The Complete Poetry
of
H. P. Lovecraft

b.1890 — d.1937

This book contains every poem in the public domain that has been attributed to H. P. Lovecraft and confirmed in the online resource, The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

So far as I know, this collection includes all of H. P. Lovecraft's available published works of poetry. However, if additional works of poetry are discovered or pointed out, they will be added whenever they happen to become available.

If you yourself notice that any works are missing from this collection and can provide the names of the poems and either the texts or links to them, please post the information as a reply in the MobileRead forum so that the stories can be added.

Please note: This volume of the complete works consists purely of his poems. It does not include his mature and singly authored fiction, juvenilia, collaborative works, letters or nonfiction. Such works are represented in other volumes in this complete series.

Again: Any legitimate poems that are missing will be added once their titles and texts or links are posted on Mobile Read.

If any of these poems prove not to be within the public domain, then they must be pointed out so that they may be removed.

Compiled by: Andy Martin

MobileRead Member: Ghostyjack

Contents

Part I. - Juvenilia (1887-1905)

Poemata Minora, Volume II

Part II. - Fantasy and Horror

Nemesis

Astrophobos

The Poe-et’s Nightmare

Despair

Revelation

The House

The City

To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany

The Nightmare Lake

On Reading Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder

The Cats

Festival

Hallowe’en in a Suburb aka “In a Suburb”

The Wood

The Outpost

The Ancient Track

The Messenger

Nathicana

Fungi from Yuggoth

In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d

To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures

Part III. - Occasional Verse

On Receiving a Picture of Swans

Fact and Fancy

Laeta; a Lament

Part IV. - Satire

Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea

Pacifist War Song—1917

Waste Paper

Dead Passion’s Flame

Arcadia

Life’s Mystery

Part V. - Seasonal and Topographical

A Garden

Sunset

Providence

Christmas

Christmas Greetings

Part VI. - Politics and Society

An American to Mother England

Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee

The Rose of England

The Peace Advocate

Ode for July Fourth, 1917

The Conscript

Part I.
Juvenilia (1887-1905)

Poemata Minora, Volume II

* * * * *

Written: 1902

First Published in:

“Ode to Selene or Diana” (as “To Selene”)
The Tryout, Vol. 5, No. 4 (April 1919), Page 18

“To the Old Pagan Religion” (as “The Last Pagan Speaks”)
The Tryout, Vol. 5, No. 4 (April 1919), Page 17

“On the Ruin of Rome”
A Winter Wish. Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press, 1977, Page 150

“To Pan” (as “Pan”)
The Tryout, Vol. 5, No. 4 (April 1919), Page 16

“On the Vanity of Human Ambition”
A Winter Wish. Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press, 1977, Page 143

Ode to Selene or Diana

Immortal Moon, in maiden splendour shine.

Dispense thy beams, divine Latona’s child.

Thy silver rays all grosser things define,

And hide harsh truth in sweet illusion mild.

In thy soft light, the city of unrest

That stands so squalid in thy brother’s glare

Throws off its habit, and in silence blest

Becomes a vision, sparkling bright and fair.

The modern world, with all it’s care & pain,

The smoky streets, the hideous clanging mills,

Face ’neath thy beams, Selene, and again

We dream like shepherds on Chaldæa’s hills.

Take heed, Diana, of my humble plea.

Convey me where my happiness may last.

Draw me against the tide of time’s rough sea

And let my sprirt rest amid the past.

To the Old Pagan Religion

Olympian gods! How can I let ye go

And pin my faith to this new Christian creed?

Can I resign the deities I know

For him who on a cross for man did bleed?

How in my weakness can my hopes depend

On one lone God, though mighty be his pow’r?

Why can Jove’s host no more assistance lend,

To soothe my pain, and cheer my troubled hour?

Are there no Dryads on these wooded mounts

O’er which I oft in desolation roam?

Are there no Naiads in these crystal founts?

Nor Nereids upon the Ocean foam?

Fast spreads the new; the older faith declines.

The name of Christ resounds upon the air.

But my wrack’d soul in solitude repines

And gives the Gods their last-receivèd pray’r.

On the Ruin of Rome

Low dost thou lie, O Rome, neath the foot of the Teuton

Slaves are thy men, and bent to the will of thy conqueror:

Wither hath gone, great city, the race that gave law to all nations,

Subdu’d the east and the west, and made them bow down to thy consuls.

Knew not defeat, but gave it to all who attack’d thee?

Dead! and replac’d by these wretches who cower in confusion

Dead! They who gave us this empire to guard and to live in

Rome, thou didst fall from thy pow’r with the proud race that made thee,

And we, base Italians, enjoy’d what we could not have builded.

To Pan

Seated in a woodland glen

By a shallow reedy stream

Once I fell a-musing, when

I was lull’d into a dream.

From the brook a shape arose

Half a man and half a goat.

Hoofs it had instead of toes

And a beard adorn’d its throat

On a set of rustic reeds

Sweetly play’d this hybrid man

Naught car’d I for earthly needs,

For I knew that this was Pan

Nymphs & Satyrs gather’d ’round

To enjoy the lively sound.

All to soon I woke in pain

And return’d to haunts of men.

But in rural vales I’d fain

Live and hear Pan’s pipes again.

On the Vanity of Human Ambition

Apollo, chasing Daphne, gain’d his prize

But lo! she turn’d to wood before his eyes.

More modern swains at golden prizes aim,

And ever strive some worldly thing to claim.

Yet ’tis the same as in Apollo’s case,

For, once attain’d, the purest gold seems base.

All that men seek ’s unworthy of the quest,

Yet seek they will, and never pause for rest.

True bliss, methinks, a man can only find

In virtuous life, & cultivated mind.

Part II.
Fantasy and Horror

Nemesis

* * * * *

Written: 1st November 1917

First Published in The Vagrant,
No. 7 (June 1918), Pages 41-43

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,

I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,

When the sky was a vaporous flame;

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o’er seas without ending,

Under sinister grey-clouded skies

That the many-fork’d lightning is rending,

That resound with hysterical cries;

With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches

Of the hoary primoridal grove,

Where the oaks feel the presence that marches

And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;

And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains

That rise barren and bleak from the plain,

I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains

That ooze down to the marsh and the main;

And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

I have scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,

I have trod its untenanted hall,

Where the moon writhing up from the valleys

Shews the tapestried things on the wall;

Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

I have peer’d from the casement in wonder

At the mouldering meadows around,

At the many-roof’d village laid under

The curse of a grave-girdled ground;

And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,

I have flown on the pinions of fear

Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,

Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:

And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted

The jewel-deck’d throne by the Nile;

I was old in those epochs uncounted

When I, and I only, was vile;

And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,

And great is the reach of its doom;

Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,

Nor can respite be found in the tomb:

Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,

I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,

I have sounded all things with my sight;

And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

Astrophobos

* * * * *

Written: 25th November 1917

First Published in The United Amateur,
Vol. 17, No. 3 (January 1918), Page 38

In the midnight heavens burning

Thro’ ethereal deeps afar,

Once I watch’d with restless yearning

An alluring, aureate star;

Ev’ry eye aloft returning,

Gleaming nigh the Arctic car.

Mystic waves of beauty blended

With the gorgeous golden rays;

Phantasies of bliss descended

In a myrrh’d Elysian haze;

And in lyre-born chords extended

Harmonies of Lydian lays.

There (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure,

Where the free and blessed dwell,

And each moment bears a treasure

Freighted with a lotus-spell,

And there floats a liquid measure

From the lute of Israfel.

There (I told myself) were shining

Worlds of happiness unknown,

Peace and Innocence entwining

By the Crowned Virtue’s throne;

Men of light, their thoughts refining

Purer, fairer, than our own.

Thus I mus’d, when o’er the vision

Crept a red delirious change;

Hope dissolving to derision,

Beauty to distortion strange;

Hymnic chords in weird collision,

Spectral sights in endless range.

Crimson burn’d the star of sadness

As behind the beams I peer’d;

All was woe that seem’d but gladness

Ere my gaze with truth was sear’d;

Cacodaemons, mir’d with madness,

Thro’ the fever’d flick’ring leer’d.

Now I know the fiendish fable

That the golden glitter bore;

Now I shun the spangled sable

That I watch’d and lov’d before;

But the horror, set and stable,

Haunts my soul for evermore

The Poe-et’s Nightmare

* * * * *

Written: 1916

First Published in The Vagrant,
No. 8 (July 1918), Pages 13-23

A Fable

Luxus tumultus semper causa est.

Lucullus Languish, student of the skies,

And connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,

A bard by choice, a grocer’s clerk by trade,

(Grown pessimist thro’ honours long delay’d),

A secret yearning bore, that he might shine

In breathing numbers, and in song divine.

Each day his fountain pen was wont to drop

An ode or dirge or two about the shop,

Yet naught could strike the chord within his heart

That throbb’d for poesy, and cry’d for art.

Each eve he sought his bashful Muse to wake

With overdoses of ice-cream and cake;

But thou’ th’ ambitious youth a dreamer grew,

Th’ Aonian Nymph declin’d to come to view.

Sometimes at dusk he scour’d the heav’ns afar,

Searching for raptures in the evening star;

One night he strove to catch a tale untold

In crystal deeps—but only caught a cold.

So pin’d Lucullus with his lofty woe,

Till one drear day he bought a set of Poe:

Charm’d with the cheerful horrors there display’d,

He vow’d with gloom to woo the Heav’nly Maid.

Of Auber’s tarn and Yaanek’s slope he dreams,

And weaves an hundred Ravens in his schemes.

Not far from our young hero’s peaceful home

Lies the fair grove wherein he loves to roam.

Tho’ but a stunted copse in vacant lot,

He dubs it Tempe, and adores the spot;

When shallow puddles dot the wooded plain,

And brim o’er muddy banks with muddy rain,

He calls them limpid lakes or poison pools

(Depending on which bard his fancy rules).

’Tis here he comes with Heliconian fire

On Sundays when he smites the Attic lyre;

And here one afternoon he brought his gloom,

Resolv’d to chant a poet’s lay of doom.

Roget’s Thesaurus, and a book of rhymes,

Provide the rungs whereon his spirit climbs:

With this grave retinue he trod the grove

And pray’d the Fauns he might a Poe-et prove.

But sad to tell, ere Pegasus flew high,

The not unrelish’d supper hour drew nigh;

Our tuneful swain th’ imperious call attends,

And soon above the groaning table bends.

Tho’ it were too prosaic to relate

Th’ exact particulars of what he ate

(Such long-drawn lists the hasty reader skips,

Like Homer’s well-known catalogue of ships),

This much we swear: that as adjournment near’d,

A monstrous lot of cake had disappear’d!

Soon to his chamber the young bard repairs,

And courts soft Somnus with sweet Lydian airs;

Thro’ open casement scans the star-strown deep,

And ’neath Orion’s beams sinks off to sleep.

Now start from airy dell the elfin train

That dance each midnight o’er the sleeping plain,

To bless the just, or cast a warning spell

On those who dine not wisely, but too well.

First Deacon Smith they plague, whose nasal glow

Comes from what Holmes hath call’d “Elixir Pro”;

Group’d round the couch his visage they deride,

Whilst thro’ his dreams unnumber’d serpents glide.

Next troop the little folk into the room

Where snores our young Endymion, swath’d in gloom:

A smile lights up his boyish face, whilst he

Dreams of the moon—or what he ate at tea.

