CHAPTER NINE

PROSE-POEMS

Sometime around 1914, Smith began writing prose-poems: short, concise prose works, often only a paragraph or two in length, written in a highly poetic style and usually expressing a single mood, image, fancy, or emotion, in the form of a miniature narrative or parable.135 Over the next fifteen years, up to the start of his fiction-writing period, he completed fifty-odd such pieces; nearly all are collected in the posthu­mous volume Poems in Prose, edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer, while the few remaining items can be found in Strange Shadows.

In introducing his volume, Sidney-Fryer provides a long and inter­esting history of the prose-poem, tracing its origins with Aloysius Bertrand, through its use by Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and finally Smith.136 Sidney-Fryer characterizes the poem in prose at its best as displaying “a terse and artistic unity in which style, subject-matter, and imagery all work toward the central effect, whether subtly or overtly”.137

In his prose-poems we find the least-fettered display of Smith’s artistry in fiction, both in terms of literary techniques and choice of subject matter and materials. Here Smith was free to ignore the encumbrances he found in conventional story writing—plot and charac­terization—and “to present and develop an idea, image, story, or emo­tional experience without having to bother with rhyme or strict metre or the arbitrary line length of the traditional forms of verse”.138

The overall thematic integrity of Smith’s work is manifested by prose-poems devoted to loss, the passing of greatness, the question of illusion and reality, ennui, and the yearn­ing for the peace of oblivion. Specific connections to Smith’s other writings, especially his short stories, are quickly apparent as well. As mentioned earlier, the story “The Demon of the Flower” is literally an extension of the prose ­poem “The Flower Devil”; such is the case also for “The Planet of the Dead” and “From the Crypts of Memory”. The influence of “The Traveller” and “The Muse of Hyperborea” on “The White Sybil” has been noted, as has the notion that the setting of “A Phantasy” formed a precursor to the world of Zothique. Further, the meeting of lovers in “A Dream of Lethe” is echoed in the Zothique tale, “Necromancy in Naat”, while the prose-poem “To the Daemon” foreshadows “The Flower-Women”, particularly in its image of a woman cradled within the bowl of a flower.

It is unfortunate that space limitations allow a look at only a few of the poems in prose. And it should be emphasized that these works are all pale in summary or quotation: each should be read in full to appreciate its subtleties of mood and imagery.

The primarily mood-oriented prose-poems range in tone from sorrow to exaltation, and many are unabashedly romantic. “The Broken Lute”, for example, tells of a minstrel whose lover has grown cold to him, and who, in sadness, smashes his lute upon a path the woman frequents. There, he hopes, she will see it and breathe once more in her heart a secret sigh for their lost love. “The Litany of the Seven Kisses” relates a lover’s ritual and contains some passages of classic beauty (“I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster”). In “The Mithridate” love is likened both to an anecdote and a poison, “a poison doubly lethal, because it kills so slowly, or does not kill at all”. In “The Abomination of Desolation” the only travelers who pass unscathed through the specter-ridden desert of Soom are two lovers, who have found “an abiding Eden in each other’s eyes” and who, shielded by their love, are spared the horrors of the outer void.

“From the Crypts of Memory”, perhaps Smith’s most well-known prose-poem, tells of the somber inhabitants of an age-old world, where the dead far outnumber the living, and the people carry on a dim, lifeless existence. Doom is omnipresent; above the world hangs a dying sun. Further, the inhabitants are oppressed by the great accomplish­ments of their past, which lie undecayed and unsurpassed. Smith expanded this prose-poem into the short story “The Planet of the Dead” (1930, LW), in which the Earthman Francis Melchior, his gaze trans­fixed upon a star on the horizon, finds himself coexisting as a poet on a planet of that star. The death of the sun has been proclaimed to be a month away, so Melchior, here called Antarion, steals away to one of the numberless cities of the dead to live his last days alone with his lover Thameera. When the sun expires and the cold that falls becomes “a growing agony, and then a merciful numbness, and then an all-encom­passing oblivion”, Melchior awakens back on Earth, bearing the double sorrow of his own life and Antarion’s, and he wonders which existence of the two is the dream.

