Monthly Archives: July 2025

Week 665: The Last Hero, by G.K.Chesterton

Posted on by
3

This is a rather strange poem, and really it just won’t do. Chesterton’s idea of a hero is apparently a psychopathic loner who carries off women by force and can relate to his fellow men only when he is in the process of bashing their brains out. If this had been penned by some warrior skald in Viking times, some Egill Skallagrímsson say, I suppose it might be accorded the tolerance of autres temps, autres moeurs, but coming from a rather portly Edwardian gentleman who had a romantic infatuation with swords, it seems a little short of ridiculous. And yet, and yet… in its way it is vivid and eloquent, and has lines that, taken out of their martial context, might appeal even to the dedicated pacifist. ‘I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,/As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.’ Well, that’s certainly the way I want to go, running in my bluebell woods some spring morning when I am a hundred.

The Last Hero

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

The chance of battle changes — so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.
O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown,
You never loved a woman’s smile as I have loved her frown.

The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day,
They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way,
I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, —
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans,
What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?
My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease,
Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.
To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given,
The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.
The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see,
To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me;
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet’s breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.

G.K.Chesterton

Week 664: Los heraldos negros, by César Vallejo

Posted on by
1

This week another rather bleak piece by the strikingly original Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938; see also week 566). It was written at a time of personal crisis, involving the death of his mother, relationship problems, economic hardship and in the face of all these a struggle to retain the deep Catholic faith of his childhood.

It does seem to be a feature of the devout, that having paid what they feel to be their spiritual dues they react to calamity with a sense of personal outrage rather than a weary acceptance of the fact that bad things happen to good people and that’s just the way the world is. Nevertheless, the poem has struck a chord with many readers for the way it expresses the existential bafflement of man trying to make sense of a senseless universe, and for the way in which Vallejo redeems the passivity of his suffering with the defiance of his art. Yep, when the going gets tough, the tough write a poem…

The translation that follows is my own. The word ‘potro’ in line 7 is a bit of a crux here. It can mean ‘colt’ or ‘foal’ but can also mean ‘rack’ (as used for torture). While the rack is an ancient device, having been used by the Greeks, an association with Attila seems unlikely, but a punishment in Attila’s times was certainly to be trampled to death by horses: see for example the Old Norse poem ‘Hamðismál’, in which two brothers Hamðir and Sörli avenge the death of their sister Svanhild who has been executed in this way by Ermanaric, an emperor of the Goths. Thus I have gone with the equine interpretation as seeming to me the more probable, but I would be interested to know how a native Spanish speaker takes this line.

Los heraldos negros

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma… ¡Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son… Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros Atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

Y el hombre… Pobre… ¡pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!

César Vallejo

The black heralds

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!
Blows as from God’s hate, as if beneath them
The undertow of all you ever suffered
Wells up again within you… I don’t know!

They are few, but they are… They scar with their dark trenches
The fiercest faces and the strongest backs.
They are perhaps the steeds of barbarous Attilas
Or the black heralds sent by Death.

They are deep falls that sunder Christ from souls
Whose dear faith is blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloody blows are like the crackling of bread
Left to burn before the oven door.

And man… Poor man! He turns to look, as when
A touch upon the shoulder summons us;
He looks wild-eyed, and all that he has lived
Pools before his gaze to a puddle of guilt.

There are blows in life, so heavy… I don’t know!


Week 663: Two in August, by John Crowe Ransom/The Thatch, by Robert Frost

Posted on by
Reply

This week’s offer is two poems that are strikingly similar in concept, both using the unrest of birds as a trope for marital disharmony, but widely different in style, Ransom’s ornate patrician gravity contrasting with Frost’s plain-spoken simplicity. I like both poems, though my personal kinship would be more with the Frost. Incidentally I would not think that one poem necessarily influenced the other: it seems a thought that could easily occur independently.

Hackberry: a deciduous tree native to North America, producing small berries in autumn that provide food for birds.

Two in August

Two that could not have lived their single lives
As can some husbands and wives
Did something strange: they tensed their vocal cords
And attacked each other with silences and words
Like catapulted stones and arrowed knives.

Dawn was not yet; night is for loving or sleeping,
Sweet dreams or safekeeping;
Yet he of the wide brows that were used to laurel
And she, the famed for gentleness, must quarrel.
Furious both of them, and scared, and weeping.

How sleepers groan, twitch, wake to such a mood
Is not well understood,
Nor why two entities grown almost one
Should rend and murder trying to get undone,
With individual tigers in their blood.

She in terror fled from the marriage chamber
Circuiting the dark rooms like a string of amber
Round and round and back,
And would not light one lamp against the black,
And heard the clock that clanged: Remember, Remember.

And he must tread barefooted the dim lawn,
Soon he was up and gone;
High in the trees the night-mastered birds were crying
With fear upon their tongues, no singing nor flying
Which are their lovely attitudes by dawn.

Whether those bird-cries were of heaven or hell
There is no way to tell;
In the long ditch of darkness the man walked
Under the hackberry trees where the birds talked
With words too sad and strange to syllable.

John Crowe Ransom

The Thatch

Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
Of a certain upper-window light.
The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should see which one would win,
We should see which one would be the first to yield.
The world was a black invisible field.
The rain by rights was snow for cold.
The wind was another layer of mold.
But the strangest thing: in the thick old thatch,
Where summer birds had been given hatch,
Had fed in chorus, and lived to fledge,
Some still were living in hermitage.
And as I passed along the eaves
So low I brushed the straw with my sleeves,
I flushed birds out of hole after hole,
Into the darkness. It grieved my soul,
It started a gried within a grief,
To think their case was beyond relief –
They could not go flying about in search
Of their nest again, nor find a perch.
They must brood where they fell in mulch and mire,
Trusting feathers and inwad fire
Till daylight made it safe for a flyer.
My greater grief was by so much reduced
As I thought of them without nest or roost.
That was how that grief started to melt.
They tell me the cottage where we dwelt,
Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;
Its life of hundreds of years has ended
By letting the rain I knew outdoors
In onto the upper chamber floors.

Robert Frost

Week 662: Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost

Posted on by
Reply

It is easy to take this little poem of Robert Frost’s, justly celebrated for its laconic deftness, as no more than a pithy generalised reflection on human nature and overlook the fact that it is also saying something deeply personal about Frost’s own nature. ‘From what I’ve tasted of desire’ hints at problems with an ardent temperament more fully explored in his poem ‘The Subverted Flower’, while ‘I think I know enough of hate’ echoes his self-description elsewhere as ‘a good hater’. Under the folksy mask Frost was, perhaps more than most poets, a man of lacerating sensitivity, which is not surprising given that he was over forty before he achieved any recognition as a poet and even then had to endure the ill-informed condescension of critics like Edmund Wilson before his reputation became properly established.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost