First published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1947, this short poem has never been reprinted.
DEATH
by Clarence E. Flynn
Why do you fear me?
I am your friend.
I but guide trav’lers
Rounding the bend-
Lead them to freedom
From time and age,
Help them start writing
On a new page….
Seek for me never,
Keep your course true-
When I am needed
I’ll come to you,
Then I will show you
Roads without end-
Why do you fear me?
I am your friend.
I discovered Man And The Cosmos by August Derleth, a poem from the cosmicist school of poetry, languishing in the pages of Wonder Stories, April 1935. According to ISFDB it has never been reprinted. When Derleth wrote it he was talking about what he thought would come. Today, at this very moment, people are up there on the International Space Station, living it.
Man and the Cosmos
By August W. Derleth
Death lies athwart the frozen dark
Where never the song of a lark
Has echoed; here breeds the unknown spawn
Of evil, here where there is no dawn.
None but man deserts the light
For probing in this endless night;
None but he dares the icy breath
Of the lurking cosmic death.
Only a tiny atom of flesh
Webbed in an unanswerable mesh
Of questions and burning doubt,
Wanting to known what Life’s about.
And, the generous Mr. Jim Moon, of the Hypnobobs podcast, has today recorded it for our listening pleasure.
One of my favourite poems, and one of my favourite Edgar Allan Poe poems, Dream-Land, gets an all too brief half-hour discussion (a close reading) by the folks at the Poem Talk podcast (episode #48). When I talk about this poem with my students it usually takes between 45 minutes and an hour.
Podcast December 19, 2011, it was hosted by Al Filreis and featurd John Timpane, Thomas Devaney, and Jerome McGann. The official shownotes are HERE.
First published in the December 18, 1909 issue of Saturday Review.
Here’s the entire text:
The Raft-Builders by Lord Dunsany
‘All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things–small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings–and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Hemp (A Virginia Legend) is a lovely rhyming ballad about a despicable scabrous pirate.
LibriVox has the audio |MP3|. And I’ve made a |PDF| from the original publication in the January 1916 issue of Century Magazine (complete with illustrations).
