“To a Dreamer“

   Poem (24 lines in quatrains); written on April 25, 1920. First published in the Coyote(January 1921); rpt. WT(November 1924).

   The narrator scans the features of a nameless dreamer and wonders where his “dream-steps” have led him. The poem contains the first mentions of such terms (used later in HPL’s stories) as the “peaks of Thok” and the “vaults of Zin”; the “vale of Pnath” is also mentioned, although Pnath had first been coined in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919). HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 4, 1921; AHT) that the poem was founded on an idea occurring among Baudelaire’s notes and jottings (presumably from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry,ed. T.R.Smith [Modern Library, 1919], which HPL owned and which was the source of the epigraph in “Hypnos”).