Utente:JhonSavor/Sandbox25

Poesie che Robert Ervin Howard ha composto con protagonista lo spadaccino puritano Solomon Kane. Tutte e tre sono state pubblicate successivamente alla morte dell'autore, avvenuta l'11 Giugno 1936 a Cross Plains, Texas.

https://spraguedecampfan.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/the-3-solomon-kane-poems-reviewed-by-frank-coffman/

Per formattare i testi delle poesie: L'infinito

http://www.ilpalindromo.it/store-art-gallery/Solomon-Kane-La-saga-completa

https://www.horrormagazine.it/14683/il-palindromo-presenta-solomon-kane-la-saga-completa

Il ritorno a casa di Solomon Kane

Il ritorno a casa di Solomon Kane
Titolo originale	Solomon Kane’s Homecoming
1ª ed. originale	1936
1ª ed. italiana	1979
Genere	Poesia
Lingua originale	inglese
Ambientazione	Inghilterra
Protagonisti	Solomon Kane
Serie	Solomon Kane

Storia editoriale

https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/opere/NILF1039422/la-corona-di-asa/

Solomon Kane ritorna a casa (Solomon Kane's Homecoming in Fanciful Tales of Space and Time, 1936)

“Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” was first published in Fanciful Tales, Fall 1936. There is a brief mention of REH’s death on the page printing this poem. This poem has appeared in every Solomon Kane collection.

There is a variant version of “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming.” It was originally published in The Howard Collector #15. It has been reprinted several times. The easiest to find version is probably in The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Ballantine Books (Del Rey), 2004.

Chronologically this poem comes after “The Children of Asshur.” Per Glenn Lord: “After many a year away, Kane returns to his hometown of Devon. The year is 1610.”

Testo

The white gulls wheeled above the cliffs,

the air was slashed with foam,

The long tides moaned along the strand

when Solomon Kane came home.

He walked in silence strange and dazed

through the little Devon town,

His gaze, like a ghost’s come back to life,

roamed up the streets and down.

The people followed wonderingly

to mark his spectral stare,

And in the tavern silently

they thronged about him there.

He heard as a man hears in a dream

the worn old rafters creak,

And Solomon lifted his drinking-jack

and spoke as a ghost might speak:

“There sat Sir Richard Grenville once;

in smoke and flame he passed,

“And we were one to fifty-three,

but we gave them blast for blast.

“From crimson dawn to crimson dawn,

we held the Dons at bay.

“The dead lay littered on our decks,

our masts were shot away.

“We beat them back with broken blades,

till crimson ran the tide;

“Death thundered in the cannon smoke

when Richard Grenville died.

“We should have blown her hull apart

and sunk beneath the Main.”

The people saw upon his wrists

the scars of the racks of Spain.

“Where is Bess?” said Solomon Kane.

“Woe that I caused her tears.”

“In the quiet churchyard by the sea

she has slept these seven years.”

The sea-wind moaned at the window-pane,

and Solomon bowed his head.

“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,

and the fairest fade,” he said.

His eyes were mystical deep pools

that drowned unearthly things,

And Solomon lifted up his head

and spoke of his wanderings.

“Mine eyes have looked on sorcery

in the dark and naked lands,

“Horror born of the jungle gloom

and death on the pathless sands.

“And I have known a deathless queen

in a city old as Death,

“Where towering pyramids of skulls

her glory witnesseth.

“Her kiss was like an adder’s fang,

with the sweetness Lilith had,

“And her red-eyed vassals howled for blood

in that City of the Mad.

“And I have slain a vampire shape

that sucked a black king white,

“And I have roamed through grisly hills

where dead men walked at night.

“And I have seen heads fall like fruit

in the slaver’s barracoon,

“And I have seen winged demons fly

all naked in the moon.

“My feet are weary of wandering

and age comes on apace;

“I fain would dwell in Devon now,

forever in my place.”

The howling of the ocean pack

came whistling down the gale,

And Solomon Kane threw up his head

like a hound that snuffs a trail.

