‘The Song of a Mad Minstrel’, ‘The Tavern’ & ‘Dead Man’s Hate’ – Some Poems by Robert E. Howard.

 

This was originally going to be a post about the REH short tale ‘The Black Stone’; well, that was the plan until I realised that I’d already posted about it, way back in 2022. No worries, I thought to myself, ‘The Little People’ is an intriguing title, I’ll give that a go. And to be honest, it wasn’t a bad tale either; for an entry in a collection of horror stories it certainly didn’t end how I’d expected it to (and that’s not a bad thing). The only problem I had with the tale is that while it’s certainly not a ‘fragment’, a page was missing from REH’s typescript and so ‘The Little People’ has a gap in the middle where the only thing I could gather was that the narrators sister was still annoyed with him. Not a bad tale to read, maybe not one for a whole post here though.

I wasn’t in the mood to be beaten though so I took a chance and decided to do something that I very rarely do, if ever. Yep, I thought I’d read me some poetry :o)

It might be the poetry that I had to study at school and college, it might be any number of things to be honest. The fact is that I can be deep in a journey through Middle Earth and loving every second, my eyes will still glaze over the minute anyone starts giving it some verse, especially Aragorn. I was feeling pretty bloody-minded though (yesterday was a tough one) so I did it anyway and… My eyes still had that habit of trying to skim over the verses but, not so much this time.

In my journey through the ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard’ (Del Rey) I came across the poems ‘The Song of a Mad Minstrel’, ‘The Tavern’ & ‘Dead Man’s Hate’. So like I said, I’m not widely read in REH’s poetry (at all) but it was clear, from this small sample, that Howard was more than happy to sacrifice a little meter, here and there, if it meant that he could show the reader the imagery that he wanted to. This made reading these poems a slightly ‘stumbling’ experience at times although to be fair, I don’t read much poetry at all so maybe I’m just out of practice?

Either way… The tales that REH spins here, and the imagery that he dresses them up in, is more than worth a little awkwardness when reading them. Lets just say that if I’d studied poetry like this at school, this would be a very different blog ;o) Howard loses none of his storytelling ability, jumping to poetry from prose, demonstrating real consistency to leave his reader more than a little unsettled by what they’ve seen.

‘The Song of a Mad Minstrel’ starts off unsettlingly enough but the real terror lies in the journey into insanity that our minstrel took, particularly what they saw at the end.

There were Ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;
There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy face.

Very Lovecraftian in its setting but unmistakably Howard in its energy.

‘The Tavern’ was actually my favourite of the three. Here’s a poem that knows what it needs to do and just gets straight to it; no fuss, no muss. Just the creepiest tavern you ever came across that may do well in clientele (albeit ‘leprous’) but only because it never lets them leave. There are a few pubs like that in London…

And ‘Dead Man’s Hate’ was a little bit flowery for my taste but still came through when it needed to with just the sort of thing that you’d never want to see after a hanging. Especially if the hanged man had previously sworn to kill you. I loved the way that REH presents this tale as a lesson that Adam Brand had to learn, but only the once.

For stronger than death or hempen noose are the fires of a dead man’s hate.

Don’t expect to see too much poetry around these parts, going forwards, but it made for a nice change to find something that worked a little better for me than normal. Here’s to hopefully more to come.