with the dead, and for us, too, whenever yeoman's good, and fraught with promise of a potent brew."
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97 096 - The Traveler 3:50
Dedicated to V.H. Stranger, where goest thou? In the sad raiment of a pilgrim, with shattered sandals retaining the dust and mire of so many devious ways. With thy brow that alien suns have darkened, and thy hair made white from the cold rime of alien moons, wanderest thou in search of the cities greater than Rome, with walls of opal and crystal, and fains more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of hyperboreal seas. Or fairest thou to the lands unpeopled and unexplored, to the sunless deserts lit by the baleful and calamitous bacons of volcanoes? Or seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are like a royal pageant, pausing with innumerable flambeau held aloft on the verge of the waveless waters?
Nay, it is none of these that I seek. But forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home. In the quest thereof I have wandered from the first immemorable years of my youth till now, and have mingled the dust of many realms of many highways in my garment's hem. I have seen the cities greater than Rome, and the fanes more white than the clouds of summer, the lands unpeopled and unexplored, And the land that is thronged by the red and monstrous lilies. Even the far aerial walls of the cities of Mirage, and the saffron meadows of sunset I have seen, but never more the city and land of my former home. Where lieth the land of thine home? And by what name shall we know it, and distinguish the rumour thereof among the rumours of many lands?
Alas! I know not where it lieth, nor in the broad black scrolls of geographers, and the charts of old seamen who have sailed to the marge of the seventh sea is the place thereof recorded. And its name I have never learned. How bait I have learned the name of empires lying beneath stars to us invisible. In many languages have I spoken, in barbarous tongues unknown to Babel. And I have heard the speech of many men, even of them that inhabit the strange isles of the sea of fire and the sea of snow, thunder and lutes and battle-drums, the fine unceasing querulousness of gnats, and the stupendous moaning of the simoon, lyres of ebony, damascened with crystal, bells of malachite with golden clappers.
The song of exotic birds that sigh like women or sob like fountains. Whispers and shoutings of fire. The multitudinous mutter of cities asleep. The manifold tumult of cities at dawn. And the slow and weary murmur of desert wandering streams. All, all have I heard. But never in any place, from any tongue. A sound or syllable that resembled in the least the name I would learn.
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98 097 - The Flower-Devil 2:44
In a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the thing has existed from primeval time in the garden of the kings that rule an equatorial realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine and intricate as the web of some enormous spider, with petals of livid rose and purple like the purple of putrefying flesh, and a stem rising like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so old, so encrusted with the growth of centuries, that it resembles an urn of stone. The monstrous flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower, from the years of the oldest legend, An evil demon has dwelt, a demon whose name and whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mystriarchs of the kingdom, but to none other.
Over the half-animate flowers, the ophidian orchids that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open their ribbed petals by night and fasten their tiny yellow teeth on the bodies of sleeping dragonflies. The carnivorous cacti that yawn with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous yellow prickles. The plants that palpitate like hearts. The blossoms that pant with a breath of venomous perfume. Over all these, the flower devil is supreme in its malign immortality and evil, perverse intelligence. Inciting them to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, Even to acts of rebellion against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto death, by some vicious and benefic flower.
In places the garden has run wild from lack of care on the part of the fearful gardeners. And has become a monstrous tangle of serpentine creepers and hydra-headed plants, convolved and inter-writhing in lethal hate or venomous love, and horrible as a root of wrangling vipers and pythons. And like his innumerable ancestors before him, The king dares not destroy the flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king's subjects, or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest and most beloved queen.
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99 098 - Images 2:54
Tears. Thy tears are not as mine. Thou weepest as a green fountain among palms and roses, With lightly falling drops that bedew the flowery turf. My tears are like a rain of mara in the desert. Leaving a bitter pool whose waters are fire and poison. The Secret Rose.
My soul hath dreamt of a rose, whose marvellous and secret flower, fraught with an unimaginable perfume, hath never grown in any garden.
Only in valleys of the shifting cloud, only among the palms and fountains of a land of mirage, Only in isles beyond the seas of sunset it blooms for a moment and is gone. But ever the ghost of its fragrance haunts the hall of slumber, and the women whom I meet in dreams wear always its blossom for coroner. The Wind and the Garden To thee my love is something strange and fantastical and far away. Like the vast and desolate sighing of the desert wind, to one who dwells in a garden of palm and rose and lotus, filled by no louder sound than the mellow lisp of a breeze of perfume or the sigh of silvering fountains. Offerings Before thee, O goddess of my dreams, idol of my desires, I have burnt amber and myrrh, Frankincense, and all the strange and rich perfumes of lands a thousand leagues beyond Araby or Taiprobane.
