Thursday, August 15, 2019

Impression


Read "Impression" at The Eldritch Dark:


This slight poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) does a wonderful job of painting a visual image of a moonlight scene set in a "sleeping garden".  I think the closing stanza is particularly good:


Like mirrors made of lucid stone
The pools lie still and bright and cold,
Where moon and stars behold,
In some eternal trance, themselves alone.


The rhythmic pulse of those four lines is strong, with the second line being especially propulsive when read aloud.  On the last line, the placement of the comma is perfect to emphasize the closing phrase "themselves alone", reflecting what the heavenly objects see in the pools "Like mirrors made of lucid stone".  

There is no great drama at work in ""Impression", but I had the opportunity to read it by late evening moonlight, and the poem fit the occasion beautifully.


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