CHAPTER TEN

VERSE

In view of the mass of Smith’s poetry and its complexity, little more can be accomplished in this chapter than to provide an outline of his work in verse together with a few examples.

The Selected Poems volume contains over five hundred works, and perhaps as many as two-hundred additional poems remain uncollected or unpublished. The range of his productions is equally tremendous: the verse includes a host of nature studies (“The Cherry-Snows” [ca. 1912], “Autumn Orchards” [1923], “The Old Water-Wheel” [1941]), philosophical pieces (“Transcendence”, “Chance” [1923], “Town Lights” [1941]), love poems (“Exotique”, “Connaissance” [1929]), satires and parodies (“Tin-Can on a Mountain-Top”), and a few blatantly erotic works (“The Temptation” [1924]).140 Smith was a traditionalist in poetry and took for his models the romanticists George Sterling, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Ambrose Bierce. As such, he aligned himself with a poetic movement whose day had passed, and which had been superseded by the modernist work of T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, and Ezra Pound.

In their construction, Smith’s poems are mainly conventional in form and meter, though the 1940s saw him dabbling in haiku, producing such excellent works as “Nuns Walking in the Orchard”:

Sable-robed, at noon,

They passed beneath red cherries

Ripening with June.141

In terms of their content, Smith’s poetry abounds in the themes and imagery we have observed in his prose productions. Nowhere, for instance, is Smith’s fascination with classic myth and fable clearer than in “The Masque of Forsaken Gods” (ca. 1912), “In Thessaly” (1935), and the love poem “‘Do You Forget, Enchantress?” (1946). And because Smith took up fiction-writing rather late in life, many important themes made their first appearances in his verse. The prominence of loss in the poetry has already been mentioned. His views on the subject of reality and illusion are effectively summed-up in the poem “Maya” (ca. 1925), named for the Hindu goddess or symbol of earthly illusion. “Retrospect and Forecast” (1912) demonstrates an early awareness of the vampiric feeding of life upon death: “Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast / The breast that fed thee—Death, disguiseless, stem: Even now, within my mouth, from tomb and urn, / The dust is sweet”. The sense of earlier incarnations of the soul, such as we find in the stories “The Chain of Aforgomon”, “Xeethra”, and “Ubbo-Sathla”, is foreshadowed by poems like “Decadence” (ST,SP):

By some strange antepast I have consumed

In a former star foregone the fruits of this;

And frost and dust commingle in the kiss

Of love, with my foresaken self entombed.

The many aspects and vagaries of love are the subjects of scores of works, including the poem-cycles “The Jasmine Girdle” and “The Hill of Dionysus” (the former was written in the 1920s for Genevieve Sully; the latter commemorates Smith’s friendship in the 1940s with Madelynne Greene and Eric Barker). While many of the love-poems are purely ecstatic (“Psalm”,142 “One Evening”), a host of others (“Ses­tet”, “Selenique” (1923), “Canticle”) carry some contrasting element of weariness, sorrow, or bitterness. For example, love in “A Psalm to the Best Beloved” is equated with peace—but it is the peace of oblivion, a shelter from the horrors of the world:

Thy loosened hair is a veil

For the weariness of mine eyes and eyelids,

Which have known the redoubled sun

In a desert valley with slopes of the dust of white marble

And have gazed on the mounded salt

In the marshes of a lake of dead waters.

Thy body is a secret Eden

Fed with Lethean springs,

And the touch of thy flesh is like to savor of lotos.

By contrast, a respite from love itself is wished for in “Amor Aeternalis”:

Away! I know the weariness and fever—

Kisses compounded of the world’s old dust

With fire that feeds the seventh hell for ever!

The grave shall keep a gentler couch than thine,

Though round my heart the roots of nettles twine,

Wreathed in the ancient attitude of lust.

However, it is Smith’s macabre and fantastic poetry that has caught the fancy of most of his readers. Although Smith produced poems of this kind throughout his creative life, a spectral mood is predominant in the collections Incantations (published only as a section in Selected Poems) and The Dark Chateau, in the same sense that cosmic imagery is common to the poems of The Star Treader. Incantations consists of verse composed both before and after Smith’s venture in weird-fiction; some of the poems (“The Envoys”, “Tolometh”, “The Satumienne”) tell min­iature tales, and could easily have sprung from ideas slated for future short stories. An echo of the fantastic is heard even in the nature studies from this period. In the poem “Lichens” (1929), for instance, Smith writes:

Old too they seem and with the stones coeval—

­Fraught with the stillness and the mystery

Of time not known to man;

Like runes and pentacles of a primeval

Unhuman wizardry

That none may use or scan.