Strange and rich offerings have I brought thee, the gems of unknown regions and the spoil of cities remoter than Caden or Samarkand. But these delight thee not, only the simple scented flowers of spring and the diamonds and opals of dew. A coronal. The pale and flowerless poppies of Proserpine, the cold blind lotus of Leth, and the strange white sea-blooms that grow from the lips of drowned men in the blue darkness of the nether sea, these have I woven as a coronal for my dead love.
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100 099 - The Black Lake 2:31
In a land where weirdness and mystery had strongly leaked themselves with eternal desolation, the lake was outpoured at an undiscoverable date of elder aeons, to fill some fathomless gulf far down amid the shadows of snowless volcanic mountains. No eye, not even the sun's, when he stared vertically upon it for a few hours at midday, seemed able to divine its depths of sullen blackness and unrupled silence. It was for this reason that I found a so singular pleasure in frequently contemplating the strange lake, sitting, for I knew not how long, on its blake, basaltic shores. Where grew but a few fleshly red orchids, bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings into the alluring mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf.
It was at an hour of morning before the sun had surmounted the rough and broken rim of the summits when I first came. And clomb down through the shadows which filled like some subtler fluid the volcanic basin. Seen at the bottom of that stirless tincture of air and twilight, the lake seemed as dregs of darkness. Peering for the first time, after the deep and difficult descent into the so dull and leaden waters, I was at length aware of certain small and scattered gleams of silver. Apparently far beneath the surface. And fancying them the metal in some mysterious ledge, or the glints of long-sunken treasure, I bent closer in my eagerness, and finally perceived that what I saw was but the reflection of the stars, which, though the day was full upon the mountains and the lands without, were yet visible in the depth and darkness of that enshadowed place.
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101 100 - Vignettes 4:41
Beyond the Mountains Surely beyond the mountains there is peace. Beyond the mountains that lie so blue and still at the world's extreme, Such ancient calm, such infinite quietude is upon them, that surely no toiling cities, no sea whose foam a ship as ever cloven can lie beyond, but valleys of azure silence, where amaranthine flowers sleep and dream untroubled of any wind, by the hyalescence of tranquilly flowing streams, unbroken as the surface of a mirror.
The Broken Lute Because you are silent to my lyric prayers, deaf to the melodies I have made from the sighs and murmurs of a wounded love, I have broken my golden lute and cast it away, tarnished and unstrung among the red leaves and faded roses of the September garden. Silence, the silver dust of lilies, the mournful, muted wind of autumn, and the fitfully drifting leaves have claimed it for their own. Seeing it there, as you pass on your queenly way amid the crumbling roses, will you not echo in your heart one sigh of the many sighs which, as a music for your pleasure, were breathed from its chords during the summer's half-forgotten days?
Nostalgia of the Unknown. The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound, is upon me at times. Often I long for the gleam of yellow suns upon terraces of translucent azure marble, mocking the windless waters of lakes unfathomably calm, for lost legendary palaces of serpentine, silver and ebony, Whose columns are green stalactites, for the pillars of fallen temples standing in the vast, purpureal sunset of a land of lost and marvellous romance. I sigh for the dark green depths of cedar forests through whose fantastically woven boughs one sees, at intervals, an unknown tropic ocean like gleams of blue diamond. For isles of palm and coral that fret in amber morning, somewhere beyond Cathay or Tacobana.
For the strange and hidden cities of the desert, with burning brazen domes and slender pinnacles of gold and copper, that pierce a heaven with heated lazuli.
Gray sorrow. Oft times in the golden sad November days, I meet among the dead roses of the garden the ghost of an old sorrow, a sorrow gray and dim as the mist of autumn, as a wandering mist that was once a rain of tears. There, through the long decline of afternoon, I walk among the roses with the ghost of my sorrow, whose half forgotten Half invisible form becomes dimmer and more indistinct, till I know its face no longer from the twilight, nor its voice from the vesper wind.
