Poetry Corner: I crown me with the million-colored sun
Here is the anguish of Donald Wondrei contemplating the injustice of the obscurity of Clark Ashton Smith, whom he regards as a poet equal to Shelly or Byron.
http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/reviews/71/the-emperor-of-dreams
I confess I am in agreement with Wondrei on this one. I cannot understand why the name of Clark Ashton Smith is not help up in equal reverence with the poets of the romantic school: to me he seems akin to them in approach and spirit, his lyrical command of the English language not inferior, the opulence of his imagery superior to that of Shelly, if not equal to Keats.
Perhaps his subject matter was too otherworldly, too science-fictional, futuristic? Perhaps he was too well suited, in other words to write the poetry of the modern age as it should be written, a poetry taking place in the titanic universe of Einstein, filled with blazing star-gulfs where time itself is astonished by the immensity, and myriads of galaxies stream from the unimaginable singularity of all-creation, and rush toward universal billion-year-long night? Dante’s careful crystalline globes of Ptolemaic regularity, or Milton’s earth that dangles like an ornament on a slender chain from the battlements of heaven, no bigger than a star next to the moon, are too small for the modern imagination to take seriously: give me galaxies, I say, give me superclusters, and we will see what gigantic angels of fire are grand enough to wheel among the colored nebulae of an ever-expanding cosmos.
The opening lines from one of Clark Ashton Smith’s longer poems:
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.
Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,
The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,
By jealous moons maleficently urged
To follow me for ever; mountains horned
With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed
With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,
Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;
And continents of serpent-shapen trees,
With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,
Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire
By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,
And evil kings, predominanthly armed
With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon
Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,
Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,
With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,
Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons
Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,
With antic gnomes abominably wise,
Heave up their icy horns across my way.
But naught deters me from the goal ordained
By suns and eons and immortal wars,
And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name
Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs
By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ
For ending of a brazen book; the goal
Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand
In amplest heavens multiplied to hold
My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,
And Promethèan armies of my thought,
That brandish claspèd levins. There I call
My memories, intolerably clad
In light the peaks of paradise may wear,
And lead the Armageddon of my dreams
Whose instant shout of triumph is become
Immensity’s own music: for their feet
Are founded on innumerable worlds,
Remote in alien epochs, and their arms
Upraised, are columns potent to exalt
With ease ineffable the countless thrones
Of all the gods that are or gods to be,
And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set
Above the seventh paradise.
Supreme
In culminant omniscience manifold,
And served by senses multitudinous,
Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
Of utter night and chaos, I convoke
The Babel of their visions, and attend
At once their myriad witness….
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
