It Seems to Me That I Have Lived Alone
Clark Ashton SmithIt seems to me that I have lived alone— Alone, as one that liveth in a dream: As light on coldest marble, or the gleam Of moons eternal on a land of stone, The days have been to me. I have but known The silence of Thulean lands extreme— A silence all-attending and supreme As is the sea’s enormous monotone. Upon the waste no palmed mirages are, But strange chimeras roam the steely light, And cold parhelia hang on hilt and scaur Where flowers of frost alone have bloomed… . I crave The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save My spirit from the ravening Infinite.
The sonnet builds a vast, frozen, inhuman landscape. The speaker has not been living but existing, the way light exists on marble: present, cold, without warmth or trace. Then comes the turn: after all that cosmic emptiness, what the speaker craves is something small. Finite arms. Not transcendence — arms. The word finite is not accidental: the Infinite is what is destroying them. The finite is what would save them. And ravening — the infinite is not peaceful here. It is hungry.