The hair of Circe. I am afraid of thy hair. Lustrous, heavily curled, it suggests the coils of a golden snake. And half the fascination of thy painted lips, of thy still and purple-lidded eyes, is due to the fear that it may awake beneath my caresses.
The Eyes of Circe Thine eyes are green and still as the lakes of the desert. They awake in me the thirst for strange and bitter mysteries, the desire of secrets that Deadly and sterile.
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102 101 - A Dream of Lethe 2:27
In the quest of her whom I had lost, I came at length to the shores of Lethe, under the vault of an immense empty ebon sky, from which all the stars had vanished one by one. Proceeding, I knew not whence A pale, elusive light as of the waning moon, or the phantasmal phosphorescence of a dead sun, lay dimly and without lustre on the sable stream, and on the black, flowerless meadows. By this light I saw many wandering souls of men and women, who came, hesitantly or in haste, to drink off the slow, unmurmuring waters. But among all these there were none who departed in haste, and many who stayed to watch, with unseeing eyes, the calm and waveless movement of the stream. At length in the lily-tall and gracile form, and the still uplifted face of a woman who stood apart from the rest, I saw the one whom I had sought.
And hastening to her side, with a heart wherein old memories sang like a nest of nightingales, was fain to take her by the hand. But in the pale, immutable eyes, and wan, unmoving lips that were raised to mine, I saw no light of memory, nor any tremor of recognition. And knowing now that she had forgotten, I turned away despairingly. And finding the river at my side, was suddenly aware of my ancient thirst for its waters, a thirst I had once thought to satisfy at many diverse springs, but in vain. Stooping hastily, I drank, and rising again, perceived that the light had died or disappeared, and that all the land was like the land of a dreamless slumber, wherein I could no longer distinguish the faces of my companions.
Nor was I able to remember any longer why I had wished to drink of the waters of oblivion.
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103 102 - The Caravan 2:09
My dreams are like a caravan that departed long ago, with tumult of interpret banners and spears, and the clamour of bugles and brave adventurous songs, to seek the horizons of perilous, untried, barbaric lands. And kingdoms immense and vaguely rumoured, with cities beautiful and opulent as the cities of paradise, and deep Edenic veils of palm and cinnamon and myrrh, lying beneath skies of primeval azure silence. For traffic in the realms of mystery and wonder, in the marts of scarce imaginable cities and metropoli a million leagues away, on the last horizon of romance, My dreams departed as a caravan with its laden camels. Since then the years are many, the days have flown as the flocks of southering swallows.
Unnumbered moons have multiplied in fugitive silver, uncounted suns in irretainable gold. But, alas, my dreams have not returned. Have the swirling sands engulfed them? On a noon of storm when the desert rose like a sea, and rolled its tawny billows on the walled gardens of the green and fragrant lands? Or perished they, devoured by the crimson demons of thirst and the ghouls and vultures? Or lived they still, as captives in alien dungeons not to be ascertained, or held by a wizard's spell in palaces demon-built, And cities baroque and splendid as the cities in a tale from the thousand and one nights.
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104 103 - The Princess Almeena 1:51
The Princess Almina From her balcony of pearl, the Princess Almina, clad in a gown of iris-aided silk, with her long and sable locks unbound, gazes toward the sunset-flooded sea beyond a terrace of green marble that peacocks guard. Below, In the tinted light, fantastic trees, whose holes are serpentine, train a fine and hair-like foliage, mingling with the moon-shaped leaves of enormous lilies. Rainbow-colored reeds cluster about the pools and fountains of black water that are rimmed with carven malachite. But these the princess does not heed, but gazes upon the far-off seas. Where the golden icres of the sun have gathered in a vast lake overflowing the horizon. Ere long, a wind from the west, from islands where palm trees blossom above the purple foam, brings in its breath the odor of unknown flowers to mingle with the balms of the garden and the sweet suspiration of the princess.
The princess who dreams, listening to the wind, that her lover, The captain of the Emperor's most redoubtable trineme of war, sailing the sky-blue seas beyond the horizon and the sunset, has remembered her wild and royal loveliness, and has breathed in his heart a secret sigh.
