by S. T. Joshi
I reach the gulf s irrespirable verge,
Where fails the strongest storm for breath, and fall,
Supportless, through the nadir-plunged gloom,
Beyond the scope andvision of the sun,
To other skies and systems.(465–76)
As we begin the fourth section (476f.), we find the narrator in a peculiar realm that the “Argument” terms “a gulf into which falls in cataracts the ruin and rubble of the universe.” This description does not seem immediately to apply to the region in which the narrator at first finds himself, for it appears to be simply another exotic world not entirely different in kind from the one he left. But eventually the narrator finds that the lush trees around him fall away, and he sees “an empty desert, all ablaze / With amethysts and rubies, and the dust / Of garnets or carnelians” (499–501). The symbolism appears to suggest the uselessness of these valued gems in this realm of waste and vacancy. Later “the grinding sands give place / To stone or metal” (506-7), and still later:
A hundred streams of shattered marble run,
And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,
Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,
To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts
Adown the gulfs eternal.(514–18)
These substances represent the building materials—and, by an elementary metonymy, the entire civilisations—of all the cultures of earth: primitive man is represented by stone and bronze, classical culture by marble, and the modern age by steel. All have met a similar ignominious fate at the end of time. And when the narrator follows “a river of steel and a river of bronze” (519) whose ripples are “loud and timeless as the clash / Of a million lutes” (520–21), we understand that both the material accomplishments and the aesthetic achievements of mankind, and perhaps the entire cosmos, are no more. The conclusion is now inevitable:
But when I reach
The verge, andseek through sun-deafening gloom
To measure with my gaze the dread descent,
I see a tiny star within the depths—
A light that stays me while the wings of doom
Convene their thickening thousands: for the star
Increases, taking to its hueless orb,
With all the speed of horror-changed dreams,
The light as of a million million moons;
And floating up through gulfs land glooms eclipsed
It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open . . . (568–82)
The universe is finished, and the narrator cannot complete his line because he has perished along with everything else in the cosmos.
Let us now return to the question of how convincing is this portrayal of the rise and fall of the universe in this poem. As stated earlier, the title leads one to suspect merely a farrago of drug-induced delusions; but under this interpretation the subtitle, “The Apocacalypse of Evil,” could have no coherent meaning. Smith states in the “Argument” that the drug was “used here as a symbol”—or perhaps as a vehicle for the envisioning of the cosmic spectacle. The subtitle clearly points to some cataclysm that will occur at some point in the poem, a cataclysm that will affect not merely the narrator but the world in which he finds himself. In effect, the narrative structure of The Hashish-Eater should be evident even without Smith’s “Argument”: no aesthetic work should require such an external aid to explicate it, and a close reading will establish the direction and purpose of the poem perhaps better than any prose account, whether by Smith or by anyone else.
How much the poem and its symbolism mirror Smith’s own philosophy is something that may be left for later study; but the poem may help to shed light on a recent issue in Smith studies. In a provocative article, Steve Behrends queried whether Smith should be regarded as a cosmicist or a misanthrope, and suggests that the latter is closer to Smith’s own view.[126] But The Hashish-Eater may indicate that Smith’s misanthropy (of which his letters offer abundant evidence) was born in part through his cosmicism. In a manner very similar to Lovecraft’s, Smith’s perception of the vastness of the cosmos could have suggested to him the grotesque puniness of the human puppets who inhabit one tiny comer of it for a twinkling of an eye; and to a man of Smith’s keen sensitivity, the spectacle of humanity’s ignorance of its own insignificance, or even its pompous claims of actual importance in the cosmos, may have triggered a contempt that ultimately developed into actual misanthropy. Conversely, misanthropy could have led Smith to seek release from petty human concerns and failings in the vastness of the cosmos. Whatever the case, misanthropy and cosmicism need not be perceived as mutually exclusive: one could easily have led to the other. And the “indifference” that Behrends rightly sees as the hallmark of Lovecraft’s cosmicism may not be so different from misanthropy as one might think: indifference to human affairs may well be the purest form of misanthropy. In any event, The Hashish-Eater may occupy a significant place in Smith’s thought as well as his work, as a narrative of cosmic decline and the hubris of the derisive little human insects who are helpless to avert it.
