Selections from

Songs and Sonnets Atlantean

by Donald Sidney-Fryer

From Songs and Sonnets Atlantean. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971.

Atlantis

"O Ebon-Colored Rose"

To Clark Ashton Smith

"Thy Spirit Walks the Sea"

A Symbol for All Splendor Lost

To Edmund Spenser

A Vision of Strange Splendor (from "Minor Chronicles of Atlantis")

O Beautiful Dark-Amber Eyes of Old

Sonnets on an Empire of Many Waters (Selections)

VII. Atalantessys

XII. Poseidonis

XVI. A Letter From Valoth

XVII. (No, not until the final age of Earth)

For Master Edmund Spenser His Great Song

From Songs and Sonnets Atlantean: The Second Series (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003)

In an Atlantean Bath

Strength of Dreams

Copán

Our Lady of the Unicorn

Rêverie Gothique

Atlantis

Translated from the Atlantean of Athallarion

An alpha huge athwart the Ocean Sea,

The island continent Atlantis, old

In thrice-resplendent sovereign empery,

Uprose form deeps now deeper still. In gold

And orichalch it please her to enfold

The pomp, the pride, of her imperial court;

Where Beauty flamed her flambeaux manifold,

And blazing Wealth maintained its foremost port,

Enshrined – O Empire's heart – in Empire's uttermost fort:–

O fortress. . . pharos. . . archsublime acropolis of kings;

Where once the crown and trident swayed that pompous prideful court

Where Majesty in splendent state would muse on splendid things. . . .

O Splendor sunk, alas! beyond recall, that once of your

Her crown and trident's empire stretched from east to western shore. . . .

Alas! And now no more. . . For ever more. . . Alas!

"O Ebon-Colored Rose"

Translated from the Atlantean of Athallarion

"Ces fleurs maladives."

Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, dedication.

". . . Ebon blooms that swell in ghastly woods . . . "

Robert E. Howard, Which Will Scarcely Be Understood.

"Not such as earth out of her fruitful womb

Throws forth to men, sweet and well-savoréd,

But direful deadly black, both leaf and bloom,

Fit to adorn the dead, and deck the dreary tomb."

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, II:VII:LI.

The rose blooms ebon in these longsome latter years,

These long, too long, autumnal afternoons and nights.

Her darkling petals sparkle not with dew but rears. . . .

The dearling dew of lover's dusk no more delights

Her languid leaves, nor traces errant loving flights

Upon her face, but in that same dew's sparkling stead

Burn bitter salty tears with pallid paling lights,

The paling mournful lamps of dying loves and dead,

Whose flames with oils of grief, and shame,

and wan distress, are fed. . . .

Like night-black vipers that we overlate beware,

The darkling thorns lurk low, close to the rose's bed,

And sullenly distill the venom called Despair. . . .

And when the mournful lamps shall dim,

shall fail, shall utterly leave no light,

Then shall the ebon rose be lost,

lost in the cosmic waste of night.

To Clark Ashton Smith

(13 January 1893-14 August 1961)

One with the stars and singing splendour of the night,

The alchemist of beauty and of bale is gone,

Leaving at last in long-delayed and stately flight

For worlds were never-ending suns of wonder dawn;

Where unicorned chimeras all of crystal fawn

About the breast of sphinx and succubus asmile;

Where black, profulgent prodigies of horror spawn,

Alone or though the cunning necromantic guile

Of mighty and omniscient mages; where the vial

Of darkly glamorous night has poured its black above

Some Atlantean, enchanted, ocean-founding isle

Where prince and princess prove the philtre-spell of love. . . .

One with all worlds and things of wonder

lying lost of space and time

He is at long last gone to claim,

once more, his native sphere sublime.

August & December 1961.

"Thy Spirit Walks the Sea"

Dedicated to Nora May French, in memoriam.

"What shifting films of distance fold you, blind you,

This windy eve of dreams, I cannot tell.

I know they grope through some strange mist to find you,

My hands that give you Greeting and Farewell."

Nora May French, Ave Atque Vale

Standing upon this lyric promontory

Which rises up beside the western sea,

We muse on Phyllis and her Sapphic glory:

Since that same time when you but seemed to flee

And in these waves they cast your ashes free,

Now more than half a hundred years have passed:

Beyond this world, its impure grief and glee,

You hold a greater world . . . the ocean's vast . . .

With whose untrammeled realms your spirit shall outlast:

Within what sunken colonnades and gardens do you roam,

Amid what palaces of some deep Atlantean past? . . .

Whose regal ways you have returned to claim once more as home:

And have you found – beyond this planet's barriers and bars –

Those greater spheres and realms . . . deep in the Ocean Sea of stars?

Point Lobos: 31 December 1968

A Symbol for All Splendor Lost

"Abides nor goal nor ultimate of peace,

Nor lifts a beacon on the cosmic deep

To guide our wandering world on seas sublime . . ."

