This unpublished poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) exists as a manuscript in the John Hay Library at Brown University, and has a notation of "unfinished" written on the bottom of the manuscript.
Unseen, without a sound, were closed
The irremeable doors of clay;
Debarred from earth, to space exposed
The spirit took her outward way.
She rose, at first on cautious wings--
New to the freedom of the sky,
E'en a wind, from wanderings
In devious forests thick and high
Coming into the day at last
But soon, upon ascended heights,
A sense of barriers overpassed
Came on her, and she met the vast
Swiftening unto its wider flights.
To her, with backward gaze,
The earth was shaken from its place,
And flung returnless, unredeemed,
In gulfs that closed without a trace;
Where the precipitated moon
A glittering pebble followed swift;
And shot the sun, that dwindled soon--
A plummet in an endless rift.
"As to the vortices of dread
That wast beyond the nether bars
They fell," said she, above her head--
A night that bristled with its stars.
"Methinks that yonder suns, in rows
Serried, innumerable, shine
As the angels where disclose
The portals of the place divine."
Tow'rd eyries of the clustered spheres--
Their vantages remotely seen--
She soared apace, nor thought to face
The gulfs that drave between:
By night resistless pushed apart,
The systems, on each side
Divided swift, and through the rift
She saw the blackness wide
Field of ulterior suns, that stood
In far-assembled pride.
Although much of the diction in this poem feels strained, it's a fascinating idea to trace the path of a spirit emerging after the death of a physical being in a journey to "The portals of the place divine."
I don't know when CAS wrote this poem, but it certainly feels like a early effort akin to the work that led up to his first published volume of poetry (The Star-Treader and Other Poems). In reading "Ballad of a Lost Soul", I can't help but recall CAS' later epic poem "The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil", which traces a similar journey of cosmic proportions, although following a much less conventional course!
