Robert E. Howard’s Use of Verse in “Men of the Shadows”

by Frank Coffman

In what is either an extended epigram (although quite lengthy to be termed such) or, perhaps more properly, an “introductory” or “prefatory” poem in the Bran Mak Morn tale, “Men of the Shadows,” and also in the internal verses that comprise first, a chant or incantation, and, second, a prophecy, each uttered by the “Wizard” in the story, Robert E. Howard displays his virtuosity with rhymed and metered verse. Interestingly, he diverges in each of these poetic passages from his normal modes of either his typical measure of literary ballad or, more rarely, the sonnet.

Art by Gary Gianni from Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

In the introductory poem, we find Howard’s poetic synopsis and his created view of the mysterious Picts (quite mysterious and much debated in his day; less so after a century of continued research and scholarship). Suffice it to say that Howard’s vision of the Picts as “the first great nation” and “last of the Stone Age men” falls before modern investigation and discovery. As a background for mythic and heroic fiction, of course, it remains perfectly legitimate—even though not historically true.

The actual Picts come quite late upon the scene in the history of humanity. Modern studies have shown them (as has been known for some time) distinct from Gaelic/Celtic culture and language, with the modern DNA analysis indicating a population native to the British Isles from the early Iron Age—and not part of the incursions into Scotland and elsewhere in later centuries. Their interactions with Rome and accounts by Romans—including the likely derivation of the name from picti or “painted ones” (based upon the staining of warriors’ bodies with blue woad and running pretty much naked into battle) and the mystery of their stone fortresses, symbols on megaliths, and virtually complete lack of record of their language, have all added to the mystery.

In Howard’s worldview, we can see the Picts, and their king, Bran Mak Morn, as examples of his views about the barbaric essence of human nature. Hence, his focus in this and other stories of Bran and the Picts as an ancient race, having risen up from primitive barbarism to confront the symbol of “civilization” of the Roman Empire. That clash—between many and various tribes of barbarians and Rome—was, of course, completely real and historically accurate. And there’s no doubt that Hadrian’s Wall was built as a direct reaction to Rome’s inability to venture far into and control what is now Scotland. And the historic Picts were, indeed, the thorn in Rome’s side at that border.

In the third stanza of the introductory poem (see below), Howard also gives the Picts a much broader, indeed an expansive history of migration—again, which is historically not attested and almost certainly not true. In stanza five, we have the curious use of the word “must” (“We are one with the eon’s must…”), which use can only be connected with a rare, tangential meaning for the word: “mold” or “dust” in the sense of detritus or the decomposition of the body.

In the penultimate stanza, there seems a grammatical flaw in the subject-verb connection between “Stonehenge” and “Murmur.” Unless Howard is seeing the “henge” as a plural thing due to the several standing and scattered stones. There are also several places where a comma would be appropriate, but that is minor—due to the fact that they often appear at line endings and those require a brief pausing in such situations at any rate (except for when the line is intended to grammatically run on).

The introductory poem is formally quite interesting as well as being finely wrought. The quatrains that comprise the poem all use iambic trimeter as a base—but with Howard’s customary use of much anapestic variation by substituting the three-syllable foot uu/ for the base dipodic iamb u/. Most interesting is Howard’s alternation of feminine rhymes (lines ending on unaccented syllables) in the odd lines and masculine rhymes (lines ending on accented syllables) in the even lines. He achieves this by using two- or three-syllable words to end lines 1 and 3 of each stanza and monosyllables to end lines 2 and 4 (except in stanza three where line 2 ends with “unknown”—but still a word with stress on the ultimate syllable.

This results in the need for an extra unaccented syllable in the odd lines. Such addition of a syllable is technically called “hypercatalexis” in the language of prosody. Howard also makes use of inverted feet, using the occasional trochee /u in the place of the iamb u/ for metrical variation. He also creates an initial stressed syllable by the use of an “acephalous” (“headless”) iambic foot to begin a line—thus resulting in a lone accent to begin. A scan of the first two stanzas shows Howard’s use of all of these techniques and variations:

uu/u/uu/u anapest | iamb | anapest | hypercatalexis
uu/u/u/ anapest | iamb | iamb
/uu/uu/u trochee | iamb | iamb | hypercatalexis
/uu/u/ acephalous iamb | anapest | iamb

/uu/u/u trochee | iamb | iamb | hypercatalexis
/uu/uu/ trochee | iamb | anapest
u/u/uu/u iamb | iamb | anapest | hypercatalexis
u/uu/u/ iamb | anapest | iamb

The poem doesn’t make use of as much alliteration as Howard usually employs. The best example of this sound effect is in the penultimate stanza: “Stonehenge of long-gone glory / Sombre and lone in the night,…” The repeated Ss and Ls provide a soft, sibilant echo. And the juxtaposition of the more guttural “-gone glory” provide both alliteration and the rounding out of the long O-sounds of these lines with the vowel echoing known as “assonance.”