George Sterling, Sonnets by the Night Sea, I.

No more, no less than Plato's quaint conceit, –

Atlantis, – more than myth, this memory

Of a paradise we may once more complete,

This image of an island empery

Supreme in wealth, extent, antiquity, –

Has now become my own arcanic lore,

But more, a torch deep in eternity,

A symbol for all splendor lost, and more,

A sign for all of loveliness evanished evermore. . . .

Forevermore? Perhaps there shall rise yet in far-off time,–

Beyond this bleak, blind interim of now and nevermore,–

Many a new Atlantis form "the cosmic sea sublime". . . .

And there, perhaps, in future gardens marvellous and vast,

Shall bloom again all splendor and all beauty lost and past.

To Edmund Spenser

(1552?-1599)

". . . The Prince of Poets in his tyme. . ."

From the inscription on the monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey.

Historiographers have said you died,

And were within Westminster Abbey laid

To rest – surely such worthies must have lied;

For at your seeming death you were conveyed,

While yet in courtly ruff and garb arrayed,

To Faeryland, and to Cleopolis,

That capital resplendently displayed,

And to the heart of that metropolis, –

Panthèa, – the city's crown, and proud acropolis:

And there, within that crystal tower-palace's great hall,

The place of Gloriana's court, the one true Bowre of Bliss;

You have completed your great song, O gentlest bard of all:

Now rightly as Sir Edmund Spenser may you there be seen,

Both knight and poet laureate to Her Majesty, the Queene.

From

Minor Chronicles of Atlantis

Translated from the Atlantean of Prince Atlantarion.

Dedicated to Fritz and Jonquil Leiber.

A Vision of Strange Splendor

1. I dreamed a dream: a million-colored rose unfolded to my view. Standing on an empty plain beneath an empty sky, I watched both the plain and the sky gradually disappear, and I myself became concentred only to one enormous eye that could see in any directions, an eye that also had the power somehow to apprehend sound, an essence of audient vision somehow suspended in pure space. But somehow I knew that I lay at the bottom of some innominate abyss.

2. Of a sudden a great mass of ever-seething flame and smoke uprose, seemingly from nowhere. With sonorities as of a million thunders, the great mass of smoke and flame, firmly fixed upon the nothingness of the nadir, uncoiled swiftly to the zenith, with lights upon lights upon lights of a strange, septuple splendor.

3. Anon a weird, half-veiled illuminescence hovered over and out from this outré phenomenon, and suddenly at the top of the great mass of smoke and flame, a rosebud appeared, a rosebud curiously black and white and gray, a rosebud which waxed fuller and fuller, suddenly to burst forth in riotous bloom incredible, with a million petals and with a million colors, filling space as far as the eye could see.

4. Now this million-colored rose began to expand further and further, again filling space as far as the eye could see. And anon, deep within the profounds of the million-colored petals, I perceived tiny particles of incandescent matter which I suddenly recognized as innumerable stars around which there circled in unending cycles other stars as well as moons and planets.

5. Now all these atoms or stars began to circle around the great central eye which, I belatedly noticed, could perceive in all directions at once. Over and over, the atoms or stars wheeled around the great central eye in a deliberate and pre-measured music that seemed to have no end and no beginning. And now the splendors of that far-flung rose waxed ever brighter, whit colors and lights never imaged and never to be imagined.

6. And once again the million-colored rose began to expand further and further, again filling space as far as the eye could see. And somehow I knew that the million-colored rose had reached her uttermost growth, her uttermost bloom. What an infinity of atoms and stars nestled in her petals! In that one great expansive jet of light… a resplendent fountainhead or matrix of innumerable and innominate shapes and forms and fantasies… I perceived and understood the essential unity of everyone and everything.

7. Anon the stars or atoms grew faint and began to fail, and the million-colored rose began to withdraw back upon and into herself. Then with a suddenness unexpected as it was frightening, the rose burst into great and all-consuming flame. But through the flames I was able still to perceive a rosebud of pristine beauty, a rosebud curiously black and white and gray. The rosebud vanished and in her place a fiery alpha appeared, endued with incredible splendors. Anon the million-colored splendors of the alpha changed to a single phosphorescent and compassionate blue, and then the alpha disappeared. And then I and the eye and the vision become one. And then I woke.

O Beautiful Dark-Amber Eyes of Old

Translated from the French of Michel de Labretagne.

O beautiful dark-amber eyes of old:

Did I not know them in the long ago?

Within a boscage deep and manifold,

Again I am the unicorn . . . and, lo!

You are the maid, the cause of all my woe,

Dressed in a gown of sendaline and gold,

To whom in gentle trust and love I go,

To lay my horn upon your lap. . . . Behold!

