Upon his pillar stands upright
The rigid anchoret: his pose,
Over the desert, toward the sky,
Prolongs the rectitude of stone,
The rising and unbroken line.
Emmets and men go by beneath.
The veering vultures fan his brow:
He sees them not: his sanctity
Enfolds him like the fuming cloud
A thousand thuribles might yield.
At evening pass in pompous file
The larvae sent by Satanas.
To mock him, on a pagan height
The ram pant sagittary stands,
Stallion of maenads half-equine;
And pulsing soft horizons fall
And swell with forms the heathen shun-
Dark sisters of the Ashtaroth
That crawl from undescended gulfs
Or slither over sliding scaurs.
With kelpy tresses wreathed with foam,
Voluptuous cold Nereides
Upon the surging desert float;
And Cypris, as from out the sea,
Rises reborn with veil nor zone.
Behind dissolving peristyles
Lithe sphinxes crouch and rear in rut;
And mincing from Gomorrah's night,
Vague-membered gods androgynous
Invert an ithyphallic sign.
The reeking shames of Sheol glow
And writhe before him. . . . Still upright
The saint exalts the columned stone
With folden arms and changeless eyes-
In chastity long ankylosed.
The Stylite
Clark Ashton Smith
(1)
Poem topics: cloud, dark, night, sea, sky, evening, long, cold, soft, beneath, sanctity, saint, stone, desert, Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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