The Hashish-Eater — opening
Clark Ashton SmithBow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and enfold The falling stars within my vans of night.
The poem opens with two words — Bow down — and no apology. The voice is not human. The scale keeps escalating past any reasonable ceiling: not just a sun but a million-colored sun, not just skies but trailing skies worn as a robe. The mounting zenith is still rising even as he sits enthroned on it. Vans of night is an archaic word for wings, or the foremost edge of something advancing — his wings are made of night itself. The cruelty of the poem is that this voice — so absolute, so cosmic — spends the hundreds of lines that follow losing everything, dissolving into the very vastness it claimed to rule.