‘A Hand’

Roses Laughed in Her Pretty Hair by Robert E. Howard

James LaFond's impressions, reading from page 87 of A Word from the Outer Dark

This single verse consists of 10 lines in five rhyming couplets and struck this reader right off as a laugh at the expense of civilized conventions, such as in the soft sarcasm implicit in lines one and two:

A little hand was prettily raised,
Nor ever enough might it be praised.

Howard then goes on to toy with the civility necessitated between men and women of his age and well enough predicts that it would disintegrate under the pressure of the collapsing bones of our civilization and devolve into men going their own way and pursuing their own competitive past times. There was no need for the poet to predict video games, for the men of his time had their own secretive competitions: they played cards; and the poet insinuates that he is not rude enough to tell the young beauty that though her hand is fair, it pales before the winning hand he was dealt on another night.

The rescue of the masculine soul from the pettiness of petite civilization through competitive past times was something more obvious in Howard's day, when men boxed, than it is to today when they are confined in a sedentary social box.

(c) 2018 James LaFond