Saturday, August 15, 2020

The Cycle

Here's another poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that went unpublished in his lifetime.  It's not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text:


O love, long known and revenant forever!
How vast the ways wherein our footsteps fall,
The ways that meet and sever;
And yet how few withal
The fleeting yesternights that we remember.
These things are past surprise:
What fiery moons have died
To feed our ancient passion,
Leaving no shard nor ember,
What suns gone dark and ashen
Lighting strange lands for our extinguished eyes.


I often have a somewhat lukewarm reaction to CAS' love poems, but "The Cycle" is rich with suggestions of the uncanny, invoked from the very first line with the use of the word "revenant".  Few poets could handle supernatural themes like CAS, and the ending is truly beautiful, full of the dark sorcery of a love whose power reached into the cosmos:


What fiery moons have died
To feed our ancient passion,
Leaving no shard nor ember,
What suns gone dark and ashen
Lighting strange lands for our extinguished eyes.


One wonders why CAS chose not to include this work in his Selected Poems (1971).  It deserves to stand beside his best works in verse, so it's a bit of a shame that it has remained somewhat obscure.


1 comment:

  1. For me CAS' love poetry is a mixed bag, but never bad as a rule. I think his best love poems are the kind that perfectly merge his tender feelings with his cosmic, ancient, and sorcerous yearnings. "Cycle" is a good example of this, how it shows that their shared love is one that revels in a glorious cosmos.

    Though hardly related, the title makes me think of CAS' other love poem "Sea Cycle", which is one of my favorites. It may take a while but it will be fun to discuss this poem when its time comes!

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