At Nadir

This is another poem unpublished in Clark Ashton Smith's (CAS) lifetime, and not available on The Eldritch Dark, so let's start with the text itself:


I mark yon ruddy star go down
       O'er hills mysterious with night,
And far-off peaks that darkly frown
          In towering and impassive might.

At last it trembles on the crest
          Of some vague, mist-enshrouded height,
A moment seeming to arrest
          Its downward and unswerving flight.


This is a fairly straightforward poem, and yet there are some strong images in these brief lines: "far-off peaks that darkly frown", "it trembles on the crest", "downward and unswerving flight".  Proof that even in a minor item from the corpus, CAS can invoke a response from a reader who makes the effort to engage with the author's rich language.