On George Sterling’s The Thirst of Satan (and in tribute to the new Complete Poems of George Sterling)
The sincerity with which Robinson Jeffers addressed George Sterling in at least two poems powerfully demonstrates the respect and affection in which the San Francisco Bohemian was held by fellow poets. Among his rare direct personal tributes, only the lines Jeffers penned directly to his wife Una, and once or twice to his father, speak with the quiet intimacy of his sonnets to Sterling.
To the real artists, Sterling was never a merely cavorting satyr or dissolute wreck; at life’s end, he had in many ways fulfilled as well as squandered his vast talent. He had devoted much of his life to helping fellow poets. Sterling’s powers at their best were indeed high: one example from among his own masterful sonnets is “To the Mummy of the Lady Isis in the Bohemian Club, San Francisco.”
Clearly, given the magnificence of this sonnet, what could have seemed a mere ancient collectible, a trophy to cherish about as much as as a taxidermized moose’s head (even for the young poetic sparks of San Francisco), was to Sterling an imperishable source of brooding wonder and pity:
No bird shall tell thee of the seasons’ flight:
Sealed are thine ears that now no longer list.
The little veins of temple and of wrist
Are food no more for sleepless love’s delight,
And crumbling in the sessions of thy night,
Pylon and sphinx shall be as fleeting mist.
Bitter with natron are the lips that kissed,
And shorn of dreams the spirit and the sight.
Ah! dust misused! better to feed the flow’r,
Than grace the revels of an alien hour,
When babe or lord wake never to caress
The bosom where unerring Death hath struck
And milkless breasts that give the ages suck—
Stilled in the slumber that is nothingness.
In her recent collection Easy, the fine poet Marie Ponsot offers a poem of similar theme, “What Speaks Out,” about an ancient lute and the mummified remains of the young Mesopotamian girls or women who played it. It is a very good poem, but not of the same ardor or fiercely disciplined form as Sterling’s.
Last December, I was happy to receive as a Christmas present the complete poems of Clark Ashton Smith, in the handsome new Hippocampus paperbacks. Smith was a compelling lyricist with a sweeping vision of the cosmos, but the master who encouraged him to achieve a wider interstellar vista, and to focus that ever-larger lens with accuracy, long before Hubble, was George Sterling. This is at best a capsule review, and I have yet to read the greatly expanded new Sterling edition, but maybe I can sum up my feelings for the great San Franciscan as follows:
To George Sterling
master poet, dean of the California Romantics
Permeable membrane, skin for comets
to spear through, transom for the outflung cosmos
and brainvault sky reciprocally to range
strange to’s and fro’s, apostle of osmosis,
to young poets all a well-stocked hall of grange,
you swept both star and starfish into your dragnet:
a fisher of men, or of ghostly celestial posers
you’d someday land and render one true gnosis.
The bite of liquor likelier to betray you,
you sought Earth’s core star, jewel and magnetic geode
far richer than your laurels of Tamalpais:
but could such molten crystal robes array you?
At last, by the lodestone summons mesmerized,
you ate of the rapture capsule, and did silently implode.
