To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., Upon His Phantastick
Tales, Verse, Pictures, & Sculptures
A time-black tower against dim banks of cloud;
Around its base the pathless, pressing wood.
Shadow and silence, moss and mould, enshroud
Grey, age-felled slabs that once as cromlechs stood.
No fall of foot, no song of bird awakes
The lethal aisles of sempiternal night,
Tho’ oft with stir of wings the dense air shakes,
As in the tower there glows a pallid light.
For here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought
Strange eidola that chill the world with fear;
Whose graven runes in tones of dread have taught
What shapes beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer.
Dark Lord of Averoigne—whose windows stare
On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!
Where Once Poe Walked
Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,
Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,
Arch’d high above a hidden world of yore.
Round all the scene a light of memory plays,
And dead leaves whisper of departed days,
Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.
Lonely and sad, a specter glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, though his song
Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.
Only the few who sorcery’s secret know,
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
Christmas Greeting to Mrs. Phillips Gamwell—1925
As when a Pigeon loos’d in Realms remote
Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote,
To speed my blessings from a barb’rous clime
To thee and Providence at Christmas-time.
Brick Row
Old warehouses in South Water Street, Providence, threatened with demolition in the name of aesthetic “progress.”)
It is so long they have been standing there—
Red brick, slant roofs, above the harbour’s edge;
Chimneys against a fragment of salt air,
And a green hill ascending ledge by ledge.
