Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Connaissance

Read "Connaissance" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/99/connaissance

With this poem, Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) seems to have gotten back to some of the themes that informed his earliest poetry, and does so with panache:


You flow a stronger blood within my blood,
Poured from a heart whose pulses
Suffuse the veins of centaurs and of gods.
You are a thought encompassing all other thoughts,
Even as the sea enfolds the kelp and coral
And the sea-flowers and sea-monsters
And the domes of deep unsunned Atlantis.


The bolded word in the second-to-last line is correction to a typo in the version of this poem at The Eldritch Dark.

CAS' poetry always seems to work best when it is a swirl of his original conceptions bolstered by ideas and images borrowed from myth and fable, and "Connaissance" draws its strength from those very energies.


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