A-down the wind like a running pack

the hounds of the ocean bayed,

And Solomon Kane rose up again

and girt his Spanish blade.

In his strange cold eyes a vagrant gleam

grew wayward and blind and bright,

And Solomon put the people by

and went into the night.

A wild moon rode the wild white clouds,

the waves in white crests flowed,

When Solomon Kane went forth again

and no man knew his road.

They glimpsed him etched against the moon,

where clouds on hilltop thinned;

They heard an eery echoed call

that whistled down the wind.

Critica

A Review of “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” by Frank Coffman

“Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” is a poem meant to be the summary of and epilogue to his adventures chronicled in Howard’s prose and narrative poetry about the character. As such, it reads like a list of what movie and television script writers call “loglines.”

The brief, within-one-stanza outlines given for several micro-synopses of some of Kanes adventures, follow a longer and more detailed synopsis of the death of Grenville which is given two stanzas. Kane’s learning of the death of Bess hints at a bit of backstory, as well as the strongest thematic note in the poem: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, / and the fairest fade,” he said. The theme of Transience is one that runs throughout Howard’s work.

Howard also manages, as almost always, to fill this narrative with drama and pace. We move quickly through Kanes several adventures with the brief presentation of details, meanwhile being—as would be his audience—amazed by, not only the “realistic” elements of adventure (the dangers and toll of battle), but, moreso, the clearly supernatural elements: sorcery, deathless queen, pyramids of skulls, City of the Mad, vampire, dead men [walking], winged demons…

Yet even though he attests that he is “weary of wandering,” he takes his leave and ventures forth again into the unknown.

A-down the wind like a running pack

    the hounds of the ocean bayed,

And Solomon Kane rose up again

    and girt his Spanish blade.

In his strange cold eyes a vagrant gleam

    grew wayward and blind and bright,

And Solomon put the people by

    and went into the night.

With the lovely metaphor of the “hounds of the ocean” baying for him to return to sea. He girds on once more his “Spanish blade” and, with the “vagrant gleam” heads off on the road that “no man [knows].” Much like the restless Odysseus/Ulysses, who, as Tennyson wrote, “[could] not rest from wandering, we have Solomon Kane, even in his agonizing weariness, departing again—recognizing that his endless until a very end.

Formally, the poem is what might be called a “Double Ballad” in its stanza pattern. The ballad of folk and oral tradition has the same rhyme scheme and general rhythm: 4343 accents in four lines and ABCB rhyme scheme with only the short lines rhyming. Howard doubles this and also makes his 8-line stanzas Literary Ballads, rather than Traditional or Folk Ballads by using a fairly even iambic meter for the verses. As with all of his work—and the work of any good poet using formal meter—he inserts variations into several lines to guard against a too-regular meter from cloying or becoming monotonous. Many lines have anapestic substitution: uu/ for the iambic u/. The last stanza is perfectly iambic, but a good example of variation is in stanza 10:

A-down the wind like a running pack

    the hounds of the ocean bayed,

And Solomon Kane rose up again

    and girt his Spanish blade.

In his strange cold eyes a vagrant gleam

    grew wayward and blind and bright,

And Solomon put the people by

    and went into the night.

These lines would SCAN (showing the meter) as follows (substituted anapestic “feet” are in bold):

u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ u/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/ u/ u/ u/

This shows anapestic substitution in six of the eight lines of the stanza. Note also that Howard varies the position of the substituted metrical “foot”—also the mark of a skilled versifier.

All in all, another excellently wrought poem. Howard was a poetic genius whose skill at formalist versification and the use of the narrative mode surpassed most of the speculative poets of his—or any other—day.

Adattamenti

• Un audiolibro del 2013 della poesia Solomon Kane's Homecoming letta da Glenn Hascall.

Marvel Comics adapted the poem in The Savage Sword of Conan #20. The adaptation was by Roy Thomas, Virglio Redondo, and Rudy Nebres. It was adapted a second time in The Sword of Solomon Kane #6. REH’s text was used alongside art by Sandy Plunkett and Al Williamson.

Data	Edizione inglese	TItolo	Titolo italiano	Sceneggiatura	Disegni	Colori	Copertina	Prima edizione italiana	Data italiana
Luglio 1977	Savage Sword of Conan 20	Solomon Kane's Homecoming	Il ritorno a casa di Solomon Kane	Roy Thomas	Virgilio Redondo	Bianco e nero	Earl Norem	La Saga di Solomon Kane 1 (Panini Comics)	Ottobre 2017
Luglio 1986	The Sword of Solomon Kane 6	Solomon Kane's Homecoming	Solomon Kane torna a casa	R. E.Howard (autore della poesia originale)	Sandy Plunkett	n/a	Dan Green	Conan il Barbaro 68 (Panini Comics)	Gennaio 1995
Luglio 1989	Savage Sword of Conan 162	Solomon Kane's Homecoming	Solomon Kane ritorna a casa	Steve Carr	Steve Carr	Bianco e nero	Dorian Vallejo	La Spada Selvaggia di Conan 97 (Panini Comics)	Gennaio 1995

L'unica macchia nera

L'unica macchia nera
Titolo originale	The One Black Stain
1ª ed. originale	1962
1ª ed. italiana	1979
Genere	Poesia
Lingua originale	inglese
Ambientazione	Puerto San Julián, Patagonia
Protagonisti	Solomon Kane
Antagonisti	Francis Drake
Altri personaggi	Thomas Doughty
Serie	Solomon Kane

Storia editoriale

https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/opere/NILF1039414/la-macchia-nera/

L'unica macchia nera (The One Black Stain in The Howard Collector, 1962)

This poem first appeared in The Howard Collector V1N2 Spring, 1962. A note acknowledges that the poem was from “the Barlow microfilm.” R. H. Barlow was a superfan of H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales writers. Mr. Barlow was directly responsible for preserving several of REH’s poems. He is deserving of a whole article and much thanks but that will have to be done another day. For now, I point you to his Wikipedia article. Barlow committed suicide due to society’s repression of homosexuals. Sadly, the progress made since Barlow’s time is in danger of being reversed.

“The One Black Stain” next appeared in Red Shadows, Donald M. Grant, 1968. In this book’s introduction Glenn Lord states: “A strip of microfilm from the effects of the late R. H. Barlow yielded the next Kane item: the poem, “The One Black Stain,” which appeared in 1962 in an amateur journal, The Howard Collector.” Why this poem was left out of the Centaur Press Solomon Kane paperback books is a real puzzle. The poem did appear in the Bantam and Baen paperbacks.

Chronologically this poem comes after “The Moon of Skulls.” Per Glenn Lord: “After returning Marylin to England, Kane accompanies Sir Francis Drake on his freebooting voyages to the New World (1566-72). It was during this time that Kane learned somewhat of craft-fighting Indians in Darien. He was likewise with Drake, on the latter’s globe-girding voyage, and, at St. Julian’s Bay (Patagonia, June 1577)…”

Testo

They carried him out on the barren sand where the rebel captains died; Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand as Magellan reared them on the strand, And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land wail to the lonely tide.

Drake faced them all like a lion at bay, with his lion head upflung: "Dare ye my word of law defy, to say this traitor shall not die?" And his captains dared not meet his eye but each man held his tongue.

Solomon Kane stood forth alone, grim man of sober face: "Worthy of death he may well be, but the trial ye held was mockery, "Ye hid your spite in a travesty where justice hid her face.

"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 the law."

Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake. "Puritan knave!" swore he. "Headsman! Give him the axe instead! He shall strike off yon traitor's head!" Solomon folded his arms and said, darkly and somberly:

"I am no slave for your butcher's work." "Bind him with triple strands!" Drake roared and the men obeyed, Hesitantly, as if afraid, But Kane moved not as they took his blade and pinioned his iron hands.

They bent the doomed man over to his knees, the man who was to die; They saw his lips in a strange smile bend, one last long look they saw him send, At Drake his judge and his one time friend who dared not meet his eye.

The axe flashed silver in the sun, a red arch slashed the sand; A voice cried out as the head fell clear, and the watchers flinched in sudden fear, Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near above the lonely strand.

"This be every traitor's end!" Drake cried, and yet again. Slowly his captains turned and went and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent Than where the cold scorn with anger blent in the eyes of Solomon Kane.

Night fell on the crawling waves; the admiral's door was closed; Solomon lay in the stenching hold; his irons clashed as the ship rolled. And his guard, grown weary and overbold, lay down his pipe and dozed.

He woke with a hand at his corded throat that gripped him like a vise; Trembling he yielded up the key, and the somber Puritan stood free, His cold eyes gleaming murderously with the wrath that is slow to rise.

Unseen, to the admiral's door, went Solomon Kane from the guard, Through the night and silence of the ship, the guard's keen dagger in his grip; No man of the dull crew saw him slip through the door unbarred.

Drake at the table sat alone, his face sunk in his hands; He looked up, as from sleeping -- but his eyes were blank with weeping As if he saw not, creeping, death's swiftly flowing sands.

He reached no hand for gun or blade to halt the hand of Kane, Nor even seemed to hear or see, lost in black mists of memory, Love turned to hate and treachery, and bitter, cankering pain.

A moment Solomon Kane stood there, the dagger poised before, As a condor stoops above a bird, and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred And Kane went forth without a word and closed the cabin door.

Critica

A Review of Robert E. Howard’s “The One Black Stain” by Frank Coffman

Robert E. Howard’s poem, “The One Black Stain,” is a work proving the young man’s mastery of poetic form and sound. It also exemplifies Howard’s love of history and real historical subjects to ground his fictional work—both in prose and poetic forms.

The poem recounts the execution of Sir Thomas Doughty by Sir Francis Drake—with the fictional addition of the character of Solomon Kane, not only at the scene, but giving his objections to the execution to the extent that Drake has Kane arrested and bound belowdecks. Kane, of course, then gets free of his bonds, helped by a sleeping guard and confronts Drake threateningly—before disappearing into the night at the poem’s conclusion. Thematically, it demonstrates a couple characteristics of the character of Kane: 1) his hatred of injustice (and, perhaps specifically, of authority abused); 2) though his “wrath” is “slow to rise,” it reinforces the lethal volatility of his temper.

Typical of Howard who had become a master of the narrative poem—an art that fell away from popularity among “free verse” and other “realist/modern” poets in the later 20th c. and has only in the past few decades seen a true revival—the poem is a variation of the ballad form, due to its regularity of rhythm of the type known as the “literary ballad” (as opposed to the “folk ballad” or “ballad of tradition” that has been the standard in Western language narrative poetics for over 800 years).

The poem is an expanded “Long-line Ballad” (as I have termed it in my Robert E. Howard: Selected Poems and elsewhere). Rather than the 4343 accent pattern of the traditional ballad and the normal iambic alternation of tetrameter and trimeter lines, Howard uses two 7-beat lines and one 8-beat central line in his three-line stanzas, He uses multiple internal rhymes in the “long segments.” In this poem, we might divide each stanza for the 7-8-7 accent tercets into two parts—but with much variation in the essentially iambic rhythm, often substituting an anapestic foot uu/ for the iamb or inverting the iamb u/ into a trochee /u or leaving off an initial unstressed syllable in the line (acephalous/ “headless” iambic foot = / rather than u/) for metrical variation. The basic pattern of accents and rhymes is as follows:

Basic Meter (with many variations, as noted above: u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic trimeter 7 accents total u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic tetrameter 8 accents total u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic trimeter 7 accents total

Rhyme Scheme (showing the typical line divisions): They carried him out on the barren sand 4 A where the rebel captains died; 3 B Where the grim grey rotting gibbets stand 4 A as Magellan reared them on the strand, 4 A And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land 4 A wail to the lonely tide. 3 B

While this is not an especially difficult rhythm to achieve, the necessity for all the internal rhyming is daunting and very difficult to achieve. That fact and the typical narrative power of Howard’s verses and compact storytelling make me rank this as one of Howard’s best poetic works.

