Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Moon-Sight

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was unpublished in his lifetime, and is not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here is the complete text: 


We wandered in your garden
When the broad magnolia-flowers
Took on a stranger pallor from the moon
And the rose gave up the half of all its redness.
I turned to you,
And your face was the long-expected vision,
Far-sought, but never found,
In the dark bafflement of many a dreamland maze,
Through sunless, moonless woods
And beside unflowing waters 
In the twain deserts of the waking world
And the worlds of sleep.
I saw you then,
Supremely fair, incomparably dear,
Till seeing was become a greater ecstasy
Than others know in all possession--
Till the whole of love and life was in your face
And the whole world's loveliness,
And memory was no more
Than an arabesque of shadows swept away in light,
And time and space were phantoms
Forgotten and dispersing 
To leave this ever-during instant 
This luminous parterre
Bearing the one momentous flower of your face.


While this is not a great poem overall, it seems to me as though there is a poem-within-a-poem that might have worked well all by itself:


I turned to you,
And your face was the long-expected vision,
Far-sought, but never found,
In the dark bafflement of many a dreamland maze,
Through sunless, moonless woods
And beside unflowing waters 
In the twain deserts of the waking world
And the worlds of sleep.


The complete work has the feeling of a rough draft, but the eight lines quoted directly above the heart of it.  Despite the lack of rhyme and standard meter, that extract makes for a stronger work than "Moon-Sight" taken as a whole.

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