Weird Tales/Volume 14/Issue 6/Fantaisie d'Antan

Fantaisie D'antan by Clark Ashton Smith

Lost and alien lie the leas,

Purfled all with euphrasies,

Where the lunar unicorn

Breasts an amber-pouring morn

Risen from hesperian seas

Of a main that has no bourn.

Only things impossible

There in deathless glamor dwell:

Pegasus and sagittary,

Trotting, part the ferns of faery,

Succubi and seraphim

Tryst among the cedars dim;

Where the beaded waters brim,

White limoniads arise,

Interlacing arms and tresses

With the sun-dark satyresses;

There, on Aquilonian skies,

Gryphons, questing to and fro

For the gold of long ago,

Find at eve an aureate star

In the gulf crepuscular;

There the Hyperboreans,

Pale with wisdom more than man's,

Tell the wileful centauresses

Half their holocryptic lore;

There, at noon, the tritonesses,

All bemused with mandragore,

Mate with satyrs of the shore.

Love, could we have only found

The forgotten road that runs

Under all the sunken suns

To that time-estrangèd ground,

Surely, love were proven there

More than long and lone despair;

Holden and felicitous,

Love were fortunate to us;

And we too might ever dwell,

Deathless and impossible,

In those amber-litten leas,

Circled all with euphrasies.