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105 104 - Ennui 4:22
Ennui. In the alcove, whose curtains are cloth of gold, and whose pillars are fluted sapphire, reclines the Emperor Khan, on his couch of ebony set with opals and rubies, and cushioned with the furs of unknown and gorgeous beasts. With implacable and weary gaze, from beneath unmoving lids that seem carven of purple-veined onyx, he stares at the crystal windows, giving upon the infinite fiery azures of a tropic sky and sea. Oppressive as nightmare, a formless, nameless fatigue, heavier than any burden the slaves of the mines must bear, lies for ever at his heart. All deliriums of love and wine, the agonizing ecstasy of drugs, even the deepest and the faintest pulse of delight or pain, all are proven, all are futile for the outworn but insatiate Emperor.
Even for a new grief, or a subtler pang than any felt before, he thinks, lying on his bed of ebony, that he would give the silver and vermilion of all his mines, with the crowded caskets, the carcanets, and crowns that lie in his most immemorial treasure-vault. Vainly, with the verse of the most inventive poets, the fanciful purple-threaded fabrics of the subtlest looms, The unfamiliar gems and minerals from the uttermost land, the pallid leaves and blood-like petals of a rare and venomous blossom. Vainly, with all these, and many stranger devices, wilder, more wonderful diversions, the slaves and sultanas have sought to alleviate the iron hours. One by one he has dismissed them with a weary gesture.
And now in the silence of the heavily curtained alcove he lies alone, with the canker of ennui at his heart, like the undying mordant worm at the heart of the dead. Anon, from between the curtains at the head of his couch, a dark and slender hand is slowly extended, clasping a dagger, Whose blade reflects the gold of the curtain in a thin and stealthily wavering gleam. Slowly, in silence, the dagger is poised, then rises and falls like a splinter of lightning. The Emperor cries out as the blade, piercing his loosely folded robe, wounds him slightly in the side. In a moment, the alcove is filled with armed attendants who seize and drag forth the would-be assassin. A slave girl. The princess of a conquered people who has often, but vainly, implored her freedom from the Emperor.
Pale and panting with terror and rage she faces Kahn and the guardsmen, while stories of unimaginable monstrous tortures, of dooms unnameable, crowd upon her memory. But Kahn, aroused and startled only for the instant, feels again the insuperable weariness. More strong than anger or fear, and delays to give the expected signal, and then, momentarily moved, perchance, by some ironical emotion half akin to gratitude, gratitude for the brief but diverting danger which has served to alleviate his ennui for a little, he bids them free the princess, and with a regal courtesy places about her throat His own necklace of pearls and emeralds, each of which is the cost of an army.
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106 105 - The Statue of Silence 1:20
carven I knew not from what substance, nor with what form or feature, because of the manifold drapery of black which fell about it as a veil or a pall. Turning to Saiki, who was with me, I said, O thou who knowest by name and form the Adola of all things, pray tell me what thing is this? And she answered, The name of it is Silence. But neither God nor man nor demon knoweth the form thereof, nor its entity. The seraphim paws often before it, waiting the day when the shape shall be unveiled. And the gods and demons of the universe are mute in its presence, half-hoping, half-fearing the time when these lips shall speak, and deliver forth, one dreameth not what, of oracle, or query, or judgment, or doom.
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107 106 - Remoteness 1:06
Remoteness. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Amy Graymoor.
There are days when all the beauty of the world is dim and strange, when the sunlight about me seems to fall on a land remoter than the poles of the moon. The roses in the garden surprise me, like the monstrous orchids of unknown color blossoming in planets beyond Aldabaron. And I am startled by the yellow and purple leaves of October, as if the veil of some tremendous and awful mystery were half withdrawn for a moment. In such hours as these, O heart of my heart, I fear to touch thee. I avoid thy caresses, dreading that thou wilt vanish as a dream at dawn, or that I shall find thee a phantom, the specter of one who died and was forgotten many thousand years ago, in a far-off land on which the sun no longer shines.
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108 107 - The Memnons of the Night 2:32
Ringed with a bronze horizon, which, at a point immensely remote, seems welded with the blue brilliance of a sky of steel, they oppose the black splendour of their porphyritic forms to the sun's inseparable gaze.
Reared in the morning twilight of primeval time by a race whose towering tombs and cities are one with the dust of their builders in the slow laps of the desert, they abide to face the terrible latter dawns that move abroad in a starkness of fire, consuming the veils of night on the vast and sphinx-like desolations. Level with the light, their tenebrific Brows preserve a pride as of titan kings. In their lidless, implacable eyes of staring stone is the petrified despair of those who have gazed too long on the infinite.
