Reading from page 4-5 of A Word from the Outer Dark, 2008, Robert E. Howard Properties
Howard uses the sun and the moon in his verse and prose like a stage manager uses curtains and lighting, but with something more to it, a totemic illumination, of a narrator musing in melancholy tone in the manner that the heavenly bodies silently glare down and reluctantly give way.
The Kiowa’s Tale consists of seven four-line verses.
The protagonist is unnamed, the natural world framed through his mind’s eye for the first three verses as he lay all day in ambush, waiting with infinite patience for his enemy.
In the fourth verse, the enemy, also unnamed, is introduced in the same natural frame of extra-human reference, sparking the bloodlust of the enemy lying in lethal wait.
The fifth verse continues to build killing tension until something musical occurred, turning the Kiowa from a hunter to a watcher.
In verse six and seven, as the warrior stole away into the falling night, he seems content with the trick the world has played on his intentions.
A Well of Heroes: Two:
Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard
