Lilith; A Dramatic Poem

A demon out of Hebrew legend haunts a medieval France of castle gardens and snow-bound fortresses, ruining every man who wants her, in George Sterling's 1919 verse drama Lilith.

Prince Tancred meets her as a young man, and she persuades him to break open his mother's tomb for the ruby buried there. His father dies of the shock, and the damage spreads outward across forty years: a friend lost at a lakeside, a shepherd's daughter loved and then abandoned, and at last an old man broken on the rack in a mountain keep while she turns to the next admirer.

George Sterling (1869–1926) was the presiding poet of bohemian California – a fixture of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, close friend of Jack London, protégé of Ambrose Bierce, and early mentor to Clark Ashton Smith. He worked on this blank-verse play between 1904 and 1918, published it in 1919 in an edition of only 300 copies, and rated it the best thing he ever did. Reviewers of the day largely agreed with him. Sterling took his Lilith as a figure of temptation, and he follows her through four acts and forty years without ever letting his prince off.