Forgotten Sorrow

Clark Ashton Smith

A stranger grief than any grief by music told
Is mine: regret for unremembered loves, and faces
Veiled by the night of some unknown farewell, or places
Lost in the dusty ebb and lapse of kingdoms old
On the slow desert, rises vague and manifold
Within my heart at summer twilight. Through the spaces
Of all oblivion, voidly then my soul retraces
Her dead lives given to the marbles and the mould
In dim Palmyra, or some pink, enormous city
Whose falling columns now the boles of mightier trees
Support in far Siam. . . . All grievous love, and pity,
All loveliness unheld for long, and long estranged,
Appeals with voices, indistinguishably changed,
Like bells in deep Atlantis, tolled by summer seas.

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