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The Star-Treader

by Clark Ashton Smith

A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,

Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth

Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth

Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams

Thine ancient pathway of the suns,

Whose flame is part of thee;

And deeps outreach immutably

Whose largeness runs

Through all thy spirit's mystery.

Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze

Of stars where through thou camest in old days;

Pierce without fear each vast

Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.

A hand strikes off the chains of Time,

A hand swings back the door of years;

Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,

And opens the strait dream to space sublime."

Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay!

What eye shall note or measure mete

His passage on a purpose fleet,

The thread and weaving of his way!

It caught me from the clasping world,

And swept beyond the brink of Sense,

My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled,

Like to a planet chained and hurled

With solar lightning strong and tense.

Swift as communicated rays

That leap from severed suns a gloom

Within whose waste no suns illume,

The wing'd dream fulfilled its ways.

Through years reversed and lit again

I followed that unending chain

Wherein the suns are links of light;

Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres

The twisting of the threads of years

In weavings wrought of noon and night;

Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,

Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.

III

Enkindling dawns of memory,

Each sun had radiance to relume

A sealed, disused, and darkened room

Within the soul's immensity.

Their alien ciphers shown and lit,

I understood what each had writ

Upon my spirit's scroll;

Again I wore mine ancient lives,

And knew the freedom and the gyves

That formed and marked my soul.

I delved in each forgotten mind,

The units that had builded me,

Whose deepnesses before were blind

And formless as infinity -

Knowing again each former world -

From planet unto planet whirled

Through gulfs that mightily divide

Like to an intervital sleep.

One world I found, where souls abide

Like winds that rest upon a rose;

Thereto they creep

To loose all burden of old woes.

And one I knew, where warp of pain

Is woven in the soul's attire;

And one, where with new loveliness

Is strengthened Beauty's olden chain -

Soft as a sound, and keen as fire -

In light no darkness may depress.

Where no terrestrial dreams had trod

My vision entered undismayed,

And Life her hidden realms displayed

To me as to a curious god.

Where colored suns of systems triplicate

Bestow on planets weird, ineffable,

Green light that orbs them like an outer sea,

And large auroral noons that alternate

With skies like sunset held without abate,

Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly

The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell.

Dead passions like to stars relit

Shone in the gloom of ways forgot;

Where crownless gods in darkness sit

The day was full on altars hot.

I heard - once more a part of it -

The central music of the Pleiades,

And to Alcyone my soul

Swayed with the stars that own her song's control.

Unchallenged, glad I trod, a revenant

In worlds Edenic longly lost;

Or walked in spheres that sing to these,

O'er space no light has crossed,

Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed

To Heaven's angelic chant.

What vasts the dream went out to find!

I seemed beyond the world's recall

In gulfs where darkness is a wall

To render strong Antares blind!

In unimagined spheres I found

The sequence of my being's round -

Some life where firstling meed of Song,

The strange imperishable leaf,

Was placed on brows that starry Grief

Had crowned, and Pain anointed long;

Some avatar where Love

Sang like the last great star at morn

Ere Death filled all its sky;

Some life in fresher years unworn

Upon a world whereof

Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie

On pools aglow with latter spring:

There Life's pellucid surface took

Clear image of all things, nor shook

Till touch of Death's obscuring wing;

Some earlier awakening

In pristine years, when giant strife

Of forces darkly whirled

First forged the thing called Life -

Hot from the furnace of the suns -

Upon the anvil of a world.

VII

Thus knew I those anterior ones

Whose lives in mine were blent;

Till, lo! my dream, that held a night

Where Rigel sends no word of might,

Was emptied of the trodden stars,

And dwindled to the sun's extent -

The brain's familiar prison-bars,

And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth

Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.