The chieftain elf th’ unconscious youth surveys,

And on his form a strange enchantment lays:

Those lips, that lately thrill’d with frosted cake,

Uneasy sounds in slumbrous fashion make;

At length their owner’s fancies they rehearse,

And lisp this awesome Poe-em in blank verse:

Aletheia Phrikodes

Omnia risus et omnia pulvis et omnia nihil.

Demoniac clouds, up-pil’d in chasmy reach

Of soundless heav’n, smother’d the brooding night;

Nor came the wonted whisp’rings of the swamp,

Nor voice of autumn wind along the moor,

Nor mutter’d noises of th’ insomnious grove

Whose black recesses never saw the sun.

Within that grove a hideous hollow lies,

Half bare of trees; a pool in centre lurks

That none dares sound; a tarn of murky face

(Tho’ naught can prove its hue, since light of day,

Affrighted, shuns the forest-shadow’d banks).

Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes,

From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air

That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees

Which stand about, clawing the spectral gloom

With evil boughs. To this accursed dell

Come woodland creatures, seldom to depart:

Once I behold, upon a crumbling stone

Set altar-like before the cave, a thing

I saw not clearly, yet from glimpsing, fled.

In this half-dusk I meditate alone

At many a weary noontide, when without

A world forgets me in its sun-blest mirth.

Here howl by night the werewolves, and the souls

Of those that knew me well in other days.

Yet on this night the grove spake not to me;

Nor spake the swamp, nor wind along the moor,

Nor moan’d the wind about the lonely eaves

Of the bleak, haunted pile wherein I lay.

I was afraid to sleep, or quench the spark

Of the low-burning taper by my couch.

I was afraid when thro’ the vaulted space

Of the old tow’r, the clock-ticks died away

Into a silence so profound and chill

That my teeth chatter’d—giving yet no sound.

Then flicker’d low the light, and all dissolv’d,

Leaving me floating in the hellish grasp

Of body’d blackness, from whose beating wings

Came ghoulish blasts of charnel-scented mist.

Things vague, unseen, unfashion’d, and unnam’d

Jostled each other in the seething void

That gap’d, chaotic, downward to a sea

Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.

All this I felt, and felt the mocking eyes

Of the curs’d universe upon my soul;

Yet naught I saw nor heard, till flash’d a beam

Of lurid lustre thro’ the rotting heav’ns,

Playing on scenes I labour’d not to see.

Methought the nameless tarn, alight at last,

Reflected shapes, and more reveal’d within

Those shocking depths than ne’er were seen before;

Methought from out the cave a demon train,

Grinning and smirking, reel’d in fiendish rout;

Bearing within their reeking paws a load

Of carrion viands for an impious feast.

Methought the stunted trees with hungry arms

Grop’d greedily for things I dare not name;

The while a stifling, wraith-like noisomeness

Fill’d all the dale, and spoke a larger life

Of uncorporeal hideousness awake

In the half-sentient wholeness of the spot.

Now glow’d the ground, and tarn, and cave, and trees,

And moving forms, and things not spoken of,

With such a phosphorescence as men glimpse

In the putrescent thickets of the swamp

Where logs decaying lie, and rankness reigns.

Methought a fire-mist drap’d with lucent fold

The well-remember’d features of the grove,

Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams

The hot, unfinish’d stuff of nascent worlds

Hither and thither thro’ infinities

Of light and darkness, strangely intermix’d;

Wherein all entity had consciousness,

Without th’ accustom’d outward shape of life.

Of these swift-circling currents was my soul,

Free from the flesh, a true constituent part;

Nor felt I less myself, for want of form.

Then clear’d the mist, and o’er a star-strown scene,

Divine and measureless, I gaz’d in awe.

Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck

Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken

Which mortals call the boundless universe.

On ev’ry side, each as a tiny star,

Shone more creations, vaster than our own,

And teeming with unnumber’d forms of life;

Tho’ we as life would recognise it not,

Being bound to earthy thoughts of human mould.

As on a moonless night the Milky Way

In solid sheen displays its countless orbs

To weak terrestrial eyes, each orb a sun;

So beam’d the prospect on my wond’ring soul:

A spangled curtain, rich with twinkling gems,

Yet each a mighty universe of suns.

But as I gaz’d, I sens’d a spirit voice

In speech didactic, tho’ no voice it was,

Save as it carried thought. It bade me mark

That all the universes in my view

Form’d but an atom in infinity;

Whose reaches pass the ether-laden realms

Of heat and light, extending to far fields

Where flourish worlds invisible and vague,

Fill’d with strange wisdom and uncanny life,

And yet beyond; to myriad spheres of light,

To spheres of darkness, to abysmal voids

That know the pulses of disorder’d force.

Big with these musings, I survey’d the surge

Of boundless being, yet I us’d not eyes,

For spirit leans not on the props of sense.

The docent presence swell’d my strength of soul;

All things I knew, but knew with mind alone.

Time’s endless vista spread before my thought

With its vast pageant of unceasing change

And sempiternal strife of force and will;

I saw the ages flow in stately stream

Past rise and fall of universe and life;

I saw the birth of suns and worlds, their death,

Their transmutation into limpid flame,

Their second birth and second death, their course

Perpetual thro’ the aeons’ termless flight,

Never the same, yet born again to serve

The varying purpose of omnipotence.

And whilst I watch’d, I knew each second’s space

Was greater than the lifetime of our world.

Then turn’d my musings to that speck of dust

Whereon my form corporeal took its rise;

That speck, born but a second, which must die

In one brief second more; that fragile earth;

That crude experiment; that cosmic sport

Which holds our proud, aspiring race of mites

And moral vermin; those presuming mites

Whom ignorance with empty pomp adorns,

And misinstructs in specious dignity;

Those mites who, reas’ning outward, vaunt themselves

As the chief work of Nature, and enjoy

In fatuous fancy the particular care

Of all her mystic, super-regnant pow’r.

And as I strove to vision the sad sphere

Which lurk’d, lost in ethereal vortices,

Methough my soul, tun’d to the infinite,

Refus’d to glimpse that poor atomic blight;

That misbegotten accident of space;

That globe of insignificance, whereon

(My guide celestial told me) dwells no part

Of empyrean virtue, but where breed

The coarse corruptions of divine disease;

The fest’ring ailments of infinity;

The morbid matter by itself call’d man:

Such matter (said my guide) as oft breaks forth

On broad Creation’s fabric, to annoy

For a brief instant, ere assuaging death

Heal up the malady its birth provok’d.

Sicken’d, I turn’d my heavy thoughts away.

Then spake th’ ethereal guide with mocking mien,

Upbraiding me for searching after Truth;

Visiting on my mind the searing scorn

Of mind superior; laughing at the woe

Which rent the vital essence of my soul.

Methought he brought remembrance of the time

When from my fellows to the grove I stray’d,

In solitude and dusk to meditate

On things forbidden, and to pierce the veil

Of seeming good and seeming beauteousness

That covers o’er the tragedy of Truth,

Helping mankind forget his sorry lot,

And raising Hope where Truth would crush it down.

He spake, and as he ceas’d, methought the flames

Of fuming Heav’n resolv’d in torments dire;

Whirling in maelstroms of rebellious might,

Yet ever bound by laws I fathom’d not.

Cycles and epicycles, of such girth

That each a cosmos seem’d, dazzled my gaze

Till all a wild phantasmal glow became.

Now burst athwart the fulgent formlessness

A rift of purer sheen, a sight supernal,

Broader that all the void conceiv’d by man,

Yet narrow here. A glimpse of heav’ns beyond;

Of weird creations so remote and great

That ev’n my guide assum’d a tone of awe.

Borne on the wings of stark immensity,

A touch of rhythm celestial reach’d my soul;

Thrilling me more with horror than with joy.

Again the spirit mock’d my human pangs,

And deep revil’d me for presumptuous thoughts:

Yet changing now his mien, he bade me scan

The wid’ning rift that clave the walls of space;

He bade me search it for the ultimate;

He bade me find the Truth I sought so long;

He bade me brave th’ unutterable Thing,

The final Truth of moving entity.

All this he bade and offer’d—but my soul,

Clinging to life, fled without aim or knowledge,

Shrieking in silence thro’ the gibbering deeps.

Thus shriek’d the young Lucullus, as he fled

Thro’ gibbering deeps—and tumbled out of bed;

Within the room the morning sunshine gleams,

Whilst the poor youth recalls his troubled dreams.

He feels his aching limbs, whose woeful pain

Informs his soul his body lives again,

And thanks his stars—or cosmoses—or such

That he survives the noxious nightmare’s clutch.

Thrill’d with the music of th’ eternal spheres

(Or is it the alarm-clock that he hears?),

He vows to all the Pantheon, high and low,

No more to feed on cake, or pie, or Poe.

And now his gloomy spirits seem to rise,

As he the world beholds with clearer eyes;

The cup he thought too full of dregs to quaff

Affords him wine enough to raise a laugh.

(All this is metaphor—you must not think

Our late Endymion prone to stronger drink!)

With brighter visage and with lighter heart,

He turns his fancies to the grocer’s mart;

And strange to say, at last he seems to find

His daily duties worthy of his mind.

Since Truth prov’d such a high and dang’rous goal,

Our bard seeks one less trying to his soul;

With deep-drawn breath he flouts his dreary woes,

And a good clerk from a bad poet grows!

Now close attend my lay, ye scribbling crew

That bay the moon in numbers strange and new;

That madly for the spark celestial bawl

In metres short or long, or none at all:

Curb your rash force, in numbers or at tea,

Nor overzealous for high fancies be;

Reflect, ere ye the draught Pierian take,

What worthy clerks or plumbers ye might make;

Wax not too frenzied in the leaping line

That neither sense nor measure can confine,

Lest ye, like young Lucullus Launguish, groan

Beneath Poe-etic nightmares of your own!

Despair

* * * * *

Written: 19th February 1919

First Published in Pine Cones,
Vol. 1, No. 4 (June 1919), Page 13

O’er the midnight moorlands crying,

Thro’ the cypress forests sighing,

In the night-wind madly flying,

Hellish forms with streaming hair;

In the barren branches creaking,

By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking,

Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking;

Damn’d daemons of despair.

Once, I think I half remember,

Ere the grey skies of November

Quench’d my youth’s aspiring ember,

Liv’d there such a thing as bliss;

Skies that now are dark were beaming,

Gold and azure, splendid seeming

Till I learn’d it all was dreaming—

Deadly drowsiness of Dis.

But the stream of Time, swift flowing,

Brings the torment of half-knowing—

Dimly rushing, blindly going

Past the never-trodden lea;

And the voyager, repining,

Sees the wicked death-fires shining,

Hears the wicked petrel’s whining

As he helpless drifts to sea.

Evil wings in ether beating;

Vultures at the spirit eating;

Things unseen forever fleeting

Black against the leering sky.

Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,

Clawing fiends of future sadness,

Mingle in a cloud of madness

Ever on the soul to lie.

Thus the living, lone and sobbing,

In the throes of anguish throbbing,

With the loathsome Furies robbing

Night and noon of peace and rest.

But beyond the groans and grating

Of abhorrent Life, is waiting

Sweet Oblivion, culminating

All the years of fruitless quest.

Revelation

* * * * *

Written: March 1919

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 5, No. 3 (March 1919), Pages 3-4

In a vale of light and laughter,

Shining ’neath the friendly sun,

Where fulfilment follow’d after

Ev’ry hope or dream begun;

Where an Aidenn gay and glorious,

Beckon’d down the winsome way;

There my soul, o’er pain victorious,

Laugh’d and lingered—yesterday.

Green and narrow was my valley,

Temper’d with a verdant shade;

Sun-deck’d brooklets musically

Sparkled thro’ each glorious glade;

And at night the stars serenely

Glow’d betwixt the boughs o’erhead,

While Astarte, calm and queenly,

Floods of fairy radiance shed.

