Thursday, January 13, 2022

The Poets of Optimism

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was unpublished in his lifetime, and is not available on The Eldritch Dark, so here's the complete text:


We are the masters
of all the dreams
of daylight and night.

We repeat
and always we embroider
this melody:

The world is his,
the sun is yours,
the moon is mine.


There is also a Spanish-language version of this same poem titled "Las Poetas del optimismo".

I'm not sure whom CAS was referring to as "The Poets of Optimism".  In general, these lines read like a sarcastic comment on writers who seek to uplift and ennoble the human experience, sort of like versifying self-help authors.  But without a better sense of who specifically CAS might have been writing about, it's a difficult poem to interpret.  

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