The Isle of Saturn

by Clark Ashton Smith


	In one of these (islands) the barbarians feign that Saturn is held
	prisoner by Zeus.

							-- Plutarch


	Say, what seer, what poet has beheld Saturnia?
	Clio or Euterpe, tell, if this you know:
	Zones of guardian storm unslackening, sempiternal
	Doldrums of the flat untraversable foam
	Drive the encroaching keels to leeward,

	So no sailor glimpses it, no chart includes.
	Never yet has man profaned it, never printed
	Xanthic sands whereover duskier flames the blue
	For tall marble cliffs whereon the hippogriffin
	Rears his head and gazes seaward,

	Unalamed, and all replete with grainy grasses.
	Slant with wind, and drenced by spindrift, walls of cypress
	Closely ward untended crofts where mellowed apples
	Fall not from the bough to break the cyclic silence
	Of a mighty myth that slumbers.

	There, in calamus and the lush hemlock matted,
	By the muffled windings of unmumurous streams,
	Black gigantic swans that winter in strange planets,
	Age to age returning, make their nests, and rear
	Shadowy broods that no one numbers.

	There the dragon-mother, couched amid the boulders,
	High on rugged fells that rim the smoothed main,
	Hatches out her blotched and horny young, with folded
	Wings that open soon in fluttered, brief essays-
	Tumbling on the downs and tors.

	Darkly, in the gaunt and gleamless mountain-sides,
	Drowse the metals for the mail of gods rewakened;
	And the trees of savage forests hold on high
	Still-unshapen hafts of Titan battle-maces
	To be wielded in vast wars.

	Stretched between two peaks, within a lea-wide valley,
	Saturn, slumbering, heals his wounds through halcyon cycles:
	Rains and dews like balm anoint him; wild grapes clamber
	Over him with ripening clusters; and black ivy
	Plaits his golden beard uncombed.

	Others there are sleeping. . . . Will they haply waken-
	Monstrous phantoms, striding down from fell and highland,
	Crawling like to rivered lava through the dale-beds?-
	Gods who rose and reigned and died before the Titans,
	Lying in topless tombs undomed.