It flamed among the violets—near, how near,
To unenchanted fields and hills of home! ( “Rosa Mystica,” LO 94–95) Note that the Atlantis mentioned above is “grey”—thus obliquely indicating that this is the post-cataclysmic Atlantis lying beneath the ocean, and evidently mantled with the grey of the deep-sea silt.
The second reference is to that Atlantis of the Pacific, the Mu postulated by
James Churchward, or sometimes rendered as Lemuria (as in the present case), also postulated as extant in the Indian Ocean, stretching between Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent once upon a time. This reference appears in the sonnet “Mirrors,” which Smith has cast in that metre somewhat rare in English (but not in
French, where it serves as the basic line in classical prosody), the alexandrine, a metre he handles characteristically with incomparable dexterity.
Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique!
Whether in melancholy marble palaces
In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness
Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek;
Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak
242 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses
Of lost Lemuria, or behind the lattices
Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique
Of wan, mysterious women!—Mirrors, mirrors old,
Mirrors immutable, impassible as Fate,
Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past
Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold;
And fleeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last,
Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate. ( SP 83)
Note the hyper-subtle effect the poet achieves by the enjambement in lines 6
through 9, an effect tantalizing in its half-palpable quality, as of images that disappear before they are fully formed in our minds but that hint at an extraordinary beauty just beyond our powers to imagine.
The third reference is to Lemuria and Atlantis both, and is found in lines 40–
53 of Smith’s elegy “To Nora May French.”1
If thy voice
In any wise return, and word of thee,
It is a lost, incognizable sigh,
Upon the wind’s oblivious woe, or blown,
Antiphonal, from wave to plangent wave
In the vast, unhuman sorrow of the main,
On tides that lave the city-laden shores
Of lands wherein the eternal vanities
Are served at many altars; tides that wash
Lemuria’s unfathomable walls,
And idly sway the weed-involvèd oars
At wharves of lost Atlantis; tides that rise
From coral-coffered bones of all the drowned,
And sunless tombs of pearl that krakens guard. ( LO 166)
The reader will have noted how naturally the references to Lemuria and Atlantis occur within the context of the given passage (with its imagery of sea-wind and sea-tide).
The fourth reference—or (rather) in this case, example—is the entire sonnet
“In Lemuria,” a masterpiece of compression and subtle suggestiveness. This oth-
erworldly sonnet narrates its tale through a succession of exotic scenes or images, a succession that culminates in the hyper-exotic reference, the “jaspers from the moon.”
Rememberest thou? Enormous gongs of stone
Were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers
Acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears,
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243
And spoke the names of monsters overthrown—
Griffins whose angry gold, and fervid store
Of sapphires wrenched from marble-plungèd mines—
Carnelians, opals, agates, almandines,
I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore.
In the wide fane that shrined thee, Venus-wise,
The fallen clamours died. . . . I heard the tune
Of tiny bells of pearl and melanite,
Hung at thy knees, and arms of dreamt delight;
And placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes,
Pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon. ( LO 60)
Is it to a goddess or empress, statue or living woman, that the warrior-prince-
narrator proffers the booty of conquest? It is a tribute to the author’s adroitness that we do not definitely know. The only clue that we have is the tinkling of the
“tiny bells of pearl and melanite,” which might indicate a living person making the natural slight movements that a sitting person makes. Yet the tinkling could be caused by the wind or by some artificial means, as of a priest stirring those bells by hand or by some hidden mechanism in the statue, if the object in question is indeed a statue.
The fifth Atlantean reference occurs in the sonnet “Symbols.” In this lyric the poet abjures his already quite exotic style of imagery for one even more exotic, if possible. (The poem immediately precedes, in the original Ebony and Crystal, Smith’s greatest and most imaginative effort, The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil. ) No more of gold and marble, nor of snow,
And sunlight, and vermilion, would I make
My vision and my symbols, nor would take
The auroral flame of some prismatic floe,
Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow,
Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake
The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake. . . .
To body forth my fantasies, and show
Communicable mystery, I would find,
In adamantine darkness of the earth,
Metals untouched of any sun; and bring
Black azures of the nether sea to birth—
Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind,
Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring. ( LO 95)
It seems clear from the context (lines 13–14) that the springtime to which Smith refers is not so much specifically that of Plato’s lost continent as it is, more generally, a springtime indescribably primal. Observe the original way in which the poet
244 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
indicates the fact that these “Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring” are buds—through the subtle epithet “blind.”
The sixth reference, or example, is only implicitly Atlantean, and occurs in
lines 105–13 of The Hashish-Eater. This is the vision or episode that closes the second of the overall ten sections (as originally published in 1922) that make up this compressed epic, sections two, three, and four consist of a relentless piling-up of one vision on top of another.
