Wednesday, July 22, 2020

The Nightmare Tarn



Read "The Nightmare Tarn" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/374/the-nightmare-tarn

Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) submitted this poem to Weird Tales magazine, where it was published in the issue for November 1929.  

Although the supernatural character of this work is well-defined (and certainly very appropriate for the pages of Weird Tales), the poem is weighed down by a fair amount of repetitious description, making for a dense read.  

This density is not common to CAS' verse, since he was a technically gifted poet with a vast command of the English language.  So "The Nightmare Tarn" strikes me as something of an oddity, a CAS poem that just doesn't really seem to get off the ground.

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