Adattamenti

Marvel Comics adapted the poem in The Savage Sword of Conan #62. There was a one-page introduction by Louise Jones and six pages of art by David Wenzel. This adaptation was reprinted in the Dark Horse, The Saga of Solomon Kane, omnibus collection.

Data	Edizione inglese	TItolo	Titolo italiano	Sceneggiatura	Disegni	Colori	Copertina	Prima edizione italiana	Data italiana
Marzo 1981	Savage Sword of Conan 62	The One Black Stain	L'unica macchia nera	R. E.Howard (autore della poesia originale)	David Wenzel	Bianco e nero	David Mattingly	La Saga di Solomon Kane 2 (Panini Comics)	Giugno 2018

Il ritorno di sir Richard Grenville

Il ritorno di sir Richard Grenville
Titolo originale	The Return of Sir Richard Grenville
1ª ed. originale	1968
1ª ed. italiana	1979
Genere	Poesia
Lingua originale	inglese
Ambientazione	Africa (ipotesi del curatore Glenn Lord)
Protagonisti	Solomon Kane
Coprotagonisti	Richard Grenville
Antagonisti	Una tribù di cannibali
Serie	Solomon Kane

Storia editoriale

https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/opere/NILF1039418/il-ritorno-di-sir-richard-grenville/

“The Return of Sir Richard Grenville” appeared in all the various Solomon Kane collections. Marvel Comics did an adaptation in The Savage Sword of Conan #41. The adaptation is by Roy Thomas and David Wenzel. It was also reprinted in the Dark Horse Solomon Kane omnibus collection titled The Saga of Solomon Kane.

Chronologically this poem comes after “Hawk of Basti.” Per Glenn Lord: “Kane finds himself in cannibal country.”

• Il ritorno di sir Richard Grenville (The Return of Sir Richard Grenville in Red Shadows,1968)

Testo

One slept beneath the branches dim, Cloaked in the crawling mist, And Richard Grenville came to him And plucked him by the wrist.

No nightwind shook the forest deep Where the shadows of Doom were spread, And Solomon Kane awoke from sleep And looked upon the dead.

He spake in wonder, not in fear: "How walks a man who died? "Friend of old times, what do ye here, "Long fallen at my side?"

"Rise up, rise up," Sir Richard said, "The hounds of doom are free; "The slayers come to take your head "To hang on the ju-ju tree.

"Swift feet press the jungle mud "Where the shadows are grim and stark, "And naked men who pant for blood "Are racing through the dark."

And Solomon rose and bared his sword, And swift as tongue could tell, The dark spewed forth a painted horde Like shadows out of Hell.

His pistols thundered in the night, And in that burst of flame He saw red eyes with hate alight, And on the figures came.

His sword was like a cobra's stroke And death hummed in its tune; His arm was steel and knotted oak Beneath the rising moon.

But by him sang another sword, And a great form roared and thrust, And dropped like leaves the screaming horde To writhe in bloody dust.

Silent as death their charge had been, Silent as night they fled; And in the trampled glade was seen Only the torn dead.

And Solomon turned with outstretched hand, Then halted suddenly, For no man stood with naked brand Beneath the moon-lit tree.

Critica

A Review of “The Return of Sir Richard Grenville” by Frank Coffman

Robert E. Howard’s poem, “The Return of Sir Richard Grenville,” is a rare type of ghost story in that it presents us with the “Helpful Ghost.” As with all modern literature in the speculative genres, the roots of story motifs and plot elements are found in the folkloric, legendary, and mythic tales of the past.

With respect to folktales, the standard source for story elements in the world’s oral traditions is Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature, a monumental six-volume work collected by the eminent folklorist from Indiana University and his team of scholars. It is a huge decimal outline of the motifs (the smallest elements of story structure, building blocks of narrative) of the world’s folk-oral “illiterature.”

