Saturday, July 27, 2019

In the Wind


Read "In the Wind" at The Eldritch Dark:



In common with "Fire of Snow" (which I read yesterday), this brief quatrain from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915.  Although that venue is not considered very hospitable to formalist poets such as CAS, it is still in publication more than one hundred years later, which is remarkable for a journal devoted to poetry.

The Poetry magazine archive has a digital scan of that original magazine appearance, which has both poems by CAS on the same page:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13159

Despite the brevity of "In the Wind", these lines fully describe the kinetic experience of watching clouds move over the landscape, presumably on a sunny day.  Even within the restricted space of a single quatrain, CAS is able to use his technical gifts to capture the essence of a familiar experience.

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