Seeker

Read "Seeker" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/492/seeker

The version of this poem at The Eldritch Dark has several minor typos, just enough to warrant including the complete corrected text here:

In valleys where the lotos falls
And rots by lily-stifled streams,
A sleeper, dreaming of the sea,
Shall rise, and leave the halcyon lawns,

And follow fainting trails alone
Into the waste that has no well,
O fare on some fantasmal quest
To climes beyond the boreal snow.

For, sated with the lotos-fruit,
He craves again the vanishing brine,
The sunken ships, the siren isles,
The maelstroms haunted by the mew.

Amid chimera and mirage
He plucks the acrid outland pome
And mordant herbs that make him whole,
And trails the meteor and the star,

To leave his vulture-burnished bones
In lands of knightlier sleep than they
Shall haply share whose bones are laid
Where now the lotos-blossoms blow.

This poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) has the character of an artistic manifesto, as a "sleeper" arises from a life of idleness "where the lotos falls / And rots by lily-stifled streams" and sets off in pursuit of legends: 

He craves again the vanishing brine,
The sunken ships, the siren isles,
The maelstroms haunted by the mew.

The protagonist of the poem certainly shares some of the history associated with the Odysseus of Homer's Odyssey, but it seems quite clear the CAS intends for this poem to be something more than a portrait of that particular figure.

In the end, the sleeper's fate is not so different than that of those "whose bones are laid / Where now the lotos-blossoms blow", and yet his journey enabled him to encounter exotic wonders unknown to his fellow lotos-eaters.  For in following a path beneath "the meteor and the star" The Seeker has risen above the ordinary and the obvious, and created a life genuinely worth living.