Cassilda's Song
 

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

I like this, Tim. I was looking forward to tracing it to some long fantasy poem I’d never heard of. Too bad there isn’t more (at least not much more) like this in the book it led me to. Don’t know if I’ll read it all, but I did read “The Prophets’ Paradise,” a very striking chapter of what might be called prose poems. Thanks for the lead!

Carl

I enjoyed this too. Possibly not enough to read the series, but who knows...
The mebedded song and the title remind me a bit of Mignon's Song in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, "Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluhen," not a bad thing, I think. But for fantasy novels with poems embedded, TOlkien remains the gold standard to my midn. I still regret the films found no better way to incorporate them.

CHeers,
John

I love dark and foreboding. I also love Ambrose Bierce, the progenitor of stories about Carcosa, which, after its appearance in the work of Chambers and Lovecraft, last showed up in the first season of 'True Detective.'

Carl, I too am reading 'The King in Yellow.' The first four stories are said to be the most atmospheric.

John, as you know from your travels, jeda deutsche Stadt hat eine Goethestrasse. Ja?

Hi Tim,

That is very likely! I had an interesting chat with a German the other day who argued that after WW II, Goethe offered a way to be German totally unconnected with Nazism. A fair point, I thought.

Cheers,
John

The King In Yellow gets very good, then mediocre, then very good again. What I would do to read that play!
Tolkien wrote badly moralistic fiction that a lot of people have immitated to get money. HAVE you read Viriconium by M. John Harrison? There is a sleezy poet in there who writes incredibly strange poems. Sadly he is stabbed to death quite early on in the sequence, though he returns in the decadence of In Viriconium.

W.T., I read Tolkein only once. That was almost more than enough, although I'm glad I read him.

I judge the value of a book by how many times I read it. I like the books and writers that obsess me.

I have an abiding love for the short story. JCO, Alice Munro, Bierce, Tobias Wolfe, so many. I'd like to plug Tom McGuane, whose 'Cloudbursts' consists of 61 stories, every one of them good.

Und eine Schillerstrasse, John. I think that Christopher Marlowe really did sell his soul to the devil. Goethe? No, I'd wager that he didn't.

Hi Tim,

Tolkien needs no defense from me.

Yup, Goethe and Schiller, that eternal pair. Marlowe went to my school, actually, we have a Marlowe house there. He died young and violently, which Goethe obviously did not - if Goethe sold his soul, he struck a fairly hard bargain. But Goethe never wrote "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it."

Cheers,
John

Known for its contributions to mathematics, Cambridge is a venerable institution.

Yes, in an age of great poetry, Marlowe set the standard for blank verse. Shakespeare considered him a rival.

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse

Hi Tim,

I see Marlowe did go to Cambridge! He also went to school at King's, Canterbury - he's our most famous alum, I'd have to say. Let's see. Somerset Maugham went there more recently.

The Newton joke goes: "So, I see optics, I see motion, I see gravitation. But what have you done for me lately?" Newton's the most famous alum of my Cambridge college, Trinity.

So that's that story.

Cheers,
John