I know I know what your thinking; isn't this just a bit of plagarism? I mean, this poem is just the text of Mountains of Madness, the H.P. Lovecraft novel. That position overlooks the edits and alterations that have been made to the text. Perhaps the biggest job was cutting out the second and third adjectives and adverbs cluttering the text. Think what you will about Lovecraft's racism, as a writer he had a vivid sense of the motion of a text, and the affects that could be achieved by that motion. He also either did not trust himself, and tarted everything up with unnecessary flourishes and 'color' or he was a big windbag.
Bob Ducca is a very inspirational man and if you google his name I'm sure you'll find some fitting introduction to his wisdom. When I hear him reach his poetry my head swims and for a moment I feel I am back among the smoke and street-cars of 20's Paris.
Parable of Hope for Bob Ducca from H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness
Arranged by Michael Newton
I
We had risen Gradually
Flying over the higher foothills and along
Towards the relatively low pass
As we advanced We occasionally looked down
The terrain the crevasses the glaciers, wind-bared passes,
and the other bad spots
mystery beckoning in the sea of sky
archaic myths the winds swept in
the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths
the touch of evil glimpsed betwixt their sound
as complex and unplaceable
As any of the other dark impressions.
no human eye had ever gazed those mountains of madness.
Unable to speak behold that realm
Disbelief in senses Finally saw
fiendish violation of known natural law
II
long before we had passed the great star
and reached our plane
these foothills black, ruin-crusted slopes reared Against the east,
reminding us of those strange Asian paintings
And Nicholas Roerch;
We could not face without panic
The prospect of again sailing by
Those cave-mouths where the wind made sounds
Keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch We made takeoff Over the nightmare city The primal Cyclopean masonry spread
as it had done when we first saw it
and we began rising and turning
The ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things
I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me,
And stared at the reddish farther sky Betwixt the walls of the pass,
Wishing I had wax-stopped ears Looking back,
Ahead, sidewise, and upward Began shrieking
Mad Close to disaster
(What final horror made him scream so insanely?)
III
Hinting that the final horror was a mirage…
Single, fantastic, daemoniac glimpse
Among the churning clouds
Memory had chance to draw
black pit, cavern rim, five dimensions, windowless solids, nameless cylinder, elder pharos, Yog-Sothoth, primal-white jelly, in darkness, out of space, wings, eyes, moon-ladder, the original, eternal, undying,
When fully himself he repudiates all this,
Attributes it to his curious and macabre reading…
But the higher sky was surely vaporous
And swirls of ice-dust do take strange forms,
And Imagination can sometimes be reflected,
Refracted, and magnified in
Layers of restless cloud,
But he never could have seen so much in one instant.
At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word.
