This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was unpublished in his lifetime, and is not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text:
Enormous from the mountain's night,
From silence, and the night of snow,
The moon arises, lone and slow,
In mists of cold and crimson light.
Her monstrous orb incarnadine,
A roe's-egg seems, that griffins bear
Along the gulf of silver air,
And darkling valleys deep with pine.
Like many of CAS' shorter poems, "Fantasie" manages to achieve a lot with a minimal number of words.
The opening stanza presents a compelling vision of moonrise on a chilly night, and the second stanza exits with one of those near-perfect phrases that one finds frequently in the work of CAS: "darkling valleys deep with pine." Through skilled use of internal rhyme, CAS manages, with those five words alone, to paint a robust image of pine trees in remote and lonely valleys, shrouded under the mantle of night. Quite breathtaking in its simple effectiveness.
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