Previously published as ‘In My Soul Forever,’ revised and expanded

The following was not published in Howard’s lifetime, and there is no certain date of its composition, most likely being composed between 1928 and 1932.

Sourced from Bran Mak Morn, The Last King, Del Rey, 2005

“How can I wear the harness of toil

And sweat at the daily round,

While in my soul forever

The drums of Pictdom sound?"

Howard was obsessed with how much less vibrant, how lifeless, how deathly pale, the business of getting by in the modern world was, compared to the world of his ancestors, which he never fantasized as idyllic or blessed as do most of those inclined to anachronistic fantasy. Nowhere is his belief that a man’s life in his bloodline once meant more than it did in his time, more heartfelt and driven than in these four lines.

Howard’s expression of disdain for “toil” for a “daily round” [routine], would have been seen as the irresponsible laziness of an undisciplined young man, by my grandparents, great grandfather [who I knew well] and by my parents. Only now, in the time of my sons, in their generation, do I see blooming a general recognition that working hard to the point of investing your spark of life into money making, is becoming accepted as a fool’s plight. I lived most of my life as such a fool, and having come out the other end to physical poverty and plentitude of the soul, I see Howard now as more the mystic than the shirker I had imagined him; his work as a writer the toiling of a soul rather than the shackling of it to a toiling body.