Mute as the mountains from whose iron matrix they were hewn, their mouths have never acknowledged the sovereignty of the suns. That pass in triumphal flame from horizon unto horizon of the prostrate land. Only at Eve, when the West is like a brazen furnace, and the far-off mountains smoulder like ruddy gold in the depth of the heated heavens. Only at Eve, when the East grows infinite and vague, and the shadows of the Waste are one with the increasing shadow of night, then, and then only, From the sullen throats of stone, a music rings to the bronze horizon, a strong, a sombre music, strange and sonorous like the singing of black stars or a litany of gods that invoke oblivion, a music that thrills the desert to its heart of adamant and trembles in the granite of forgotten tombs till the last echoes of its jubilation, terrible as the trumpets of doom.
Are one with the black silence of infinity.
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109 108 - The Garden and the Tomb 1:35
I know a garden of flowers, flowers lovely in multiform as the orchids of far exotic worlds, as the flowers of manifold petal, whose colors change as if by enchantment, in the alternation of the triple suns. Flowers like tiger lilies from the Garden of Satan, Like the paler lilies of paradise, or the amaranths on whose perfect and immortal beauty the seraphim so often ponder. Flowers fierce and splendid like the crimson or golden flowers of fire. Flowers bright and cold as the crystal flowers of snow. Flowers whereof there is no likeness in any world of any sun, which have no symbol in heaven or in hell. Alas, in the heart of the garden is a tomb. A tomb so trellised and embowered with vine and blossom that the sunlight reveals the ghastly gleam of its marble to no careless or incurious scrutiny.
But in the night, when all the flowers are still, and their perfumes are faint as the breathing of children in slumber, then, and then only, the serpent's bread of corruption crawl from the tomb, and trail the phaeter and phosphorescence of their abiding place. From end to end of the garden.
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110 109 - In Cocaigne 2:01
It was a windless afternoon of April, beneath skies that were tender as the smile of love, when we went forth, you and I, to seek the fabulous and fortunate realm of cocaine. Past leafing oaks with foliage of bronze and chrysalite, through zones of yellow and white and red and purple flowers, Like a landscape seen through a prism, we fared with hopeful and tremulous hearts, forgetting all save the dream we had cherished. At last we came to the lonely woods, the pines with their depth of balmy, cool, compassionate shadow, which are sacred to the genius of that land. There, for the first time, I was bold to take your hand in mine. And led you to a slope where the woodland lilies, with petals of white and yellow ivory, gleamed among the fallen needles.
As in a dream, I found that my arms were about you. As in a dream, I kissed your yielding lips, and the ardent pallor of your cheeks and throat. Motionless, you clung to me, and a flush arose beneath my kisses like a delicate stain, and lingered softly. Your eyes deepened to my gaze, like the brown pools of the forest at evening, and far within them, as an immensity itself, trembled and shone the steadfast stars of your love. As a ship that has wandered beneath stormy suns and disastrous moons, but comes at last to the arms of the shielding harbour, my head lay on the gentle heaving of your delicious breast, and I knew. That we had found cocaine.
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111 110 - The Litany of the Seven Kisses 1:59
I. I kiss thy hands, thy hands, whose fingers are delicate and pale as the petals of the white lotus.
II. I kiss thy hair, which has the luster of black jewels.
Three. I kiss thy brow, which resembles the rising moon in a valley of cedars. Four. I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster.
Five. I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veined flowers that close beneath the oppression of a tropic evening, in a land where the sunsets are bright as the flames of burning amber.
Six. I kiss thy throat, whose ardent pallor is the pallor of marble warmed by the autumn sun. Seven. I kiss thy mouth. Which has the savour and perfume of fruits agleam with spray from a magic fountain, in the secret paradise that we alone shall find. A paradise whence they that come shall never more depart, for the waters thereof are lethe, and the fruit is the fruit of the tree of life.
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112 111 - From a Letter 2:03
From a letter. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Jacqueline Bankfort.
