WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Heavens and Earth cover

Heavens and Earth

Chapter 8: SIR JOHN RIMBECK TO THE PRINCESS OF ACRE
By Stephen Vincent Benét
Open in WeRead

About This Book

The collection assembles varied lyric and narrative poems that range from reworkings of classical myths to sharp urban vignettes and satirical sketches of modern life. Several longer pieces retell mythic episodes with vivid, imagistic language, while other poems observe city streets, public figures, and personal loss with concise reportage and elegiac restraint. Recurring concerns include desire, mortality, war, and social disorder, framed by a tension between heroic past and everyday present and rendered through formal experimentation and dramatic monologue.

SIR JOHN RIMBECK TO THE PRINCESS OF ACRE

Death comes like a glimpse of thin blue sky through the fog of fight,
And the trident-flame of the mind fails, and the soul drinks night.
But on shores unknown it arises! it is white of its ancient scars.
Arrayed with stars as a garment, beneath night’s thick stars!
And now I must have died I think—and had this grace,
To look with new eyes for a moment, and to see one face
That fills my heart like a feasting where mailed kings break bread,
You are kind as a poor man’s alms, Lord, if I take this to the dead!
Slowly the lights, the noise return, but they touch not me.
I, who knew not my chains at all, stand here free!
Sound the assay, white bugles! Shields, clash loud!
Fate and one face I follow, through a gate grown proud!