"Smith, Clark Ashton - Soliloquy In An Ebon Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

Deploring still some splendid, stately love-
Gone like the pomps of void Ecbatana-
That only lives in epodes, but will rise
To ghost the goldless morrows, clothed about
With hues of suns declining and decayed,
And crowned with ruinous autumn.

Other thoughts
Exhume the withered winf-shards of ideals
Brittle and light as perished moths, or bring
To sight the mummied of blair mischance,
By dismal eves and moons disatrous flying,
Their vans have darkened. On beloved deaths
I muse, and through my- twice-wept tears re-gather
The threads that Clotho and Lachesis have spun
And Atropos has cut; and see the bleak
Sinister gleaming of the steely shears
Behind the rivenarrasses of time.

What weapon can we arm us with? What bulwark
Build against grief and time? What moat renewed
With waters mortal as those the shroud Gomorrah,
Will the sea-going termite never ferry
To gnaw the ebon tower, the ebon ark
Holding the Muses' covenant? Splendor-brimmed,
What grail of God or Satan will suffice
For all the breadless days, the unguerdoned labors?

Yet, for a toll so light, by Song transported,
To sail beyond Elysium and Thelem,
And see, from oblivion looming, balmier shores
Of fables infinite! To light our dreams
At rose Aldebaran or sky-huge Antates,
Then quench their heat, or temper Damascus thought
In cold aphelions and apastrons far!
To pace the sun's Typhoean ramparts vast!
To couch on Saturns's outmost ring, or roll
With Pluto through his orb of eventide
Whose Hesper is the dwindled sun! To flaunt
Before the blind in immarcesible purple
Won from the murex of Uranian seas,
And fire-plucked vermeil of Vulcan, worn against
These aguish mists and wintry shadows! Thus
We trimmph; thus the laurel overtops
The upas and the yew; and we decline
No toil, no dolor of`our votive doom.

High-housed within the Alchemic Citadel,
We are served by Azoth and by Alkahest.
Out of the gleamless mire and sand we make