The Poetry of Donald Wandrei
It is entirely possible that Donald Wandrei (1908–1987) will ultimately be remembered principally for his poetry. In spite of such short stories as “The Red Brain” and “Colossus,” and the novel The Web of Easter Island, it is Wandrei’s verse that is the most consistently meritorious branch of his literary work. This is the more remarkable in that the overwhelming bulk of his poetry seems to have been written in his teens and early twenties. Ecstasy and Other Poems (1928) and Dark Odyssey (1931) contain the majority of his verse; and of the poems not derived from these collections included in Poems for Midnight (1964), most seem to have been written in the very late 1920s and early 1930s. H. P. Lovecraft read the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours in manuscript in 1927,[127] although the cycle was not published in its entirety until Poems for Midnight—if, indeed, it was published complete there. Why Wandrei stopped writing poetry after about 1934 may be as much of a mystery as his surcease of fiction-writing—or, at least, the publishing of his fiction—at about the same time. How much we have lost may be gauged by the four poems Wandrei wrote in late 1977 and 1978, poems as finely polished as those of his youth.
The central theme of Wandrei’s early verse is encapsulated in a line from “Let Us Love To-night”: “Beauty must die.” This is the burden of the very first poem in Ecstasy and Other Poems, “The Voice of Beauty,” which flawlessly crystallises this emotion. Even Wandrei’s most erotically unrestrained poem, “Ecstasy,” slyly introduces this theme amidst its paean to the glories of physical love:
Now shall I hold her white body closer and closer, till her red lips be ashen . . .
It is this funeral image that lingers over and above the ecstasies of the rest of the poem; and the final lines make it clear what conception Wandrei wishes to leave us with:
There will never be rapture nor passion like ours, our bound shall not sever
Though we die.
The poet is wearied of life, which he has drained to the dregs; he has loved too well, seen and read too much, and longs for some fresh impulse to jolt him out of his jaded ennui:
Wearied of pomp and power, gorged with glut,
I turn to this,
And find that what I thought so great is but
A maiden’s kiss. (“Awakening”)
But such moments are few, and he can only yearn for oblivion:
Out of oblivion, no voice will stir
To tell of pomp and splendour long unknown,
Of buried kings, and empires perilous;
The older glory of the days that were
Will be as perished poppies overblown
In Paphian gardens lost and ruinous.
(“Futility”)
It is passages like this that introduce
the cosmic element so familiar from Wandrei’s fiction. The bulk of Wandrei’s poetry is, in fact, not horrific but lyric, elegiac (his exquisite “In Memoriam: George Sterling”), and erotic; and it could be said that Wandrei achieves his most breathtaking effects as a poet when he combines the love poem with cosmicism—a unique compound we can find in no poetry save that of Clark Ashton Smith. “To Myrrhiline” contains an imperishable line, “For thee, the gods a planet would destroy”; from another perspective, the poet in “Borealis” scans the skies, where
All heaven smouldered in mysterious burning,
And blazed in beauty, deep on topless deep . . .
But the conclusion is arresting:
And then I turned, and looked within your eyes,
And all the glory faded from the skies.
Pure cosmicism is manifested in “The Challenger”:
He passed beyond the utmost realm of stars,
Beyond the heavens’ great celestial throng,
In search of vengeance for an ancient wrong
Inflicted by the gods in elder wars.
He burst asunder all the whelming bars
Of Time and Space, and strode upon his long
Abysmal pilgrimage, undaunted, strong
From all the hate of all those bitter scars.
For ever mounting past the realm of light,
He stood at last before the citadel
That rose from out the gulfs of utter night,
Malignant, as if guarded by a spell,
And on the doors of doom, disdainful, hurled
His cosmic challenge in an alien world.
A slightly different type of cosmicism—one where humanity’s limitations in the face of an alien and unknown cosmos is etched—can be seen in “Chaos Revealed”:
So few the days, so much that one could know,
So little light, so many corridors,
So dark whichever pathway one may go,
So great the gap, and firmly barred the doors,
That I am weary though I’ve not gone far,
And find defeat ere I have much begun;
Wherefor, solution distant as a star,
And certainty, by doubt and change, undone,
And conquest everlastingly beyond,
Where no man walks, and shall not ever see,
Nor ever have; and since this mortal bond
Is too exacting for man’s magistry,
Therefor am I, with what I have, content,
But still assail the deeper firmament.
The poet, blessed or cursed with an unnatural heightening of sensation, can occasionally find himself monomaniacally fascinated with a single phenomenon, as in the remarkable poem “Red”:
I am grown mad with love of thee, O Red!
Thy spectral talons fold me to thy mouth!
I swoon in eyes that mock the rotting dead—
One kiss, O Red, to break this hideous drouth!
Similarly, in “The Five Lords,” who are Black, Green, Red, Purple, and White, each of them is in some fashion connected with death; Black “gave him the pall of Death’s last blight, / All things died in my black might”; Green is the colour of “Hatred and spleen,” but also of “green corpses”; Red, the colour of blood, is “a spectre from the dead”; Purple has “royal robes like a purple ghost”; and finally White:
I am the colour yet to be;
All his great love will end in me,
In my design;
I am the sweet close winding-sheet
In whose oblivion we shall meet;
Though ye colours pass, though his limbs be fleet,
He is mine.
