The Star-Treader and Other Poems

The Star-Treader and Other Poems Clark Ashton Smith

TO MY MOTHER

NERO

This Rome, that was the toil of many men,
The consummation of laborious years—
Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead,
And image of the wide desire of kings—
Is made my darkling dream's effulgency,
Fuel of vision, brief embodiment
Of wandering will, and wastage of the strong
Fierce ecstacy of one tremendous hour,
When ages piled on ages were a flame
To all the years behind, and years to be.
Yet any sunset were as much as this,
Save for the music forced by hands of fire
From out the hard strait silences which bind
Dull Matter's tongueless mouth—a music pierced
With the tense voice of Life, more quick to cry
Its agony—and save that I believed
The radiance redder for the blood of men.
Destruction hastens and intensifies
The process that is Beauty, manifests
Ranges of form unknown before, and gives
Motion and voice and hue where otherwise
Bleak inexpressiveness had leveled all.
If one create, there is the lengthy toil;
The laboured years and days league tow'rd an end
Less than the measure of desire, mayhap,
After the sure consuming of all strength,
And strain of faculties that otherwhere
Were loosed upon enjoyment; and at last
Remains to one capacity nor power
For pleasure in the thing that he hath made.
But on destruction hangs but little use
Of time or faculty, but all is turned
To the one purpose, unobstructed, pure,
Of sensuous rapture and observant joy;
And from the intensities of death and ruin,
One draws a heightened and completer life,
And both extends and vindicates himself.
I would I were a god, with all the scope
Of attributes that are the essential core
Of godhead, and its visibility.
I am but emperor, and hold awhile
The power to hasten Death upon his way,
And cry a halt to worn and lagging Life
For others, but for mine own self may not
Delay the one, nor bid the other speed.
There have been many kings, and they are dead,
And have no power in death save what the wind
Confers upon their blown and brainless dust
To vex the eyeballs of posterity.
But were I god, I would be overlord
Of many kings, and were as breath to guide
Their dust of destiny. And were I god,
Exempt from this mortality which clogs
Perception, and clear exercise of will,
What rapture it would be, if but to watch
Destruction crouching at the back of Time,
The tongueless dooms which dog the travelling suns;
The vampire Silence at the breast of worlds,
Fire without light that gnaws the base of things,
And Lethe's mounting tide, that rots the stone
Of fundamental spheres. This were enough
Till such time as the dazzled wings of will
Came up with power's accession, scarcely felt
For very suddenness. Then would I urge
The strong contention and conflicting might
Of chaos and creation, matching them,
Those immemorial powers inimical,
And all their stars and gulfs subservient—
Dynasts of Time, and anarchs of the dark—
In closer war reverseless; and would set
New discord at the universal core,
A Samson-principle to bring it down
In one magnificence of ruin. Yea,
The monster Chaos were mine unleashed hound,
And all my power Destruction's own right arm!
I would exult to mark the smouldering stars
Renew beneath my breath their elder fire,
And feed upon themselves to nothingness.
The might of suns, slow-paced with swinging weight
Of myriad worlds, were made at my desire
One long rapidity of roaring light,
Through which the voice of Life were audible,
And singing of the immemorial dead
Whose dust is loosened into vaporous wings
With soaring wrack of systems ruinous.
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, and 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.

CHANT TO SIRIUS

What nights retard thee, O Sirius!
Thy light is as a spear,
And thou penetratest them
As a warrior that stabbeth his foe
Even to the center of his life.
Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs;
They form a bridge thereover,
That shall endure till the links of the universe
Are unfastened, and drop apart,
And all the gulfs are one,
Dissevered by suns no longer.
How strong art thou in thy place!
Thou stridest thine orbit,
And the darkness shakes beneath thee,
As a road that is trodden by an army.
Thou art a god,
In thy temple that is hollowed with light
In the night of infinitude,
And whose floor is the lower void;
Thy worlds are as priests and ministers therein.
Thou furrowest space,
Even as an husbandman,
And sowest it with alien seed;
It beareth alien fruits,
And these are thy testimony,
Even as the crops of his fields
Are the testimony of an husbandman.

THE STAR-TREADER

I

A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,
Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth
Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth
Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams
Thine ancient pathway of the suns,
Whose flame is part of thee;
And deeps outreach immutably
Whose largeness runs
Through all thy spirit's mystery.
Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze
Of stars where through thou camest in old days;
Pierce without fear each vast
Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.
A hand strikes off the chains of Time,
A hand swings back the door of years;
Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,
And opens the strait dream to space sublime."

II

Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay!
What eye shall note or measure mete
His passage on a purpose fleet,
The thread and weaving of his way!
It caught me from the clasping world,
And swept beyond the brink of Sense,
My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled,
Like to a planet chained and hurled
With solar lightning strong and tense.
Swift as communicated rays
That leap from severed suns a gloom
Within whose waste no suns illume,
The wingèd dream fulfilled its ways.
Through years reversed and lit again
I followed that unending chain
Wherein the suns are links of light;
Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres
The twisting of the threads of years
In weavings wrought of noon and night;
Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,
Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.