by S. T. Joshi
Here we find the Biblical “thee”; the unusual and archaic term “fantastical”; the personification of aninimate objects (wind that sighs, a breeze that lisps, fountains that sigh), polysyndeton, or the use of multiple conjunctions (“palm and rose and lotus” instead of merely “palm, rose, and lotus”), and the careful use of rhythm—all elements far more commonly found in verse (at any rate, in Smith’s verse) than in prose.
Two prose poems, “The Memnons of the Night” and “The City of Destruction,” beg direct comparison with poems Smith had written some time earlier. The first—drawing upon the celebrated image (alluded to by Shelley in “Ozymandias”) of the ancient statue of Memnon in Egypt, which purportedly rang out with the first rays of sunrise—was completed in December 1915, about nine months after the sonnet “Memnon at Midnight,” on the same theme (see SU 131). While it would be difficult to match the sonnet’s extraordinarily compressed expression of the crushing weight of years and their obliteration of all things, even the gods, the prose poem retains a vitality of its own, even reversing the thrust of the sonnet by suggesting the power of art to escape the maw of time; for it is those statues, erected “by a race whose towering tombs and cities are one with the dust of their builders,” that nonetheless “oppose the black splendour of their porphyritic forms to the sun’s insuperable gaze” and “abide to face the terrible latter dawns” (N 8). The fragmentary prose poem “The City of Destruction” was apparently written after the poem “The City of Destruction,” labelled by Smith “A Fragment.”[123] In this case, the prose poem comes off as a feeble and ineffective rewriting of the poem (whose stanzas, each consisting only of two long Alexandrines, are themselves close to prose poetry); the prose poem’s use of the phrase “machineries of doom” (N 23) cannot match the piquancy of the poem’s “engineries of doom” (SP 66), and overall the prose poem conveys a sense of bombast and fustian whereas the poem is endowed with an authentic aura of awe and terror.
The prose poems “The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty” and “The Corpse and the Skeleton” remind us of several dramatic dialogues of Smith’s early period, among them “The Masque of Forsaken Gods” (SP 27–31), “The Ghoul and the Seraph” (SP 137–41), and “The Witch in the Graveyard” (SP 156–59). The relation between “The Corpse and the Skeleton” and “The Ghoul and the Seraph” is especially close, for in both works we find a cheerful morbidity and rollicking archaic slang that pungently reflects the all-pervasiveness of death and the absence of any meaningful afterlife. Consider the ghoul’s song in the poem—
Good cheer to thee, white worm of death!
The priest within the brothel dies,
The baud hath sickened from his breath!
In grave half-dug the digger lies:
Good cheer to thee, white worm of death! (SP 138)
with the corpse’s opening words in the prose poem: “How now, old bare-bones! What word of the worm? Methinks you have known him well, in your time” (N 26). Both works speak cynically of the inefficacy of religion in the face of dusty oblivion. The ghoul hurls these words in the face of the seraph:
And who art thou?—some white-faced fool of God,
With wings that emulate the giddy bird,
And bloodless mouth for ever filled with psalms
In lieu of honest victuals?(SP 138)
while the skeleton, responding to the corpse’s ingenuous query, “Where, then . . . are the heavens of light and hells of fire, promised unto faith by the sybils and hierophants?” states bluntly: “Ask of yonder cadaver, him whose corpulence diminishes momently, for the pampering of worms. He was once a priest, and spoke authentically of these matters, with all the delegated thunder of gods” (N 26–27).
It is in their philosophical messages that Smith’s prose poems depart to some degree from the overall thrust of his poems of a contemporaneous period. In particular, the overt cosmicism that we see in such splendid early poems as “The Star-Treader” and “Ode to the Abyss” is generally absent from the prose poems—or, perhaps, expressed in a different way. Possibly Smith had consciously or unconsciously reacted to his mentor George Sterling’s repeated warnings to broaden his palette beyond the death of worlds and suns; and although Smith had noted early on that “To my imagination, no other natural event seems half as portentous as the going out of a sun” (SU 62), he grudgingly remarked in 1915 that “There’ll not be nearly so much of the spacial [sic] element in my second book as in the other” (SU 122), referring to the overabundance of cosmic verse in The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912). Accordingly, in the prose poems, both early and late, the immensity of space is replaced by the immensity of time—a richly fruitful theme whose multifold ramifications Smith explored in a number of works.