It is therefore not surprising that a number of Wandrei’s poems were inspired by pictorial art, in particular that of his brother Howard Wandrei. This makes particularly poignant the sentiment expressed in an early poem, “The Greatest Regret”:
Ah, God, that I could draw instead of write,
That I could picture worlds I’ve never known,
And wander in far lands and seas, alone,
That I to cosmic realms could take my flight!
Then, on this paper now so blank and white,
The growth of seeds of morbid beauty, sown
Upon the moon, I’d show, strange things that moan,
And fearful regions of a nameless fright.
With mad new colours and queer lines I’d trace
Phantasmal things of beauty and of death,
Vampirish beings of a stellar race,
Soft plants and creatures, dead, that still draw breath.
Ah, God! That I had genius, mad and great,
To paint the things I never shall relate.
It is as if words were somehow too heavy, too connected with rational discourse to serve as the vehicles for the ethereal sensations expressed in poetry and art:
There is a language I would fain employ,
An unknown golden tongue where every word
Is like the pure, sweet warbling of a bird,
And every sound a thing of lyric joy.
That tongue hath no harsh syllable to annoy
The listening ear; its tones are softly heard
As if a wind had musically stirred
Far silver bells with Song’s most sweet alloy.
And I, who long for fairer melodies
Would use that tongue’s undreamed-of ecstasies
For songs as wondrous as this wondrous dream,
Whose perfect euphony would be as clear
And haunting as some fabulous lost stream,
Poems for Beauty’s own enraptured ear.
(“The Poet's Language”)
Of the horrific poetry, perhaps Wandrei’s single most celebrated—or notorious—poem is “The Corpse Speaks.” Blunt and obvious as this is, it is nonetheless effective:
Dark, dark, cold, dead,
Silent, still, old, dead;
Dead, dead,
For ever dead.
Dead, dead,
For ever dead.
Flesh? Fled.
For ever fled.
Body? Spread.
For ever spread.
Soul? Dead.
For ever dead.
For ever dead, dead, dead.
Rarely have monosyllables been used to such harrowing effect. They suggest all manner of things—the ultimate decomposition of the human brain in death; the hammering of nails in a coffin; the slow, monstrous march of zombies. No other diction, no other imagery, no other metre could convey quite this effect.[128]
More conventionally, many poems transport us to lands of wonder and fantasy where realism is sloughed off and imagination rules:
For many a thousand leagues about
Terrific things hold fearful sway,
That war eternally on day
And change the name of Night to rout.
. . .
Upon that distant evil star
They hold in mirth their mad domain,
And antique wizards try in vain
To slay the fiends in magic war.
(“In Mandrikor”)
“Somewhere Past Ispahan,” Wandrei’s longest single poem, elegantly unites many of his poetic themes—fantasy, eroticism, the ennui of exhausted sensation—in a kaleidoscopic panorama of all that the world and the universe have to offer to the sensitive mind:
Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,
With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;
Now no things interest me,
And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,
Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,
And dreams that can not be.
To a consciousness like this, only an escape into the imagination can offer solace:
Into the moonlight, Cyrenaya, I would go
And leave behind me all the weary works of man,
And take the caravan
To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,
&nb
sp; The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow
Somewhere past Ispahan.
Wandrei’s most extensive venture into horrific verse is the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours. Here we become concerned both with origins and with Wandrei’s final wishes for this sequence. In Ecstasy and Other Poems we find the poem “Nightmare”; revised, this appears as “Nightmare in Green” in the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours. I am inclined to think that—as with Lovecraft”s “Recapture,” written several weeks before Fungi from Yuggoth but ultimately incorporated into that cycle—“Nightmare” was written prior to the bulk of the other sonnets and may have suggested the framework of the rest. Then there is the question of what the final version of the Sonnets should be. Three different versions were published in Wandrei’s lifetime: twelve sonnets appeared in various issues of Weird Tales between May 1928 and March 1929; twenty appeared in August Derleth’s anthology Dark of the Moon (1947); and finally, twenty-six appeared in Poems for Midnight. Here is a conspectus of the appearances:
Sonnet
Weird Tales
Dark of the Moon
Poems for Midnight
The Hungry Flowers
■
■
■
Dream-Horror
■
■[129]
■3
Purple
■
■
■
The Eye
■
■
■
The Grip of Evil Dreams
■
■[130]
■4
As I Remember
■
■[131]
■5
The Statues
■
■
■
The Creatures
■
■[132]
■6
The Head
■
■
■
The Red Specter
■
Doom
■
A Vision of the Future
■
■[133]
■7
After Sleep
■
■
In the Attic