Ode to the Abyss

by Clark Ashton Smith


	O many-gulfed, unalterable one,
	Whose deep sustains
	Far-drifting world and sun,
	Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;
	And thou shalt be
	When never world remains;
	When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride
	Is sunk in voidness absolute,
	And their majestic music wide
	In vaster silence rendered mute.
	And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,
	And law to cancel and disperse
	The tangled tissues of the universe,
	His might were impotent to conquer thee,
	O indivisible infinity !
	Thy darks subdue
	All light that treads thee down a space,
	Exulting over thine archetypal deeps.
	The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps
	The flame of mightiest stars;
	In aeon-implicating wars
	Thou tearest planets from their place;
	Worlds granite-spined
	To thine erodents yield
	Their treasures centrally confined
	In crypts by continental pillars sealed.
	What suns and worlds have been thy prey
	Through unhorizoned reaches of the past!
	What spheres that now essay
	Time's undimensioned vast,
	Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length
	With life that cried its query of the Night
	To ears with silence filled !
	What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength,
	Girt by a sun's unwearied might,
	And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled !

	O incontestable Abyss,
	What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps--
	What blaze of a sidereal multitude
	No peopled world is left to miss !
	What motion is at rest within thy deeps--
	What gyres of planets long become thy food--
	Worlds unconstrainable
	That plunged therein to peace
	Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships;
	And suns that fell
	To huge and ultimate eclipse,
	And from the eternal stances found release !
	What sound thy gulfs of silence hold !
	Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars
	And crash of orbits that diverged,
	With Life's thin song are merged;
	Thy quietudes enfold
	Paean and threnody as one,
	And battle-blare of unremembered wars
	With festal songs
	Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres;
	And music that belongs
	To undiscoverable younger years
	With words of yesterday.
	Ah ! who may stay
	Thy soundless world-devouring tide ?
	O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars,
	Are worlds but as a destined fruit for thee ?
	May no sufficient bars
	Nor marks inveterate abide
	As shores to baffle thine unbillowing sea ?
	Still and unstriving now,
	What plottest thou,
	Within thy universe-ulterior deeps,
	Dark as the final lull of suns ?
	What new advancement of the night
	On citadels of stars around whose might
	Thy slow encroachment runs,
	And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps ?