Exhausted, Maclaren sleeps for thirteen hours. Shambling through the ship, he thinks:
"With a host of furious fancies -" (p. 123)
-see Tom O'Bedlam.
The full stanza reads:
"With a host of furious fancies
"Whereof I am commander
"With a burning spear and a horse of air.
"To the wilderness I wander.
"By a knight of ghosts and shadows
"I summoned am to tourney
"Ten leagues beyond the wide worlds end:
"Methinks it is no journey."
We recognize the knight. A burning spear and a horse of air could be a laser gun and a hovercraft? I first read the concluding three lines quoted at the beginning of The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and identified with the phrase:
"Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end..."
2 comments:
Paul:
A burning spear is also invoked in "The Battle of Brandobar" from After Doomsday:
"'Have done, have done, my comrades twain,
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Mine eyes have tallied each splinter and nail
In yonder burning spear.'"
Here, of course, the "burning spear" is an approaching enemy fleet of starships.
Kaor, DAVID!
I KNEW I had seen that "burning spear" somewhere in the works of Anderson! I was so impressed by his poem "The Battle of Brandobar" that I copied it out by hand into my pretentiously named CODEX ANDERSONIANUS.
And of course all readers of Poul Anderson knows how he used "a knight of ghosts and shadows"!
Sean
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