These beautiful dark-amber eyes I know from old.

Selections from

Sonnets on an Empire of Many Waters

Dedicated to Kirby McCauley

VII

Atalantessys

Translated from the Atlantean of Prince Atlantarion.

Far southern kingdom of gigantic flowers,

And marble palaces upon the shore,

Or in the midst of gardens, groves, and bowers:

Great golden poppies in the sunlight pour

Forth auras like a dust of golden ore –

Huge orchids in the shade bloom ebon-hued:

While grossly grow the flowers called mandragore,

Deep nenuphars, with tropical suns endued,

Spread out on pool and stream their own tremendous magnitude:

Borne on cold ocean-streams from ultimate Antarctic bournes,

Masses of ice, like ships arch-fantasy-wise carved and hued,

Sail up offshore to melt away . . . whose passing no one mourns:

White palaces upon the shore, in gardens, groves, and bowers. . . .

Out of far southern seas there lifts the realm of gigantic flowers.

XII

Poseidonis

Translated from the Atlantean of Athallarion.

Cradle of empire and of mighty kings;

Great mountain-heart-land whose great mountains rise

Up far beyond the reach of any wings!

Tremendous bulks ascending to the skies

Beyond the heights whereto the phoenix flies,

Hereat they stand like puissant kings of old:

Upon their robes of evergreen there lies,

In lavish wise, the sunlight's breath of gold,

And fires their silver crowns with splendors white and cold:

Poseidonis, within the matrix of your Citadel,

The endless halls and corridors in funeral pomp enfold

Over three thousand kings and queens who thus for aye shall dwell:

Lo! these great peaks which rise beyond the reach of any wings,

Cradle this cradle-realm of empire and of mighty kings.

XVI

A Letter from Valoth

Translated from the Atlantean of Aänsess.

From Aänsess, Archknight, Archroyal Governor of the Atlantean Forts and Watchtowers in Valoth, Karanak, and southern Ivvrianaä; to His Majesty, King Atlantarion I, Overlord of the Empire of Atlantis; Dictated from Apenderragon the Great Watchtower in southern Valoth but Three Days after the Great Cataclysm.

My prince, our Avalonessys is now no more:

Upon that single day and night of rain,

Beyond the reckoning of the utmost shore,

With all earth shuddering as in fear and pain,

Slowly the island sank below the main,

Leaving behind a foam-filled wrath unknown,

More bleak and barren than an arctic plain,

A desolation utterless and lone,

Where winds and waves now mourn, and make imperial moan:

The blossoms of the foam, a white and fatal green,

Now bloom above those miles of apple-blossoms flown

Beneath a deeper sea no longer fair and green:

Submerged beyond the reckoning of the utmost shore,

Alas, my prince, our Avalonessys is now no more!

XVII

No, not until the final age of Earth,

When man has gone, and nothing claims the land,

Shall this proud city know a new rebirth:

The sea shall dwindle to its utmost strand;

The deep-sea silt shall change to fine gray sand,

Then like a vasty pall shall fall away:

And then Atlantis once again shall stand

Resplendent in the splendidness of day;

Until – at last – her last, and very last, decay. . .

When all her fair proud ruin shall dissolve to dust,

And thus, to dust dissolved, forevermore shall stay;

For in the end, unjust or just, the end is just:

For in the end the Earth itself shall surely not outlast, –

Less than a speck of cosmic dust slow-dwindling on the Vast. . . .

For Master Edmund Spenser His Great Song

Two stanzas for The Faerie Queene.

VII: Proem: I.

You ask, Who is this famous Faerie Queene,

Whom we so much do praise, yet nowhere show,

But always vouch, although but seldom seen?

Mistress of shapes and changes whom we know,

Transcendent, immanent, both weal and woe,

The source of all things noble, just, serene;

This sovereign lady fair from long ago,

This presence often felt, yet seldom seen,

Lo! Sapience or Mother Nature is our Faerie Queene.

VII: VIII : III.

But since that Sabaoth's sight may never be

Whilst here on Earth we needs must wend our way

And suffer changeful state, then list grant me,

O that great Sabaoth God, the strength to play

My bardic lute, and sing my wonted lay,

My song of wars and loves which will not cease

Until the reckoning of that seventh day

Whenas all things from change will find release,

To rest back in their source, that still small point called peace.

Master Donald Sidney-Fryer.

San Francisco, California.

30 September 1970.

[The Second Series]

In An Atlantean Bath

Translated from the Atlantean of Prince Atlantarion.

