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Poetry of the Gods
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1920
Type(s):
Short Fiction
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
1
About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
•
(1926)
•
(1931)
•
(1928)
•
(1926)
•
(1916)
•
(1934)
•
(1927)
•
(1931)
•
(1930)
•
(1936)
Copyright:
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and in the USA.
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2
A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great
War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and
wishes, unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the spacious
twentieth-century drawing room, up the deeps of the air, and eastward
to olive groves in distant Arcady which she had seen only in her dreams.
She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chan-
deliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed
over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it is-
sued through the foliage about an antique shrine.
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared out-
wardly a typical product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the
immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surround-
ings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived, that abode
of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates
scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less
explicable misplacement in time and space, whereby she had been born
too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to
harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dis-
pel the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each mo-
ment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing
bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than
anything else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted
from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill
vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane
through which one views a magnificent sunset.
Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive
treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her lan-
guor. An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had
discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unat-
tained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a
bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose
yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the un-
studied music of a bard who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for
unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of winged,
spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal, convention-
bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually
faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple,
star-strewn mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.
{verse
3
Moon over Japan,
White butterfly moon!
Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream
To the sound of the cuckoo's call…
The white wings of moon butterflies
Flicker down the streets of the city,
Blushing into silence the useless wicks of sound-lanterns in the hands
of girls
Moon over the tropics,
A white-curved bud
Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven…
The air is full of odours
And languorous warm sounds…
A flute drones its insect music to the night
Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.
Moon over China, Weary moon on the river of the sky,
The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver
minnows
Through dark shoals;
The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples,
The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.
{verse
Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of
her delight at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half
closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay hidden like crys-
tals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden but to gleam efful-
gently at the birth of day.
{verse
Moon over Japan,
White butterfly moon!
Moon over the tropics,
A white curved bud
Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.
The air is full of odours
4
And languorous warm sounds…
Moon over China,
Weary moon on the river of the sky…
{verse
Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged hel-
met and sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on
earth. Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which
Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded shell of melody, and
upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring,
Hermes spoke:
“0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the
sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas,
thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty
and song. 0 Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when
Apollo first knew her, thou has truly spoken of the new age, for even
now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to wake
and behold about him the little rose-crowned fauns and the antique
Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a
few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods were never
dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in
lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now
draweth nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness
shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about
Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on
before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings
and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight
with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean
yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and
have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In
Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the chil-
dren of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer
for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and
will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their
vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned
the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals,
once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night
shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those
dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that
they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and
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