There amid the tinted bowers,

Raptur’d with the opiate spell

Of the grasses, ferns, and flowers,

Poppy, phlox and pimpernel,

Long I lay, entranc’d and dreaming,

Pleas’d with Nature’s bounteous store,

Till I mark’d the shaded gleaming

Of the sky, and yearn’d for more.

Eagerly the branches tearing,

Clear’d I all the space above,

Till the bolder gaze, high faring,

Scann’d the naked skies of Jove;

Deeps unguess’d now shone before me,

Splendid beam’d the solar car;

Wings of fervid fancy bore me

Out beyond the farthest star.

Reaching, gasping, wishing, longing

For the pageant brought to sight,

Vain I watch’d the gold orbs thronging

Round celestial poles of light.

Madly on a moonbeam ladder

Heav’n’s abyss I sought to scale,

Ever wiser, ever sadder,

As the fruitless task would fail.

Then, with futile striving sated,

Veer’d my soul to earth again,

Well content that I was fated

For a fair, yet low domain;

Pleasing thoughts of glad tomorrows,

Like the blissful moments past,

Lull’d to rest my transient sorrows,

Still’d my godless greed at last.

But my downward glance, returning,

Shrank in fright from what it spy’d;

Slopes in hideous torment burning,

Terror in the brooklet’s tide:

For the dell, of shade denuded

By my desecrating hand,

’Neath the bare sky blaz’d and brooded

As a lost, accursed land.

The House

This poem is about the house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence that also inspired the short story “The Shunned House”.

* * * * *

Written: 16th July 1919

First Published in National Enquirer,
Vol. 9, No. 11 (11th December 1919), Page 3

’Tis a grove-circled dwelling

Set close to a hill,

Where the branches are telling

Strange legends of ill;

Over timbers so old

That they breathe of the dead,

Crawl the vines, green and cold,

By strange nourishment fed;

And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.

In the gardens are growing

Tall blossoms and fair,

Each pallid bloom throwing

Perfume on the air;

But the afternoon sun

With its shining red rays

Makes the picture loom dun

On the curious gaze,

And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.

The rank grasses are waving

On terrace and lawn,

Dim memories sav’ring

Of things that have gone;

The stones of the walks

Are encrusted and wet,

And a strange spirit stalks

When the red sun has set,

And the soul of the watcher is fill’d with faint pictures he fain would forget.

It was in the hot Junetime

I stood by that scene,

When the gold rays of noontime

Beat bright on the green.

But I shiver’d with cold,

Groping feebly for light,

As a picture unroll’d—

And my age-spanning sight

Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.

The City

* * * * *

Written: October 1919

First Published in The Vagrant,
No. 10 (October 1919), Pages 6-7

It was golden and splendid,

That City of light;

A vision suspended

In deeps of the night;

A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.

I remember the season

It dawn’d on my gaze;

The mad time of unreason,

The brain-numbing days

When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.

More lovely than Zion

It shone in the sky,

When the beams of Orion

Beclouded my eye,

Bringing sleep that was fill’d with dim mem’ries of moments obscure and gone by.

Its mansions were stately

With carvings made fair,

Each rising sedately

On terraces rare,

And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming there.

The avenues lur’d me

With vistas sublime;

Tall arches assur’d me

That once on a time

I had wander’d in rapture beneath them, and bask’d in the Halcyon clime.

On the plazas were standing

A sculptur’d array;

Long-bearded, commanding,

Grave men in their day—

But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face batter’d away.

In that city effulgent

No mortal I saw;

But my fancy, indulgent

To memory’s law,

Linger’d long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.

I fann’d the faint ember

That glow’d in my mind,

And strove to remember

The aeons behind;

To rove thro’ infinity freely, and visit the past unconfin’d.

Then the horrible warning

Upon my soul sped

Like the ominous morning

That rises in red,

And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.

To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,
Eighteenth Baron Dunsany

* * * * *

Written: November 1919

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 5, No. 11 (November 1919), Pages 11-12

As when the sun above a dusky wold

Springs into sight, and turns the gloom to gold,

Lights with his magic beams the dew-deck’d bow’rs,

And wakes to life the gay responsive flow’rs;

So now o’er realms where dark’ning dulness lies,

In solar state see shining Plunkett rise!

Monarch of Fancy! whose ethereal mind

Mounts fairy peaks, and leaves the throng behind;

Whose soul untainted bursts the bounds of space,

And leads to regions of supernal grace;

Can any praise thee with too strong a tone,

Who in this age of folly gleam’st alone?

Thy quill, Dunsany, with an art divine

Recalls the gods to each deserted shrine;

From mystic air a novel pantheon makes,

And with new spirits fills the meads and brakes;

With thee we wander thro’ primeval bow’rs,

For thou hast brought earth’s childhood back, and ours!

How leaps the soul, with sudden bliss increas’d,

When led by thee to lands beyond the East!

Sick of this sphere, in crime and conflict old,

We yearn for wonders distant and untold;

O’er Homer’s page a second time we pore,

And rack our brains for gleams of infant lore:

But all in vain—for valiant tho’ we strive

No common means these pictures can revive.

Then dawns Dunsany with celestial light,

And fulgent visions break upon our sight:

His barque enchanted each sad spirit bears

To shores of gold, beyond the reach of cares.

No earthly trammels now our thoughts may chain;

For childhood’s fancy hath come back again!

What glitt’ring worlds now wait our eager eyes!

What roads untrodden beckon thro’ the skies!

Wonders on wonders line the gorgeous ways,

And glorious vistas greet the ravish’d gaze;

Mountains of clouds, castles of crystal dreams,

Ethereal cities and Elysian streams;

Temples of blue, where myriad stars adore

Forgotten gods of aeons gone before!

Such are thine arts, Dunsany, such thy skill,

That scarce terrestrial seems thy moving quill;

Can man, and man alone, successful draw

Such scenes of wonder and domains of awe?

Our hearts, enraptur’d, fix thy mind’s abode

In high Pegāna; hail thee as a god;

And sure, can aught more high or godlike be

Than such a fancy as resides in thee?

Delighted Pan a friend and peer perceives

As thy sweet music stirs the sylvan leaves;

The Nine, transported, bless thy golden lyre,

Approve thy fancy, and applaud thy fire;

Whilst Jove himself assumes a brother’s tone,

And vows the pantheon equal to his own.

Dunsany, may thy days be glad and long;

Replete with visions, and atune with song;

May thy rare notes increasing millions cheer,

Thy name beloved, and thy mem’ry dear!

’Tis thou who hast in hours of dulness brought

New charms of language, and new gems of thought;

Hast with a poet’s grace enrich’d the earth

With aureate dreams as noble as thy birth.

Grateful we name thee, bright with fix’d renown,

The fairest jewel in Hibernia’s crown.

The Nightmare Lake

* * * * *

Written: December 1919

First Published in The Vagrant,
No. 12 (December 1919), Pages 13–14

There is a lake in distant Zan,

Beyond the wonted haunts of man,

Where broods alone in a hideous state

A spirit dead and desolate;

A spirit ancient and unholy,

Heavy with fearsome melancholy,

Which from the waters dull and dense

Draws vapors cursed with pestilence.

Around the banks, a mire of clay,

Sprawl things offensive in decay,

And curious birds that reach that shore

Are seen by mortals nevermore.

Here shines by day the searing sun

On glassy wastes beheld by none,

And here by night pale moonbeams flow

Into the deeps that yawn below.

In nightmares only is it told

What scenes beneath those beams unfold;

What scenes, too old for human sight,

Lie sunken there in endless night;

For in those depths there only pace

The shadows of a voiceless race.

One midnight, redolent of ill,

I saw that lake, asleep and still;

While in the lurid sky there rode

A gibbous moon that glow’d and glow’d.

I saw the stretching marshy shore,

And the foul things those marshes bore:

Lizards and snakes convuls’d and dying;

Ravens and vampires putrefying;

All these, and hov’ring o’er the dead,

Narcophagi that on them fed.

And as the dreadful moon climb’d high,

Fright’ning the stars from out the sky,

I saw the lake’s dull water glow

Till sunken things appear’d below.

There shone unnumber’d fathoms down,

The tow’rs of a forgotten town;

The tarnish’d domes and mossy walls;

Weed-tangled spires and empty halls;

Deserted fanes and vaults of dread,

And streets of gold uncoveted.

These I beheld, and saw beside

A horde of shapeless shadows glide;

A noxious horde which to my glance

Seem’d moving in a hideous dance

Round slimy sepulchres that lay

Beside a never-travell’d way.

Straight from those tombs a heaving rose

That vex’d the waters’ dull repose,

While lethal shades of upper space

Howl’d at the moon’s sardonic face.

Then sank the lake within its bed,

Suck’d down to caverns of the dead,

Till from the reeking, new-stript earth

Curl’d foetid fumes of noisome birth.

About the city, nigh uncover’d,

The monstrous dancing shadows hover’d,

When lo! there oped with sudden stir

The portal of each sepulchre!

No ear may learn, no tongue may tell

What nameless horror then befell.

I see that lake—that moon agrin—

That city and the things within—

Waking, I pray that on that shore

The nightmare lake may sink no more!

On Reading Lord Dunsany’s
Book of Wonder

* * * * *

Written: March 1920

First Published in The Silver Clarion,
Vol. 3, No. 12 (March 1920), Page 4

The hours of night unheeded fly,

And in the grate the embers fade;

Vast shadows one by one pass by

In silent daemon cavalcade.

But still the magic volume holds

The raptur’d eye in realms apart,

And fulgent sorcery enfolds

The willing mind and eager heart.

The lonely room no more is there—

For to the sight in pomp appear

Temples and cities pois’d in air

And blazing glories—sphere on sphere.

The Cats

* * * * *

Written: 15th February 1925

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press, (1977), Pages 116-117

Babels of blocks to the high heavens tow’ring,

Flames of futility swirling below;

Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flow’ring,

Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.

Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,

Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;

Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers

Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun.

Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,

Shrieking and ringing and scrambling insane,

Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,

Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.

Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal,

Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,

Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,

Yelling the burden of Pluto’s red rune.

Tall tow’rs and pyramids ivy’d and crumbling,

Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber’d streets;

Bleak broken bridges o’er rivers whose rumbling

Joins with no voice as the thick tide retreats.

Belfries that blackly against the moon totter,

Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac’d,

And living to answer the wind and the water,

Only the lean cats that howl in the waste!

Festival

Originally a christmas poem sent to Farnsworth Wright, who surprised Lovecraft by publishing it as “Yule Horror”.

* * * * *

Written: December 1925

First Published in Weird Tales,
Vol. 8, No. 6 (December 1926), Page 846

There is snow on the ground,

And the valleys are cold,

And a midnight profound

Blackly squats o’er the wold;

But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallow’d and old.

There is death in the clouds,

There is fear in the night,

For the dead in their shrouds

Hail the sun’s turning flight,

And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule-altar fungous and white.

To no gale of earth’s kind

Sways the forest of oak,

Where the sick boughs entwin’d

By mad mistletoes choke,

For these pow’rs are the pow’rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.

And mayst thou to such deeds

Be an abbot and priest,

Singing cannibal greeds

At each devil-wrought feast,

And to all the incredulous world shewing dimly the sign of the beast. 

