The Star-Treader and other poems.

by Clark Ashton Smith.

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, un.o.bstructed, 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 G.o.d, with all the scope Of attributes that are the essential core Of G.o.dhead, 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s of posterity.

But were I G.o.d, I would be overlord Of many kings, and were as breath to guide Their dust of destiny. And were I G.o.d, 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 G.o.dhead s.p.a.ce and speech For its a.s.sertion, 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 G.o.d, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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; s.p.a.ceward 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 s.p.a.ce sublime."

II

Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay!

What eye shall note or measure mete His pa.s.sage 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 winged 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.

III

Enkindling dawns of memory, Each sun had radiance to relume A sealed, disused, and darkened room Within the soul's immensity.

Their alien ciphers shown and lit, I understood what each had writ Upon my spirit's scroll; Again I wore mine ancient lives, And knew the freedom and the gyves That formed and marked my soul.

IV

I delved in each forgotten mind, The units that had builded me, Whose deepnesses before were blind And formless as infinity-- Knowing again each former world-- From planet unto planet whirled Through gulfs that mightily divide Like to an intervital sleep.

One world I found, where souls abide Like winds that rest upon a rose; Thereto they creep To loose all burden of old woes.

And one I knew, where warp of pain Is woven in the soul's attire; And one, where with new loveliness Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain-- Soft as a sound, and keen as fire-- In light no darkness may depress.

V

Where no terrestrial dreams had trod My vision entered undismayed, And Life her hidden realms displayed To me as to a curious G.o.d.

Where colored suns of systems triplicate Bestow on planets weird, ineffable, Green light that orbs them like an outer sea, And large auroral noons that alternate With skies like sunset held without abate, Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell.

Dead pa.s.sions like to stars relit Shone in the gloom of ways forgot; Where crownless G.o.ds in darkness sit The day was full on altars hot.

I heard--once more a part of it-- The central music of the Pleiades, And to Alcyone my soul Swayed with the stars that own her song's control.

Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant In worlds Edenic longly lost; Or walked in spheres that sing to these, O'er s.p.a.ce no light has crossed, Diverse as h.e.l.l's mad antiphone uptossed To Heaven's angelic chant.

VI

What vasts the dream went out to find!

I seemed beyond the world's recall In gulfs where darkness is a wall To render strong Antares blind!

In unimagined spheres I found The sequence of my being's round-- Some life where firstling meed of Song, The strange imperishable leaf, Was placed on brows that starry Grief Had crowned, and Pain anointed long; Some avatar where Love Sang like the last great star at morn Ere Death filled all its sky; Some life in fresher years unworn Upon a world whereof Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie On pools aglow with latter spring: There Life's pellucid surface took Clear image of all things, nor shook Till touch of Death's obscuring wing; Some earlier awakening In pristine years, when giant strife Of forces darkly whirled First forged the thing called Life-- Hot from the furnace of the suns-- Upon the anvil of a world.

VII

Thus knew I those anterior ones Whose lives in mine were blent; Till, lo! my dream, that held a night Where Rigel sends no word of might, Was emptied of the trodden stars, And dwindled to the sun's extent-- The brain's familiar prison-bars, And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.