Will you not join me in Atlantis, where we will go down through streets of blue and yellow marble to the wharves of Oracolk, and choose us a galley with a golden Eros for figurehead, and sails of Tyrion Sendel? With mariners that knew Odysseus. and beautiful amber-breasted slaves from the mountain vales of Lemuria, we will lift anchor for the unknown fortunate isles of the outer sea, and, sailing in the wake of an opal sunset, we'll lose that ancient land in the glaucus twilight, and see from our couch of ivory and satin the rising of unknown stars and perished planets. Perhaps we will not return, but we'll follow the tropic summer from Isle To Halcyon Isle, across the Amaranthian seas of myth and fable.
We will eat the lotus, and the fruit of lands whereof Odysseus never dreamt, and drink the pallid wines of Faerie, grown in a veil of perpetual moonlight. I will find for you a necklace of rosy-tinted pearls, and a necklace of yellow rubies, and crown you with precious corals that have the semblance of sanguine-colored blossoms. We will roam in the marts of forgotten cities of Jasper, and Carnelian-builded ports beyond Cathay. And I will buy you a gown of peacock azure damascened with copper and gold and vermilion, and a gown of black Samite with runes of orange, woven by fantastic sorcery without the touch of hands, in a dim land of spells and filters.
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113 112 - From the Crypts of Memory 5:15
From the Crypts of Memory. From Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith. Read for LibriVox.org by Sandra Cullum.
From the Crypts of Memory.
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course Decadent from the high, irremable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close. Ah strange was that gulf-forgotten star, how stranger than any dream of dreamers in the spheres of today, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries. In their retrospection of the sidereal past, there, through cycles of a history, whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living.
Like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages.
And overall was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens, a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole enormous lamp, failed to illumine. And drawing back its fires from the face of the resolvable ether, threw a baffled and despairing beam on the vague, remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people, we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks, of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time, and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the Lenta of Leth. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor. Made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulchre, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay. And darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams, The dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep.
We felt for our women with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper And streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow. Cities, whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century-forgotten gods Looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past.
Or wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, We sought the rare and mystic immortelles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage, or wept with a sweet, and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowering silence of acharontic waters. And one by one we died, and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
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114 113 - A Phantasy 1:38
I have dreamt of an unknown land, a land remote in ulterior time, an alien space not ascertainable, the desert of a long-completed past, upon which has settled the bleak, irrevocable silence of infinitude. Where all is ruined save the stone of tombs and cenotaphs, and where the soul peoples are the kingless, uncounted tribes of the subterranean dead.
Above this land of my dream, cityed with tombs and cenotaphs, a red and smouldering sun maintains a spectral day. In alternation with an ashen moon through the black ether where the stars have long since perished. And through the hush of the consummation of time, above the riven monuments and crumbled records of alien history, flit in the final twilight the mysterious wings of Seraphim, sent to fill ineffable errands, or confer with demons of the abyss. And black gigantic angels, newly returned from missions of destruction, pause amid the sepulchers. To sift from their gloomy and tremendous vans the pale ashes of annihilated stars.
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115 114 - The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty 4:55
The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty Of the demon who standeth, or walketh always with me at my left hand, I asked, Hast thou seen beauty? Her that me seemeth was the mistress of my soul in eternity? Her that is now beyond question set over me in time, even though I behold her not. And it may be have never behold, nor ever shall. Her of whose aspect I am ignorant as noon is concerning any star. Her of whom, as witness and testimony, I have found only the hem of her shadow. Or at most, her reflection in a dim and troubled water. Answer, if thou canst, and tell me, is she like pearls or like stars? Does she resemble most the sunlight that is transparent and unbroken, or the sunlight divided into splendour and iris?
Is she the heart of the day, or the soul of the night?
To which the demon answered after, as I thought, a brief space of meditation. Concerning this beauty, I can tell thee but little beyond that which thou knowest. Albeit, in those orbs to which the demons of my rank have admission, There be greater adumbrations of some transcendent mystery than here. Yet have I never seen that mystery itself, and know not if it be male or female. Aeons ago, when I was young and incautious, when the world was new and bright, and there were more stars than now, I, too, was attracted by this mystery, and sought after it in all accessible spheres. But failing to find the thing itself, I soon grew weary of embracing its shadows, and took to the pursuit of illusions less insubstantial.
