MUSINGS

Robert E. Howard

The little poets sing of little things:

Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;

Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,

And modest flowers waving in the sun.

The mighty poets write in blood and tears

And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.

They reach their mad blind hands into the night,

To plumb abysses dead to human sight;

To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,

Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.

The Creation

James Weldon Johnson, 1871 - 1938

And God stepped out on space,

And he looked around and said:

I'm lonely—

I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see

Darkness covered everything,

Blacker than a hundred midnights

Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,

And the light broke,

And the darkness rolled up on one side,

And the light stood shining on the other,

And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,

And God rolled the light around in his hands

Until he made the sun;

And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.

And the light that was left from making the sun

God gathered it up in a shining ball

And flung it against the darkness,

Spangling the night with the moon and stars.

Then down between

The darkness and the light

He hurled the world;

And God said: That's good!

Then God himself stepped down—

And the sun was on his right hand,

And the moon was on his left;

The stars were clustered about his head,

And the earth was under his feet.

And God walked, and where he trod

His footsteps hollowed the valleys out

And bulged the mountains up.

Then he stopped and looked and saw

That the earth was hot and barren.

So God stepped over to the edge of the world

And he spat out the seven seas—

He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—

He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—

And the waters above the earth came down,

The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,

And the little red flowers blossomed,

The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,

And the oak spread out his arms,

The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,

And the rivers ran down to the sea;

And God smiled again,

And the rainbow appeared,

And curled itself around his shoulder.

Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand

Over the sea and over the land,

And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!

And quicker than God could drop his hand,

Fishes and fowls

And beasts and birds

Swam the rivers and the seas,

Roamed the forests and the woods,

And split the air with their wings.

And God said: That's good!

Then God walked around,

And God looked around

On all that he had made.

He looked at his sun,

And he looked at his moon,

And he looked at his little stars;

He looked on his world

With all its living things,

And God said: I'm lonely still.

Then God sat down—

On the side of a hill where he could think;

By a deep, wide river he sat down;

With his head in his hands,

God thought and thought,

Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

Up from the bed of the river

God scooped the clay;

And by the bank of the river

He kneeled him down;

And there the great God Almighty

Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,

Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,

Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;

This great God,

Like a mammy bending over her baby,

Kneeled down in the dust

Toiling over a lump of clay

Till he shaped it in is his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.

Amen. Amen

A Fable

by Clark Ashton Smith

O lords and gods that are! the assigning tide, upon

Some prowless beach where a forgotten fisher dwells,

At last will leave the sea-flung jars of Solomon;

And he, the fisher, fumbling 'mid the weeds and shells,

Shall find them, and shall rive the rusted seals, and free

The djinns that shall tread down thy towering iron hells

And turn to homeless rack thy walled Reality;

That shall remould thy monuments and mountains flown,

And lift Atlantis on their shoulders from the sea

To flaunt her kraken-fouled necropoles unknown;

And raise from realm-deep ice the boreal cities pale

With towers that man has neither built nor overthrown....

O lords and gods that are! I tell a future tale.

The Road of Kings

by Robert E. Howard

Gleaming shell of an outworn lie; fable of Right divine-

You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine.

The throne that I won by blood and sweat, by Crom, I will not sell

For promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!

When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat,

The people scattered gold-dust before my horse's feet;

But now I am a great king, the people hound my track

With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?

I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.

The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;

Rush in and die, dogs - I was a man before I was a king!

“What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?

I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.

The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;

Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.”

Robert E. Howard

(Creator of Conan the barbarian)

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

Ash nazg thrakutulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

The Nereid

Clark Ashton Smith

Her face the sinking stars desire:

Unto her place the slow deeps bring

Shadow of errant winds that wing

O'er sterile gulfs of foam and fire.

Her beauty is the light of pearls.

AII stars and dreams and sunsets die

To make the fluctuant glooms that lie

Around her; and low noonlight swirls

Down ocean's firmamental deep

To weave for who glimmers there

Elusive visions, vague and fair;

And night is as a dreamless sleep:

She has not known the night's unrest

Nor the white curse of clearer day;

The tremors of the tempest play

Like slow delight about her breast.

The berylline pallors of her face

Illume the kingdom of the drowned.

In her the love that none has found,

The unflowering rapture, folded grace,

Await some lover strayed and lone,

Some god misled, who shall not come

Though the decrescent seas lie dumb

And sunken in their wells of stone.

But nevermore of him, perchance,

Her enigmatic musings are,

Whose purpling tresses float afar

In grottoes of the last romance.

Serene, an immanence of fire

She dwells for ever, ocean-thralled,

Soul of the sea's vast emerald.

Her face the sinking stars desire.

Almost Anything

by Clark Ashton Smith

Superlatively sonorous

Like a saxophone full of brass tacks and coffin-nails;

Reverberantly rhythmical and rhythmically reverberant

Like the quobbing of a foetus five months old

In the womb of a she-baboon;

Imperial, romantic and picturesque

Like a merd-brown fog slinking away through slum alleys

And over the city dump;

Fair and pulchritudinous as a female Hottentot with buttocks two axe-handles broad

And eyes that shine like rotten mackerel by moonlight;

More savorous than Gorgonzola buried for two months

At the bottom of a ship-load of guano;

Soft and voluptuous

Like the bosom of an acaleph that is more than slightly moribund;

And fragrant as a room

Where a cat was shut in by mistake. . .

But you say that my meaning is obscure,

And that it is hard to understand what I am referring to:

I ask you,

Hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frère,

What is the use of writing this modernist poetry

If one is not permitted

To be decently or indecently cryptic on occasion? . . .

