Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

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TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE
by: James Elroy Flecker

I WHO am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Mæonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

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This poem, entitled only ‘To Edmund Clerihew Bentley‘, appears in the front matter of G.K. Chesteron’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, his droll and nightmarish fantasy of philosophical policework, and the poem is by his hand. Certain of the lines have a biting pertinence to the affairs of our day–I am thinking particularly of disnatured science, decayed art, laughterless lust, plumed cowardice, shamelessness honored.

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came —
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.
Children we were — our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain —
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved —
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells —
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand —
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e’er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

G. K. C.

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The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil
Clark Ashton Smith

With excuses to my Jesuit confessor, Fr. de Casuist, I would like to impose on my vow of restricting my posts to Friday in order to hear a quote from the devil.

Here is the Mount Niphates monologue in Milton’s PARADISE LOST. This is that speech which those in the camp of William Blake, who say that Milton unbeknownst was of the Devil’s party, have trouble to explain. (For those of you who are fans of THE INCREDIBLES, this is the first example of ‘monologing’, a practice many a lesser super-villain in after times was fain to copy.)

O for that warning voice, which he who saw

The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud,

Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,

Came furious down to be revenged on men,

Woe to the inhabitants on Earth! that now,

While time was, our first parents had been warned

The coming of their secret Foe, and scaped,

Haply so scaped, his mortal snare! For now

Satan, now first inflamed with rage, came down,

The tempter, ere the accuser, of mankind,

To wreak on innocent frail Man his loss

Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell.

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O God of Earth and Altar

by G. K. Chesterton:

O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation Of honor, and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation, Deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together, Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation, A single sword to thee. Amen.

 

My comment: a darn fine poet, Chesterton. The man also writes murder mysteries, books on apologetic, biographies, essays…

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:

The Donkey

G.K.Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked

    And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

    Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

    And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

    On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

    Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

    I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

    One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

    And palms before my feet.

I came across this poem once in a comic book: a small child found the head of the defeated and deactivated Ultron, invincible robotic foe of the Avengers, lying in a rubbish heap: the boy, not knowing this to be the relic of a world-conquering super-machine, used the metal head for a soccer ball. Who says comics can’t teach fine literature?

What will remain of our own empires and triumphs once history has swept us away, O men of the West?

GLOSSARY:  heill] health.  bruckle] brittle, feeble.  slee] sly.  dansand] dancing.  sicker] sure.  wicker] willow.  wannis] wanes.  mellie] mellay.  sowkand] sucking.  campion] champion.  stour] fight.  piscence] puissance.  straik] stroke.  supplee] save.  makaris] poets.  the lave] the leave, the rest.  padyanis] pageants.  anteris] adventures.  schour] shower.  endite] inditing.  fallowis] fellows.  wichtis] wights, persons.  man] must.  dispone] make disposition.

John Derbyshire over at National Review Online mentioned this poem, and I looked it up. Note the reference to the Spartan King in the closing line.

From The Times of 1860: “Some Sikhs and a private of the Buffs (the East Kent Regiment), having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese.  On the next morning they were brought before the authorities and commanded to perform the kotow.  The Sikhs obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked on the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.”

The Private of the Buffs
 
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle
 
 
LAST night, among his fellow roughs, 
  He jested, quaff’d, and swore: 
A drunken private of the Buffs, 
  Who never look’d before. 
To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown, 
  He stands in Elgin’s place, 
Ambassador from Britain’s crown, 
  And type of all her race. 
  
Poor, reckless, rude, lowborn, untaught, 
  Bewilder’d, and alone,       
A heart, with English instinct fraught, 
  He yet can call his own. 
Ay, tear his body limb from limb, 
  Bring cord, or axe, or flame: 
He only knows, that not through him       
  Shall England come to shame. 
  
Far Kentish hop-fields round him seem’d, 
  Like dreams, to come and go; 
Bright leagues of cherry-blossom gleam’d, 
  One sheet of living snow; 
The smoke, above his father’s door, 
  In gray soft eddyings hung: 
Must he then watch it rise no more, 
  Doom’d by himself, so young? 
  
Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel 
  He put the vision by. 
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel; 
  An English lad must die. 
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink, 
  With knee to man unbent,        
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink, 
  To his red grave he went. 
  
Vain, mightiest fleets, of iron fram’d; 
  Vain, those all-shattering guns; 
Unless proud England keep, untam’d,       
  The strong heart of her sons. 
So, let his name through Europe ring— 
  A man of mean estate, 
Who died, as firm as Sparta’s king, 
  Because his soul was great.