Hallowe’en in a Suburb
aka
“In a Suburb”

* * * * *

Written: March 1926

First Published in The National Amateur,
Vol. 48, No. 4 (March 1926), Page 33

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,

And the trees have a silver glare;

Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,

And the harpies of upper air,

That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread

Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,

But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep

Where the rivers of madness stream

Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves

In the meadows that shimmer pale,

And comes to twine where the headstones shine

And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change

That tore from the past its own

Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r

Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne

And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain

That moons long-forgotten saw,

And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,

Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw

To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,

The ugliness and the pest

Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,

Shall some day be with the rest,

And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,

And the leprous spires ascend;

For new and old alike in the fold

Of horror and death are penn’d,

For the hounds of Time to rend.

The Wood

* * * * *

Written: January 1929

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 11, No. 2 (January 1929), Page 16

They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles

Of forest night had hid eternal things,

They scal’d the sky with tow’rs and marble piles

To make a city for their revellings.

White and amazing to the lands around

That wondrous wealth of domes and turrets rose;

Crystal and ivory, sublimely crown’d

With pinnacles that bore unmelting snows.

And through its halls the pipe and sistrum rang,

While wine and riot brought their scarlet stains;

Never a voice of elder marvels sang,

Nor any eye call’d up the hills and plains.

Thus down the years, till on one purple night

A drunken minstrel in his careless verse

Spoke the vile words that should not see the light,

And stirr’d the shadows of an ancient curse.

Forests may fall, but not the dusk they shield;

So on the spot where that proud city stood,

The shuddering dawn no single stone reveal’d,

But fled the blackness of a primal wood.

The Outpost

* * * * *

Written: 26th November 1929

First Published in Bacon’s Essays,
Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1930), Page 7

When evening cools the yellow stream,

And shadows stalk the jungle’s ways,

Zimbabwe’s palace flares ablaze

For a great King who fears to dream.

For he alone of all mankind

Waded the swamp that serpents shun;

And struggling toward the setting sun,

Came on the veldt that lies behind.

No other eyes had vented there

Since eyes were lent for human sight—

But there, as sunset turned to night,

He found the Elder Secret’s lair.

Strange turrets rose beyond the plain,

And walls and bastions spread around

The distant domes that fouled the ground

Like leprous fungi after rain.

A grudging moon writhed up to shine

Past leagues where life can have no home;

And paling far-off tower and dome,

Shewed each unwindowed and malign.

Then he who in his boyhood ran

Through vine-hung ruins free of fear,

Trembled at what he saw—for here

Was no dead, ruined seat of man.

Inhuman shapes, half-seen, half-guessed,

Half solid and half ether-spawned,

Seethed down from starless voids that yawned

In heav’n, to these blank walls of pest.

And voidward from that pest-mad zone

Amorphous hordes seethed darkly back,

Their dim claws laden with the wrack

Of things that men have dreamed and known.

The ancient Fishers from Outside—

Were there not tales the high-priest told,

Of how they found the worlds of old,

And took what pelf their fancy spied?

Their hidden, dread-ringed outposts brood

Upon a million worlds of space;

Abhorred by every living race,

Yet scatheless in their solitude.

Sweating with fright, the watcher crept

Back to the swamp that serpents shun,

So that he lay, by rise of sun,

Safe in the palace where he slept.

None saw him leave, or come at dawn,

Nor does his flesh bear any mark

Of what he met in that curst dark—

Yet from his sleep all peace has gone.

When evening cools the yellow stream,

And shadows stalk the jungle’s ways,

Zimbabwe’s palace flares ablaze,

For a great King who fears to dream.

The Ancient Track

* * * * *

Written: 26th November 1929

First Published in Weird Tales,
Vol. 15, No. 3 (March 1930), Page 300

There was no hand to hold me back

That night I found the ancient track

Over the hill, and strained to see

The fields that teased my memory.

This tree, that wall—I knew them well,

And all the roofs and orchards fell

Familiarly upon my mind

As from a past not far behind.

I knew what shadows would be cast

When the late moon came up at last

From back of Zaman’s Hill, and how

The vale would shine three hours from now.

And when the path grew steep and high,

And seemed to end against the sky,

I had no fear of what might rest

Beyond that silhouetted crest.

Straight on I walked, while all the night

Grew pale with phosphorescent light,

And wall and farmhouse gable glowed

Unearthly by the climbing road.

There was the milestone that I knew—

“Two miles to Dunwich”—now the view

Of distant spire and roofs would dawn

With ten more upward paces gone…

There was no hand to hold me back

That night I found the ancient track,

And reached the crest to see outspread

A valley of the lost and dead:

And over Zaman’s Hill the horn

Of a malignant moon was born,

To light the weeds and vines that grew

On ruined walls I never knew.

The fox-fire glowed in field and bog,

And unknown waters spewed a fog

Whose curling talons mocked the thought

That I had ever known this spot.

Too well I saw from the mad scene

That my loved past had never been—

Nor was I now upon the trail

Descending to that long-dead vale.

Around was fog—ahead, the spray

Of star-streams in the Milky Way…

There was no hand to hold me back

That night I found the ancient track.

The Messenger

* * * * *

Written: 30th November 1929

First Published in Weird Tales,
Vol. 32, No. 1 (July 1938), Page 52

To Bertrand K. Hart, Esq.

The thing, he said, would come that night at three

From the old churchyard on the hill below;

But crouching by an oak fire’s wholesome glow,

I tried to tell myself it could not be.

Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry

Devised by one who did not truly know

The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,

That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.

He had not meant it—no—but still I lit

Another lamp as starry Leo climbed

Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed

Three—and the firelight faded, bit by bit.

Then at the door that cautious rattling came—

And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!

This was written in response to Bertrand Kelton Hart, author of a daily column called “The Sideshow” in the Providence Journal, who, upon discovering that Wilcox's residence in “The Call of Cthulhu” (7 Thomas Street) was his own, published in his column “…I shall not be happy until, joining league with wraiths and ghouls, I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon [Lovecraft's] own doorstep in Barnes street… I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor dissonance every morning at 3 o'clock sharp, with a clinking of chains.”

Nathicana

* * * * *

Written: ?

First Published in The Vagrant,
(Spring 1927), Pages 61-64

It was in the pale garden of Zaïs;

The mist-shrouded gardens of Zaïs,

Where blossoms the white nephalotë,

The redolent herald of midnight.

There slumber the still lakes of crystal,

And streamlets that flow without murm’ring;

Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos

Where brood the calm spirits of twilight.

And over the lakes and the streamlets

Are bridges of pure alabaster,

White bridges all cunningly carven

With figures of fairies and daemons.

Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets,

And strange is the crescent Banapis

That sets ’yond the ivy-grown ramparts

Where thickens the dust of the evening.

Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;

And here in the swirl of vapours

I saw the divine Nathicana;

The garlanded, white Nathicana;

The slender, black-hair’d Nathicana;

The sloe-ey’d, red-lipp’d Nathicana;

The silver-voic’d, sweet Nathicana;

The pale-rob’d, belov’d Nathicana.

And ever was she my belovèd,

From ages when Time was unfashion’d;

From days when the stars were not fashion’d

Nor any thing fashion’d but Yabon.

And here dwelt we ever and ever,

The innocent children of Zaïs,

At peace in the paths and the arbours,

White-crown’d with the blest nephalotë.

How oft would we float in the twilight

O’er flow’r-cover’d pastures and hillsides

All white with the lowly astalthon;

The lowly yet lovely astalthon,

And dream in a world made of dreaming

The dreams that are fairer than Aidenn;

Bright dreams that are truer than reason!

So dream’d and so lov’d we thro’ ages,

Till came the curs’d season of Dzannin;

The daemon-damn’d season of Dzannin;

When red shone the suns and the planets,

And red gleamed the crescent Banapis,

And red fell the vapours of Yabon.

Then redden’d the blossoms and streamlets

And lakes that lay under the bridges,

And even the calm alabaster

Glow’d pink with uncanny reflections

Till all the carv’d fairies and daemons

Leer’d redly from the backgrounds of shadow.

Now redden’d my vision, and madly

I strove to peer thro’ the dense curtain

And glimpse the divine Nathicana;

The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;

The lov’d, the unchang’d Nathicana.

But vortex on vortex of madness

Beclouded my labouring vision;

My damnable, reddening vision

That built a new world for my seeing;

A new world of redness and darkness,

A horrible coma call’d living.

So now in this coma call’d living

I view the bright phantons of beauty;

The false, hollow phantoms of beauty

That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.

I view them with infinite longing,

So like do they seem to my lov’d one;

So shapely and fair like my lov’d one;

Yet foul from their eyes shines their evil;

Their cruel and pitiless evil,

More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,

Twice ill for its gorgeous concealment.

And only in slumbers of midnight

Appears the lost maid Nathicana,

The pallid, the pure Nathicana,

Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.

Again and again do I seek her;

I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,

Deep draughts brew’d in wine of Astarte

And strengthen’d with tears of long weeping.

I yearn for the gardens of Zaïs;

The lovely lost garden of Zaïs

Where blossoms the white nephalotë,

The redolent herald of midnight.

The last potent draught I am brewing;

A draught that the daemons delight in;

A draught that will banish the redness;

The horrible coma call’d living.

Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing,

The redness and madness will vanish,

And deep in the worm-peopled darkness

Will rot the base chains that hav bound me.

Once more shall the gardens of Zaïs

Dawn white on my long-tortur’d vision,

And there midst the vapours of Yabon

Will stand the divine Nathicana;

The deathless, restor’d Nathicana

Whose like is not met with in living.

In a letter to Donald Wandrei written August 2nd, 1927, Lovecraft said that this poem was supposed to be a “parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning”.

In his response ten days later, Wandrei said “It is a rare and curious kind of literary freak, a satire too good, so that, instead of parodying, it possesses, the original”.

Fungi from Yuggoth

* * * * *

Written: 27th December 1929-4th January 1930

First Published in Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, (1943), Pages 395-407

I. The Book

The place was dark and dusty and half-lost

In tangles of old alleys near the quays,

Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,

And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.

Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost,

Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees,

Rotting from floor to roof—congeries

Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.

I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap

Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,

Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep

Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.

Then, looking for some seller old in craft,

I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.

II. Pursuit

I held the book beneath my coat, at pains

To hide the thing from sight in such a place;

Hurrying through the ancient harbor lanes

With often-turning head and nervous pace.

Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick

Peered at me oddly as I hastened by,

And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick

For a redeeming glimpse of clean blue sky.

No one had seen me take the thing—but still

A blank laugh echoed in my whirling head,

And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill

Lurked in that volume I had coveted.

The way grew strange—the walls alike and madding—

And far behind me, unseen feet were padding.

III. The Key

I do not know what windings in the waste

Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,

But on my porch I trembled, white with haste

To get inside and bolt the heavy door.

I had the book that told the hidden way

Across the void and through the space-hung screens

That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,

And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

At last the key was mine to those vague visions

Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood

Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth’s precisions,

Lurking as memories of infinitude.

The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,

The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.

IV. Recognition

The day had come again, when as a child

I saw—just once—that hollow of old oaks,

Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes

The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.

It was the same—an herbage rank and wild

Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes

That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes

Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.

I saw the body spread on that dank stone,

And knew those things which feasted were not men;

I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,

But Yuggoth, past the starry voids—and then

The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,

And all too late I knew that it was I!

V. Homecoming

The daemon said that he would take me home

To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled

As a high place of stair and terrace, walled

With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,

While miles below a maze of dome on dome

And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.

Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled

On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

All this he promised, and through sunset’s gate

He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,

And red-gold thrones of gods without a name

Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.

Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:

“Here was your home,” he mocked, “when you had sight!”

VI. The Lamp

We found the lamp inside those hollow cliffs

Whose chiseled sign no priest in Thebes could read,

And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs

Warned every creature of earth’s breed.