From the dim red dawn of Creation
From the fogs of timeless Time
Came we, the first great nation,
First on the upward climb.

Savage, untaught, unknowing,
Groping through primitive night,
Yet faintly catching the glowing,
The hint of the coming Light.

Ranging o’er lands untraveled,
Sailing o’er seas unknown
Mazed by world-puzzles unraveled,
Building our land-marks of stone.

Vaguely grasping at glory,
Gazing beyond our ken
Mutely the ages’ story
Rearing on plain and fen.

See, how the Lost Fire smolders,
We are one with the eons’ must.
Nations have trod our shoulders,
Trampling us into the dust.

We, the first of the races,
Linking the Old and New —
Look, where the sea-cloud spaces
Mingle with ocean-blue.

So we have mingled with ages,
And the world-wind our ashes stirs,
Vanished are we from Time’s pages,
Our memory? Wind in the firs.

Stonehenge of long-gone glory
Sombre and lone in the night,
Murmur the age-old story
How we kindled the first of the Light.

Speak night-winds, of man’s creation,
Whisper o’er crag and fen,
The tale of the first great nation,
The last of the Stone Age men.

Art by Gary Gianni from Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

When we shift to the two internal passages of verse, Howard continues to display his versatility with rhyme and meter by shifting to three patterns different from the introductory overview of the emergence of the Picts. We find passages that each present the words of an old Wizard that Bran encounters. In addition to borrowing from the tradition of classical epic and much other heroic poetry, Howard has the old seer use of an epithet in the place of Bran’s name. He calls him “Wolf of the Heather.” This Homeric touch was undoubtedly familiar to Howard. It shows the likely influence of “Hector, Tamer of Horses” or “Zeus, Cloud-Gatherer,” or “Rosy-Fingered Dawn.”

The cryptic brief passage of the Wizard’s first incantation demonstrate great poetic skill. Howard here slips back into his favorite mode of imitation of either the traditional ballad or—more often—a more polished version, usually called “the Literary Ballad.” The eight lines of the incantation (see the following passage of verse) might just as easily have been presented as two ballad quatrains rhymed in the traditional ABCB and with accentual lengths of 4-3-4-3 syllables, respectively. BUT Howard adds the extra touch of adding internal rhyme in the even-numbered lines. The lines are uniformly iambic as a base alternating tetrameter and trimeter. The only variant line is the last in which two dactyls lead to a lone (hypercatalectic, in this case stressed) syllable. The rhyme scheme of the eight lines can be represented as follows (with the doubled letters indicating the internal rhymes):

AA
B
CC
B
DD
E
FF
E

Due to the relatively “Rhyme Poor” nature of English (since we have dropped most of the inflected endings that other Western languages have generally kept), Howard’s use of this “extra” rhyming is a marker of his skill as a verse poet.

“Gaze ye upon the ancient Fire of the Lost Race, Wolf of the Heather! Aai, hai! they say a chief has risen to lead the race onward.”

The wizard stooped above the coals of the fire which had gone out, muttering to himself.

Stirring the coals, mumbling in his white beard, he half droned, half sang a weird chant, of little meaning or rhyme, but with a kind of wild rhythm, remarkably strange and eery.

“O’er lakes agleam the old gods dream;
Ghosts stride the heather dim.
The night winds croon; the eery moon
Slips o’er the ocean’s rim.
From peak to peak the witches shriek.
The gray wolf seeks the height.
Like gold sword sheath, far o’er the heath
Glimmers the wandering light.”

Shortly after this passage, we find the Wizard continuing with different chant, this time seemingly using words as some sort of spell or summoning or, in this case, a sort of invocation for calling forth forgotten knowledge. It seems to me that—as regards both the listing of “ingredients” that are thrown into the fire in a sort of “pyromancy” AND in the meter and pace of the lines to be directly derivative from the famous opening of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Compare the verses below with the lines from “The Bard”:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act. 4, Scene 1

In Howard’s tale, we have:

The ancient stirred the coals, pausing now and then to toss on
them some weird object, keeping time with his motions with his chant.

