While Robert E. Howard is mostly known for his novellas, he did write quite many poems, which are, like his longer narrative, filled with horror, darkness, heroics, sadness and at times even a bit of love. I am the first person to admit, that I might not be the best person to talk about poetry of any kind, as it isn't a genre I dwell in. But, as I am on the trek to at least dip into everything Howard wrote, I feel I should at least acknowledge the poems, albeit I can't really offer any deeper insight about them (that is if I can really offer any deeper insight about anything, really).The very first poem in the collection I have is perhaps Howard's best known single poem, Cimmeria. It is a poetic description of the country his best-known character, Conan, was born in. The poem gives a grim, dreary image of the lands, which, in many ways, git the people who live there, in a constant battle against the hostile nature. While, as such, Cimmeria doesn't dwell too deeply in death, the inevitably of it looms above it, just like it looms as a subject in many of Howard's poems.
Many of the poems Howard wrote, be them takes off his fantasy work of more rooted to real existence, have this same grim tone in them. Considering the personality and the troubled nature of Howard, his poems feel, at times at least, something of more personal value to him. Especially the ones talking about deep sadness and depression, not to mention one specific poem, Love's Young Dream, about a shame of lust visiting a brothel, feel like they were written based on personal experience.
At first, I thought it was quite peculiar, that ocean is such a strong and visible motif in Howard's poems, but then it dawned to me, that the sea is quite an appropriate setting for many of his musings. It is a setting that allowed him to dwell deeply in the thoughts of isolation, sadness, death and longing. Ocean already is a vast and dangerous setting, where people travel out of their natural element. And this is something that works well for Howard's vocabulary.
Sadness, myths, death. Fantasy, reality and misery. But also wonder, questions and philosophical musings. All these things can be found in the poems Howard wrote in his short years. Some, if not all of them, tell their own tales of the man who wrote them, a man, who wasn't happy, but who was thinking deep thoughts of his own in a world he quite didn't fully grasp or which did not quite grasp him.
Some of his poems are long, almost short story like, some are short snippets that feel almost unfinished. Hell, some of them might be unfinished, perhaps even abandoned by him. But they might give a bit better glimpse of what kind of a person he really was. These ideas, sentences, half though phrases.
Or perhaps it is just easy to think that in contrast to being aware of how his life ended.
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