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Ode On Imagination
by Clark Ashton SmithImagination's eyes
Outreach and distance far
The vision of the greatest star
That measures instantaneously -
Enisled therein as in a sea -
Its cincture of the system-laden skies.
Abysses closed about with night
A tribute yield
To her retardless sight;
And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores
Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.
She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,
And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,
Pierces the centermost sublimity
Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire
Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,
And inly riven by Titanic throes,
Fills all his frame with outward cataract
Of separate and immingling torrent streams.
Her eyes exact
From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows
In wastes celestial, alien dreams
Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.
Adown the clefts of under-space
She rides, her steed a falling star,
To seek, where void and vagueness are,
Some mark or certainty of place.
Upon their heavenly precipice
The gathered suns shrink back aghast
From that interminate abyss,
And threat of sightless anarchs vast.
She stands endued
With supermundane crown, and vestitures
Of emperies that include
All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream -
Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme
Where moon-transcending light endures.
She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow
In scarce-discern'd fields and closes blind,
Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons;
Or roves in forests where all sound is low:
Each voice that shuns
The noiseful day, and enters there to find
Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves,
Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves.
Upon some supersensual eminence
She hears the fragments of a thunder loud,
Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense
Flame through the walls of hollow cloud.
But these she may not wholly grasp
With incomplete terrestrial clasp.
Her eyes inevitably see,
'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things,
The movements of Essentiality -
Of ageless principles - that alter not
To temporal alterings -
Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more.
And stars no longer hot;
Or broken constellations strewn
Like coals about the heavenly floor,
And rush of night upon the noon
Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly
In icy deserts of the sky.
From the beginning of the spheres,
When systems nebulous out-thrown
Drove back the brinks
Of nullity with limitary marks,
Till end of suns, and sunless death of years,
To her are known
The unevident inseparable links
That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.