Thursday, September 6, 2018

Sonnets of the Seasons (Summer)


This is the second of a grouped set of three sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS), and as it was unpublished in his lifetime, let's start with the poem itself:


Now comes the Seasons' high and ardent noon
          Fulfillment of Spring's youthful prophecy
          Full-flow'red and fruited.  Hesitatingly
She follows on the last late showers of June.
Bringing the roses and a waxing moon
          Enamored of her beauty, fervently 
          The Sun-God leans, with oaths of constancy
To kiss her face.  Ah! days of warmth and boon,
Wrapped in a haze of sunlit, drowsy peace
          Oh! purple nights, slumbrously passionate
And bright with starry zones and coronals,
When birds weave webs of silver harmonies
          Till air grows heavy with the aural weight,
And silence like a sweeter music falls.



As with the sonnet "Spring" which opened this series of three, this is a fairly straightforward nature study, but this time around the language has an almost ecstatic quality.  The  closing lines of the poem are especially powerful:


          Oh! purple nights, slumbrously passionate
And bright with starry zones and coronals,
When birds weave webs of silver harmonies
          Till air grows heavy with the aural weight,


And silence like a sweeter music falls.


"The aural weight" of birdsong ceasing as night falls is a wonderful phrase, and really shows CAS' ability to render in a handful of words the full resonance of a lived experience.

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