No more was there—just that one brazen bowl

With traces of a curious oil within;

Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll,

And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.

Little the fears of forty centuries meant

To us as we bore off our slender spoil,

And when we scanned it in our darkened tent

We struck a match to test the ancient oil.

It blazed—great God!… But the vast shapes we saw

In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe.

VII. Zaman’s Hill

The great hill hung close over the old town,

A precipice against the main street’s end;

Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down

Upon the steeple at the highway bend.

Two hundred years the whispers had been heard

About what happened on the man-shunned slope—

Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,

Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

One day the mail-man found no village there,

Nor were its folk or houses seen again;

People came out from Aylesbury to stare—

Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain

That he was mad for saying he had spied

The great hill’s gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.

VIII. The Port

Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail

That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,

And hoped that just at sunset I could reach

The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.

Far out at sea was a retreating sail,

White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach,

But evil with some portent beyond speech,

So that I did not wave my hand or hail.

Sails out of lnnsmouth! echoing old renown

Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night

Is closing in, and I have reached the height

Whence I so often scan the distant town.

The spires and roofs are there—but look! The gloom

Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!

IX. The Courtyard

It was the city I had known before;

The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs

Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs

In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.

The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me

From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate,

As edging through the filth I passed the gate

To the black courtyard where the man would be.

The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed

That ever I had come to such a den,

When suddenly a score of windows burst

Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:

Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead—

And not a corpse had either hands or head!

X. The Pigeon-Flyers

They took me slumming, where gaunt walls of brick

Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil,

And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick,

Wink messages to alien god and devil.

A million fires were blazing in the streets,

And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly

Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky

While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.

I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things,

And that those birds of space had been Outside—

I guessed to what dark planet’s crypts they plied,

And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.

The others laughed—till struck too mute to speak

By what they glimpsed in one bird’s evil beak.

XI. The Well

Farmer Seth Atwood was past eighty when

He tried to sink that deep well by his door,

With only Eb to help him bore and bore.

We laughed, and hoped he’d soon be sane again.

And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too,

So that they shipped him to the county farm.

Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue—

Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.

After the funeral we felt bound to get

Out to that well and rip the bricks away,

But all we saw were iron hand-holds set

Down a black hole deeper than we could say.

And yet we put the bricks back—for we found

The hole too deep for any line to sound.

XII. The Howler

They told me not to take the Briggs’ Hill path

That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,

For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four,

Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.

Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view

The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,

I could not think of elms or hempen rope,

But wondered why the house still seemed so new.

Stopping a while to watch the fading day,

I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,

When through the ivied panes one sunset ray

Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.

I glimpsed—and ran in frenzy from the place,

And from a four-pawed thing with human face.

XIII. Hesperia

The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires

And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,

Opens great gates to some forgotten year

Of elder splendours and divine desires.

Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,

Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;

A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear

Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.

It is the land where beauty’s meaning flowers;

Where every unplaced memory has a source;

Where the great river Time begins its course

Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.

Dreams bring us close—but ancient lore repeats

That human tread has never soiled these streets.

XIV. Star-Winds

It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,

Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours

Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,

But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.

The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,

And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,

Heeding geometries of outer space,

While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.

This is the hour when moonstruck poets know

What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents

And tints of flowers fill Nithon’s continents,

Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.

Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,

A dozen more of ours they sweep away!

XV. Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly

Of the black cone amid the polar waste;

Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,

By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.

Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,

And only pale auroras and faint suns

Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources

Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder

What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;

But the bird told of vaster parts, that under

The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.

God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew

Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

XVI. The Window

The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown,

Of which no one could ever half keep track,

And in a small room somewhat near the back

Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.

There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone

I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;

Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack

Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.

One later day I brought the masons there

To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,

But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air

Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.

They fled—but I peered through and found unrolled

All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told.

XVII. A Memory

There were great steppes, and rocky table-lands

Stretching half-limitless in starlit night,

With alien campfires shedding feeble light

On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands.

Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide

To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay

Like a huge python of some primal day

Which endless time had chilled and petrified.

I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,

And wondered where I was and how I came,

When a cloaked form against a campfire’s glare

Rose and approached, and called me by my name.

Staring at that dead face beneath the hood,

I ceased to hope—because I understood.

XVIII. The Gardens of Yin

Beyond that wall, whose ancient masonry

Reached almost to the sky in moss-thick towers,

There would be terraced gardens, rich with flowers,

And flutter of bird and butterfly and bee.

There would be walks, and bridges arching over

Warm lotos-pools reflecting temple eaves,

And cherry-trees with delicate boughs and leaves

Against a pink sky where the herons hover.

All would be there, for had not old dreams flung

Open the gate to that stone-lanterned maze

Where drowsy streams spin out their winding ways,

Trailed by green vines from bending branches hung?

I hurried—but when the wall rose, grim and great,

I found there was no longer any gate.

XIX. The Bells

Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing

Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;

Peals from no steeple I could ever find,

But strange, as if across some great void winging.

I searched my dreams and memories for a clue,

And thought of all the chimes my visions carried;

Of quiet Innsmouth, where the white gulls tarried

Around an ancient spire that once I knew.

Always perplexed I heard those far notes falling,

Till one March night the bleak rain splashing cold

Beckoned me back through gateways of recalling

To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.

They tolled—but from the sunless tides that pour

Through sunken valleys on the sea’s dead floor.

XX. Night-Gaunts

Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,

But every night I see the rubbery things,

Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,

And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.

They come in legions on the north wind’s swell,

With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,

Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings

To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,

Heedless of all the cries I try to make,

And down the nether pits to that foul lake

Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.

But oh! If only they would make some sound,

Or wear a face where faces should be found!

XXI. Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came

The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;

Silent and lean and cryptically proud,

And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.

Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,

But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;

While through the nations spread the awestruck word

That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;

Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;

The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled

Down on the quaking citadels of man.

Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,

The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.

XXII. Azathoth

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,

Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,

Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,

But only Chaos, without form or place.

Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered

Things he had dreamed but could not understand,

While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered

In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining

Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,

Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining

Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.

“I am His Messenger,” the daemon said,

As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.

XXIII. Mirage

I do not know if ever it existed—

That lost world floating dimly on Time’s stream—

And yet I see it often, violet-misted,

And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.

There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,

Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,

And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers

Wistfully just before a winter’s night.

Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,

Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill

There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,

With evening chimes for which I listen still.

I do not know what land it is—or dare

Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.

XXIV. The Canal

Somewhere in dream there is an evil place

Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along

A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong

Of frightful things whence oily currents race.

Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead

Wind off to streets one may or may not know,

And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow

Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.

There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound

Is of the oily water as it glides

Under stone bridges, and along the sides

Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.

None lives to tell when that stream washed away

Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.

XXV. St. Toad’s

“Beware St. Toad’s cracked chimes!” I heard him scream

As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind

In labyrinths obscure and undefined

South of the river where old centuries dream.

He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged,

And in a flash had staggered out of sight,

So still I burrowed onward in the night

Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.

No guide-book told of what was lurking here—

But now I heard another old man shriek:

“Beware St.Toad’s cracked chimes!” And growing weak,

I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear:

“Beware St. Toad’s cracked chimes!” Aghast, I fled—

Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead.

XXVI. The Familiars

John Whateley lived about a mile from town,

Up where the hills began to huddle thick;

We never thought his wits were very quick,

Seeing the way he let his farm run down.

He used to waste his time on some queer books

He’d found around the attic of his place,

Till funny lines got creased into his face,

And folks all said they didn’t like his looks.

When he began those night-howls we declared

He’d better be locked up away from harm,

So three men from the Aylesbury town farm

Went for him—but came back alone and scared.

They’d found him talking to two crouching things

That at their step flew off on great black wings.

XXVII. The Elder Pharos

From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare

Under cold stars obscure to human sight,

There shoots at dusk a single beam of light

Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.

They say (though none has been there) that it comes

Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,

Where the last Elder One lives on alone,

Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.

The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask

Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide

A face not of this earth, though none dares ask

Just what those features are, which bulge inside.

Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,

But what they found, no one will ever know.

XXVIII. Expectancy

I cannot tell why some things hold for me

A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall,

Or of a rift in the horizon’s wall

Opening to worlds where only gods can be.

There is a breathless, vague expectancy,

As of vast ancient pomps I half recall,

Or wild adventures, uncorporeal,

Ecstasy-fraught, and as a day-dream free.

It is in sunsets and strange city spires,

Old villages and woods and misty downs,

South winds, the sea, low hills, and lighted towns,

Old gardens, half-heard songs, and the moon’s fires.

But though its lure alone makes life worth living,

None gains or guesses what it hints at giving.

XXIX. Nostalgia

Once every year, in autumn’s wistful glow,

The birds fly out over an ocean waste,

Calling and chattering in a joyous haste

To reach some land their inner memories know.

Great terraced gardens where bright blossoms blow,

And lines of mangoes luscious to the taste,

And temple-groves with branches interlaced

Over cool paths—all these their vague dreams shew.

They search the sea for marks of their old shore—

For the tall city, white and turreted—

But only empty waters stretch ahead,

So that at last they turn away once more.

Yet sunken deep where alien polyps throng,

The old towers miss their lost, remembered song.

XXX. Background

I never can be tied to raw, new things,

For I first saw the light in an old town,

Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down

To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.

Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams

Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,

And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes—

These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.

Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,

Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths

That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths

Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.

They cut the moment’s thongs and leave me free

To stand alone before eternity.

XXXI. The Dweller

It had been old when Babylon was new;

None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,

Where in the end our questing shovels found

Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.

There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,

And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew

Fantastic beings of some long ago

Past anything the world of man recalls.

And then we saw those stone steps leading down

Through a choked gate of graven dolomite

To some black haven of eternal night

Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.

We cleared a path—but raced in mad retreat

When from below we heard those clumping feet.

XXXII. Alienation

His solid flesh had never been away,

For each dawn found him in his usual place,

But every night his spirit loved to race

Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.

He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,

And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,

When one still night across curved space was thrown

That beckoning piping from the voids behind.

He waked that morning as an older man,

And nothing since has looked the same to him.

Objects around float nebulous and dim—

False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.

His folk and friends are now an alien throng

To which he struggles vainly to belong.

XXXIII. Harbour Whistles

Over old roofs and past decaying spires

The harbour whistles chant all through the night;

Throats from strange ports, and beaches far and white,

And fabulous oceans, ranged in motley choirs.

Each to the other alien and unknown,

Yet all, by some obscurely focussed force

From brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac’s course,

Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone.

Through shadowy dreams they send a marching line

Of still more shadowy shapes and hints and views;

Echoes from outer voids, and subtle clues

To things which they themselves cannot define.

And always in that chorus, faintly blent,

We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent.

XXXIV. Recapture

The way led down a dark, half-wooded heath

Where moss-grey boulders humped above the mould,

And curious drops, disquieting and cold,

Sprayed up from unseen streams in gulfs beneath.

There was no wind, nor any trace of sound

In puzzling shrub, or alien-featured tree,

Nor any view before—till suddenly,

Straight in my path, I saw a monstrous mound.

Half to the sky those steep sides loomed upspread,

Rank-grassed, and cluttered by a crumbling flight

Of lava stairs that scaled the fear-topped height

In steps too vast for any human tread.

I shrieked—and knew what primal star and year

Had sucked me back from man’s dream-transient sphere!

XXXV. Evening Star

I saw it from that hidden, silent place

Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.

It shone through all the sunset’s glories—thin

At first, but with a slowly brightening face.

Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,

Beat on my sight as never it did of old;

The evening star—but grown a thousandfold

More haunting in this hush and solitude.

