From “Fungi of Yuggoth” [XIV. Star-winds]
It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But showing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney smoke whirls round with alien grace,
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.
This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon’s continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to me convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 24, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“XIV. Star-winds” was first published in the science-fiction periodical Weird Tales, Vol. XVI, No. 3 (September 1930) and is part of a thirty-six-sonnet sequence. About the sequence, Ed Simon, public humanities special faculty in the English department of Carnegie Mellon University, writes in his essay, “The Unlikely Verse of H. P. Lovecraft,” published in The Hedgehog Review (July 2024), “Working within the most venerable form of English poetry, the genre of Surrey and Wyatt, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Lovecraft builds ingenious little fourteen-line mechanisms expressing a ghoulish sensibility. Ostensibly, the cycle recounts the journeys of a man in possession of a volume evocative of the Necronomicon which allows him to travel between parallel realities. However, as in the cosmic horror of his prose works, there is always Lovecraft’s potent anti-vision of a cold and dead universe.”
H. P. Lovecraft