Now I am become grey and ashen without, and red like old fire within, who was fiery and flame-coloured all through, back in the star-thronged aeons of which I speak. Heed me, for I am as wise and weary and ancient as the far-travelled and comet-scarred sun. And I am become of the opinion that the thing-beauty itself does not exist. Doubtless the semblance thereof is but a web of shadow and illusion, woven by the crafty hand of God, that he may snare demons and men therewith for his mirth and the laughter of his archangels. The demon seized and took to watching me as usual, obliquely and with one eye, an eye that is more red than Aldebaran, Then of the angel, who walketh or standeth always with me at my right hand, I asked, Hast thou seen beauty?
Or hast thou heard any assured rumour concerning beauty? To which the angel answered after, as I thought, a moment of hesitation, As to this beauty I can tell thee but little beyond that which thou knowest. Albeit in all the heavens, this mystery is a topic of the most frequent and sublime speculation among the archangels, and a perennial theme for the more inspired singers and harpists of the cherubim. Here, despite all this, we are greatly ignorant as to its true nature and substance and attributes. But sometimes there are mighty adumbrations which cover even the superior seraphim From above, their wingtips and make unfamiliar twilight in heaven. And sometimes there is an echo which fills the empyrean and hushes the archangelic harps in the midst of their praising of God.
This is not often, and these visitations of echo and shadow spread in awe over the assembled thrones and splendors and dominations, which at other times accompanies Only the eminence or appearance of God Himself. Thus are we assured as to the reality of this beauty. And because it remains a mystery to us, to whom naught else is mysterious except God, we conjecture that it is the thing upon which God meditateth, self-obscured and centred, and because of which He hath held Himself in manifest to us for so many aeons. That this is the secret which God keepeth even from the seraphim.
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116 115 - The Shadows 4:49
There were many shadows in the palace of Augustus. About the silver throne that had blackened beneath the invisible passing of ages, they fell from pillar and broken roof and fretted window in ever-shifting multiformity. Seeming the black fantastic spectres of doom and desolation, They moved through the palace in a gradual, grave, and imperceptible dance, whose music was the change in motion of suns and moons. They were long and slender like all other shadows before the early light and behind the declining sun, squat and intense beneath the desert noontide, and faint with the withered moon. And in the interlunar darkness, They were as myriad tongues, hidden behind the shut and silent lips of night.
One came daily to that place of shadows and desolation, and sate upon the silver throne, watching the shadows that were of desolation. King nor slave disputed him there in the palace, whose kings and whose slaves were powerless alike in the intangible dungeon of centuries. The tombs of unnumbered and forgotten monarchs were white upon the yellow desert round about. Some had partly rotted away, and showed like the sunken eye-sockets of a skull, blank and lidless beneath the staring heavens. Others still retained the undesecrated seal of death, and were as the closed eyes of one lately dead. But he who watched the shadows from the silver throne Heeded not these, nor the fleet wind that dipped to the broken tombs, and emerged shrilly, its unseen hands dark with the dust of kings.
He was a philosopher. From what land there was none to know or ask, nor was there any to ask what knowledge or delight he sought in the ruined palace, with eyes all way upon the moving shadows. Nor what were the thoughts that moved through his mind in ghostly unison with them. His eyes were old and sad with meditation and wisdom, and his beard was long and white upon his long white robe. For many days he came with the dawn and departed with sunset, and his shadow leaned from the shadow of the throne and moved with the others. But one eve, He departed not, and thereafter his shadow was one with the shadow of the silver throne. Death found, and left him there, where he dwindled into dust that was as the dust of slaves or kings.
But the ebb and refluence of shadows went on in the days that were before the end. Ere the aged world, astray with the sun and strange heavens, Should be lost in the cosmic darkness, or under the influence of other and conflicting gravitations, should crumble apart and bare its granite bones to the light of strange suns, and the granite too should dissolve and be as the dust of slaves and kings. Noon was encircled with darkness, and the depths of palace dusk were chasmed with sunlight. Change, there was none other than this, for the earth was dead, and stirred not to the tottering feet of time. And in the expectant silence before the twilight of the sun, the moving shadows seemed but a mockery of change, a meaningless, antic phantasmagoria of things that were, an after-figuring of forgotten time.
And now the sun was darkened slowly in mid-heaven as by some vast and invisible bulk, and twilight hushed the shadows in the palace of Augustes as the world itself swung down toward the long and single shadow of irretrievable oblivion.
End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. End of Ebony and Crystal by Clark Ashton Smith