It traced strange pictures on the quivering air—

Half-memories that had always filled my eyes—

Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies

Of some dim life—I never could tell where.

But now I knew that through the cosmic dome

Those rays were calling from my far, lost home.

XXXVI. Continuity

There is in certain ancient things a trace

Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;

A tenuous aether, indeterminate,

Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.

A faint, veiled sign of continuities

That outward eyes can never quite descry;

Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,

And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow

On old farm buildings set against a hill,

And paint with life the shapes which linger still

From centuries less a dream than this we know.

In that strange light I feel I am not far

From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.

In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard
Where Once Poe Walk’d

* * * * *

Written: 8th August 1936

First Published in Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe.
Milwaukee, WI: Maurice W. Moe (1936), Page ?

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,

Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;

Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,

Arch’d high above a hidden world of yore.

Round all the scene a light of memory plays,

And dead leaves whisper of departed days,

Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.

Lonely and sad, a spectre glides along

Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;

No common glance discerns him, tho’ his song

Peals down thro’ time with a mysterious spell:

Only the few who sorcery’s secret know

Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.

To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq.,
upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures

* * * * *

Written: 11th December 1936

First Published in Weird Tales,
Vol. 31, No. 5 (April 1938), Page 392

A time-black tower against dim banks of cloud;

Around its base the pathless, pressing wood.

Shadow and silence, moss and mould, enshroud

Grey, age-fell’d slabs that once as cromlechs stood.

No fall of foot, no song of bird awakes

The lethal aisles of sempiternal night,

Tho’ oft with stir of wings the dense air shakes,

As in the tower there glows a pallid light.

For here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought

Strange eidola that chill the world with fear;

Whose graven runes in tones of dread have taught

What things beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer.

Dark Lord of Averoigne—whose windows stare

On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!

Part III.
Occasional Verse

On Receiving a Picture of Swans

* * * * *

Written: 14th September 1915

First Published in The Conservative,
Vol. 1, No. 4 (January 1916), Pages 2-3

Impromtu verse, or ‘poetry’ to order, is easy only when approached in the cooly prosaic sprit. Given something to say, a metrical mechanic like myself can easily hammer the matter into technically correct verse, substituting formal poetic diction for real inspiration or thought. For instance, I lately received a post-card bearing the picture of swans on a placid stream. Desiring to reply in appropriate verse, I harked back to the classic myth of Phaethon and Cygnus, handling it as follows:

With pensive grace the melancholy Swan

Mourns o’er the tomb of luckless Phaëton;

On grassy banks the weeping poplars wave,

And guard with tender care the wat’ry grave.

Would that I might, should I too proudly claim

An Heav’nly parent, or a Godlike fame,

When flown too high, and dash’d to depths below,

Receive such tribute as a Cygnus’ woe!

The faithful bird, that dumbly floats along,

Sighs all the deeper for his want of song.

“This required about 10 minutes of composition.”

—in a letter to Robert Kleiner, 1915

Fact and Fancy

* * * * *

Written: February 1917

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 3, No. 3 (February 1917), Page 7

How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind

Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind;

Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude,

And wreck the solace of the poet’s mood!

Young Zeno, practic’d in the Stoic’s art,

Rejects the language of the glowing heart;

Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws;

Condemns th’ effect whilst looking for the cause;

Freezes poor Ovid in an ic’d review,

And sneers because his fables are untrue!

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,

But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

Stay! vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast

The graceful legends of the story’d past;

Whose tongue in censure flays th’ embellish’d page,

And scolds the comforts of a dreary age:

Would’st strip the foliage from the vital bough

Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou?

Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye

Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky;

Finds Sylphs and Dryads in the waving trees,

And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze;

For whom the stream a cheering carol sings,

While reedy music by the fountain rings;

To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide

Till friendly presence fills the rising tide.

Happy is he, who void of learning’s woes,

Th’ ethereal life of body’d Nature knows:

I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems,

And flout his gravity in sunlit dreams!

Laeta; a Lament

Respectfully dedicated to Rheinhart Kiciner, Esq., With compliments of the author

* * * * *

Written: February 1918

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (February 1918), Pages 15-16

How sad droop the willows by Zulal’s fair side,

Where so lately I stray’d with my raven-hair’d bride:

Ev’ry light-floating lily, each flow’r on the shore,

Folds in sorrow since Laeta can see them no more!

Oh, blest were the days when in childhood and hope

With my Laeta I rov’d o’er the blossom-clad slope,

Plucking white meadow-daisies and ferns by the stream,

As we laugh’d at the ripples that twinkle and gleam.

Not a bloom deck’d the mead that could rival in grace

The dear innocent charms of my Laeta’s fair face;

Not a thrush thrill’d the grove with a carol so choice

As the silvery strains of my Laeta’s sweet voice.

The shy Nymphs of the woodland, the fount and the plain,

Strove to equal her beauty, but strove all in vain;

Yet no envy they bore her, while fruitless they strove,

For so pure was my Laeta, they could only love!

When the warm breath of Auster play’d soft o’er the flow’rs,

And young Zephyrus rustled the gay scented bow’rs,

Ev’ry breeze seem’d to pause as it drew near the fair,

Too much aw’d at her sweetness to tumble her hair.

How fond were our dreams on the day when we stood

In the ivy-grown temple beside the dark wood;

When our pledges we seal’d at the sanctify’d shrine,

And I knew that my Laeta forever was mine!

How blissful our thoughts when the wild autumn came,

And the forests with scarlet and gold were aflame;

Yet how heavy my heart when I first felt the fear

That my starry-eyed Laeta would fade with the year!

The pastures were sere and the heavens were grey

When I laid my lov’d Laeta forever away,

And the river god pity’d, as weeping I pac’d

Mingling hot bitter tears with his cold frozen waste.

Now the flow’rs have return’d, but they bloom not so sweet

As in days when they blossom’d round Laeta’s dear feet;

And the willows complain to the answering hill,

And the thrushes that once were so happy are still.

The green meadows and groves in their loneliness pine,

Whilst the Dryads no more in their madrigals join,

The breeze once so joyous now murmurs and sighs,

And blows soft o’er the spot where my lov’d Laeta lies.

So pensive I roam o’er the desolate lawn

Where we wander’d and lov’d in the days that are gone,

And I yearn for the autumn, when Zulal’s blue tide

Shall sing low by my grave at the lov’d Laeta’s side. 

Part IV.
Satire

Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea

A Dull, Dark, Drear, Dactylic Delirium in Sixteen Silly, Senseless, Sickly Stanzas

Respectfully Dedicated with Permission to MAURICE WINTER MOE, Esq.

“Ego, canus, lunam cano.”

—Maevius Bavianus.

* * * * *

Written: 30th September 1915

First Published in The Providence Amateur,
Vol. 1, No. 2 (February 1916), Pages 14-16

Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me;

Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.

Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me

Sadly of years in the lost nevermore.

Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish’d boulder;

Sweet is the sound and familiar to me.

Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,

Walk’d I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.

Bright was the morn of my youth when I met her,

Sweet as the breeze that blew in o’er the brine.

Swift was I captur’d in Love’s strongest fetter,

Glad to be hers, and she glad to be mine.

Never a question ask’d I where she wander’d,

Never a question ask’d she of my birth:

Happy as children, we thought not nor ponder’d,

Glad with the bounty of ocean and earth.

Once when the moonlight play’d soft ’mid the billows,

High on the cliff o’er the waters we stood,

Bound was her hair with a garland of willows,

Pluck’d by the fount in the bird-haunted wood.

Strangely she gaz’d on the surges beneath her,

Charm’d by the sound or entranc’d by the light.

Then did the waves a wild aspect bequeath her,

Stern as the ocean and weird as the night.

Coldly she left me, astonish’d and weeping,

Standing alone ’mid the regions she bless’d:

Down, ever downward, half gliding, half creeping,

Stole the sweet Unda in oceanward quest.

Calm grew the sea, and tumultuous beating

Turn’d to a ripple, as Unda the fair

Trod the wet sands in affectionate greeting,

Beckon’d to me, and no longer was there!

Long did I pace by the banks where she vanish’d:

High climb’d the moon, and descended again.

Grey broke the dawn till the sad night was banish’d,

Still ach’d my soul with its infinite pain.

All the wide world have I search’d for my darling,

Scour’d the far deserts and sail’d distant seas.

Once on the wave while the tempest was snarling,

Flash’d a fair face that brought quiet and ease.

Ever in restlessness onward I stumble,

Seeking and pining, scarce heeding my way.

Now have I stray’d where the wide waters rumble,

Back to the scene of the lost yesterday.

Lo! the red moon from the ocean’s low hazes

Rises in ominous grandeur to view.

Strange is its face as my tortur’d eye gazes

O’er the vast reaches of sparkle and blue.

Straight from the moon to the shore where I’m sighing

Grows a bright bridge, made of wavelets and beams.

Frail may it be, yet how simple the trying;

Wand’ring from earth to the orb of sweet dreams.

What is yon face in the moonlight appearing;

Have I at last found the maiden that fled?

Out on the beam-bridge my footsteps are nearing

Her whose sweet beckoning hastens my tread.

Currents surround me, and drowsily swaying,

Far on the moon-path I seek the sweet face.

Eagerly hasting, half panting, half praying,

Forward I reach for the vision of grace.

Murmuring waters about me are closing,

Soft the sweet vision advances to me:

Done are my trials; my heart is reposing

Safe with my Unda, the Bride of the Sea.

Epilogue

As the rash fool, a prey of Unda’s art,

Drown thro’ the passion of his fever’d heart,

So are our youth, inflam’d by tempters fair,

Bereft of reason and the manly air.

How sad the sight of Strephon’s virile grace

Turn’d to confusion at his Chloë’s face,

And e’er Pelides, dear to Grecian eyes,

Sulking for loss of his thrice-cherish’d prize.

Brothers, attend! If cares too sharply vex,

Gain rest by shunning the destructive sex!

Pacifist War Song—1917

* * * * *

Written: March 1917

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 3, No. 4 (March 1917), Page 10

We are the valiant Knights of Peace

Who prattle for the Right:

Our banner is of snowy fleece,

Inscribed: “TOO PROUD TO FIGHT!”

By sweet Chautauqua’s flow’ry banks

We love to sing and play,

But should we spy a foeman’s ranks,

We’d proudly run away!

When Prussian fury sweeps the main

Our freedom to deny;

Of tyrant laws we ne’er complain,

But gladsomely comply!

We do not fear the submarines

That plough the troubled foam;

We scorn the ugly old machines—

And safely stay at home!

They say our country’s close to war,

And soon must man the guns;

But we see naught to struggle for—

We love the gentle Huns!

What tho’ their hireling Greaser bands

Invade our southern plains?

We well can spare those boist’rous lands,

Content with what remains!

Our fathers were both rude and bold,

And would not live like brothers;

But we are of a finer mould—

We’re much more like our mothers!

Waste Paper

A Poem of Profound Insignificance

* * * * *

Written: late 1922? early 1923?

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press, (1977), Pages 138–141

Πάντα γέλως καί πάντα κόνις καί πάντα τό μηδέν

Out of the reaches of illimitable light

The blazing planet grew, and forc’d to life

Unending cycles of progressive strife

And strange mutations of undying light

And boresome books, than hell’s own self more trite

And thoughts repeated and become a blight,

And cheap rum-hounds with moonshine hootch made tight,

And quite contrite to see the flight of fright so bright

I used to ride my bicycle in the night

With a dandy acetylene lantern that cost $3.00

In the evening, by the moonlight, you can hear those darkies singing

Meet me tonight in dreamland… BAH

I used to sit on the stairs of the house where I was born

After we left it but before it was sold

And play on a zobo with two other boys.

