Saturday, September 15, 2018

The Island of a Dream

Here is another poem unpublished during the lifetime of the author Clark Ashton Smtith (CAS).  Nor is it available on The Eldritch Dark, so I'll being with the text itself:


Oh! alien isle, sea-lost and isolate,
          What loud horizons of the irremediable sea
          Ensure thy strange, remote serenity,--
Beyond what last horizon isolate!

Lo! For thy sake, the world's allured young winds 
          Shall roam passageless, desolate, forlorn,
          seeking thee ever; shoreless and outworn, 
To the sea's purple sink the world's old winds.

Like Heaven's one large inverted flower,
          The enchanted lotus of the purple light
          Sufficient; till the manifold, vast, white,
And deep moon-nenuphar supremely blows.


Of the early poems by CAS that I have so far, this one feels closest to being unfinished, in the sense that there are several ideas presented that feel incomplete.  For example, there are invocations of the colors purple and white that don't seem to fulfill a clear purpose.  

That said, the poem is titled "The Island of a Dream", which does make we wonder whether CAS' goal might simply have been to capture one of his dreams in poetic form, without too much concern for making all of the pieces fit together logically.

No comments:

Post a Comment