Shaka

Map illustrating the rise of the Zulu Empire in southern Africa under Shaka (1816–28)

I have said ‘Night,

Are you not coming to an end because of dawn?’

And he murmurs back, the night,

‘You go too far, you have gone far enough.’

—F. T. Prince, “Chaka”

Thus Prince has the Zulu king speak,

of millions murderer, "Napoleon

of Africa," inventor of the iklwa,

a  stabbing spear so named because of the sound it made

when plucked from the victim’s flesh.

Is all this all mere myth and legend?

They’ve named an airport after Shaka

at a place called La Mercy.

You can fly there from Dubai or Bangladesh.

Hoi polloi, black, white, or bont,* love killers,

and make them kings of song and story.

Napoleon’s a solar myth, it’s said,

 surrounded by his twelve marshals,

clearly a version of Ra, Apollo, or Jesus Christ.†

The French still don’t like to think he lost at Waterloo!

There are some who call Hitler a saint.

Others think Stalin the savior of the Russian people,

and Mao the restorer of China’s ancient glory.

“You go too far, you have gone far enough.”‡

Quite true! We upright apes—we like our idols tough.

* bont =pied, many-colored, variegated (Afrikaans).

† See, e.g., Albert Sonnenfeld, “Napoleon as Sun Myth,” Yale French Studies 26 (1960): 32–36.

‡ F. T. Prince, “Chaka,” in id., The Doors of Stone (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), 48.

What Can't Be Told

Joseph-Benoît Suvée, portrait of the poet André Chénier (1762–94). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne.

Clouds will separate us —

the time to part has come now.

Wild goose flies away . . .

—Matsuo Bashō (1644–94)

Shelley in the plangent sea storm,

Keats at close to midnight, Rome,

Lowell in his New York taxi,

pace the honking of its horn,

Jarrell on that darkling highway

in a Carolina wood,

maybe saw it—thinking, good!

Plath might well have glimpsed it,

woozy from the oven gas,

Chénier on that Paris scaffold,

aloof amid the witless mass.

A little stern, a little earnest, wearing

just the slightest frown,

smitten by its ardent bearing,

none of them could write it down.

Llareggub, or, Just Desserts

One might attribute this to some great man—

or woman—feasting in the fuscous past.

(The adjective means "brownish gray," dulling

senses to recede.) With whilom days now all

tricked out, we strain in dismal shades of that

to see through an obscuring cataract.

There are no great men or women today.

Were there, our contemporaries' display

and unctuous insights would quickly convey

it. The insalubrious gloom of fact

and painful findings should at least appall.

Deduced such crass origins—no syllabub,

bright with thick cream, but dreary Llareggub

—greatness itself's now limned in fuscous gray.

• Cover image from the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry.

• A syllabub is an old British dessert made by curdling cream with wine, liquor, or citrus fruit.

• Dylan Thomas invented a Welsh village called Llareggub— "buggerall" spelled backwards—in his 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood.