Thursday, September 27, 2018

The Summer Hills


This is another early poem by Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that was not published during his lifetime, so I'll begin with the text itself:


How brown the rolling hills outspread--
The grass of spring is sere and dun;
From cloudless skies the flaying sun
Has bronzed its green.  The Spring is dead,
As plain the sombre hills declare;
The flow'rs are gone that yesterday,
It seems, with mass of bloom, held sway;
No more the hills their liv'ry hear
This brown doth Summer's rule proclaim--
Fierce Summer, with his touch that seres
His sign on ev'ry hill appears,
His fervid heat, his breath of flame.


While the idea of characterizing summer heat and sunshine as flame is nothing original to CAS, the flow of his rich language is entrancing, especially in the very last lines:



Fierce Summer, with his touch that seres
His sign on ev'ry hill appears,
His fervid heat, his breath of flame.


The description of "Fierce Summer" is both powerful and instantly recognizable for any reader that has sweated through a broiling day when it seems that the rains will never come again.

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