Friday, January 4, 2019

Averted Malefice

Read "Averted Malefice" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/44/averted-malefice

For starters, I have to note that "each root maleficently fat" is an amazing phrase to describe a mandrake!

"Averted Malefice" is something of an outlier among the early poems by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that I have read so far, since it takes as its subject matter a fairly conventional encounter with a witch.  The magic is all in CAS' incredible command of the English language: the cadence of this poem is near-perfect when read aloud, and the rhymes are exact and musical.

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