The Poetry Corner

Ode On Imagination

By Clark Ashton Smith

Imagination's eyes Outreach and distance far The vision of the greatest star That measures instantaneously - Enisled therein as in a sea - Its cincture of the system-laden skies. Abysses closed about with night A tribute yield To her retardless sight; And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores. She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield, And through the obstruction of his vestment dire, Pierces the centermost sublimity Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire Heaves upward like a monstrous sea, And inly riven by Titanic throes, Fills all his frame with outward cataract Of separate and immingling torrent streams. Her eyes exact From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows In wastes celestial, alien dreams Brought down on wings of fleetest beams. Adown the clefts of under-space She rides, her steed a falling star, To seek, where void and vagueness are, Some mark or certainty of place. Upon their heavenly precipice The gathered suns shrink back aghast From that interminate abyss, And threat of sightless anarchs vast. She stands endued With supermundane crown, and vestitures Of emperies that include All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream - Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme Where moon-transcending light endures. She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow In scarce-discernd fields and closes blind, Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons; Or roves in forests where all sound is low: Each voice that shuns The noiseful day, and enters there to find Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves, Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves. Upon some supersensual eminence She hears the fragments of a thunder loud, Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense Flame through the walls of hollow cloud. But these she may not wholly grasp With incomplete terrestrial clasp. Her eyes inevitably see, 'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things, The movements of Essentiality - Of ageless principles - that alter not To temporal alterings - Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more. And stars no longer hot; Or broken constellations strewn Like coals about the heavenly floor, And rush of night upon the noon Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly In icy deserts of the sky. From the beginning of the spheres, When systems nebulous out-thrown Drove back the brinks Of nullity with limitary marks, Till end of suns, and sunless death of years, To her are known The unevident inseparable links That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.