Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Solicitation

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was published in the Golden Atom science fiction fanzine in 1959, although evidently it was written in the early 1930's.  It's not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text: 


Are you to blame, or I, if round you twine 
The wanton tendrils of the heart's wild vine?
Ah, suffer them to live, and in your heart
Permit the scioned love to mount with mine.

Vainly I strove against it, half afraid
Of the mad cast that destiny had made:
Vainly I strove...and must I love in vain
When two might share the arbor's clustered shade?

Purer and sweeter than any poet's rhyme,
From out the clement Cytherean clime,
The lyric voice of Cypris calls to us
Across the dismal dissonance of time.

Harken, and heed, and let the hateful din
Fail to an insect's fretting far and thin.
Though others prate of shame and wrong, we shall
Maintain the pagan purity of sin.

Oh, heed, and follow: in autumn forests lone,
Again the immemorial doves make moan,
And flashing waters beckon like white hands
Where all the wings of all the loves have flown.


It's not a bad poem, but neither is it CAS at his best, so I'm not surprised it found a published home in a fanzine.

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