“From the Crypts of Memory” (N 12–13), perhaps Smith’s greatest prose poem, is a complex rumination on this conception. Here, the weight of years produces an overwhelming sense of the futility of human effort—a futility underscored by Smith’s opening tableau, whereby the star on which his first-person narrator finds himself is known to be destined to plunge into an abyss and thereby “find a dark and disastrous close.” The star is one in which “the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living”—in other words, where the accumulated heritage of the past had so robbed its present-day inhabitants of the initiative to live and create that they come to be like the dead themselves. Even love, otherwise seen by Smith as an affirmation of life, becomes akin to death: “We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads.” The imagery of life-in-death is remarkably complete: the people seek “mystic immortelles” (plants that retain their colour even after death), or other flowers that “wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew” (nepenthe being the drug that induces forgetfulness, or the death of memory) “by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters” (Acheron being one of the rivers of the Greek underworld). And the prose poem’s conclusion suggests that the distinction between life and death, customarily fraught with immense significance, is itself derisively illusory: “We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.”
“The Garden and the Tomb” (N 9) underscores the same message. The very fact that “in the heart of the garden is a tomb” is itself a metaphor for the intrusion of death into the very fabric of life. At night the garden descends into “slumber” (i.e., a kind of death), and only then do “serpents bred of corruption crawl from the tomb”—symbols of death that come to life and overwhelm the actual life of the garden. In “The Peril That Lurks among Ruins” (N 31–32) a Daemon warns against going too often into ruins, for the shadows that lurk there “have all the sopor of despair” (i.e., they rob the living of the sense of purpose and hope). In a brilliant metaphor, the Daemon notes: “For, heedless of the peril, one may slip on some invisible precipice of the Past and go falling forevermore” to become “a shadow with shadows.” Then there is “A Phantasy” (N 13), whose imagery once again so confounds life and death that we scarcely know which is which. Smith uses a succession of paradoxes to convey his message: the “unknown land” of the narrator’s dream is “citied”—not by thriving populations, but by “tombs and cenotaphs”; in the air “flit the mysterious wings of seraphim” (traditional inhabitants of heaven) and the “demons of the abyss” (inhabitants of hell); but we also find “black, gigantic angels” (black, associated with death, fusing ill with angels, the symbol of eternal life) who “pause amid the sepulchers to sift from their gloomy and tremendous vans the pale ashes of annihilated stars.”
Less cosmic is “The Shadows” (N 15–16), but it is nonetheless a powerful vignette underscoring the motelike ineffectuality of human existence in the wake of accumulated history. The shadows that populate the palace of Augusthes are the “fantastic spectres of doom and desolation,” and the throne around which they gather has been “blackened beneath the invisible passing of ages.” Augusthes (whose name symbolises
the Graeco-Roman past, Augus- being a Latin stem and -thes a Greek one) rules there alone, “in the intangible dungeon of centuries.” Ultimately he dies, becoming a shadow himself. The prose poem ends with an imperishable image of universal obliteration: “And twilight hushed the shadows in the palace of Augusthes, as the world itself swung down toward the long and single shadow of irretrievable oblivion.”
If there are any forces that might, for a time, stave off the inexorable doom of time, they are love and art, for these alone appear to offer the only way in which meaning can be lent to life before its engulfment by the glutless worm. A number of Smith’s prose poems are nothing more than addresses to a real or imagined beloved. The section of “Vignettes” entitled “The Broken Lute” shows Smith to be a troubadour, seeking the affection of a scornful lover. Here again “The Litany of the Seven Kisses” stands supreme, and one of its segments—“I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster”—contains what is surely one of the most exquisite images in the entire spectrum of English literature. But the work is more than a succession of beautiful images, more even than an artful attempt at seduction; its concluding segment reveals that the two lovers will discover a “secret paradise . . . whence they that come shall nevermore depart . . . for . . . the fruit is the fruit of the tree of Life” (N 10; emphasis added)—in other words, love can engender the only kind of immortality that human beings will ever know.
“The Abomination of Desolation” addresses a somewhat similar point. Here the narrator warns us against approaching the desert of Soom, for it contains a horror that no one can precisely specify. But once upon a time two lovers traversed the region: “And they alone . . . have had no tale to relate of any troublous thing, of any horror that followed or lurked before them” (N 18). Love, in effect, produces a kind of visual Lethe, whereby the horrors of existence are forgotten or bypassed. Smith uses Lethe (the river of forgetfulness in Greek myth) to telling effect in several prose poems, generally in the context of lost love. In “A Dream of Lethe” (N 5–6) a man comes to the shores of Lethe “in the quest of her whom I had lost.” Finding her, he is distressed to see that she no longer recognises him: she has drunk from the river. He too drinks: “Nor was I able to remember any longer why I had wished to drink of the waters of oblivion.” A lost love is best forgotten. This is a message that the protagonist of “The Mirror in the Hall of Ebony” (N 17) would have profited from: although he comes along “the tide of Lethe” to a long hall of ebony, he knows not why he is there; but when he comes upon a mirror and sees his “haggard face” and “the red mark on the cheek where one I loved had struck me in her anger,” his recollections return in a flood, and he is “enormously troubled.” The slightest of chance occurrences can act as a mnemonic trigger of loss and sorrow.
Smith ingeniously mingles fantasy and eroticism in some of his most delicate prose poems. “In Cocaigne” tells of two lovers who seek the “fabulous and fortunate realm” of Cocaigne, but find it only in a fusion of spiritual and sexual love. “From a Letter” (N 11) has much the same import: in making a plea to his beloved to “join me in Atlantis” or other imaginary lands (“the mountain-vales of Lemuria,” “carnelian-builded ports beyond Cathay”), the narrator is in reality beseeching her to share a life of love without end. But, as “The Mithridate” (N 21) suggests, love is far from an unalloyed good; it can indeed act as a mithridate (antidote) against all the poisons of the world, but “when you love me not, or love me ill,” it itself becomes a poison “that is doubly lethal because it kills so slowly, or does not kill at all.”
“The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty” (N 14–15) is a quintessential embodiment of Smith’s conception of art as the salvation of humanity. Here the narrator successively queries a Demon and an Angel regarding the existence of Beauty. The Demon thinks he has seen it now and again, but has “fail[ed] to find the thing itself,” and therefore, in bitterness, is convinced that Beauty does not exist. The Angel, on the other hand, has also seen only “adumbrations” of Beauty, but these are sufficient to convince her that Beauty does exist, even if it is only “the thing upon which God meditateth.” In spite of the religious imagery of the prose poem (”And sometimes there is an echo which fills the empyrean, and hushes the archangelic harps in the midst of their praising God”), the message is a secular one: the Demon is a Demon precisely because, in his refusal to acknowledge the real existence of an entity of which he has seen only fleeting glimpses, he has descended into a cynicism that condemns him to a life bereft of the beauties (fleeting and shadowy as they may be) that existence has to offer. “Chinoiserie,” unusual in its Oriental setting, fuses the themes of love and art. Ling Yang, the poet, uses his unrequited love of the Lady Moy as inspiration for his songs; but the Lady Moy, unaware of his affection, envies the Lady Loy, who centuries ago had fulfilled a similar inspirational function for the poet Ling Yung.
Many of Smith’s prose poems on art specifically address the art of fantasy, and can thereby serve as anticipations of, and justifications for, the fantastic fiction that Smith would come to write. It is no accident that two of the most powerful of these, “To the Daemon” (16 December 1929; N 17–18) and “The Muse of Hyperborea” (22 December 1929; N 21–22), were both written in the winter of 1929, when Smith commenced the intensive writing of fiction. The narrator of the former, in appealing to a paradoxically “benign maleficent” daemon, urges him to tell him tales, but “none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently.” When the narrator beseeches the daemon to “tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space,” one is reminded of Smith’s comment that “I am far happier when I can create everything in a story, including the milieu.”[124] The entire prose poem must be read to see how uncannily it appears to be a kind of manifesto for the fantastic fiction Smith would write over the next six years. “The Muse of Hyperborea,” in spite of its title, does not appear to have much to do with the tales of Smith’s Hyperborea cycle, even though it was written a month after the first of those tales, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.” Instead, the muse appears as a more general symbol for cosmic wonder, since as a result of her inspiration the narator “behold[s] a vision of vast auroras, on continents that are wider than the world, and seas too great for the enterprise of human keels.”
