The Star-Treader

A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams, Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams Thine ancient pathway of the suns, Whose flame is part of thee; And the deep gulfs abide coevally Whose darkness runs Through all thy spirit's mystery. Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze Of stars wherethrough thou camest in old days; Pierce without fear each vast Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past. A hand strikes off the chains of Time, A hand swings back the door of years; Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears, And opens the strait dream to space sublime"

Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay ! What eye shall note or measure mete His passage on a purpose fleet, The thread and weaving of his way ! It caught me from the clasping world, And swept beyond the brink of Sense, My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled Like to a planet chained and hurled With solar lightning strong and tense. Swift as communicated rays That leap from severed suns a gloom Within whose waste no suns illume, The winged dream fulfilled its ways. Through years reversed and lit again I followed that unending chain Wherein the suns are links of light; Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres The twisting of the threads of years In weavings wrought of noon and night; Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll, Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.

Enkindling dawns of memory, Each sun had radiance to relume A sealed, disused, and darkened room Within the soul's immensity. Their alien ciphers shown and lit, I understood what each had writ Upon my spirit's scroll; Again I wore mine ancient lives, And knew the freedom and the gyves That formed and marked my soul.

I delved in each forgotten mind, The units that had builded me, Whose deepnesses before were blind And formless as infinity— Knowing again each former world— From planet unto planet whirled Through gulfs that mightily divide Like to an intervital sleep. One world I found, where souls abide Like winds that rest upon a rose; Thereto they creep To loose all burden of old woes. And one there was, a garden-close Whose blooms are grown of ancient sin And death the sap that wells and flows: The spirits weep that dwelt therein. And one I knew, where chords of pain With stridors fill the Senses' lyre; And one, where Beauty's olden chain Is forged anew with stranger loveliness, In flame-soft links of never-quenched desire And ineluctable duress

Where no terrestrial dreams had trod My vision entered undismayed, And Life her hidden realms displayed To me as to a curious god. Where colored suns of systems triplicate Bestow on planets weird, ineffable, Green light that orbs them like an outer sea, And large auroral noons that alternate With skies like sunset held without abate, Life's touch renewed incomprehensibly The strains of mirth and grief's harmonious spell. Dead passions like to stars relit Shone in the gloom of ways forgot; Where crownless gods in darkness sit The day was full on altars hot. I heard—enisled in those melodic seas— The central music of the Pleiades, And to Alcyone my soul Swayed with the stars that own her song's control. Unchallenged, glad, I trod, a revenant In worlds Edenic longly lost; Or dwelt in spheres that sing to those, Through space no light has crossed, Diverse as Hell's mad antiphone uptossed To Heaven's angelic chant.

What vasts the dream went out to find ! I seemed beyond the world's recall In gulfs where darkness is a wall To render strong Antares blind ! In unimagined spheres I found The sequence of my being's round— Some life where firstling meed of Song, The strange imperishable leaf, Was placed on brows that starry Grief Had crowned, and. Pain anointed long; Some avatar where Love Sang like the last great star at morn Ere the pale orb of Death filled all its sky; Some life in fresher years unworn Upon a world whereof Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie On pools aglow with latter spring: There Time's pellucid surface took Clear image of all things, nor shook Till the black cleaving of Oblivion's wing; Some earlier awakening In pristine years, when giant strife Of forces darkly whirled First forged the thing called Life— Hot from the furnace of the suns— Upon the anvil of a world.

Thus knew I those anterior ones Whose lives in mine were blent; Till, lo! my dream, that held a night Where Rigel sends no message of his might, Was emptied of the trodden stars, And dwindled to the sun's extent— The brain's familiar prison-bars, And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.

Clark Ashton Smith