A Dead City

by Clark Ashton Smith

Twilight ascends the abandoned ramps of noon

Within an ancient land, whose after-time

Unfathomably shadows its ruined prime.

Like rising mist the night increases soon

Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon

On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,

And touch with pallor of sepulchral rime

The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

She comes at last: unsepultured, they show

In all the hoary starkness of old stone.

From out a shadow like the lips of Death

Issues a wind, that through the ruins blown,

Cries like a prophet's ghost, with waiting breath,

The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

❖ CASSILDA'S SONG ❖

~ by Robert W. Chambers

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

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.