Sunday, October 11, 2020

Sonnet

Read "Sonnet" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/533/sonnet-%28how%29

This love poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) returns to the theme of romance as a refuge from the tedium of everyday reality, and does so with some truly beautiful language:


How shall the Golden Age thy bosom brings—
That home of dreams unharbored otherwhere—
Not fall before this brazen press of things,
Till we too fade like morning phantoms there?


Ultimately, the narrator arrives at the inevitable conclusion, recognizing the temporal nature of any human connection: 


When all is over, let the cindered sun
Go down in night no memory shall haunt—
Yes, let full-fountained Lethe rise and flow
As on the loves of lovers long ago.


This "Sonnet" has a fatalistic beauty that is quite haunting.

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