We called ourselves the Blackstone Military Band

Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?

In the spring of the year, in the silver rain

When petal by petal the blossoms fall

And the mocking birds call

And the whippoorwill sings, Marguerite.

The first cinema show in our town opened in 1906

At the old Olympic, which was then call’d Park,

And moving beams shot weirdly thro’ the dark

And spit tobacco seldom hit the mark.

Have you read Dickens’ American Notes?

My great-great-grandfather was born in a white house

Under green trees in the country

And he used to believe in religion and the weather.

“Shantih, shantih, shantih”… Shanty House

Was the name of a novel by I forget whom

Published serially in the All-Story Weekly

Before it was a weekly. Advt.

Disillusion is wonderful, I’ve been told,

And I take quinine to stop a cold

But it makes my ears ring… always ring…

Always ringing in my ears…

It is the ghost of the Jew I murdered that Christmas day

Because he played “Three O’Clock in the Morning” in the flat above me.

Three O’Clock in the morning, I’ve danc’d the whole night through,

Dancing on the graves in the graveyard

Where life is buried; life and beauty

Life and art and love and duty

Ah, there, sweet cutie.

Stung!

Out of the night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I never quote things straight except by accident.

Sophistication! Sophistication!

You are the idol of our nation

Each fellow has

Fallen for jazz

And we’ll give the past a merry razz

Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber

And fellow-guestship with the glutless worm.

Next stop is 57th St.—57th St. the next stop.

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring,

And the Governor-General of Canada is Lord Byng

Whose ancestor was shot or hung,

I forget which, the good die young.

Here’s to your ripe old age,

Copyright, 1847, by Joseph Miller,

Entered according to act of Congress

In the office of the librarian of Congress

America was discovered in 1492

This way out.

No, lady, you gotta change at Washington St. to the Everett train.

Out in the rain on the elevated

Crated, sated, all mismated.

Twelve seats on this bench,

How quaint.

In a shady nook, beside a brook, two lovers stroll along.

Express to Park Ave., Car Following.

No, we had it cleaned with the sand blast.

I know it ought to be torn down.

Before the bar of a saloon there stood a reckless crew,

When one said to another, “Jack, this message came for you.”

“It may be from a sweetheart, boys,” said someone in the crowd,

And here the words are missing… but Jack cried out aloud:

“It’s only a message from home, sweet home,

From loved ones down on the farm

Fond wife and mother, sister and brother…”

Bootleggers all and you’re another

In the shade of the old apple tree

’Neath the old cherry tree sweet Marie

The Conchologist’s First Book

By Edgar Allan Poe

Stubbed his toe

On a broken brick that didn’t shew

Or a banana peel

In the fifth reel

By George Creel

It is to laugh

And quaff

It makes you stout and hale,

And all my days I’ll sing the praise

Of Ivory Soap

Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your home?

The stag at eve had drunk his fill

The thirsty hart look’d up the hill

And craned his neck just as a feeler

To advertise the Double-Dealer.

William Congreve was a gentleman

O art what sins are committed in thy name

For tawdry fame and fleeting flame

And everything, ain’t dat a shame?

Mah Creole Belle, ah lubs yo’ well;

Aroun’ mah heart you hab cast a spell

But I can’t learn to spell pseudocracy

Because there ain’t no such word.

And I says to Lizzie, if Joe was my feller

I’d teach him to go to dances with that

Rat, bat, cat, hat, flat, plat, fat

Fry the fat, fat the fry

You’ll be a drug-store by and by.

Get the hook!

Above the lines of brooding hills

Rose spires that reeked of nameless ills,

And ghastly shone upon the sight

In ev’ry flash of lurid light

To be continued.

No smoking.

Smoking on four rear seats.

Fare win return to 5¢ after August 1st

Except outside the Cleveland city limits.

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir

Strangers pause to shed a tear;

Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Good night, good night, the stars are bright

I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight

Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.

Nobody home

In the shantih.

This poem is a parody of T. S. Elliot’s The Waste Land, and mondernist poetry in general, which Lovecraft referred to as a “practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general”.

Dead Passion’s Flame

A Poem by Blank Frailty

* * * * *

Written: Summer 1935

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press (1977), Page 136

Ah, Passion, like a voice—that buds!

With many thorns… that sharply stick:

Recalls to me the longing of our bloods…

And—makes my wearied heart requick!……

Arcadia

By Head Balledup

* * * * *

Written: Summer 1935

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press (1977), Page 136

O give me the life of the village,

Uninhibited, free, and sweet;

The place where the arts all flourish,

Grove Court and Christopher Street.

I am sick of the old conventions,

And critics who will not praise,

So sing ho for the open spaces,

And aesthetes with kindly ways.

Here every bard is a genius,

And artists are Raphaels,

And above the roofs of Patchin Place

The Muse of Talent dwells.

Life’s Mystery

* * * * *

Written: ?

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press (1977), Page 137

Life! Ah, Life!

What may this fluorescent pageant mean?

Who can the evanescent object glean?

He that is dead is the key of Life—

Gone is the symbol, deep is the grave!

Man is a breath, and Life is the fire;

Birth is death, and silence the choir.

Wrest from the aeons the heart of gold!

Tear from the fabric the threads that are old!

Life! Ah, Life!

—L. Phillips Howard

Part V.
Seasonal and Topographical

A Garden

* * * * *

Written: April 1917

First Published in The Vagrant,
(spring 1927), Page 60

There’s an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams,

Where the very Maytime sunlight plays and glows with spectral gleams;

Where the gaudy-tinted blossoms seem to wither into grey,

And the crumbling walls and pillars waken thoughts of yesterday.

There are vines in nooks and crannies, and there’s moss about the pool,

And the tangled weedy thicket chokes the arbour dark and cool:

In the silent sunken pathways springs an herbage sparse and spare,

Where the musty scent of dead things dulls the fragrance of the air.

There is not a living creature in the lonely space around,

And the hedge-encompass’d quiet never echoes to a sound.

As I walk, and wait, and listen, I will often seek to find

When it was I knew that garden in an age long left behind;

I will oft conjure a vision of a day that is no more,

As I gaze upon the grey, grey scenes I feel I knew before.

Then a sadness settles o’er me, and a tremor seems to start:

For I know the flow’rs are shrivell’d hopes—the garden is my heart!

Sunset

* * * * *

Written: December 1917

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 4, No. 1 (December 1917), Page 8

The cloudless day is richer at its close;

A golden glory settles on the lea;

Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose

To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.

And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,

The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;

Freed form the noonday glare, the favour’d sight

Increasing grace in earth and sky divines.

But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,

Or fairest lustre fills th’ expectant grove,

The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene

Leaves but a hallow’d memory of love!

Providence

* * * * *

Written: 26th September 1924

First Published in The Brooklynite,
Vol. 14, No. 14 (November 1924), Pages 2-3

Where bay and river tranquil blend,

And leafy hillsides rise,

The spires of Providence ascend

Against the ancient skies.

Here centuried domes of shining gold

Salute the morning’s glare,

While slanting gables, odd and old,

Are scatter’d here and there.

And in the narrow winding ways

That climb o’er slope and crest,

The magic of forgotten days

May still be found to rest.

A fanlight’s gleam, a knocker’s blow,

A glimpse of Georgian brick—

The sights and sounds of long ago

Where fancies cluster thick.

A flight of steps with iron rail,

A belfry looming tall,

A slender steeple, carv’d and pale,

A moss-grown garden wall.

A hidden churchyard’s crumbling proofs

Of man’s mortality,

A rotting wharf where gambrel roofs

Keep watch above the sea.

Square and parade, whose walls have tower’d

Full fifteen decades long

By cobbled ways ’mid trees embower’d,

And slighted by the throng.

Stone bridges spanning languid streams,

Houses perch’d on the hill,

And courts where mysteries and dreams

The brooding spirit fill.

Steep alley steps by vines conceal’d,

Where small-pan’d windows glow

At twilight on a bit of field

That chance has left below.

My Providence! What airy hosts

Turn still thy gilded vanes;

What winds of elf that with grey ghosts

People thine ancient lanes!

The chimes of evening as of old

Above thy valleys sound,

While thy stern fathers ’neath the mould

Make blest thy sacred ground.

Thou dream’st beside the waters there,

Unchang’d by cruel years;

A spirit from an age more fair

That shines behind our tears.

Thy twinkling lights each night I see,

Tho’ time and space divide;

For thou art of the soul of me,

And always at my side!

Christmas

* * * * *

Written: November 1920

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 1920), Page 16

The cottage hearth beams warm and bright,

The candles gaily glow;

The stars emit a kinder light

Above the drifted snow.

Down from the sky a magic steals

To glad the passing year,

And belfries sing with joyous peals,

For Christmastide is here!

Christmas Greetings

* * * * *

Written: November 1920

First Published in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft.
San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books (2001):

“To Eugene B. Kuntz et al”
Page 310

“To Laurie A. Sawyer”
Page 316

“To Sonia H. Greene”
Page 322

“To Rheinhart Kleiner”
Page 324

“To Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)”
Pages 324-325

“To Annie E. P. Gamwell”
Page 330

“To Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)”
Page 330

To Eugene B. Kuntz et al

May good St. Nick, like as a bird of night,

Bring thee rich blessings in his annual flight;

Long by thy chimney rest his pond’rous pack,

And leave with lessen’d weight upon his back!

To Laurie A. Sawyer

As Christmas snows (as yet a poet’s trope)

Call back one’s bygone days of youth and hope,

Four metrick lines I send—they’re quite enough—

Tho’ once I fancy’d I could write the stuff!

To Sonia H. Greene

Once more the ancient feast returns,

And the bright hearth domestic burns

With Yuletide’s added blaze;

So, too, may all your joys increase

Midst floods of mem’ry, love, and peace,

And dreams of Halcyon days.

To Rheinhart Kleiner

St. John, whose art sublimely shines

In liquid odes and melting lines,

Let Theobald his regard express

In verse of lesser loveliness.

As now in regal state appear

The festive hours of Yuletide cheer,

My strongest wish is that you may

Feel ev’ry blessing of the day!

To Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)

Little Tiger, burning bright

With a subtle Blakeish light,

Tell what visions have their home

In those eyes of flame and chrome!

Children vex thee—thoughtless, gay—

Holding when thou wouldst away:

What dark lore is that which thou,

Spitting, mixest with thy meow?

To Annie E. P. Gamwell

As when a pigeon, loos’d in realms remote,

Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote,

So speed my blessings from a barb’rous clime

To thee and Providence at Christmas time!

To Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)

Haughty Sphinx, whose amber eyes

Hold the secrets of the skies,

As thou ripplest in thy grace,

Round the chairs and chimney-place,

Scorn on thy patrician face:

Hiss not harsh, nor use thy claws

On the hand that gives applause—

Good-will only doth abide

In these lines at Christmastide!

Part VI.
Politics and Society

An American to Mother England

* * * * *

Written: January 1916

First Published in Poesy,
Vol. 1, No. 7 (January 1916), Page 62

England! My England! Can the surging sea

That lies between us tear my heart from thee?

Can distant birth and distant dwelling drain

Th’ ancestral blood that warms the loyal vein?

Isle of my Fathers! hear the filial song

Of him whose sources but to thee belong!

World-conquering Mother! by thy mighty hand

Was carv’d from savage wilds my native land:

Thy matchless sons the firm foundation laid;

Thy matchless arts the nascent nation made:

By thy just laws the young republic grew,

And thro’ thy greatness, kindred greatness knew:

What man that springs from thy untainted line

But sees Columbia’s virtues all as thine?

