by S. T. Joshi
We are reaching the stage where the distinction between Smith’s prose poems and his fantastic tales is becoming thin to the point of vanishment. Is “Sadastor” a prose poem or a tale? Given that it is substantially longer than any of his other prose poems and contains a more liberal dose of narrative thrust, one would incline to categorise it as a tale. But what, then, do we make of “The Abominations of Yondo,” written about the same time in 1925? George Sterling, when reading that story, referred to it as “prose-poetry” (SU 252), and he was not the only one to come to that opinion. As Smith relates in a letter to Sterling, Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, in rejecting the story, concluded that it was “more of a prose-poem than a narrative” (SU 263). To the extent that nearly all Smith’s prose tales employ poetic prose, they could all be classed as prose poems. Recall one of Smith’s celebrated discussions of his theory of fantastic fiction:
My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. (SL 126)
This could serve as a characterisation of his prose poems as well, although in those works he is not striving to convince the reader of the reality of the “impossibilities” expressed in them, since the “events” of the prose poems are (and are understood by the reader to be) metaphors for the philosophical conceptions that underlie them. At the very least, the prose poems can serve, both thematically and chronologically, as a bridge between Smith’s poetry and his prose fiction. But, relatively few in number as they are, they deserve consideration in their own right as some of the most flawless and delicate of Smith’s literary productions—and as potent embodiments of that “nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound” (N 4) that lies at the core of Smith’s fantastic imagination.
C. The Hashish-Eater
The Hashish-Eater is Clark Ashton Smith’s longest poem, and certainly one of his most complex. As such, it can be read on many levels. The title inclines one to consider it simply the random and chaotic visions of a drug-induced hallucination, and certainly the dense, even crowded imagery of the poem appears to foster this interpretation; but a closer reading may lead one to believe that The Hashish-Eater has a definite plot and direction, something perhaps confirmed by a recently published “Argument of ‘The Hashish-Eater’” included in the 1989 Necronomicon Press reissue of the poem.
In a letter to Samuel J. Sackett of July 11, 1950,[125] Smith refers to The Hashish-Eater as “a much-misunderstood poem,” and his “Argument” now allows us to have a better idea of what he actually meant by the poem. (Whether he actually accomplished what he meant is something we shall reserve for later discussion.) Even without the “Argument,” it can be inferred from the very construction of The Hashish-Eater that the poem is something more than a series of unconnected tableaux. Its 582 lines are divided into twelve “paragraphs,” and this device—common in epic poetry, although it is rare to find these “paragraph” divisions occurring in the middle of a line, as here—suggests that the poem is meant to be read as some sort of narrative. This suggestion is now confirmed by the “Argument.”
In the previously quoted letter to Sackett, Smith says that the poem “was intended as a study in the possibilities of cosmic consciousness,” and this suggests that the visions seen by the narrator are just that: “visions” of some actual realm or state of existence, not imaginary vistas spawned by the narrator’s imagination. It is true that occasionally the language suggests mere dream-visions: the very opening line, “Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams,” hints at it, as does a later passage: “Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold / Like tapestry, and vanish” (155–56); but in this passage, the word “forgotten” seems in context more plausibly to refer not to splendours “forgotten” by the narrator but forgotten by mankind generally because of their existence at some dim, anterior stage of cosmic history.
It is possible to divide The Hashish-Eater into four fairly discrete sections, corresponding to the chapters of a story, They are as follows:
I. A general description of the narrator’s visions (in the “Argument” it is said that “By some explanation [sic] of cosmic consciousness . . . the dreamer is carried to a height [from] which he beholds the strange and multiform scenes of existence in alien worlds”) (1–171).
II. The narrator enters his visions and becomes a participant in them (the “Argument” states: “Then, in a state similar to the Buddhic plane, he is able to mingle with them and identify himself with their actors and objects”) (171–242).
Ill. The narrator perceives an intruder into his visions (242–83) and is pursued by a series of horrors (283–476), including the monsters in those regions “that knew my trespassing” (417).
IV. Fleeing, the narrator now falls into some strange realm described in the “Argument” as “the verge of a gulf into which falls in cataracts the ruin and rubble of the universe”; from this gulf “the face of infinity itself, in all its awful blankness . . . rises up to confront him” (476–582); the poem ends on a half-line to convey this sense of the narrator’s absorption into this realm.
What strikes us about this skeletonic outline is the gradual transformation of the narrator from a position of power to one of helplessness: the figure who at the outset proclaimed himself the “emperor of dreams,” and who later refers to himelf as a “suzerain” (174), is at the end a small, cowering creature overwhelmed by the chaos and vastness of existence. This transformation can be measured concretely by examining the varying uses of the personal pronoun “I.” In the opening sections this pronoun appears not merely with great frequency, but almost always in contexts denoting the strength and vigour of the narrator as master of his visions; in later sections, the use of “I” not only decreases, but when it occurs it is always linked with the narrator’s fear of and flight from the scenes and entities he beholds. In the first 113 lines of the poem, “I” occurs fourteen times, three times in the first six lines:
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.
Later instances emphasise the narrator’s control: “I convoke” (54), “I behold” (56, 115), “I list” (60), “I see” (66), “I read” (72), “I know” (75, 91, 95), “I lean to read” (85). In an interlude (113–71), to which we shall return later, “I” occurs only twice, and in relatively passive contexts: “I see” (131), “I watch” (141); moreover, these two instances occur at the beginning of the line, whereas the previous instances occurred at the end of the line, where the enjambement creates a dynamic sense of the narrator’s power. In what I have deemed the second section of the poem (171–242), “I” occurs twelve times, and once again in positions and contexts of strength:
If I will,
I am at once the vision and the seer,
And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,
And still abide their suzerain . . . (171–74)
And later: “It is I” (188), “I fare” (200), “I am page” (216), “I seek” (221), “I hear” (224), “I find” (231, 235).
In the first forty lines of the third section (242f.) “I” appears only twice, both in the same line (246). It is here that the narrator senses an intruding presence in his realm and “Fear is born” (258). Subsequent occurrences of “I” are frequent, but the context is radically shifted, and the narrator is seen stumbling upon horrors (“I find / A corpse the ebbing water will not keep” [288–89]) and fleeing in utter terror:
But I turn
To mountains guarding with their horns of snow
The source of that befouled rill, and seek
A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,
And they with falling pennons. But in vain
I flee . . .(296–301)
And in the rest of the poem the narrator is more the passive spectator of an apocalypse than an “emperor of dreams.”
The suggestion that the narrator has entered into actual realms of entity on other planets (and possibly into past or future epochs) allows for the possibility of a philosophical interpretation of the poem: perhaps we are to see The Hashish-Eater as a reflection of Smith’s view of human and cosmic existence. Is there any dominant characteristic that can be detected in the narrator’s wanderings through space and time? Right from the beginning of the poem we are led to understand that conflict is a ceaseless component of the cosmos. Everything appears hostile and belligerent, as an early passage suggests:
sorcerers,
And evil kings, predominantly armed
With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon
Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,
Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,
With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,
Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons
Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,
With antic gnomes abominably wise,
Heave up their icy horns across my way. (17–26)
Nature itself appears imbued with enmity:
Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,
The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,
By jealous moons maleficently urged
To follow me for ever; mountains horned
With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed
With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,
Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain,
And continents of serpent-shapen trees,
With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,
Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire
By that supreme ascendance . . .(7–17)
Here, aside from the obvious suggestions of conflict (“monsters roaring for their glut,” “maleficently”), we have subtler indications: the mountains are endowed with “peaks of sharpest adamant” for some hostile purpose; and the word “usurp” interjects an explicitly political tone, as if the mountains are intruding upon the domain belonging to the sky.
Nevertheless, it is the narrator’s ability to surmount the obstacles of man and Nature that is highlighted in the opening 113 lines; perhaps the most emphatic utterance of this conception occurs at lines 49f.:
Supreme
In culminant omniscience manifold,
And served by senses multitudinous,
Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
Of utter night and chaos, I convoke
The Babel of their visions, and attend
At once their myriad witness.
