Gebir

by Savage Walter Landor

Gebir. please visit www.valdebooks.com for a full list of titles

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1798

Reviews

[Vathek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel compelled to review a poem that stands in such dire need of attention. For sheer strangeness Gebir is unequalled. Landor composed this after a feverish study of Pindar, and all of Pindar's freshness has flowed into this poem: we are thrown, sans context, in medias res, into actions of mythical proportion, which are described or stated without regard of narrative weight, cut up and mixed without a care for causality. The diction is full of harshness and strange imagery:

What should the virgin do? should royal knees
Bend suppliant, or defenceless hands engage
Men of gigantic force, gigantic arms?
For ’twas reported that nor sword sufficed,
Nor shield immense nor coat of massive mail,
But that upon their towering heads they bore
Each a huge stone, refulgent as the stars.

Or it is luxuriating in its euphony:

Far off at intervals the axe resounds
With regular strong stroke, and nearer home
Dull falls the mallet with long labour fringed.

Or brooding over the material beauty of men, objects, beasts or plants:

Be of good courage: hast thou yet forgot
What chaplets languished round thy unburnt hair,
In colour like some tall smooth beech's leaves
Curled by autumnal suns?

Or, veering at grandiloquence, pointing in alternate pride and mockery at itself.

Whether while Tamar tarried came desire,
And she grown languid loosed the wings of love,
Which she before held proudly at her will,
And nought but Tamar in her soul, and nought
Where Tamar was that seemed or feared deceit,
To fraud she yielded what no force had gained—
Or whether Jove in pity to mankind,
When from his crystal fount the visual orbs
He filled with piercing ether and endued
With somewhat of omnipotence, ordained
That never two fair forms at once torment
The human heart and draw it different ways,
And thus in prowess like a god the chief
Subdued her strength nor softened at her charms -
The nymph divine, the magic mistress, failed.

The chief defect of the poem is its conventional narrative: all the standard episodes, already moribund by time of writing, are featured here: the wrestling-match with a sea creature, the descent to the underworld, the gift of a poisoned garment. If Landor had discovered a story worthy of his diction, Gebir would be ranged among the greats.