Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower

by Clark Ashton Smith


	The poet speaks, addressing a framed picture of Baudelaire upon a
	bookcase:


	The lamp burns stilly in the standing air,
	As in some ventless caveen. Through wide windows
	The midnight brings a silence from the stars,
	And perfumes that the planet dreams in sleep.
	The hounds have ceased to bay; and the cicadas
	To play their goblin harps. The owl that whilom
	Hooted his famine to a full-chapped moon,
	Has pounced upon his gopher, or has gone
	To fresher woods behind a farther hill;
	And Hecate has grounded all the witches
	For some glade-hidden Sabbat.

	In my room
	The quick, malign, relentless clock ticks on,
	Firm as a demon's undecaying pulse,
	Or creak of Charon's oar locks as he plies
	Between the shadow-crowded shores. Evoked
	Within the vaults of my funereal brain,
	Voices awaken, sibilant and restless-
	Tongues of the viper's charnel-fostered brood,
	Half-grown, amid the shreds of winding sheets
	And crumbling wicker of old bones. They sing,
	Those little voices, all the poisonous,
	Importunate melodies you too have heard,
	O Baudelaire, in midnights when the moon
	Sank, followed by stome cloudy hearse of dreams.
	Into the skyless nadir of despond.
	Black-flickering, cloven tongues! Though we distill
	Quintessences of hemlock or nepenthe,
	We cannot slay the small, the subtle serpents.
	Whose mother is the Iamia Melancholy
	That feeds upon our breath and sucks our veins,
	Stifling us with her velvet volumes.

	Now
	My thoughts pursue the santal and sad myrrh
	Sighed by the shouds of all hesternal sorrows.
	Busied with old regrets, they carry on
	Such commerce as the burrowing necrophores
	Conduct from grave to grave; or pause to mumble
	Snatches of ancient amorous elegies,
	Deploring still some splendid, stately love-
	Gone like the pomps of void Ecbatana-
	That only lives in epodes, but will rise
	To ghost the goldless morrows, clothed about
	With hues of suns declining and decayed,
	And crowned with ruinous autumn.

	Other thoughts
	Exhume the withered winf-shards of ideals
	Brittle and light as perished moths, or bring
	To sight the mummied of blair mischance,
	By dismal eves and moons disatrous flying,
	Their vans have darkened. On beloved deaths
	I muse, and through my- twice-wept tears re-gather
	The threads that Clotho and Lachesis have spun
	And Atropos has cut; and see the bleak
	Sinister gleaming of the steely shears
	Behind the rivenarrasses of time.

	What weapon can we arm us with? What bulwark
	Build against grief and time? What moat renewed
	With waters mortal as those the shroud Gomorrah,
	Will the sea-going termite never ferry
	To gnaw the ebon tower, the ebon ark
	Holding the Muses' covenant? Splendor-brimmed,
	What grail of God or Satan will suffice
	For all the breadless days, the unguerdoned labors?

	Yet, for a toll so light, by Song transported,
	To sail beyond Elysium and Thelem,
	And see, from oblivion looming, balmier shores
	Of fables infinite! To light our dreams
	At rose Aldebaran or sky-huge Antates,
	Then quench their heat, or temper Damascus thought
	In cold aphelions and apastrons far!
	To pace the sun's Typhoean ramparts vast!
	To couch on Saturns's outmost ring, or roll
	With Pluto through his orb of eventide
	Whose Hesper is the dwindled sun! To flaunt
	Before the blind in immarcesible purple
	Won from the murex of Uranian seas,
	And fire-plucked vermeil of Vulcan, worn against
	These aguish mists and wintry shadows! Thus
	We trimmph; thus the laurel overtops
	The upas and the yew; and we decline
	No toil, no dolor of`our votive doom.

	High-housed within the Alchemic Citadel,
	We are served by Azoth and by Alkahest.
	Out of the gleamless mire and sand we make
	Pactolian metal. Fumed from our alembics,
	The world dissolves like vapors opium-wrought,
	Or drips, condensed, to philtres and to venorns
	That Circe nor Simaetha dreamed. We built,
	Daedalus-like, a labyrinth of words
	Wherein our thoughts are twi-shaped Minotaurs
	The ages shall not slay-. Our ironies,
	Like marbled adders creeping on through time,
	Shall fang the brains of poets yet to be.
	Our nacred moons and corposants of beauty
	Shall float. on ever-mootful lands retained
	By Lar and Lemur; where Chimera flies,
	And still the Sphinx unanswerably rules;
	Where the red phantoms we have loosed from Dis
	Still haunt the thickets and the cities: where
	Our phosphor lamps may serve as well as any
	Along the rutted way to Charon's wharf.