The emphasis in these first 113 lines is the narrator’s intellectual triumph over hostile forces: he utilises many of his senses and powers of intellect in perceiving the cosmos around him (“behold” [56], “list” [= hear] [60], “know” [71, 91, 95], “read” [72, 85]). One passage here underscores Smith’s sense of the tireless conflict that dominates cosmic history:
I lean to read
With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,
The monstrous archives of a war that ran
Through wasted eons, and the prophecy
Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate
Some enmity of wivern-headed kings
Even to the brink of time.(85–91)
The interlude in this first section (113-71) suggests for the first time the limits of the narrator’s control over his realm, and foreshadows his reduction to a helpless and inconsequential mote at the end of the poem. In spite of having earlier asserted his “omniscience” (50), the narrator now encounters a “mighty city” (114) whose origin he does not know:
But whose hands
Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought
To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,
No eremite hath lingered there to say,
And no man comes to learn . . .(118–22)
By line 152 the narrator attempts to reclaim his omnipotence:
Surveyed
From this my throne, as from a central sun,
The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass . . . (152–54)
And yet there are chinks in his armour even here. He mentions “The face of some averted god” (160), but appears not to know his identity; later, there are “hooded stars inscrutable to God” (168) and also, one supposes, inscrutable to him.
By the beginning of the second section (171f.) the narrator tries to take charge of his visions by bodily entering them:
I am
The neophyte who serves a nameless god,
Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos
Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,
Or flags to pave the theshold; or I am
The god himself . . .(174–79)
There is scarcely a greater way of asserting one’s power than by claiming godhead, and yet we have already read of those “stars inscrutable to God,” which suggests that in this cosmos gods are anything but omniscient; and earlier we read of “plains with no horizon, where a god / Might lose his way for centuries” (147–48): like those of Dunsany, Smith’s gods seem all too pathetically fragile in the midst of a vast and unknowable cosmos.
Then, beginning with the third section (242f.), the narrator begins his long descent from emperor to pawn; from pursuer of cosmic visions to pursued:
Hark!
What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,
In crypts of some impenetrable world?
Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy
I cannot share, though I am king of suns,
And king therewith of strong eternity,
Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard
My gates, and slay the intruder?(242–49)
In line 245, “dethroning” is of especial note, explicitly contrasting with the “throne” (153) the narrator earlier claimed as his own. He now confesses that “Fear is born / In crypts below the nadir” (258-59), and his “heart suspends / Its clamor as within the clutch of death” (275–76). At 283f. the narrator strives to reassert his power by calling up visions of, beauty, but instead of “meads of shining moly” (284) he finds instead “A corpse the ebbing water will not keep” (289). He flees to a mountaintop, but a huge “silver python” (305) pursues him. He summons a hippogriff to rescue him and take him to a remote planet “where the outwearied wings of time / Might pause and furl for respite” (321–22). Here he finds a castle that appears to be the antithesis of the hostility he has found throughout the cosmos:
There I find
A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset
Save by the purple spears of amaranth,
And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls
of flushed marble, wonderful with rose,
And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets
That take the clouds as coronal—these are mine,
For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,
And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft
To grin a welcome.(328–37)
This castle is “unbeset” by enemies; the only weapons are “spears” of delicate and “tender-sworded” flowers. Even the “heavy-teethed” portcullis is rendered harmless in that it “grin[s] a welcome.” But the peace is short-lived. A “chuckle sharp as crepitating ice” (353) is heard, and the narrator stumbles into a
monster-guarded room,
Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd
On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts
Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,
Pendulous by their toes, of tarnished bronze,
Usurp the shadowy interval of la
mps
That hang from ebon arches.(357–63)
The narrator is again struck with a “fear / That found no name in Babel” (368–69), and he flees from a series of horrors, each worse than the last, including
a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,
Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,
Overflows its arms with fold on creased fold
Obscenely bloating.(386–89)
Now the narrator hears a mutter “from beyond the horizon’s rim” (403) and realises what it is:
They come,
The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn
From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,
And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors
That owned my sway aforetime!(415–19)
These may be the most important lines of the poem, and mark the point where the narrator can no longer maintain his pretence of control over the cosmos. Instead, he becomes aware that his previous “sway” was only a sham, and that a paltry human can never have suzerainty over the cosmos. All the monsters of history, legend, and myth arise to pursue the hapless narrator, and his flight is abject:
In my tenfold fear,
A monstrous dread unnamed in any hell,
I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,
And in a trice the wizard palace reels,
And spiring to a single tower of flame,
Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown
Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind
