‘Silver Bridge in a Broken Sky’

Dreams of Nineveh by Robert E. Howard

Reading from a Word from the Outer Dark, pages 61-63

Dreams of Nineveh is my favorite Robert E. Howard poem, focusing as it does on one of my favorite ancient empires, the Assyrian, which rose twice, once from dust and once from ruin, as a hero empire, led by absolute hero kings who have much in common with Howard’s Kull and Conan, overwrought dynamos at the helms of overextended polities.

I don’t understand poetics, so in my gropings crudely quantify the verses of this panoramic poem:

Five four-line verses in the ABAB rhyming pattern comprise the opening of the poem; verse four follows:

Death fires rise in the desert sky
Where the armies of Sargon reeled;
And though her people still sell and buy,
Nineveh’s doom is still set and sealed.

Prior to this the reader is treated to the scope of civilized life, from the “Red-lipped slaves that the ancients buy,” that herald the high point of a civilization, when those people at its margins are sucked in and devoured, used, savored and discarded, to, “Hawk-eyed tribes on the desert trail,” a sign of human nature, earthly rhythm and the godly cosmos converging to bring the curtain down on another of man’s arrogant strands of hubris named civilizations, those ghastly experiments in converting humans to resources which herald man’s attempt to become God, all of which fail in cycles so timely as to suggest that our planet breathes civilizations according to some orbital design.

The sixth and seven verses are closer to epic, rising in timbre and lowering in gravity, each of seven lines, with the last four lines of the first epic verse standing out:

And starred our throne with silver nails of pride,
Our horses’ hoofs were shod with brazen fears:
We laved our hands in blood and iron tears,
And laughed to hear how shackled kings had died.

Howard builds his panorama of empire extinguished with an apex verse of eight lines, and then finished with a couplet of faded finality.

It is this reader’s sense that the deep sense of gulfs in time, space, consciousness and malevolence which shadow, shroud and veil his many weirdly heroic tales in a sense of the ironic iconic, bluing his protagonists with the chaff of shattered civilizations serving as the yarn-spinners brazier, has managed to impart a greater mythic sense to otherwise myopic tales of gritty daring with a higher purpose, unspoken, but uncluttered, there for the seeking.

(c) 2018 James LaFond