Thursday, February 3, 2022

Didus ineptus




Read "Didus ineptus" at The Eldritch Dark:


As with "Farmyard Fugue" (which I blogged about yesterday), this poem is a curiosity from the corpus of Clark Ashton Smith (CAS).  It reads almost like an encyclopedia entry in verse, with little evidence of CAS' vivid imagination being put to work.  

The actual Latin taxonomic name for the extinct dodo is Raphus cucullatus, so the poem's title "Didus ineptus" must be CAS' own invention, which can be translated into English as "Silly dodo" or perhaps "Unfit dodo".  Either way, it's an odd, minor poem from The Bard of Auburn, and it's rather surprising that he published this one (in 1958's Spells and Philtres).

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