Says the Dreamer

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was unpublished in his lifetime, and is not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text:

My dream foresees the wilderness
of a future Atlantis

wherein the fiery phoenix will build

his necromantic nest.

It beholds in Mars the waterless

canals where frolic wantonly

the salamanders that flame

like internal fires.

It knows how the dragons,

spawn of a saffron sun

shake a wooded plain

with their enormous copulations.

It sips the bitterness

of the Mercurial lakes,

and proves the savor

of winter honeycombs in Venus.

It hears the unbreathing flowers

that sing in Jupiter

the doom of conquerors

that come from another firmament.

It assumes the wings of the seraph

and shares his blissful retreat;

it suffers the thirst of the vampire

And the hunger of the lycanthrope....

But whether my mooted fate

is a fable of my fear,

or is the dream of another Dreamer

my dreams have never known.

CAS also wrote a Spanish-language version of this poem entitled "Dice el soñador".

It's interesting to compare this poem to one that CAS wrote much earlier in his life with a similar title: "Said the Dreamer".  I blogged about that poem a few years ago:

https://www.desertdweller.net/2018/12/said-dreamer.html

Both poems document the fantastic encounters of a vivid dream, and both works  exult in weird imagery.  But where "Said the Dreamer" presents an apocalyptic vision ("Then in the dream I dreamt that Time was done"), "Says the Dreamer" focuses instead on alien exoticism ("winter honeycombs in Venus"), ending with a speculation as to the source of the incredible dream voyage described.  

Comparing the two poems, written almost forty years apart, provides an insight to CAS' maturing vision, where vast destructive powers at work on a cosmic level have given way to a musing on the forces that inspire the very act of dreaming.