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The Star-Treader and Other Poems

by Clark Ashton Smith

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The Eldritch Dark

Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
  Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
  A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall
  As with some dreadful witches’ ecstasy,
  Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free
The crooked moon, impendent over all.

Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown
  Across the movement and the sound of things,
    Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon’s ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
    The night grows whole again.... The shadows rest,
  Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.

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