Saturday, December 1, 2018

The Dream-Weaver

Here we have another poem unpublished in the lifetime of Clark Ashton Smith (CAS):


Who weaveth the web of dreams?

          He hath wrought a fabric strange
Whose threads are the moon's white beams 
          And the hues that pass and change 
In the sunset's coloured gleams;

Whose woof is in the joy of flowers,

          That wake in the dawn of spring 
And the music of passing showers,
          And the song the thrushes sing
Through the sunshine-colored hours.

He hath wrought a fabric dread-- 

          A web that is hued with night,
With fear as its awful thread;
          Whose warp is the ghostly might
Of the unremembered dead.

I have sought the weaver of dreams,
          In the soul's unfathomed deep;
I have followed a clue that gleams
          Through the labyrinth of sleep,
Of a wind that sweeps the spheres.

And lost in the titan surge
          Of a wind that sweeps the stars
I have neared the farthest verge,
          Where the ends of night are bars,
And the day and darkness merge.

But in vain is the endless quest:
          For, thin as a thread of wind,
The weaver eludes the test;
          And hideth where thought is blind
In depths 'neath the soul's unrest.



This poem is an ideal melding of foundational themes in CAS' body of verse: beauty, dreams and the sense of dread presented with a scope of cosmic dimensions.  The penultimate stanza is pretty much perfect:


And lost in the titan surge
          Of a wind that sweeps the stars
I have neared the farthest verge,
          Where the ends of night are bars,
And the day and darkness merge.


Those five lines describe the poet's journey to the very limits of the possible.  In the following stanza, we learn of the futility of the quest, but the lines above suggest to me that the failure doesn't matter.  The exploration of the source of dreams is such an incredible odyssey as to create its own reward.

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