A Rumored City

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

I think it must have been in the eight grade. Our school had an English text book festooned with works that the people responsible for text books considered "high-literature". Remarkably you had extracts from Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies--I defy any American reader to come forward with a claim that they have actually read this--juxtaposed with Wordsworth's Daffodils. The next page would invariably have a scene from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (with a donkey headed mortal beautifully sketched) and on the adjacent page would be this poem:

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky. suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

This is Houseman of course. The pleasure and thrill this poem would give me as a young boy is indescribable. I'd imagine myself, tall and noble, fighting for a lost cause. The last line: And saved the sum of things for pay didn't seem to matter. After all it was a just cause.

Thirty years on when I read about Blackwater (or whatever they're now called) somehow the allure and mystique is lost. I wonder if a hundred years from now when a bookish, shy, thirteen year old reads about the exploits of Blackwater, will his heart swell and fill with longing as mine did all those years ago?

Posted at 10:39AM Jun 03, 2009 by Horatio in General  |  Comments[0]