From Many Times and Lands

From Many Times and Lands

Author	F. L. Lucas
Genre	historical poetry
Publisher	The Bodley Head
Publication date	May 1953
Pages	318

F. L. Lucas's From Many Times and Lands (1953) is a volume of some one hundred original poems, mostly dramatic monologues, vignettes, and narratives, based on historical episodes "that seem lastingly alive". Varying in length from sixteen pages to a few lines (most are two or three pages long), and written largely between 1935 and 1953, the poems were intended to show, in Lucas's words in the Preface, that "The Greeks were right. The essential theme is men in action. That has been the greatness of the West." They were thus a reaction to the "soul-scratching" interiority of mid-20th century modernist verse (The Times Literary Supplement's phrase). Lucas quotes approvingly "the wise Acton": 'History must be our deliverer, not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own'. In one of the poems ('Ivan the Terrible') he has the explorer Anthony Jenkinson discuss with a number of English poets and playwrights in a tavern in 1597 the authority of Marlowe's Tamburlaine as history:

"I try to find episodes in history that seem lastingly alive: and try to make them live on paper." ... "We have had too many Narcissi murmuring unintelligibly over their own reflections in shallow, often muddy pools. 'I and she.' 'I and Nature.' 'I and God.' 'I and myself.' ..."

... Give me a poet [says Jenkinson]

That holds the mirror, not to his own features,

But to the infinite mystery of men...

Often I think – 'Why should not poets be

Truthful as histories - and historians

Visioned as poets?'

You feed upon your dreams; they, on the world.

You live for feeling; and for knowledge they.

And each, alone, grows barren.

Title and subtitle

The book's title is taken from Swinburne's 'The Garden of Proserpine'. The dust-cover and back-strip of the first edition (but not the title-page) carried the subtitle 'Poems of Legend and History'. "They are not always factually true," wrote Lucas of these pieces. "But what men could believe, even falsely, is also part – and not the least part – of human history. Wherever historic facts are concerned, I have tried to distort them as little as possible. Where episodes are invented, I have tried to keep them true to the spirit of their time."

Sources

Sources for incidents are given in footnotes to about half the poems. The note to 'Olver Barnakarl', for example, reads:

Cf. the Icelandic Landnáma-Bóc, V. 13. i: 'Olver Barnakarl was a nobleman in Norway. He would not let children be thrown on spearpoints, as was the Vikings' custom. Therefore he was called "Barnakarl".'

Some subjects treated

'Nemroud's Tower'	4th-3rd millennium B.C.	on Birs Nimrud
'The Eyes of Amenemhet'	c.1800 B.C.	on Amenemhat III
'The End of Akhnaton'	14th century B.C.	on Akhenaten and Nefertiti
'The Archaeologist-king'	539 B.C.	Nabonidus
'The Elbe frontier'	9 B.C.	Drusus the Elder
'The Pipe of Peace'	A.D. 315	Liu Kun
'The Smile that cost an Empire'	A.D. 755-6	Emperor Ming Huang and Yang Kwei-fei
'The Sister of Haroun'	803	Harun al-Rashid and Abbasa bint Sulayman
'Olver Barnakarl'	c.850	Olver Einarsson
'The Daughter of Firdausi'	1020-25	Ferdowsi
'The End of Genghiz'	1227	Genghis Khan
'The Grass of Cambalu'	1270	Kublai Khan
'Corrievreckan'	13th century	the Lords of Islay
'The Repentance of Gabrino Fondolo'	1425	Cabrino Fondulo
'The Last Hope of Constantinople'	1453	Fall of Constantinople
'Dusk of the Renaissance'	1463	Sigismondo Malatesta and Gemistos Plethon
'The Friend of Essex'	1600	Francis Bacon
'Stella's end'	1938	Penelope Devereux
'The Old Queen's Maid of Honour'	1613	Elizabeth I
'A tale of two centuries'	1786-1815	Eléonor de Sabron and Delphine de Sabron
'The Doomed'	1775	Louis XVI
'The Buried Saviour'	1814-5	Napoleon
'Doom and the Poet'	November 17th, 1820	Keats
'Wings of a Dove'	c.1855	Charles Darwin
'Rose of Parnell'	1880-91	Charles Stewart Parnell
'The Neutrality of Éire'	1939	Irish neutrality during World War II
'Leave'	1939	returning to Cambridge from Bletchley Park
'The dead of Oran'	1940	the attack on Mers-el-Kébir
'Before the landing in Normandy'	1944	Normandy landings

Verse forms

A variety of stanzaic forms, rhyme-schemes and metres are employed, as well as heroic couplets, blank verse and free verse. The last stanza of 'The dead of Oran', on the funerals of French sailors killed in the Royal Navy's destruction of the French Fleet in 1940:

Far to the north the great men sit;

Laval in Vichy plies his pen.

But here a different greatness lives —

The faith, the courage, that forgives —

In simpler men.

Reception

Cabrino Fondulo (1370-1425), Lord of Cremona, subject of a dramatic monologue in From Many Times and Lands

The Times Literary Supplement wrote of the volume: "The excitement is unequalled by any but a very few volumes of verse published these last few years. This is poetry written to be read aloud, to be relished for its information, to be taken to bed and read, like a detective novel, for the relaxation that comes from a good story well told... These are stories in poetry. The poetry is not the worse for the story, but the story is infinitely more compelling for being set in verse."

A number of the poems were reprinted in mid-20th century anthologies, notably two of the most gruesome: 'The Repentance of Gabrino Fondolo', a Browning-esque dramatic monologue about Fondolo's regret, as he awaits execution, at the opportunity he missed of throwing the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Doge from the top of Cremona tower on their joint visit to his city as guests; and 'Spain, 1809', the story of a village woman's revenge on some French soldiers during the Peninsular War, which Margaret Wood turned into a stage-play, A Kind of Justice (1966). Among poems reprinted that were based on legend rather than history was 'The Destined Hour' (1953), a re-telling in verse of the old Arabic 'Appointment in Samarra' fable.