‘Cold Scorn with Anger Blent’

The One Black Stain by Robert E. Howard, Impressions by James LaFond

Kane paints a picture of the hero, Sir Francis Drake, turned dastard as he has a rival executed rather than dispatching him with his own hand. This is a retrospective poetic explanation of Drake’s turn away from the seafarer’s life. In other portions of his career the reader is treated to Kane’s disillusion with the System of English Monarchy relieving men of their moral responsibility and heroic status.

All three of Howard’s Kane poems were unsold but should have been used as chapter headings or prologues to his major stories, as they paint a word picture of Solomon Kane as a murderer wandering the world seeking vengeance for others to erase his own stain, at the same time ruing the stain upon his one-time leader’s name and mourning the memory of a real historic hero who was done in to obscurity by Drake and his co-crooks in The Return of Sir Richard Grenville, linked below as an audio.

The One Black Stain consists of fifteen verses of three couplets each and has the effect of elevating Kane to the seat of Judge over Men with Bloody Hands.

Again, in the single verse excerpted below, Kane, the judge, speaks from beyond the bounds of the social system, to the Aryan heart of the besmirched hero Drake, tempting this reader to see Drake as an aspect of Howard’s obsession with ancestral memory:

"More of the man had ye been,
On deck your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath,
And openly cleave him to the teeth—
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of Law."

In Kane’s words we understand why the hero prefers a sword above all else—a clean, proximate weapon of the actionist, as Burton said, “the queen of arms,” with the wielder thus king of actors, the sword being a weapon of high risk—and reinforcing the notion that God is and must be outside the human system, not a petty actor within the social strata, but an omniscience from without, compelling redress by agents of his choosing.

(c) 2018  James LaFond