Whilst nameless multitudes upon our shore

From the dim corners of creation pour,

Whilst mongrel slaves crawl hither to partake

Of Saxon liberty they could not make,

From such an alien crew in grief I turn,

And for the mother’s voice of Britain burn.

England! Can aught remove the cherish’d chain

That binds my spirit to thy blest domain?

Can Revolution’s bitter precepts sway

The soul that must the ties of race obey?

Create a new Columbia if ye will;

The flesh that forms me is Britannic still!

Hail! oaken shades, and meads of dewy green,

So oft in sleep, yet ne’er in waking seen.

Peal out, ye ancient chimes, from vine-clad tow’r

Where pray’d my fathers in a vanish’d hour:

What countless years of rev’rence can ye claim

From bygone worshippers that bore my name!

Their forms are crumbling in the vaults around,

Whilst I, across the sea, but dream the sound.

Return, Sweet Vision! Let me glimpse again

The stone-built abbey, rising o’er the plain;

The neighb’ring village with its sun-show’r’d square;

The shaded mill-stream, and the forest fair,

The hedge-lin’d lane, that leads to rustic cot

Where sweet contentment is the peasant’s lot;

The mystic grove, by Druid wraiths possess’d,

The flow’ring fields, with fairy-castles blest:

And the old manor-house, sedate and dark,

Set in the shadows of the wooded park.

Can this be dreaming? Must my eyelids close

That I may catch the fragrance of the rose?

Is it in fancy that the midnight vale

Thrills with the warblings of the nightingale?

A golden moon bewitching radiance yields,

And England’s fairies trip o’er England’s fields.

England! Old England! in my love for thee

No dream is mine, but blessed memory;

Such haunting images and hidden fires

Course with the bounding blood of British sires:

From British bodies, minds, and souls I come,

And from them draw the vision of their home.

Awake, Columbia! scorn the vulgar age

That bids thee slight thy lordly heritage.

Let not the wide Atlantic’s wildest wave

Burst the blest bonds that fav’ring Nature gave:

Connecting surges ’twixt the nations run,

Our Saxon souls dissolving into one!

Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee

“Si veris magna paratur

Fama bonis, et si successu nuda remoto

Inspicitur virtus, quicquid laudamus in ullo

Majorum, fortuna fuit.”

—Lucan.

* * * * *

Written: 18th May 1916

First Published in The Coyote,
Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 1917), Pages 1-2

Whilst martial echoes o’er the wave resound,

And Europe’s gore incarnadines the ground;

Today no foreign hero we bemoan,

But count the glowing virtues of our own!

Illustrious LEE! around whose honour’d name

Entwines a patriot’s and a Christian’s fame;

With whose just praise admiring nations ring,

And whom repenting foes contritely sing!

When first our land fraternal fury bore,

And Sumter’s guns alarm’d the anxious shore;

When Faction’s reign ancestral rights o’erthrew,

And sunder’d States a mutual hatred knew;

Then clash’d contending chiefs of kindred line,

In flesh to suffer and in fame to shine.

But o’er them all, majestic in his might,

Rose LEE, unrivall’d, to sublimest height:

With torturing choice defy’d opposing Fate,

And shunn’d Temptation for his native State!

Thus Washington his monarch’s rule o’erturn’d

When young Columbia with rebellion burn’d.

And what in Washington the world reveres,

In LEE with equal magnitude appears.

Our nation’s Father, crown’d with vict’ry’s bays,

Enjoys a loving land’s eternal praise:

Let, then, our hearts with equal rev’rence greet

His proud successor, rising o’er defeat!

Around his greatness pour disheartening woes,

But still he tow’rs above his conqu’ring foes.

Silence! ye jackal herd that vainly blame

Th’ unspotted leader by a traitor’s name:

If such was LEE, let blushing Justice mourn,

And trait’rous Liberty endure our scorn!

As Philopoemen once sublimely strove,

And earn’d declining Hellas’ thankful love;

So follow’d LEE the purest patriot’s part,

And wak’d the worship of the grateful heart:

The South her soul in body’d form discerns;

The North from LEE a nobler freedom learns!

Attend! ye sons of Albion’s ancient race,

Whate’er your country, and whate’er your place:

LEE’S valiant deeds, tho’ dear to Southern song,

To all our Saxon strain as well belong.

Courage like his the parent Island won,

And led an Empire past the setting sun;

To realms unknown our laws and language bore;

Rais’d England’s banner on the desert shore;

Crush’d the proud rival, and subdu’d the sea

For ages past, and aeons yet to be!

From Scotia’s hilly bounds the paean rolls,

And Afric’s distant Cape great LEE extols;

The sainted soul and manly mien combine

To grace Britannia’s and Virginia's line!

As dullards now in thoughtless fervour prate

Of shameful peace, and sing th’ unmanly State;

As churls their piping reprobations shriek,

And damn the heroes that protect the weak;

Let LEE’S brave shade the timid throng accost,

And give them back the manhood they have lost!

What kindlier spirit, breathing from on high,

Can teach us how to live and how to die?

The Rose of England

* * * * *

Written: October 1916

First Published in The Scot,
No. 14 (October 1916), Page 7

At morn the rosebud greets the sun

And sheds the evening dew,

Expanding ere the day is done,

In bloom of radiant hue;

And when the sun his rest hath found,

Rose-petals strow the garden round!

Thus that blest Isle that owns the Rose

From mist and darkness came,

A million glories to disclose,

And spread BRITANNIA’S name;

And ere Life’s Sun shall leave the blue,

ENGLAND shall reign the whole world thro’!

The Peace Advocate

(Supposed to be a “pome”, but cast strictly in modern metre.)

* * * * *

Written: May 1917

First Published in The Tryout,
Vol. 3, No. 6 (May 1917), Pages 12-14

The vicar sat in the firelight’s glow,

A volume in his hand;

And a tear he shed for the widespread woe,

And the anguish brought by the vicious foe

That overran the land.

But ne’er a hand for his King rais’d he,

For he was a man of peace;

And he car’d not a whit for the victory

That must come to preserve his nation free,

And the world from fear release.

His son had buckled on his sword,

The first at the front was he;

But the vicar his valiant child ignor’d,

And his noble deeds in the field deplor’d,

For he knew not bravery.

On his flock he strove to fix his will,

And lead them to scorn the fray.

He told them that conquest brings but ill;

That meek submission would serve them still

To keep the foe away.

In vain did he hear the bugle’s sound

That strove to avert the fall.

The land, quoth he, is all men’s ground,

What matter if friend or foe be found

As master of us all?

One day from the village green hard by

The vicar heard a roar

Of cannon that rivall’d the anguish’d cry

Of the hundreds that liv’d, but wish’d to die

As the enemy rode them o’er.

Now he sees his own cathedral shake

At the foeman’s wanton aim.

The ancient tow’rs with the bullets quake;

The steeples fall, the foundations break,

And the whole is lost in flame.

Up the vicarage lane file the cavalcade,

And the vicar, and daughter, and wife

Scream out in vain for the needed aid

That only a regiment might have made

Ere they lose what is more than life.

Then quick to his brain came manhood’s thought,

As he saw his erring course;

And the vicar his dusty rifle brought

That the foe might at least by one be fought,

And force repaid with force.

One shot—the enemy’s blasting fire

A breach in the wall cuts thro’,

But the vicar replies with his waken’d ire;

Fells one arm’d brute for each fallen spire,

And in blood is born anew.

Two shots—the wife and daughter sink,

Each with a mortal wound;

And the vicar, too madden’d by far to think,

Rushes boldly on to death’s vague brink,

With the manhood he has found.

Three shots—but shots of another kind

The smoky regions rend;

And upon the foeman with rage gone blind,

Like a ceaseless, resistless, avenging wind,

The rescuing troops descend.

The smoke-pall clears, and the vicar’s son

His father’s life has sav’d;

And the vicar looks o’er the ruin done,

Ere the vict’ry by his child was won,

His face with care engrav’d.

The vicar sat in the firelight’s glow,

The volume in his hand,

That brought to his hearth the bitter woe

Which only a husband and father can know,

And truly understand.

With a chasten’d mien he flung the book

To the leaping flames before;

And a breath of sad relief he took

As the pages blacken’d beneath his look—

The fool of Peace no more!

Epilogue

The rev’rend parson, wak’d to man’s estate,

Laments his wife’s and daughter’s common fate.

His martial son in warm embrace enfolds,

And clings the tighter to the child he holds.

His peaceful notions, banish’d in an hour,

Will nevermore his wit or sense devour;

But steep’d in truth, ’tis now his nobler plan

To cure, yet recognise, the faults of man.

Ode for July Fourth, 1917

* * * * *

Written: July 1917

First Published in The United Amateur,
Vol. 16, No. 9 (July 1917), Page 121

As Columbia’s brave scions, in anger array’d,

Once defy’d a proud monarch and built a new nation;

’Gainst their brothers of Britain unsheath’d the sharp blade

That hath ne’er met defeat nor endur’d desecration;

So must we in this hour

Show our valour and pow’r,

And dispel the black perils that over us low’r:

Whilst the sons of Britannia, no longer our foes,

Will rejoice in our triumphs and strengthen our blows!

See the banners of Liberty float in the breeze

That plays light o’er the regions our fathers defended;

Hear the voice of the million resound o’er the leas,

As the deeds of the past are proclaim’d and commended;

And in splendour on high

Where our flags proudly fly,

See the folds we tore down flung again to the sky:

For the Emblem of England, in kinship unfurl’d,

Shall divide with Old Glory the praise of the world!

Bury’d now are the hatreds of subject and King,

And the strife that once sunder’d an Empire hath vanish’d.

With the fame of the Saxon the heavens shall ring

As the vultures of darkness are baffled and banish’d;

And the broad British sea,

Of her enemies free,

Shall in tribute bow gladly, Columbia to thee:

For the friends of the Right, in the field side by side,

Form a fabric of Freedom no hand can divide!

The Conscript

* * * * *

Written: 1918?

First Published in A Winter Wish.
By H. P. Lovecraft, Edited by Tom Collins.
Chapel Hill, NC: Whispers Press (1977), Pages 117-118

I am a peaceful working man—

I am not wise or strong—

But I can follow Nature’s plan

In labour, rest, and song.

One day the men that rule us all

Decided we must die,

Else pride and freedom surely fall

In the dim bye and bye.

They told me I must write my name

Upon a scroll of death;

That some day I should rise to fame

By giving up my breath.

I do not know what I have done

That I should thus be bound

To wait for tortures one by one,

And then an unmark’d mound.

I hate no man, and yet they say

That I must fight and kill;

That I must suffer day by day

To please a master’s will.

I used to have a conscience free,

But now they bid it rest;

They’ve made a number out of me,

And I must ne’er protest.

They tell of trenches, long and deep,

Fill’d with the mangled slain;

They talk till I can scarcely sleep,

So reeling is my brain.

They tell of filth, and blood, and woe;

Of things beyond belief;

Of things that make me tremble so

With mingled fright and grief.

I do not know what I shall do—

Is not the law unjust?

I can’t do what they want me to,

And yet they say I must!

Each day my doom doth nearer bring;

Each day the State prepares;

Sometimes I feel a watching thing

That stares, and stares, and stares.

I never seem to sleep—my head

Whirls in the queerest way.

Why am I chosen to be dead

Upon some fateful day?

Yet hark—some fibre is o’erwrought—

A giddying wine I quaff—

Things seem so odd, I can do naught

But laugh, and laugh, and laugh!