Sunday, November 25, 2018

Poetry


Once again, we have an early poem by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) not published in his lifetime, and not available on The Eldritch Dark, so I'll begin with the text itself:


O poetry, not on the written page
Alone mayst those be found, for ocean tides
Have pulsing rhythm and the tempests rage
And gentle breeze thy rhyming flow abides;
One hears thee in the seaward pilgrimage 
Of streams, and where adown the mountain sides
Water rills in cataracts, and out in space
The planets ceaseless swing with rhythmic pace.


This is a lyrical evocation of the sources of poetry that exist all around us in the natural world.  Reading this enhances my appreciation of CAS as a poet who was equally at home writing about the landscape of the physical world as he was writing about fantastic cosmic phenomenon and gothic dreamscapes.

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