And as for the meaning—

Well, I am not any too sure myself,

But if you are really determined to know,

I suggest that you refer the matter to some modernist critic.

Astrophobos

by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

In the Midnight heaven's burning

Through the ethereal deeps afar

Once I watch'd with restless yearning

An alluring aureate star;

Ev'ry eve aloft returning

Gleaming nigh the Arctic Car.

Mystic waves of beauty blended

With the gorgeous golden rays

Phantasies of bliss descended

In a myrrh'd Elysian haze.

In the lyre-born chords extended

Harmonies of Lydian lays.

And (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure,

Where the free and blessed dwell,

And each moment bears a treasure,

Freighted with the lotos-spell,

And there floats a liquid measure

From the lute of Israfel.

There (I told myself) were shining

Worlds of happiness unknown,

Peace and Innocence entwining

By the Crowned Virtue's throne;

Men of light, their thoughts refining

Purer, fairer, than my own.

Thus I mus'd when o'er the vision

Crept a red delirious change;

Hope dissolving to derision,

Beauty to distortion strange;

Hymnic chords in weird collision,

Spectral sights in endless range….

Crimson burn'd the star of madness

As behind the beams I peer'd;

All was woe that seem'd but gladness

Ere my gaze with Truth was sear'd;

Cacodaemons, mir'd with madness,

Through the fever'd flick'ring leer'd….

Now I know the fiendish fable

The the golden glitter bore;

Now I shun the spangled sable

That I watch'd and lov'd before;

But the horror, set and stable,

Haunts my soul forevermore!

The Messenger

by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The thing, he said, would come in the night at three

From the old churchyard on the hill below;

But crouching by an oak fire's wholesome glow,

I tried to tell myself it could not be.

Surely, I mused, it was pleasantry

Devised by one who did not truly know

The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,

That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.

He had not meant it - no - but still I lit

Another lamp as starry Leo climbed

Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed

Three - and the firelight faded, bit by bit.

Then at the door that cautious rattling came -

And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!

Night Gaunt

By Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell, But every night I see the rubbery things,

Black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings,

They come in legions on the north wind’s swell

With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,

Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings

To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,

Heedless of all the cries I try to make,

And down the nether pits to that foul lake

Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.

But ho! If only they would make some sound,

Or wear a face where faces should be found!

Nemesis

By H. P. Lovecraft

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night, I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,

When the sky was a vaporous flame;

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o’er seas without ending,

Under sinister grey-clouded skies

That the many-fork’d lightning is rending,

That resound with hysterical cries;

With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches

Of the hoary primordial grove,

Where the oaks feel the presence that marches

And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;

And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains

That rise barren and bleak from the plain,

I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains

That ooze down to the marsh and the main;

And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

I have scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,

I have trod its untenanted hall,

Where the moon writhing up from the valleys

Shews the tapestried things on the wall;

Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

I have peer’d from the casement in wonder

At the mouldering meadows around,

At the many-roof’d village laid under

The curse of a grave-girdled ground;

And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,

I have flown on the pinions of fear

Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,

Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted

The jewel-deck’d throne by the Nile;

I was old in those epochs uncounted

When I, and I only, was vile;

And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,

And great is the reach of its doom;

Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,

Nor can respite be found in the tomb:

Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,

I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

Modern Elfland

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

I cut a staff in a churchyard copse,

I clad myself in ragged things,

I set a feather in my cap

That fell out of an angel’s wings.

I filled my wallet with white stones,

I took three foxgloves in my hand,

I slung my shoes across my back,

And so I went to fairyland.

But lo, within that ancient place

Science had reared her iron crown,

And the great cloud of steam went up

That telleth where she takes a town.

But cowled with smoke and starred with lamps,

That strange land’s light was still its own;

The word that witched the woods and hills

Spoke in the iron and the stone.

Not Nature’s hand had ever curved

That mute unearthly porter’s spine.

Like sleeping dragon’s sudden eyes

The signals leered along the line.

The chimneys thronging crooked or straight

Were fingers signalling the sky;

The dog that strayed across the street

Seemed four-legged by monstrosity.

‘In vain,’ I cried, ‘though you too touch

The new time’s desecrating hand,

Through all the noises of a town

I hear the heart of fairyland.’

I read the name above a door,

Then through my spirit pealed and passed:

‘This is the town of thine own home,

And thou hast looked on it at last.’

Recompense

By Robert E. Howard

I have not heard lutes beckon me, nor the brazen bugles call,

But once in the dim of a haunted lea I heard the silence fall.

I have not heard the regal drum, nor seen the flags unfurled,

But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world.

I have not seen the horsemen fall before the hurtling host,

But I have paced a silent hall where each step waked a ghost.

I have not kissed the tiger-feet of a strange-eyed golden god,

But I have walked a city's street where no man else had trod.

I have not raised the canopies that shelter revelling kings,

But I have fled from crimson eyes and black unearthly wings.

I have not knelt outside the door to kiss a pallid queen,

But I have seen a ghostly shore that no man else has seen.

I have not seen the standards sweep from keep and castle wall,

But I have seen a woman leap from a dragon's crimson stall,

And I have heard strange surges boom that no man heard before,

And seen a strange black city loom on a mystic night-black shore.

And I have felt the sudden blow of a nameless wind's cold breath,

And watched the grisly pilgrims go that walk the roads of Death,

And I have seen black valleys gape, abysses in the gloom,

And I have fought the deathless Ape that guards the Doors of Doom.

I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the Dryad's haste,

But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste.

I have not died as men may die, nor sin as men have sinned,

But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.