Medusa by Clark Ashton Smith

As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,

It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,

Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills

That seem the gibbous bones of the mummied Earth,

And plains whose hollow Face is rivelled deep

With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.

The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,

Where, for his token visible, the Head

Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks

Rough-mounded like some shattered pyramid

In a thwartly cloven hill-ravine, that seems

The unhealing scar of huge Tellurian wars.

Her lethal beauty crowned with twining snakes

That mingle with her hair, the Gorgon reigns.

Her eyes are clouds wherein black lightnings lurk,

Yet, even as men that seek the glance of Life,

The gazers come, where, coiled and serpent-swift,

Those levins wait. As round an altar-base

Her victims lie, distorted, blackened forms

Of postured horror smitten into stone—

Time caught in meshes of Eternity—

Drawn back from dust and ruin of the years,

And given to all the future of the world.

The land is claimed of Death: the daylight comes

Half-strangled in the changing webs of cloud

That unseen spiders of bewildered winds

Weave and unweave across the lurid sun

In upper air.

Below, no zephyr comes

To break with life the circling spell of doom.

Long vapor-serpents twist about the moon,

And in the windy murkness of the sky

The guttering stars are wild as candle-flames

That near the socket.

Thus the land shall be,

And Death shall wait, throned in Medusa's eyes,

Till in the irremeable webs of night

The sun is snared, and the corroded moon

A dust upon the gulfs, and all the stars

Rotted and fallen like rivets from the sky,

Letting the darkness down upon all things.

I was interested in searching for poems on ancient Greek Methology. While I was searching about this topic in google, I found a great website called "Black Cat Poems" that offers varities of poems. This website categorizes poems by subjects and poet so it is convenient to find a poem that you are looking for here.

The poem, "Medusa" written by Clark Ashton Smith is about a female monster from Greek Methology. Her head is covered with snakes and whoever sees her eyes directly would become a stone, meaning death. In the poem, Medusa who was originally beautiful, is a extreme, evil like being and the land she belongs to is very dark and has potency of death. Everything, even the sun, fears of her and leads to unfortuante ending. I think this poem describs the vivid image of Medusa very well.

This is the link where I found this poem from

http://www.blackcatpoems.com/s/medusa.html

This link gives little bit of background information about the author, Clark Ashton Smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith

You can read more detail story about Medusa from this link

http://www.webwinds.com/thalassa/medusa.htm

http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Medusa1.html