Ebony and Crystal
Poems in Verse and Prose

BY

CLARK ASHTON SMITH

AUTHOR OF

The Star-Treader and Other Poems
Odes and Sonnets

Copyright 1922
by
CLARK ASHTON SMITH

Printed by the
AUBURN JOURNAL
Auburn, Calif.

DEDICATION

TO

SAMUEL LOVEMAN

[CONTENTS]

[PREFACE]

Who of us care to be present at the accouchment of the immortal? I think that we so attend who are first to take this book in our hands. A bold assertion, truly, and one demonstrable only in years remote from these; and—dust wages no war with dust. But it is one of those things that I should most “like to come back and see.”

Because he has lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his subconscious daemon, and because he has set those murmurs to purer and harder crystal than we others, by so much the longer will the poems of Clark Ashton Smith endure. Here indeed is loot against the forays of moth and rust. Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be glad.

GEORGE STERLING.

San Francisco, October 28, 1922.

ARABESQUE

Like arabesques of ebony,

The cypresses, in silhouette,

Fantastically cleave and fret

A moon of yellow ivory.

The coldly colored rays illume

A leafy pattern manifold,

And all the field is overscrolled

With curiously figured gloom.

Like arabesques of ebony,

Or like Arabian lattices,

Forever seem the cypresses

Before a moon of ivory.

BEYOND THE GREAT WALL

Beyond the far Cathayan wall,

A thousand leagues athwart the sky,

The scarlet stars and mornings die,

The gilded moons and sunsets fall.

Across the sulphur-colored sands

With bales of silk the camels fare,

Harnessed with vermil and with vair,

Into the blue and burning lands.

And, ah, the song the drivers sing,

To while the desert leagues away—

A song they sang in old Cathay,

Ere youth had left the eldest king,—

Ere love and beauty both grew old,

And wonder and romance were flown

On fiery wings to worlds unknown,

To stars of undiscovered gold.

And I their alien words would know,

And follow past the lonely Wall,

Where gilded moons and sunsets fall,

As in a song of long ago.

TO OMAR KHAYYAM

Omar, within thy scented garden-close,

When passed with eventide

The starward incense of the waning rose—

Too fair and dear and precious to abide

After the glad and golden death of spring—

Omar, thou heardest then,

Above the world of men,

The mournful rumour of an iron wing,

The sough and sigh of desolating years,

Whereof the wind is as the winds that blow

Out of a lonesome land of night and snow,

Where ancient winter weeps with frozen tears;

And in thy bodeful ears,

The brief and tiny lisp

Of petals curled and crisp,

Fallen at Eve in Persia’s mellow clime,

Was mingled with the mighty sound of time.

Omar, thou knewest well

How the fair days are sorrowful and strange

With time’s inexorable mystery

And terror ineluctable of change:

Upon thine eyes the bleak and bitter spell

Of vision, thou didst see,

As in a magic glass,

The moulded mists and painted shadows pass—

The ghostly pomps we name reality.

And, lo, the level field,

With broken fane and throne,

And dust of old, unfabled cities sown,

In unremembering years was made to yield,

From out the shards of Pow’r,

The pillars frail and small

That lift for capital

The blood-like bubble of the poppy-flow’r;

And crowns were crumbled for the airy gold

The crocus and the daffodil should hold

As inalienable dow’r.

Before thy gaze, the sad unvaried green

The cypresses like robes funereal wear,

Was woven on the gradual looms of air,

From threadbare silk and tattered sendaline

That clothed some ancient queen;

And from the spoilt vermilion of her mouth,

The myrtles rose, and from her ruined hair,

And eyes that held the summer’s ardent drouth

In blown, forgotten bow’rs;

And amber limbs and breast,

Through ancient nights by sleepless love oppressed,

Or by the iron flight of loveless hours.

Knowing the weary wisdom of the years,

The empty truth of tears;

The suns of June, that with some great excess

Of ardour slay the unabiding rose,

And grey-haired winter, wan and fervourless

For whom no flower grows;

Seeing the scarlet and the gold that pales,

On Orient snows untrod,

In magic morns that grant,

Across a land of common green and gray,

The disenchanted day;

Knowing the iron veils

And walls of adamant,

That ward the flaming verities of God—

Knowing these things, ah, surely thou wert wise,

Beneath the warm and thunder-dreaming skies,

To kiss on ardent breast and avid mouth,

Some girl whose sultry eyes

Were golden with the sun-beloved south—

To pluck the rose and drain the rose-red wine,

In gardens half-divine;

Before the broken cup

Be filled and covered up

In dusty seas of everlasting drouth.

STRANGENESS

O love, thy lips are bright and cold,

Like jewels carven curiously

To symbols of a mystery,

A secret dim, forgotten, old.

Like woven amber, finely spun,

Thy hair, enwoofed with golden light,

Remembers yet the flaming flight

Of some unknown, archaic sun.

Thine eyes are crystals green and chill,

Wherein, as in a shifting sea,

Wan fires and drowning splendours flee

To stealthy deeps forever still.