I beheld
The slowly-thronging corals that usurp
Some harbor of a million-masted sea
And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold
Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed
And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns
The octiremes of perished emperors,
And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed
From a sea-deserted haven. ( EC 51–52)
This vision suggests an ultramundane Atlantis which is in process of being overwhelmed, not by one great catastrophe of earthquake and tsunami but by a
stranger doom requiring aeons of time.
The seventh and last Atlantean reference in Ebony and Crystal is to Atlantis and Lemuria both, and is found in the first and shorter of the two sections of the poem in prose “From a Letter”:
Will you not join me in Atlantis, where we will go down through streets of
blue and yellow marble to the wharves of orichalch, and choose us a galley with a golden Eros for figurehead, and sails of Tyrian sendal? With mariners that knew Odysseus, and beautiful amber-breasted slaves from the mountain-vales of Lemuria, we will lift anchor for the unknown fortunate isles of the outer sea; and, sailing in the wake of an opal sunset, will lose that ancient land in the gl
aucous twilight, and see from our couch of ivory and satin the rising of unknown stars and perished planets. ( NU 11)
The above is one of the rare instances wherein the poet gives us a palpable envisioning of Plato’s fabled city, complete with a mention of that fabulous alloy of copper and gold (mixed-in with some silver) called orichalch, or orichalcum, evidently a bright or pale flame-gold. Note in particular the magisterial handling of the rhythm in the second period, a rhythm which seems to lift anchor for us, and to rise and fall with the waves of the ocean herself—a rise and fall first stated in the two subordinate phrases opening the sentence, and then echoed or repeated in the last part of the last phrase, “the rising of unknown stars and perished planets.”
Smith’s fourth volume of verse—and his third major collection of poetry—
Sandalwood (published by Smith himself in 1925) , contains only two specifically At-
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lantean references. These occur in two sonnets, the first cast in alexandrines, the second in the usual decasyllabics.
The first sonnet, “Forgotten Sorrow,” is one of the most delicate and subtle
tasks that Smith ever assigned to himself, to give embodiment to a theme which
threatens to disappear during the handling of it, due to its utter filmy character, or to be destroyed if the given embodiment prove too heavy. The razor-thin terrain wherein such manifestation can take place, the poet just achieves, no more and no less. The Atlantean allusion occurs in the final image, which contains both visual and aural clues. The final image occupies the entire fourteenth line, thus logically capping the rest of the sonnet. Smith is ever the master of style and form, discovering the perfect expression for his poetic substance.
A stranger grief than any grief by music told
Is mine: regret for unremembered loves, and faces
Veiled by the night of some unknown farewell, or places
Lost in the dusty ebb and lapse of kingdoms old
On the slow desert, rises vague and manifold
Within my heart at summer twilight. Through the spaces
Of all oblivion, voidly then my soul retraces
Her dead lives given to the marbles and the mould
In dim Palmyra, or some pink, enormous city
Whose falling columns now the boles of mightier trees
Support in far Siam. . . . All grievous love and pity,
All loveliness unheld for long, and long estranged,
Appeals with voices indistinguishably changed,
Like bells in deep Atlantis, tolled by summer seas. ( LO 159)
The second sonnet wherein we find an Atlantean reference is “Enchanted Mir-
rors.” The entire piece possesses an abundance of those peculiarly Smithian elements of poetic magic, but the reference to Atlantis especially seems to possess, if possible, an even greater amount of this magical quality. We must call particular attention to the final lines of both the octet and the sestet which, although differing as to where the pauses or semi-pauses fall (in the vocal delivery of the lines), manage to achieve an almost similar rhythm or rhythmical effect, but with this one major distinction: the pauses in the last line of the sestet reverse those in the last line of the octet.
These are enchanted mirrors that I bring—
By daemons wrought from metals of the moon
To burnished forms of lune or plenilune;
Therein are faery faces vanishing,
And warm Pompeiian phantoms lovelier
Than mortal flesh or marble; and the gleam
Of Atlantean suns that rose in dream
And sank on golden worlds that never were.
