Song of the Necromancer & Others [Hardcover] [Hardcover]

 

 

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Of the "three musketeers" of Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith was the only one to outlive the pulp where he published so many of his stories and (as gathered in this volume) poems. Also, unlike H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, he saw himself first and foremost as a poet rather than a story-writer. As a result, his verse is assured. There are no duds, here. (Though Sonnet for the Psychoanalysts may be just a joke -- I'm not sure -- it is at least a very strange one.)

Smith, as a wordsmith, is a crafter of fine, Faberge-egg fantasies and wild, weird Boschean panoramas. His verse-world is thick with antique and fantastic strangeness, with deathly poisonous swamps (and fens, lakes, tarns, meres & middens) in which drowned lovers and ancient gods can be found; coolly watching serpents; graveyards (and tombs, sepulchres & the all-encompassing dust of the earth) that by night are riots of supernatural lovemaking between satyrs, dryads, vampires and ghouls; a whole negative-world celebrating the vitality of the long-lost past, alien planets, the fantastic worlds on the other side of death, and the moon-enchanted night (from Nyctalops: "We have seen the black suns/Pouring forth the night" -- great!)

Of the Weird Tales three, only Smith wrote love poetry, but of course it was of a weird sort. His is a love that can only be fulfilled through a transformation into the fantastic, or by entry into another, twilit world (in Fantasie D'Antan he classes true lovers with other things "deathless and impossible" as gryphons, succubi, centaurs and Hyperboreans). For Smith, lovers are witches, sorceresses, and demonesses; the poet himself is a sorcerer or a necromancer. Not all his poetry is about love. Some is about the sort of overweening intoxication of magical power that must come from such a lushly-overladen imagination as Smith's (The Song of the Necromancer, for instance); some is about the loss, or recovery, of enchantment in our world (O Golden-Tongued Romance, & Don Quixote on Market Street, both wonderful); but elsewhere, this reaching into fantasy is a means of escaping the disappointments and disillusions of love (as in Farewell to Eros).

Smith definitely had one foot in the Decadence movement of the late 19th century (as a poem like Ennui shows), and this is perhaps why, although he was declared a prodigy on a par with Keats when he first published his verse, he fell out of fashion once the modernists appeared. Reading his verse now, though, he seems at once as demanding as the modernists (his uncompromisingly vast vocabulary can be as challenging as Eliot's opaque allusiveness), but also far more welcoming and human. Unlike the modernists, he has something to believe in, even if it is remote and imaginary. (Arthur Machen, in a contemporary review, said that Smith "builds his poems up as if they were cathedrals".)

A volume of Smith's prose-poems were released under the name "Nostalgia of the Unknown", a title fittingly reflecting their languid air of lost-dream fantasising; a name for this volume might be "The passion of the impossible" (from Sonnet) reflecting the more intense heights to be found in Smith's poetry. Or perhaps (from Nyctalops) "The dust of flowers that withered/In worlds of otherwhere".

Rich, redolent, wonderful. Clark Ashton Smith's verse is fantasy itself.

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