In “The Demon, the Angel and Beauty”, an unnamed narrator asks alternately a demon and an angel about the nature of Beauty. “Is she the heart of day, or the soul of night?” Both reply that they have little actual knowledge: she is a “transcendent Mystery” to one and a “topic of the most frequent and sublime speculation” to the other. The demon concludes that Beauty does not exist, that she is a “web of shadow and delusion, woven by the crafty hand of God”—while the angel suggests that Beauty is God’s secret, the thing upon which God meditates, and the reason for which He has “held Himself immanifest to us for so many aeons”.

“The Touchstone” tells of a philosopher who has long searched for this fabled talisman, which reveals the true nature of things. He finds it in a very unattractive and ordinary pebble,139 and using it, he is disillusioned: the true world it reveals is one built of dust and skeletons. In the end he throws the Touchstone aside, “preferring to share with other men the common illusions, the friendly mirages that make our existence possible”. Here we see, as elsewhere in Smith, the willingness to accept illusion rather than its dubious or horrible counterpart, reality.

In “Narcissus” Smith finds echoes of vanity and self-absorption in the rust-conquered mirrors of perished sybaritic queens and in the once-shining shields of glorious, long-dead warriors, whose “brave and rutilant camp-fires” are centuried dust. The imagery used is heavy with decay; Smith reminds us that Time obliterates our concerns and conceits.

“The Frozen Waterfall” tells of a man who wishes to refind some­thing from long ago, a “many-stranded waterfall... where once we loitered and loved each other well”. Instead he finds it locked in ice and thinks of “deterred desires and aspirations, violent longings checked and frozen in their course. And I found in the waterfall the symbol I had sought; and finding it, I was doubly sad.... For was it not the symbol of my soul?”

Was it the symbol of Smith’s soul? The frozen waterfall may perhaps reflect his youthful poetic course and ambition, stilled by the changing tide of taste and fashion.

An effective use of parallel imagery is made in “The Sun and the Sepulcher”. The first paragraph presents the scene of sunset upon a tomb, the name of whose occupant is “holden awhile from Oblivion” by the strength of white marble. In the second paragraph, Smith writes that “even thus, even thus, and not otherwise” will the light of the waning sun of the future illume the glacial snows of the dead Earth.

One of the most impressive yet uncharacteristic of the prose-poems is “The Corpse and the Skeleton”. In its form it is singular, written as a dialogue between a newly-dead corpse and a long-dead skeleton; the ironic and semi-humorous tone it sustains are exceptional; and its observations and witticisms are remarkable for a piece written when Smith was only twenty-two. In essence, it tells the skeleton’s view of life and death: “‘Tis a world of creditors, of which the tomb and the worm are the last.... ‘Tis a dull business being dead, for all the number of the traffickers”. The newcomer asks: “Where, then... are the heavens of light and hells of fire...?” In silent answer, the body of a priest lies nearby, “whose corpulence diminishes momently, for the pamper­ing of worms”. Still, the corpse asks the skeleton is if there is no wisdom to be found in death, and is told:

Perchance ’tis something to know that bodies are made of dust and water, the last of which is evaporable, and the soul as the vapour thereof; for this is all our knowledge, in spite of much that is known and spoken of by hierophant and philosopher. However, unlike the lore and wisdom of these, it may be crammed without discommodation into one skull.

135. The distinction between Smith’s prose-poems and short stories is sometimes blurred, as is the case for “Sadastor”, “The Abominations of Yondo”, and “Told in the Desert”, each of which can be seen as either a brief story or an extended poem in prose.

136. Donald Sidney-Fryer himself has contributed to the genre in his own Songs and Sonnets Atlantean (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971), published under the name Donald S. Fryer, as he was former­ly known.

137. Introduction to Poems in Prose, p. xvi.

138. Ibid.

139. This same pebble makes an appearance in the tale of Zothique, “The Black Abbot of Puthuum”.