246 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
* * * * *
Therein you shall behold unshapen dooms,
And ghoul-astounding shadows of the tombs;
Oblivion, with eyes like poppy-buds,
Or love, with blossoms plucked in Devachan,
In stillness of the lily-pillared woods—
But nevermore the moiling world of man.2 ( LO 125–26)
Created at about the same time as the poems included in the original Sandalwood and, like those poems, first published in the Auburn Journal, are two quatrains that contain Atlantean or peripherally Atlantean references, and which are both similar in form, rhetoric, and effect. (Smith included both “Dissidence” and “Lemurienne” in his collection of collections, Selected Poems, in the section “Sandalwood.”) The first quatrain, “Dissidence” (first entitled “Diversity”), contains the peripherally Atlantean reference:
Within your voice the boughs of Eden sigh
In scented winds blown from the summer foam;
But in your gaze the lulling hills of home
Accept the silence of an autumn sky.3 ( SP 169)
The equation of Eden to the almost utopian, semi-paradisiacal world of Plato’s Atlantis is borne out by one possible interpretation of lines 1–2. Restricting our examination to these two lines only, we may evolve two different interpretations of what exactly is the physical image that Smith intends within the context. The first reading is that the boughs of Eden sigh because of the scented winds blown from the summer foam (i.e., at the edge of the ocean littoral). The second reading is that, within the scented winds blown from the summer foam, we can hear the boughs
of Eden sigh, and that the summer foam causes this sound as a memory, as an
auditory resurrection, of an Eden lost or sunk, Atlantis-wise, beneath the sea.
Which reading is the correct one, is impossible to tell due to the word-arrangement dictated by the exigencies of verse-rhetoric.
The second quatrain, “Lemurienne” (first entitled “The Lemurienne”), has a
directly generical Atlantean reference, apart from the title (which apparently indicates a female inhabitant of that Atlantis of the Indian Ocean, or of the Pacific, Lemuria).
From dawn to dawn your eyes of graven spar
For ever change, with chill forgotten runes;
But all the while your spirit lies afar,
A sphinx that peers on prediluvian moons.4 ( SP 169)
Also created at approximately the same time (1923–25) as the poems in San-
dalwood (including the pieces quoted above among others) is an extensive series of epigrams and pensées first published in the Auburn Journal. This is one of the few
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places in his overall creativity where Smith makes a number of overt references to a narrow contemporaneity. Most of these epigrams might be characterized as up-to-date, smart, topical; and these have predictably dated the most. Some of them are still amusing, and some still possess genuine interest. In the Auburn Journal for Thursday, 15 November 1923, four items appear under the title “Points for the
Pious.” The second of these four items, one of the most perceptive of the real
pensées, contains an unexpected reference to Atlantis:
The terror of Lilith, the fear of beauty and its destructive potentialities, lies at the heart of all puritanism. Humanity has always been divided into those who
loved beauty and those who were afraid of it. Doubtless there were witch-burners in ancient Atlantis. ( DN 53)
These same years also saw Smith writing his first play, The Fugitives, which he failed to complete. This was a romantic drama composed in blank verse interspersed
with songs. All the songs that Smith wrote for the play, he included in Sandalwood:
“Song” or “The Fugitive”; “The Song of Aviol”; “The Love-Potion”; and “The
Song of Cartha.” In his letter to R. H. Barlow dated 23 November 1936, Smith described the plot, one surprisingly dealing with Atlantis, as follows:
The plot was a simple and quite romantic one: it began with the mutual dawning of love in an Atlantean boy and girl, soon to be separated. Later, they were to meet again: the boy a wandering poet of recognized genius, the girl a ki
ng’s concubine.
Their old love reawakens, they flee from the Atlantean court and capital, to perish in the wilderness after several days and nights of mad happiness. ( SL 275) Such a play, developed in several acts and various tableaux, would have made a notable addition to the one play that he did complete, but evidently much later, The Dead Will Cuckold You.
In the summer of 1928, following the death of George Sterling in November
1926 (an event of great consequence for Smith as one of Sterling’s closest friends), Smith began writing his mature fiction, a development marked by the brief prose fantasy “The Ninth Skeleton.” Between 1928 and 1938 he was to write over one
hundred and forty short stories and novelettes. In December 1929 he created some ten poems in prose later designated as “prose pastels”—and in one of them, “To
the Daemon,” composed on the 16th, the poet addresses his tutelary daemon, or
genius, asking this entity, suitably enough, to tell him “many tales” but not necessarily of Atlantis, among other esoteric locations.
Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have
ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Nay, tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space; for I am a little weary of all recorded years and chartered lands; and the isles that are westward of Cathay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote enough to be
made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new for my thoughts
248 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons that are too recent.
Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend
and of which there are no myths in our world or any world adjoining. […] Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached. ( NU 17–18)
However, be his request as it may have been, the daemon did tell him some-
thing of Plato’s lost world, for included in Smith’s prose fictions of 1928–38 are five tales of Atlantis, or (more correctly) “the last isle of foundering Atlantis”—to wit, Poseidonis. These tales comprise “The Last Incantation,” “The Death of Malygris,” “The Double Shadow,” “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (the last word Smith
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