The song to Oblivion is exquisite:
Art thou more fair
For all the beauty gathered up in thee,
As gold and gems within some lightless sea?
For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,
Art thou more fair?
Art thou more strong
For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?
For world and star that find thy ways more deep
Than light may tread, too wearisome for song.
Art thou more fair?
Nay! thou art bare
For power and beauty on thine impotence
Bestowed by fruitful Time’s magnificence;
For fruit of all things strong and bloom of fair.
Thou art still bare
There are many charming bits in this very simple manner and mood:
PINE NEEDLES
Oh, little lances, dipped in grey,
And set in order straight and clean,
How delicately clear and keen
Your points against the sapphire day!
Attesting Nature’s perfect art
Ye fringe the limpid firmament,
Oh, little lances, keenly sent
To pierce with beauty to the heart!
The publisher, A. M. Robertson, has made the collection into an exceptionally attractive book. The cover, of deep tan boards, is decorated by a narrow panel suggestive of the mountains and pines that have been the inspiration of much of the boy’s verse.
Out from its incunabula my spirit burst
And wild-eyed fling its body-bonds aside,
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
45
Like to some snake that sloughs its freckled rind,
And zipped abroad in space.
Through darkness all unlit by any light—
Though all space loomed agloom
I heard and felt
With soul abhorrible,
The beat of alien things,
The while continuously crossed my ken
Planets wild-tressed, uncharted and unkempt.
Then waxed a febrile light and by its gloom
I saw about my feet strange griffous forms
That rising from a tas of molecules
Would upward in grim gyroscopic flight.
And with a strange dim prescience cardiac
I heard them wailing forth their lamentings,
“O thou who knowest us in long dead lives,
(In Oriental parlance, too-long time)
Grant us—oh grant—immunity from toll.
We are the poor dead words that bloomed
Athwart the white dawn of Chaucerian times
And died in peace when Spenser was a boy.
We did our work—why shoulds’t thou resurrect
And start us o’er upon the weary round?
Grant us sureness, nor haul us from our tomb.”
Then as these syllables
Engulphed themselves
In utter unintelligentibility
I heard an unrejoicing wail again
And saw
A long array of togad forms,
Majestic, emperant, with one that thundered out:
“How long, Oh poet, wilt abuse our patience?
Immortal gods, to what length shall he go
Wrestling us thus from meaning and e’en form?
Spirit of Archias! Maro’s shade, defend!
Me miserum”—and sobbed aloud the rest
Upon the undelectant void of night
And my impenerable maze of mind.
At last howe’er the voidful darkness fled
And in its place reigned crimson-radiant hues,
And orange light and oleander tints,
46 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Cerise-bespattered while with mauve and taupe
Commingled were soft tones of Alice blue,
For as aloft I swung
Borei-eyed, drenched with gloom,
I heard soft cheering words
That throbbed fair semitones and wizard sounds
Reverberating on from orb to orb
And waking kindred echoes in my soul—
Sweet to me as my own words sterling ring!
A friend read “The Star-Treader” and was moved by Smith’s peculiar muse to tear off the following:
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
John Jury. “The Star-Treader. A Book of Verse by Clark Ashton Smith—A Re-
view.” San Jose Mercury and Herald (8 December 1912): magazine section, p. 2.
In a state of such fertility as California it would certainly indicate a drought in the valleys or perhaps a slight snowfall in the mountains if a harvest of at least one poet a year were not produced. We are certainly near, if not actually at the threshold of our golden literary age. Very much surprisingly good work is being done in California just at present and especially by the younger generation of writers. The latest writer sprung, as it were, full-panoplied from the brain of Jove, is Clark Ashton Smith, a youth of about 19 years. This young man who lives near Auburn,
a beautiful little city in the Sierra foothills, was heralded a few months ago by the newspapers as a writer of exceptional ability and promise. His little book, “The Star Treader,” from the press of A. M. Robertson of San Francisco, is most certainly an extraordinary work for so young a man.
In looking into the book one is ever impressed with its maturity of thought
and its opulence in language. The poet displays little, if any of the lyrical quality which characterizes most poetry, but this characteristic is due primarily to the fact that his subjects are cosmic in their scope and are too heavily charged with intellectualism and with a sort of scientific despair to lend themselves to lyrical quality.
The dominant theme of the little book is drawn from a contemplation of the in-
finitudes of time and space and of the marvelous cycles of life and death. Passing for the time, consideration of the philosophy of the poet, if it is proper to so speak of his fundamental purpose or thought, I cannot refrain first from quoting a few lines that would seem by any test to prove Mr. Smith a true poet.