Of the many macabre poems Smith produced, a few might be singled out for their excellence. The early work in blank verse, “Medusa” (1912), is a masterpiece of mood and imagery, describing the desolate land wherein the Head of the Gorgon is hidden. The sonnet “The Eldritch Dark” (ca. 1912) tells of the world at nightfall, when, with the setting of the moon and the coming of total dark, “The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest, / Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings”. In the powerful later poem, “Revenant”, a specter returns to haunt the dead and empty world that had been his in life, eons ago.

Smith’s acknowledged masterpiece in fantastic verse, however, is “The Hashish-Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil”, which he considered “a study in the possibilities of cosmic consciousness”.143 It is believed that this 576-line epic was completed over a period of just ten days, early in 1920. In its use of a succession of invented settings, the poem may have been influenced by Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry” (1907), which Smith is known to have admired.

The “hashish” of the title is used as a symbol only, representing one means of obtaining a widening of perspective. In the poem’s oft-quoted opening lines, the narrator proclaims the power and glory that a cosmic perspective has given him: “Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; / I crown me with the million-colored sun / Of secret worlds incredible, and take I Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, / Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume the spaceward-flown horizon infinite”. In world after world, the narrator witnesses a seem­ingly inexhaustible set of fabulous scenes and situations.

Surveyed

From this my throne, as from a central sun,

The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold

Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

Or suns of changeable iridescence, bring

Their rays about me like the colored lights

Imploring priests might lift to glorify

The face of some averted god....

The visions include an attack by dwarfs upon the Titans; the destruction of a Saturnian palace by a hellish tree which has taken root in the flagstones; a scene which would later provide the basis for the story “The Demon of the Flower”; and the penning of a roc upon the moon, caught so as to pluck “from off his saber-taloned feet / Uranian sap­phires fast in frozen blood, /And amethysts from Mars”. As the narrator’s mastery deepens, he is able to merge with the characters he sees, and to participate in their momentous undertakings.

Suddenly, amidst his wanderings, he hears a note of discord or challenge that he cannot identify but which destroys his fancied omnis­cience: “all my dreams / Fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised / To semblance by a necromant”. The moment of insecurity passes, however, and the journey through the worlds is resumed. But now he finds that his visions have become tainted and hostile and that he cannot control them. In one scene he takes refuge in a magnificent castle but finds within it a monstrous throned Worm, “tumid with all the rottenness of kings”.144 He is pursued thereafter by a horde of monsters (many drawn from classical mythology) summoned “from all the dread spheres that knew my trespassing”.

In the end, ‘the emperor of dreams’ is driven to the edge of an abyss, where all things end. There he is overwhelmed by the strangeness and alienage of his visions and is consumed by the “huge white eyeless Face / That fills the void and fills the universe”. Smith explained that this represented “the face of infinity itself, in all its awful blankness”,145 a symbol of the indifference or (perceived) hostility of the realms outside human experience. Like the characters of “The White Sybil” and “The Light from Beyond”, the narrator has proven himself in­capable of mastering the powers of other spheres, and of containing or understanding the unearthly vistas opened to him.

The judgment made against Mankind, and our ignorance and hubris, is a profoundly negative one. At the same time, the tale told by the poem is extravagantly colorful and imaginative. In this way “The Hashish-Eater” serves to encapsulate, as well as any other single work, the artistry and tempera­ment of Clark Ashton Smith.

140. Unless noted, all poems discussed are collected in Selected Poems.

141. It can be noted that Smith’s Boulder Ridge acreage bordered upon a Catholic Novitiate, which he referred to playfully as “the Nunnery of Averoigne”.

142. Written under the pseudonym, “Chistophe des Laurieres”.

143. Letter to S. J. Sackett, 11 July, 1950.

144. This idea/image of a throned Worm reappears almost fifteen years later in his historical fantasy “A Tale of Sir John Maudeville” (as we have seen) and the Hyperborean story “The Coming of the White Worm”.

145. From “The Argument of the Hashish-Eater” (SS), Smith’s sum­mary of the poem.