“Gods of heather, gods of lake,
Bestial fiends of swamp and brake;
White god riding on the moon,
Jackal-jawed, with voice of loon;
Serpentgod whose scaly coils
Grasp the Universe in toils;
See, the Unseen Sages sit;
See the council fires alit.
Sec l stir the glowing coals,
Toss on manes of seven foals
Seven foals all golden shod
From the herds of Alba’s god.
Now in numbers one and six,
Shape and place the magic sticks.
Scented wood brought from afar,
From the land of Morning Star.
Hewn from limbs of sandal-trees,
Brought far o’er the Eastern Seas.
Sea-snakes’ fangs, see now, I fling,
Pinions of a sea-gull’s wing.
Now the magic dust I toss,
Men are shadows, life is dross.
Now the flames crawl, ere they blaze,
Now the smokes rise in a haze.
Fanned by far off ocean-blast
Leaps the tale of distant past.”

The meter of this passage is, yet again, different from what has gone before. These lines INVERT the rhythm that has been the norm and are prosodically described as trochaic tetrameter catalectic (lines of four trochaic feet /u [stressed-unstressed] with a “tailless” final foot—in other words: no final unaccented syllable. Thus, they scan /u/u/u/.

Howard continue with, yet again, a different meter and form:

In and out among the coals licked the thin red flames, now leaping in swift upward spurts, now vanishing, now catching the tinder thrown upon it, with a dry crackle that sounded through the stillness. Wisp of smoke began to curl upward in a mingling, hazy cloud.

“Dimly, dimly glimmers the starlight,
Over the heather-hill, over the vale.
Gods of the Old Land brood o’er the far night,
Things of the Darkness ride on the gale.
Now while the fire smoulders, while smokes enfold it,
Now ere it leap into clear, mystic flame,
Harken once more (else the dark gods withhold it),
Hark to the tale of the race without name.”

The meter here is, at base, a shift to hyperacephalous anapestic tetrameter (four anapests with the first lacking the initial two unaccented syllables, so as to create an initial stress in each line. Lines 2, 6, and 7 fit this pattern exactly. The other lines display metrical variation. But the essential meter scans thusly:

/uu/uu/uu/ [again, the first two syllables of the first anapest are left off, resulting in a hyperacephalus (double headless) anapestic foot—in other words: a single stressed syllable]. This marks the fourth different metrical pattern used by Howard thus far in the poem. There will be a fifth.

These passages of verse end up with a vision of the history of the Picts. The passage that follows several pages later becomes a sort of different divination, resulting in a prophecy for the future of the tribe.

The smoke floated upward, swirling about the wizard; as through a dense fog his fierce yellow eyes peered. As if across far spaces his voice came floating, with a strange impression of disembodiment. With a weird intonation as though the voice were, not the voice or the ancient, but a something detached, a something apart, disembodied ages and not the wizard’s mind, spake through him.
Then, a vague holocaust, in which nations moved and armies and men faded and shifted.
“Rome falls!” suddenly the wizard’s fiercely exultant voice broke the silence. “The Vandal’s foo spurns the Forum. A savage horde marches along the Via Appia. Yellow haired raiders violate the Vestal Virgins. And Rome falls!”
A ferocious yell of triumph went winging up into the night.
“I see Britain beneath the heel of th Norse invaders. I see the Picts trooping down from the mountains. There is rapine, fire and warfare.”
In the fire-fog leaped the face of Bran Mak Morn. “Hale the up-lifter! I see the Pictish nation striding upward toward the new light!

“Wolf on the height
Mocking the night;
Slow comes the light
Of a nation’s new dawn.
Shadow hordes massed
Out of the past.
Fame that shall last
Strides on and on.
Over the vale
Thunders the gale
Bearing the tale
Of a nation up-lifted.
Flee, wolf and kite!
Fame that is bright”

From the east came stealing a dim gray radiance. In the ghostly light Bran Mak Morn’s face showed bronze once more, expressionless, immobile; dark eyes gazing unwaveringly into the lire, seeing there his mighty ambitions, his dreams of empire fading into smoke.

Here again, with yet a fifth! metrical pattern, the formal virtuosity and skill of Robert E. Howard as a writer of traditional rhymed and metered verse is displayed. Here the lines flow in a base meter of dactylic dimeter hypercatalectic (two dactyls /uu, but with the second one truncated to a single stressed syllable, lacking the final two normal unstressed syllables). These very short lines move along at a frenzied pace (one reason Alfred, Lord Tennyson chose dactylic meter for his “The Charge of the Light Brigade”—it approximates the galloping of horses!):

Half a league, half a league /uu/uu
Half a league onward… /uu/u

Cannon to right of them, /uu/uu
Cannon to left of them, /uu/uu
Cannon in front of them /uu/uu
Volleyed and thundered. /uu/u

Tennyson, in his shorter lines is using dactylic dimeter [simple] catalectic (only one syllable omitted from the end of the second dactyl). But, it is entirely possible that Howard was formally inspired by Tennyson’s famous poem. Also of interest, this final chant from the Wizard is a SONNET! The passage is in fourteen lines, rhymed interestingly as follows: AAAB CCCB DDDE FF. The closing couplet of lines nullifies our possible notice that the E-line is unrhymed. My guess is that Howard hoped to find another B-rhyme to follow the Ds, but decided to use the unrhymed line instead—sense triumphing over formal sound effects.
He’d already used “dawn,” which might be the closest rhyme to the notion of some sort of “up-lifting.”

Another, yet highly unlikely and probably accidental connection with Howard’s use of these lines and rhymes is the closeness the first 12 lines come to the Welsh official meter known as Rhupunt. Even with his interest in things Celtic, it is not very probable that Howard would have been aware of—let alone studied the 24 official Welsh meters. But what could be considered internal rhymes, if these lines were combined as follows into longer lines:

“Wolf on the height | Mocking the night; | Slow comes the light | Of a nation’s new dawn.
Shadow hordes massed | Out of the past. | Fame that shall last | Strides on and on.
Over the vale | Thunders the gale | Bearing the tale | Of a nation up-lifted.
Flee, wolf and kite! | Fame that is bright”

This fits the metrical scheme of the Rhupunt which is:

“A line (not a stanza) of three, four, or five sections of four syllables each. Whatever line length is chosen— 12, 16, or 20 syllables—all sections of four, except for the last must rhyme on the fourth syllable. The last section of four syllables carries the main rhyme.”

The first three lines (extended as above), precisely in the second line, fit the 16-syllable pattern of the Rhupunt.

As another example, here is one of my Rhupunt Sonnets (invented form), but done in the shorter, 12-syllable rhyme pattern, rather than the 16:

The Hag of the Mist
(Grwrach y Rhibyn1)
[A variant Italian Sonnet done in the Welsh meter of Rhupunt*]

by Frank Coffman

An awful tryst—Hag of the Mist you chance to meet.
On leather wings, this Terror brings portent of doom.
On foggy night, this awful wight through mists may loom:
Ghastly of face, her form debased, in her you greet
Your likely death. Bereft of breath, your days are done!
And if you hear, as she draws near, Cyhyraeth’s call—
Her ghostly moan—you well may groan before you fall.
Hearing that voice, you have no choice. Of Hope there’s none.

Mere skin and bone, near skeleton when she appears.
Sometimes mere wraith, she’s—by my Faith!—invisible
No form at all, but just a call—you’ll hear it thrice;
Each cry more faint. And there’s no Saint, to quell your fears.
Your kin will grieve. Do not believe She’s mythical.
Come day or night, know well the plight. Your Life’s the price.

Again, it is most unlikely that Howard would have been aware of this, likely accidental, fitting of a Welsh form. But his amazing flexibility and acquired understanding of the nuances of poetic sound are especially well displayed in this short story. Further, Howard was by no means the only author to incorporate verses into his prose fiction. He had contemporary examples in Rudyard Kipling, Talbot Mundy, and several others. And, certainly unbeknownst to him, J. R. R. Tolkien and others “across the pond” were incorporating verse into their fiction as integral parts. This is certainly the case with Howard and his excellent display of poetic command in “Men of the Shadows.”

Art by Gary Gianni from Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

Frank Coffman is about to release his fourth large poetry collection: WHAT THE NIGHT BRINGS. His third collection, ECLIPSE OF THE MOON, has been nominated for The Elgin Award from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. Check out Mind’s Eye Publications: mindseyepublications.com

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Additional information regarding this poetry from the Howard Works website:

Verse from the story “Men of the Shadows” was used to create two separate poems, “Rune,” and “Men of the Shadows.” These poems were originally published in Always Comes Evening, Arkham House, 1957.