The interrelations between Smith’s prose poems and his fantastic tales would, indeed, require extensive discussion. Can such works as “From the Crypts of Memory” and “The Peril That Lurks among Ruins” be seen as anticipations of the Zothique cycle, set in the far future on the last inhabited continent of earth? There too the accumulated weight of the centuries has robbed the final denizens of the world of the will to live except as fleeting shadows. “From the Crypts of Memory” actually served as the nucleus of the story “The Planet of the Dead,” written on 4 April 1930. In a letter Smith explicitly notes the derivation of the story from the prose poem, but goes on to note that the story “would differ . . . in having an earthly hero, drawn to this planet by his spiritual affinity with the inhabitants” (SL 105). In this comment Smith unwittingly points to the central weakness of the story. “From the Crypts of Memory” is almost entirely symbolic; in contrast, “The Planet of the Dead” makes fleeting attempts to be a tale of supernatural realism, but in the process the delicate symbolism of the prose poem is destroyed, substituted by a trite action-adventure scenario whereby one Francis Melchior, melding his consciousness with that of the poet Antarion in the land of Charmalos, must rescue the beauteous Thameera from the clutches of King Haspa, who wishes to possess her before death overtakes the planet with the snuffing out of its sun. “The Planet of the Dead” does not rank high among Smith’s prose tales, and his attempt to adapt his splendid prose poem was a serious error in judgment.
On the other hand, the story “The Demon of the Flower” (begun in 1931 but not completed in 1933) actually improves upon the prose
poem “The Flower-Devil” (N 2). Admittedly, the latter is not one of Smith’s stellar works, and its narrative of an evil flower inhabited by an “evil demon” and a king who is fearful of destroying the flower lest the demon inhabit some other entity, including that of his own beloved, is marred by a pomposity and purple prose that render it almost comical. Smith has taken the core elements of the prose poem and transformed them into an effective tale that combines beauty and horror in exquisitely balanced proportions.
Other prose poems, while not serving as the basis for later stories, nonetheless come closer to prose narrative than to lyrical verse, although the distinction is really more of emphasis than of genre. Consider “The Black Lake” (N 3–4), one of the more overtly horrific of the prose poems. Although narrated in the first person, the work proves to be little more than a succession of baleful images. “The Princess Almeena” can be considered a narrative of sorts, in which the princess longs for the return of her lover, a commander of a trireme; but the fact that the work is narrated in the present tense, rather than the historical past tense more common in prose tales, suggests that it is meant to be more a frozen image than a narrative of events. “Ennui,” although having far more plot in the conventional sense, is surprisingly similar: it too is narrated in the present tense (“In the alcove whose curtains are cloth-of gold . . . reclines the emperor Chan” [N 7]), but it develops a modicum of suspense when the emperor is threatened by an assassin who injures him slightly—an all too fleeting relief from the overwhelming ennui under which he labours.
“The Touch-Stone,” although plainly a narrative, is almost entirely symbolic. The philosopher Nasiphra, seeking a touchstone that would “reveal the true nature of all things” (N 19), appears to find the object of his quest; but upon his handling it, “the fingers that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton”—a transparent metaphor for the horror that lurks behind the search for truth. Although the most storylike of all Smith’s prose poems, “The Touch-Stone” is marred by an arch pretentiousness that spoils its message. More successful is “The Forbidden Forest,” a delicate tale of a child, Natha, who is repeatedly told by his parents not to venture into the forest near their home, but who on one occasion does so, only to get lost and fall into an everlasting sleep. It is difficult, however, to attach any significant symbolism to the events of this work. Then there is the curious “The Osprey and the Shark,” unpublished prior to its appearance in Nostalgia of the Unknown. This appears to be not so much a prose poem as a fable, strikingly similar to those included in Ambrose Bierce’s Fantastic Fables (1899).