With respect to this poem, we find motifs: E363 Ghost returns to aid living and its sub-varieties: E363.1 Ghost aids living in emergency; E363.2 Ghost returns to protect the living; and E363.3 Ghost warns the living. Of course, we also have the situation where the ghost manifests with the ability to perform the physical action of swordplay and slaying of the physical attackers.

In typical Howard fashion, the use of figurative language—especially metaphor and simile and animation (giving living qualities to the inanimate) serve to enliven the story. Howard’s preferred poetic mode was most certainly the narrative, and this story poem has the pace and “action packing” typical of his prose tales as well. In fact, as with good ballads, the compactness and fast pace of the story details compresses Howard’s vision into a furious flurry of activity. After the dialogue of the opening, the attackers come on immediately and are just as soon dispatched.

Howard begins to animate the tale with the “crawling mist” in stanza one. Of course Solomon Kane “[speaks] in wonder, not in fear” as he inquires why the ghost of his old friend has awakened him. He is quickly told that the metaphoric “hounds of doom” are coming. Soon, the “shadows out of Hell” arrive.

Kane’s sword “was like a cobra’s stike” and personified “death hummed in its tune. Metaphorically Kane’s “arm was steel and knotted oak” (a bit overdone—Which was it, Bob? Steel? or Knotted Oak?—a definite mixed metaphor here).

His task accomplished in saving Kane, the ghost of Grenville disappears—as it the common wont of ghosts.

The poem, structurally, is a typical instance of the Literary Ballad, Howard’s favorite narrative form (although used in various incarnations and arrangements). The rhyme scheme of ABAB in each stanza is typical of the literary variant of the Traditional or Folk Ballad, rhyming more fully that the traditional form’s ABCB. And rather than a 4343 accentual metrical pattern, Howard’s base is more regular iambic in tetrameters and trimeters in the odd and even lines, respectively—although Howard does not stick to the perfect pattern except in stanzas 7 and 8:

His pistols thundered in the night, And in that burst of flame He saw red eyes with hate alight, And on the figures came.

His sword was like a cobra’s stroke And death hummed in its tune; His arm was steel and knotted oak Beneath the rising moon.

In each of the other stanzas of the poem, Howard throws in an irregular foot—usually an anapest for an iamb, as in stanza two:

No nightwind shook the forest deep Where the shadows of Doom were spread, And Solomon Kane awoke from sleep And looked upon the dead.

The anapest substitutions are in lines 2 and 3: uu/ uu/ u/ u/ uu/ u/ u/

An example of an inverted metrical foot, trochee/trochaic foot for iamb/iambic is in line 2 of stanza 1:

One slept beneath the branches dim, Cloaked in the crawling mist, And Richard Grenville came to him And plucked him by the wrist. /u u/ u/

Another line that noticeably breaks the metrical base pattern is the last line of the penultimate stanza (which also has inverted feet [trochees for iambs] in lines one and two:

Silent as death their charge had been, Silent as night they fled; And in the trampled glade was seen Only the torn dead. /u u/ u/ u/ /u u/ u/ u/ u/ u/ u/ /u u / /

In the last line, Howard ends with two strong accents, omitting the unaccented syllable of the last foot. The effect of the two heavy stressed syllables at the end reinforces and gives impact to the line.

The poem is yet another fine example of Robert E. Howard’s narrative and poetic genius. Through only the first 25 years of his life, he had become a master of the ballad and other forms and had developed his ear for poetic and musically rhythmic language.

Adattamenti

Data	Edizione inglese	TItolo	Titolo italiano	Sceneggiatura	Disegni	Colori	Copertina	Prima edizione italiana	Data italiana
Giugno 1979	Savage Sword of Conan 41	The Return of Sir Richard Grenville	Il ritorno di Sir Richard Grenville	Roy Thomas	David Wenzel	Bianco e nero	Earl Norem	La Saga di Solomon Kane 2 (Panini Comics)	Giugno 2018

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