Said the Dreamer

Read "Said the Dreamer" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/477/said-the-dreamer

This early poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) is thematically simpatico with other poems by the same author that I have read recently, such as "The Song of a Comet" and "The Star-Treader".  Each of these poems describes a fantastic journey, often within a dream.

Given that "Said the Dreamer" revisits one of CAS' oft-used themes, it doesn't seem to me that it is any sort of exemplar among its peers.  As with "Ode to the Abyss", this present poem reads too much like a succession of images without much sense that those pieces are being wrought into any sort of meaningful whole.  

Although this poem was apparently written around 1912, it was not included in a published collection for more than four decades, when Arkham House issued Spells and Philtres in 1958.  That suggests that CAS saw something in the poem later in life than he did around the time he wrote it, but I can't say that this particular poem has made much of an impression on me.