Read "Twilight Song" at The Eldritch Dark:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/614/twilight-song
This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) does a wonderful job of establishing a temporal setting. Through the succession of each of the four stanzas, the speaker establishes the time of day:
- First stanza: "Below the vesper star"
- Second stanza: "On winds of sunset gone"
- Third stanza: "Mute evening wanes in mist"
- Fourth stanza: "O night! upon thy stream"
That last stanza sets the speaker's hope that dreams will let him reconnect with a lost love:
O night! upon thy stream
Obliviously to float
And haply find in westward-flowing dream
Her place and face remote.
Obliviously to float
And haply find in westward-flowing dream
Her place and face remote.
CAS was writing a lot of romantic poems in the early 1940's (this one is from September 1942) and not all of those stand the test of time, but "Twilight Song" has a carefully crafted simplicity which has the plaintive quality of a melancholy love song.
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