Saturday, July 18, 2020

Evanescence

Here is another poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that was unpublished in his lifetime, and is not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text:


Where the golden rose
Of autumn goes,
Love shall go:
How the petals pass
In the snow-lost grass,
No man shall know.

But heed not thou
The barren bough
And the ravening wind,
Though the flower be blown
And the leaf be flown
And the sun go blind.

For the rose that is gone
Forgotten and wan
In the death-wan snows,
Another flower
in an alien hour
Oblivious blows.


Here CAS uses the sestain poetic form with rhyme scheme aabccb.  Perhaps CAS was inspired by the common usage of the same form in the French poetry of Leconte de Lisle, given that CAS translated many of de Lisle's poems into English.

The phenomenon of transiency is found in many of CAS' poems, and "Evanescence" builds upon that theme with the uplifting notion of renewal:


For the rose that is gone
Forgotten and wan
In the death-wan snows,
Another flower
in an alien hour
Oblivious blows.


That nod to the cycles of the natural world lends "Evanescence" a quality that elevates it above much of the other poetry that CAS was writing around the same time.



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