Fallen across thy dreaming face,

The dawn is made a secret thing,

Like flame of crimson lamps that swing

At midnight, in a cavern-space.

Thy smile is like the furtive gleam

Of fleeing moons a traveller sees

Through closing arms of cypress-trees,

In secret realms of night and dream.

Sphinx-like, unsolved eternally,

Thy beauty’s riddle doth abide,

And love hath come, and love hath died,

Striving to read the mystery.

THE INFINITE QUEST

In years no vision shall aver,

In lands no dream may name,

Tow’rd alien things what longings were,

And thence what languors came!

For each horizon straightly sought,

With fealty to the stars,

What death and weariness were bought,

What bitterness, what bars!

I waken unto years afar,

And find the quest made new

In Earth, that was perchance a star

Unto my former view.

ROSA MYSTICA

The secret rose we vainly dream to find,

Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago,

Or in old summers of the realms of snow,

Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind;

Or once its broad and breathless petals pined

In gardens of Persepolis, aglow

With desert sunlight, and the fiery, slow

Red waves of sand, invincible and blind.

On orient isles, or isles hesperian,

Through mythic days ere mortal time began,

It flowered above the ever-flowering foam;

Or, legendless, in lands of yesteryear,

It flamed among the violets—near, how near,

To unenchanted fields and hills of home!

THE NEREID

Her face the sinking stars desire.

Unto her place the slow deeps bring

Shadow of errant winds that wing

O’er sterile gulfs of foam and fire.

Her beauty is the light of pearls.

All stars and dreams and sunsets die

To make the fluctuant glooms that lie

Around her, and low noonlight swirls

Down ocean’s firmamental deep,

To weave for her who glimmers there,

Elusive visions, vague and fair;

And night is as a dreamless sleep:

She has not known the night’s unrest,

Nor the white curse of clearer day;

The tremors of the tempest play

Like slow delight about her breast.

Serene, an immanence of fire,

She dwells forever, ocean-thralled,

Soul of the sea’s vast emerald;

Her face the sinking stars desire.

IN SATURN

Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed

To isles of high, primeval amarant,

Where the flame-tongued sonorous flow’rs enchant

The hanging surf to silence: All engrailed

With ruby-colored pearls, the golden shore

Allured me; but as one whom spells restrain,

For blind horizons of the sombre main,

And harbors never known, my singing prore

I set forthrightly: Formed of fire and brass,

Immenser skies divided, deep on deep

Before me,—till, above the darkling foam,

With dome on cloudless adamantine dome,

Black peaks no peering seraph deems to pass,

Rose up from realms ineffable as Sleep!

IMPRESSION

The silver silence of the moon

Upon the sleeping garden lies;

The wind of evening dies,

As in forgetful dreams a ghostly tune.

How white, how still, the flowers are,

As carved of pearl and ivory!

The pines are ebony,

A sombre frieze on heavens pale and far.

Like mirrors made of lucid stone,

The pools lie calm, and bright, and cold,

Where moon and stars behold,

In some eternal trance, themselves alone.

TRIPLE ASPECT

Lo, for Earth’s manifest monotony

Of ordered aspect unto sun and star,

And single moon, I turn to years afar,

And ampler worlds ensphered in memory.

There, to the zoned and iris-differing light

Of three swift suns in heavens of vaster range,

Transcendant Beauty knows a trinal change,

And dawn and eve are in the place of night.

There, long ago, in mornings ocean-green,

I saw bright deserts dusky with the sky,

Or under yellow noons, wide waters lie

Like wrinkled bronze made hot with fires unseen.

Strange flow’rs that bloom but to an azure sun,

I saw; and all complexities of light

That work fantastic magic on the sight,

Wrought unimagined marvels one by one.

There, swifter shadows suffer gorgeous dooms—

Lost in an orange noon, an azure morn;

At twofold eve, large, winged lights are born,

Towering to meet the dawn, or briefest glooms

Of chrysoberyl filled with wondering stars,

Draw from an emerald east to skies of gold.

Tow’rd jasper waters leaning to behold,

Vague moons are lost amid great nenuphars.

DESOLATION

It seems to me that I have lived alone—

Alone, as one that liveth in a dream:

As light on coldest marble, or the gleam

Of moons eternal on a land of stone,

The dawns have been to me. I have but known

The silence of a frozen land extreme—

A sole attending silence, all supreme

As is the sea’s enormous monotone.

Upon the icy desert of my days,

No bright mirages are, but iron rays

Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light

Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave

The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save

My spirit from the ravening Infinite.

THE ORCHID

Beauty, thou orchid of immortal bloom,

Sprung from the fire and dust of perished spheres,

How art thou tall in these autumnal years

With the red rain of immemorial doom,

And fragrant where but lesser suns illume,

For sustenance of Life’s forgotten tears!

Ever thy splendour and thy light appears

Like dawn from out the midnight of the tomb.

Colours, and gleams, and glamours unrecalled,

Richly thy petals intricate revive:

Blossom, whose roots are in Eternity,