The Star-Treader and Other Poems is a book of poetry, classical poetry, that, between its archaicisms and overwrought vobaculary, wouldn’t sound out of place had it been written a century beforehand. Many reviewers make comparisons to such lofty names as Milton or Keats. It is an apt comparison, because The Star-Treader… is a sublime volume of poetry.
This volume opens an ambitious, vivid monologue called “Nero,” written from the perspective of the Roman emperor himself, who ruminates on his desire for godhood and extending his tyranny to the universe itself.
It starts off rather simply, with the observation,
This Rome, that was the toil of many men,
The consummation of laborious years—
Fulfillment’s crown to visions of the dead,
And image of the wide desire of kings—
Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency,
and continues with lines that hold foreshadows of the tremendous vision of this poem, e.g. “Fierce ecstasy of one tremendous hour, / When ages piled on ages were a flame.”
The poem grows in scope for next few verses, the narrator ponders the nature of beauty and life, creation and destruction. One reaches such lines as,
There have been many kings, and they are dead,
And have no power in death save what the wind
Confers upon their blown and brainless dust
To vex the eyeballs of posterity.
which hold taheir weighty, intrinsic meaning even outside the context of the poem.
Finally, when one reaches,
I would tear out the eyes of light, and stand
Above a chaos of extinguished suns,
That crowd, and grind, and shiver thunderously,
Lending vast voice and motion, but no ray
To the stretched silence of the blinded gulfs.
it is difficult to help the impression of a bombastic symphony blaring in the background, coming to a solemn silence to punctuate the final lines of the poem, which won’t be spoiled for the reader.
The work continues in this fashion for much of the first half, with equally ambitious poems such as the titular “The Star-Treader,” “The Night Forest,” “Song to Oblivion,” or “Medusa,” but also interspersed with shorter, elegant poems, such as “The Morning Pool,” “The Mad Wind,” or “The Soul of the Sea,” that keep the oppressive seriousness in check.
Of particular note is the verse, “Ode to the Abyss,” whose simple yet deep premise and execution leads the author to consider it one of the best Clark Ashton Smith has to offer.
The balance of poems in the volume slowly shifts after this, leaning closer to these shorter poems. There are exceptions—“The Masque of Dead Gods,” “Song of a Comet,” and “To the Darkness” are all found in the second half of this work—but they are swamped in a veritable /tide/ of shorter poems that are so numerous as to deter listing. Of particular note are “The Summer Moon,” “The Eldritch Dark” (which, incidentally, give name to one of Smith’s modern fansites), and “Retrospect and Forecast,” which all show that Smith doesn’t need dozens of lines to say something profound or interesting.
(One couldn’t speak of Smith’s shorter poems without mentioning such small poems as “The Snow-Blossoms,” “The Cherry Snows,” “A Live-Oak Leaf,” or “Pine Needles,” which could only be described as /cute/ in their simpleness.)
Then, at last, one has worked through all of this volume, gone past the epic “Saturn,” and come upon the almost bleak finality of /Finis/, a fitting end. But the bleakness reveals almost defining preoccupation of Smith’s—that of darkness, and melancholy. When Smith writes of the moon, he says,
How is it that I find,
When I turn again to thee,
That thy lost and wasted light
Is regained in one magic breath?
which isn’t to say there is no gladness in The Star-Treader and Other Poems, just that they are flecks of gladness trapped in an gray amber of resigned gloom. If there were one word to sum it all up, it would be morose.
Smith has been remarked on by many as a genius, and it is the author’s opinion that his output is well worth the reader’s time, should they be willing to work through the sometimes overwrought vocabulary and nearly oppressive gloom of the work. This recommendation is in no small part because, having been published before 1923 and Smith having passed away in 1961, the work is in the public domain and can be read online for free.