Reading from A Word from the Outer Dark, pages 6-7
the stark beauty of The Grim Lands is sketched in what seems to be a poetic groove for Howard, in seven verses of four lines each.
“When the scarlet, silver webs of dawn are spun.”
In such lines Howard rivals Homer in his placement of the human soul under heaven, and goes further, delves deeper into a more ancient outlook shared often by his contemporary, Robinson Jeffers, in placing man not only in awestruck perspective—if only he would pay attention—but in dwarfish impotence before the Universe in such lines as follows:
“And the ghosts of eons gone uprear and glide…”
In The Grim Lands the disembodied, poetic sense replaces the warrior of The Kiowa’s Tale, casting the human perspective more ephemerally than even a man’s single day of aborted action. In this stark, beautiful world, there is no Achilles to strive, nor even an Apollo for him to strive against, for even the ages that have devoured such beings have passed into whipser.
He: Gilgamesh: Into the Face of Time
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