Lovecraft, H P & Crofts, Anna Helen - Poetry And The Gods

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Poetry and the Gods

by H. P. Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts

Written 1920

Published September 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1-4.

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 chandeliers, 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 issued through the foliage about an antique shrine.

Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical

product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated

her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. 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 dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more

deeply each moment, 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 languor. An observer could have

read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought

her nearer to her unattained 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 unstudied 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.

Moon over Japan,

White butterfly moon!

Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream

To the sound of the cuckoo's call...

Poetry and the Gods

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.

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 crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden but

to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.

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

And languorous warm sounds...

Moon over China,

Weary moon on the river of the sky...

Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet 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

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PoetryandtheGodsPoetryandtheGodsbyH.P.LovecraftandAnnaHelenCroftsWritten1920PublishedSeptember1920inTheUnitedAmateur,Vol.20,No.1,p.1-4.AdampgloomyeveninginAprilitwas,justafterthecloseoftheGreatWar,whenMarciafoundherselfalonewithstrangethoughtsandwishes,unheard-ofyearningswhichfloatedoutofthespacious...

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Lovecraft, H P & Crofts, Anna Helen - Poetry And The Gods

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