The Orchid of Beauty

Read "The Orchid of Beauty" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/412/the-orchid-of-beauty

I'm going to get a little nit-picky here.  This sonnet by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was originally published in Ebony and Crystal (1922), and revised slightly for inclusion in the career-spanning Selected Poems (1971).  

The original title was simply "The Orchid", but that's not of particular interest.

The only change was to line nine, the first line of the closing sestet.  The first version of that line reads:


Colours, and gleams, and glamours unrecalled,


The later version from Selected Poems reads:


Colors, and glints, and glamors unrecalled,


I much prefer the earlier version, since the pararhyme flows smoothly from "Colours" to "gleams" to glamours".  The later version replaces the word "gleams" with "glints", a word choice that breaks the subtle rhyme and loses some of the musical character present in the original version.

Like I said, I'm being a little nit-picky, but it's my blog, so I got that right!