It is hard to know quite what to make of this stylishly subversive poem by the American poet John Crowe Ransom (see also weeks 50, 114 and 223). We like to believe, and perhaps need to believe, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, and by and large literature supports us in this belief, or possibly delusion: we take it for granted, for example, that whatever happens in reality, Macbeth is not going to chop Macduff into pieces and continue with his blood-soaked tyranny nor, to take the literary register down just a notch, that Jack Reacher is going to get killed in the last chapter leaving the wicked to flourish like the green bay tree. But Ransom turns all this on its head, giving us a pathetically ineffectual hero who talks the talk to the point of braggadocio but is total incapable of walking the walk, losing every fight he engages in as he becomes more and more disfigured and dismembered.

I am tempted to see the poem as a parable of how people may start off in life full of idealistic zeal and a desire to change the world, but are gradually forced to compromise or even abandon those ideals and end up defending no more than their own small circle of light, till their death extinguishes that too. And yet the poem is not entirely downbeat: Captain Carpenter remains ‘an honest gentleman’, fighting to the end in a manner reminiscent of the hero in the old ballad who when his legs were hewn off fought on ‘upon the stumps’. And it is clear that though evil may triumph, the poet’s sympathies remain with the ineffectual but uncompromising Captain.

Captain Carpenter

Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose for evermore.

Captain Carpenter mounted up one day
And rode straightway into a stranger rogue
That looked unchristian but be that as may
The Captain did not wait upon prologue.

But drew upon him out of his great heart
The other swung against him with a club
And cracked his two legs at the shinny part
And let him roll and stick like any tub.

Captain Carpenter rode many a time
From male and female took he sundry harms
He met the wife of Satan crying ‘I’m
The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms’.

Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind
I wish he had delivered half his blows
But where she should have made off like a hind
The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.

And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears
To a black devil that used him in this wise
O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years
Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.

Captain Carpenter got up on his roan
And sallied from the gate in hell’s despite
I heard him asking in the grimmest tone
If any enemy yet there was to fight?

‘To any adversary it is fame
If he risk to be wounded by my tongue
Or burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame
Such are the perils he is cast among

But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose
Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose’.

It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady’s bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind
He wished to get his trophy and depart
With gentle apology and touch refined
He pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.

God’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

But God’s deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
That got the Captain finally on his back
And took the red red vitals of his heart
And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

John Crowe Ransom