Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Sufficiency

Read "Sufficiency" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/552/sufficiency

This love poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) plays more to his strengths than other works in a similar vein that he wrote in the late 1920's.  The first stanza brings a flavor of the exotic:


We long for an alcove
Curtained against the dawn in Ispahan,
Or some Algerian roof, whereon
At eventide to lie
And watch the fiery passing of the sky;


The second stanza then brings things down to a prosaic level, and yet the poet revels in love's ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary:


And yet,
In this one little room, this homely place,
Have we not known enough of time and space?


A little sprinkling the alien and the cosmic allows "Sufficiency" to become something greater than a routine love poem, and who better than CAS to inject those particular ingredients?

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