"Smith, Clark Ashton - Soliloquy In An Ebon Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower

by Clark Ashton Smith


The poet speaks, addressing a framed picture of Baudelaire upon a
bookcase:


The lamp burns stilly in the standing air,
As in some ventless caveen. Through wide windows
The midnight brings a silence from the stars,
And perfumes that the planet dreams in sleep.
The hounds have ceased to bay; and the cicadas
To play their goblin harps. The owl that whilom
Hooted his famine to a full-chapped moon,
Has pounced upon his gopher, or has gone
To fresher woods behind a farther hill;
And Hecate has grounded all the witches
For some glade-hidden Sabbat.

In my room
The quick, malign, relentless clock ticks on,
Firm as a demon's undecaying pulse,
Or creak of Charon's oar locks as he plies
Between the shadow-crowded shores. Evoked
Within the vaults of my funereal brain,
Voices awaken, sibilant and restless-
Tongues of the viper's charnel-fostered brood,
Half-grown, amid the shreds of winding sheets
And crumbling wicker of old bones. They sing,
Those little voices, all the poisonous,
Importunate melodies you too have heard,
O Baudelaire, in midnights when the moon
Sank, followed by stome cloudy hearse of dreams.
Into the skyless nadir of despond.
Black-flickering, cloven tongues! Though we distill
Quintessences of hemlock or nepenthe,
We cannot slay the small, the subtle serpents.
Whose mother is the Iamia Melancholy
That feeds upon our breath and sucks our veins,
Stifling us with her velvet volumes.

Now
My thoughts pursue the santal and sad myrrh
Sighed by the shouds of all hesternal sorrows.
Busied with old regrets, they carry on
Such commerce as the burrowing necrophores
Conduct from grave to grave; or pause to mumble
Snatches of ancient amorous elegies,