2025 read #44: The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith

100 pages

Published 1912

Read from May 21 to May 24

Rating: 2 out of 5

I made a couple prior attempts to read this collection, and always found my interest waning by the third or fourth page of the opening number, “Nero.” Poetry nowadays is gorgeous but lean, scything through layers of meaning and confessional trauma with precisely keyed phrases. Antique poetry (and this stuff was a deliberate throwback even by the standards of 1912) tends to feel pompous to my modern tastes. You have to be in a particular frame of mind to appreciate a line like “This Rome… / Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency…”

But I want to become conversant with a broader range of poetry, and this was free to download, so here we are again. If you’re reading this review, I finally made it to the end.

Opening with plodding classical pretensions does Star-Treader a disservice, at least to modern readers. It’s really not as bad as that first poem would suggest. While we do slog through plenty of dusty odes to butterflies and pine trees, Smith is at his best when he (quite literally) reaches for the stars.

The titular poem is pretty good, a versification of the typical contemporary “I traveled through space and time in a dream of my past lives” contrivance. It’s a nice mix of sidereal Romanticism with early science fiction. “Medusa” is equally acceptable, a gothic landscape portrayed in words, bridging from Greek myth to a prototype of the Dying Earth.

Other poems expand on the theme of stars and the vastness of space, written at a time when the immensities of time and emptiness were first becoming understood. At the very least, Star-Treader is interesting as a document of these frightening new vistas and how they shook up anglophone conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place within it. This is demonstrated quite literally in “Ode to the Abyss”: “[God’s] might were impotent to conquer thee, / O invisible infinity!”

Perhaps Smith’s poetry is best appreciated as a vibe, with the occasional outstanding line. Later on in “Ode to the Abyss,” we get this banger: “Dark as the final lull of suns.” That carries more desolate cosmic weirdness than entire novels from later writers. Alas, there just isn’t enough of that to make up for all the rest.