The Star-treader Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABBACDECDFFGGHIJH KLLKMNMMNFHHFOPQIIQE E DHHQQQERRE QHQHQQQSQRSRRTRTPUPR VR H QQQQQEHQQHEQQQQRREEQ QRQQQ QEEQQQW W X X YZZYY Q RQ RQQQRQRBBA voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams | A |
Saying 'Make haste the webs of death and birth | B |
Are brushed away and all the threads of earth | B |
Wear to the breaking spaceward gleams | A |
Thine ancient pathway of the suns | C |
Whose flame is part of thee | D |
And the deep gulfs abide coevally | E |
Whose darkness runs | C |
Through all thy spirit's mystery | D |
Go forth and tread unharmed the blaze | F |
Of stars wherethrough thou camest in old days | F |
Pierce without fear each vast | G |
Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past | G |
A hand strikes off the chains of Time | H |
A hand swings back the door of years | I |
Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears | J |
And opens the strait dream to space sublime' | H |
- | |
II | - |
- | |
Who rides a dream what hand shall stay | K |
What eye shall note or measure mete | L |
His passage on a purpose fleet | L |
The thread and weaving of his way | K |
It caught me from the clasping world | M |
And swept beyond the brink of Sense | N |
My soul was flung and poised and whirled | M |
Like to a planet chained and hurled | M |
With solar lightning strong and tense | N |
Swift as communicated rays | F |
That leap from severed suns a gloom | H |
Within whose waste no suns illume | H |
The winged dream fulfilled its ways | F |
Through years reversed and lit again | O |
I followed that unending chain | P |
Wherein the suns are links of light | Q |
Retraced through lineal ordered spheres | I |
The twisting of the threads of years | I |
In weavings wrought of noon and night | Q |
Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll | E |
Those folds that form the raiment of the soul | E |
- | |
III | - |
- | |
Enkindling dawns of memory | D |
Each sun had radiance to relume | H |
A sealed disused and darkened room | H |
Within the soul's immensity | Q |
Their alien ciphers shown and lit | Q |
I understood what each had writ | Q |
Upon my spirit's scroll | E |
Again I wore mine ancient lives | R |
And knew the freedom and the gyves | R |
That formed and marked my soul | E |
- | |
IV | - |
- | |
I delved in each forgotten mind | Q |
The units that had builded me | H |
Whose deepnesses before were blind | Q |
And formless as infinity | H |
Knowing again each former world | Q |
From planet unto planet whirled | Q |
Through gulfs that mightily divide | Q |
Like to an intervital sleep | S |
One world I found where souls abide | Q |
Like winds that rest upon a rose | R |
Thereto they creep | S |
To loose all burden of old woes | R |
And one there was a garden close | R |
Whose blooms are grown of ancient sin | T |
And death the sap that wells and flows | R |
The spirits weep that dwelt therein | T |
And one I knew where chords of pain | P |
With stridors fill the Senses' lyre | U |
And one where Beauty's olden chain | P |
Is forged anew with stranger loveliness | R |
In flame soft links of never quenched desire | V |
And ineluctable duress | R |
- | |
V | H |
- | |
Where no terrestrial dreams had trod | Q |
My vision entered undismayed | Q |
And Life her hidden realms displayed | Q |
To me as to a curious god | Q |
Where colored suns of systems triplicate | Q |
Bestow on planets weird ineffable | E |
Green light that orbs them like an outer sea | H |
And large auroral noons that alternate | Q |
With skies like sunset held without abate | Q |
Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly | H |
The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell | E |
Dead passions like to stars relit | Q |
Shone in the gloom of ways forgot | Q |
Where crownless gods in darkness sit | Q |
The day was full on altars hot | Q |
I heard enisled in those melodic seas | R |
The central music of the Pleiades | R |
And to Alcyone my soul | E |
Swayed with the stars that own her song's control | E |
Unchallenged glad I trod a revenant | Q |
In worlds Edenic longly lost | Q |
Or dwelt in spheres that sing to those | R |
Through space no light has crossed | Q |
Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed | Q |
To Heaven's angelic chant | Q |
- | |
VI | - |
- | |
What vasts the dream went out to find | Q |
I seemed beyond the world's recall | E |
In gulfs where darkness is a wall | E |
To render strong Antares blind | Q |
In unimagined spheres I found | Q |
The sequence of my being's round | Q |
Some life where firstling meed of Song | W |
The strange imperishable leaf | - |
Was placed on brows that starry Grief | - |
Had crowned and Pain anointed long | W |
Some avatar where Love | - |
Sang like the last great star at morn | X |
Ere the pale orb of Death filled all its sky | - |
Some life in fresher years unworn | X |
Upon a world whereof | - |
Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie | - |
On pools aglow with latter spring | Y |
There Time's pellucid surface took | Z |
Clear image of all things nor shook | Z |
Till the black cleaving of Oblivion's wing | Y |
Some earlier awakening | Y |
In pristine years when giant strife | - |
Of forces darkly whirled | Q |
First forged the thing called Life | - |
Hot from the furnace of the suns | R |
Upon the anvil of a world | Q |
- | |
VII | - |
- | |
Thus knew I those anterior ones | R |
Whose lives in mine were blent | Q |
Till lo my dream that held a night | Q |
Where Rigel sends no message of his might | Q |
Was emptied of the trodden stars | R |
And dwindled to the sun's extent | Q |
The brain's familiar prison bars | R |
And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth | B |
Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth | B |
Clark Ashton Smith
(1)
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