In “The Star Treader,” the title poem is found this expression, certainly one of chaste and delicate beauty:
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
47
One world I found, where souls abide
Like winds that rest upon a rose.
And the following, revealing, it would seem, the faith of a devotee of the occult In unimagined spheres I found
The sequence of my being’s round—
Some life where firstling meed of Song,
The strange imperishable leaf,
Was placed on brows that starry Grief
Had crowned, and Pain anointed long.
Again, in the short dramatic poem, “The Masque of Forgotten Gods,” at the con-
clusion we hear the gods lamenting in unison as follows:
Our power is dead upon the earth
With the first dews and dawns of time;
But in the far and younger clime
Of other worlds, it hath rebirth.
* * * * * * *
Fresh altars in a distant sphere
Are keen with fragrance, bright with fire
New hearths to warm us from the night,
Till, banished thence, we pass in flight
While all the flames of dream expire.
Certainly these are most remarkable lines from one so youthful. It would seem that in such precocity itself the advocates of the doctrine of Karma must find their most powerful arguments.
It is often said that genius is a law unto itself, and I suppose this is a necessary and fundamental principle among literary folk. Not to say that all workers in this branch of human activity are geniuses, there ar
e, nevertheless, good reasons for holding the ordinary rules and regulations prescribed by rhetoricians and critics in healthy contempt. It cannot be said, however, that the spirit which defies all dogmas, forms, and ceremonials where such run counter to individual ideals is justified in its attitude unless based upon absolute verity in its interpretation of its theme. In respect to the view of life and nature taken by the author of “The Star-Treader,” I must confess to a feeling of great disappointment. The thought is constantly borne in upon me in reading the lines that an undue and sinister emphasis is placed upon the thoughts of chaos, of indirection, of death. Adjectives depicting the hideous, the ghoulish, the destructive, and the seemingly brutal in nature are over-worked. In this respect, as well as in respect to a most frequent selection of the inappropriate or the obsolete word, I would say the work displays the faults most common to youthful writers.
For example, aside from consideration for the verity of the thought which may
well be questioned, I can see no justification in poetry at least for speaking of the
48 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
skies as “dumb, dead and passionless.” And the omission of the adjective “fleshless” in the following it seems would not be objectionable:
With
hills
That seem the fleshless earth’s
Outjutting ribs.
Because where ribs “outjut,” the reader might well be permitted to exercise his own imagination as to their being “fleshless.”
The same overuse of words is evident in such lines as:
Dull Matter’s tongueless mouth.
And in the following:
Fuel of vision, brief embodiment
Of wandering will and wastage of the strong
Fierce ecstasy of one tremendous hour
When ages piled on ages were a flame
To all the years behind and years before.
It might be contended that the alliteration in the second line detracts from the beauty and strength of the expression and that the thought embodied in the words
“brief” in the first line and the word, “fierce” in the third, are sufficiently suggested by the context. In the same poem, “Nero,” we find the following powerful picture of the frenzy of a sateless ambition:
And were I weary of the glare of these,
I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand
Above a chaos of extinguished suns
That crowd and grind a shiver thunderously,
Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray
To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs.
Thus would I give my godhead space and speech
For its assertion, and thus pleasure it,
Hastening the feet of Time with casts of worlds
Like careless pebbles, or with shattered suns
Brightening the aspect of Eternity.
This poem illustrates what seems to be the poet’s over-emphasis of the sinister in life, the diabolical and inimical in nature.
This from “Retrospect and Forecast” illustrates the author’s same attitude, an
attitude which so far as the reader is concerned is surcharged as with the spirit of complaint. I think the vice of the spirit animating the lines consists in its libel upon the nature of life which is given the character of a vampire.
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
49
Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast,
. . . Even now within thy mouth, from tomb and urn
The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast
On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.
I have been trying to analyze in my own mind the spirit of much of the pre-
sent day which seems to invest the thought of the infinite extent of the physical universe with preeminence. It seems to me that the intrinsic values contained in the many and varied attributes of nature as reflected in the spirit have not been given their full and fair appraisement. I would say that the work of Mr. Smith is more potent with promise than achievement. That he is a young man of marvelous
powers cannot be denied.
In concluding this review I submit that the following poem “To the Dark-
ness,” to me the best in the book in itself alone would justify the publication of any book of verse and afford a basis for predicting that our young poet will accomplish much in the years to come that will insure him a place of honor and permanency in California literature.
TO THE DARKNESS
by Clark Ashton Smith
Thou hast taken the light of many suns,
And they are sealed in the prison-house of gloom
Even as candle-flames
Hast thou taken the souls of men,
With winds from out a hollow place;
They are hid in the abyss as in a sea,
And the gulfs are over them,
As the weight of many peaks,
As the depth of many seas;
Thy shields are between them and the light:
They are past its burden and bitterness:
The spears of the day shall not touch them,
The chains of the sun shall not hale them forth.
Many men there were,
In the days that are now of thy realm.
That thou hast sealed with the seal of many deeps;
Their feet were as eagles’ wings in the quest of Truth
Aye, mightily they desired her face,
Hunting her through the lands of life
50 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
As men in the blankness of the waste
That seek for a buried treasure-house of kings.
But against them were the veils
That hands may not rend nor sabers pierce;
And Truth was withheld from them,
As a water that is seen afar at dawn,
And at noon is lost in the sand
Before the feet of the traveller.
The world was a barrenness,
And the gardens were as the waste.
And they turned them to the adventure of the dark,
To the travelling of the land without roads,
To the sailing of the sea that hath no beacons.
Why have they not returned?
Their quest hath found end in thee,
Or surely they had fared
Once more to the place whence they came,
As men that have travelled to a fruitless land.
They have Iooked on thy face,
And to them it is the countenance of Truth.
Thy silence is sweeter to them than the voice of love,
Thine embrace more dear than the clasp of the beloved.
They are fed with the emptiness past the veil,
And their hunger is filled;
They have found the waters of peace,
And are athirst no more.
They know a rest that is deeper than the gulfs,
And whose seal is unbreakable as the seal of the void;
They sleep the sleep of the suns,
And the vast is a garment unto them.
Shamus O’Sheel. “A Young Poet. He has Quality, but Also the Faults of Youth.”
New York Times Book Review (26 January 1913): 38.
Clark Ashton Smith is as typically Californian as ever a Lake Poet was typically English. He is the latest note in that symphony of the arts which undoubtedly is taking form under the favorable skies, amid the caressing hills, of our Pacific empire.
When it is understood that not “Mister,” but “Master,” is the title of our poet, his years being but eighteen, it will be the more leniently forgiven him that his verse has more than a faint echo of that somewhat laboriously titanic poet, George Sterling.
He has drunk too deeply of the “Wine of Wizardry” for one of his tender years.
The result is a book which is a bit uncanny in its persiste
nt preoccupation with
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
51
themes of mighty scope and deepest speculation, and more or less like a splendid wilderness in which we long for an occasional oasis with tiny rippling springs and small flowers. To become serious, this youth has become super-serious. He is over-trained. The efforts to produce such a book at such a time has been a bit too much for him. Hardly a note breathes of personal love or any such vivid adventurous life of the body and the blood as youth should have. So the book becomes monotonous. There are failures, too, in its chosen field. So “The Masque of Forsaken
Gods” is another rehearsal of the original Olympian company in their classical
stunt. Each deity steps forward and says a little bit about their former divinity, just as a thousand poets have made them do before. Alas, poor Pan, protesting too
much that he is not dead. Gods were not killed by Christian priests, but by the poets who have fed upon their fame. There are moments of youthful hysteria in the presence of great themes, and instances of arid pseudo-mysticism which makes us hope that Mr. Smith will read the Celts and learn that true mysticism is a subtle and sudden and magic thing. But what makes us say that there is at last to be a poet by the name of Smith is, that the best poems in the book are astonishingly splendid and majestic treatments of cosmic themes, in a style of high and radiant rhetoric. We should like to quote from the title poem, from the “Song to Oblivion” and the
“Ode to the Abyss,” but we will let this splendid sonnet, in which rhetoric soars up into vision, stand for example; it is called “Nirvana:”
Poised as a god whose lone, detached post,
An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks
Of finite years, and those unvaried darks
That veil eternity, I saw the host
Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost
Of night—confusion as of dust with sparks—
Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks
Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost,
Fled with them; disunited orbs that late
Were atoms of the universal frame,
They passed to some eternal fragment-heap
And, lo the gods from space discorporate,
Who were its life and vital spirit, came
Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of sleep!
William Stanley Braithwaite. “Our Modern Poets.” Boston Evening Transcript (2 April 1913): 24.5
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