As the night around us grew dark and cool

While the warm spring-fed waters laved our limbs

In the white basin of the marble pool, –

We laughed at odd conceits and curious whims,

Splashing small waves out towards the outer rims

Where trees and bushes closed us all around:

The sky's last waves of red like giant scrims

Faded to grey, far off we heard a hound,

Nearby a bird, then we fell silent, and there came no other sound:

Anon a soft refrain arose from harp or lute or lyre

Whose maze of counterpoint a poignant voice of crystal crowned

With words, half spoken and half sung, of liquid light and fire:

Anon the voice and music ceased, whose provenance we did not know,

left within our hearts a joy as keen as any plangent woe.

Strength Of Dreams

Per Filippo della mantia

ed il su' occhio di fantasia.

(For Philip Lamantia, ecc.,

by way of tribute to him both as poet and as person.)

Thou art one with those hawks, fierce on the wing,

That hover on the updraft with their young

Where the winds on their wingtips whistle and sing:

Thou art one with those greater vultures, flung

Before the storm, huge birds that long have hung

Unmoving till blown far by wind and rain:

Thou art one with those mightiest eagles, sung

And still extolled, that still soar without strain,

That still throne then on high, yes, as sovereigns dare to reign:

Nor cunning Zeus himself, for all his fecund brow,

Nor bearded Proteus, uprising from the main,

Were yet more fierce, more deeps more manifold than thou!

The lightning bolts of thy mind's eye to furthest ends, like laser beams,

Leap out at once, with all the depth and weight and height and strength of dreams!

Copán

Wednesday afternoon, 14-September 1988.

Still standing near the ancient riverbed,

Amid the park where dark green depths advance,

The ceremonial centre looms ahead:

To-north, the central plaza's broad expanse,

Where stelae rise in hieratic trance;

To-south, the acropolis's carved stone height:

Where ceiba-trees, to-west, twist in their stance,

And shadows form the green and filtered light,

The ambient gloom seems richer still, by far, than purest night:

When was it that the quetzal-bird last chanced to grace these stones?

Withdrew, when last, its miracle of plumage emerald-bright?

So must we sigh, and ask, where silence only stalks and thrones:

The shadows on the grass describe an infinitely slow pavane

Until the twilight with far greater shadows overtakes, and overwhelms, Copán.

Our Lady Of The Unicorn

Litanie on l'honneur d'Elle.

"A mon seul désir." (To my one desire.)

Motto from a late mediaeval tapestry.

Dedicated to Donna Hall.

I

She holds forevermore in fee

All tides, all treasures, of the sea,

But never would she flout or scorn

The empire of the rose and thorn,

Or yet the kingdoms of the dew

Nor those of cypress and the yew

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

II

Where coldest ocean currents run

In seas below the midnight sun,

Cloud-borne, she hovers in the air

To watch the sport and frolic there

Of one-horned narwhals through the waves

Like jousting knights with ivory staves.

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

III

Where gardens gleam with rose and leaf,

With promise of delight or grief,

She stands amid the shadowed brake

By fountains gushing near a lake,

To wait for that One sure to come,

Driven there by his heart's own drum.

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

IV

Where morning dew and evening dew

With gems and filigree bestrew

Their traceries, the fields, their treasure-troves,

Upon the fields, upon the groves,

She skims above the level grass

Like phantom gliding over glass.

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

V

Where graveyard cypress, graveyard yew,

And grimmest ilex-oak endue

The silent space between the tombs

With but the purest gloom of glooms,

She watches through the midnight hours

To heed the bloom of ebon flowers

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

VI

Attended in her tented bourn

By maiden, lion, unicorn,

She looms inside the tapestry

Amid its figured imagery

Where, summing all of love and fear,

The motto reads: A mon seul désir.

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn.

VII

So thus and yea – yes, in this way –

To trumpets or to lutes at play,

Whether by night or yet by day,

She holds forevermore in fee

All tides, all treasures, of the sea,

But never would she flout or scorn

The empire of the rose and thorn,

Or yet the kingdoms of the dew,

Nor those of cypress and the yew.

She of the pure and only horn,

Our Lady of the Unicorn

Elle de l'unique et pure corne,

Voilà Notre-Dame à la Licorne.

Rêverie Gothique

The first faint flush of light had scarcely crept

Into the woods when, all at once, that glimmer

Dimmed to the gloom innate within the crypt:

The skies themselves grew dim, and then still dimmer,

Their vault a weight grave, grim, and even grimmer;

The sun rose up at last, a dark small coin:

Nearby a figure sat in a pale glimmer

While holding up his massive clublike loin

It seemed some daemon satyr-faun with both hands near his groin:

This imp just sat there on a knoll, grinning from ear to ear,

A radiant, joyful demigod safe in his pagan quoin,

Laughing at all that darkness with a fine show of good cheer:

One moment, blackest gloom – the next, a blaze of light – but gone,

Alas! quite gone, out from those woods, that daemon satyr-faun.

Copyright © 1971, 2003, 2004 by Donald Sidney-Fryer. Used by permission.

Donald Sidney-Fryer: Last of the Courtly Poets

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