I think it’s time to laugh. I suppose I don’t often give B.
the credit other people seem to for his humor. This is so silly that you have
to laugh at it. It seems like it’s from a dream, but who really knows? It could
be that, or it could be a waking fantasy, just play. But that doesn’t really
matter, both would make the same point and get at the same issues in B.’s
heroic career. Nose bloodied, having never lost a battle, voice raised in song,
leading his innocent green-clad lady in her armor forward on her white palfrey.
Of course she’s on a “palfrey,” fitted with a ladylike side-saddle, no doubt.
The knight gallant hasn’t lost a fight yet, but there might be a loss looming,
he fears—death maybe? The foe against which every knight, no matter how chivalrous,
eventually loses? Or maybe it’s just a plain old dragon after all, no metaphorical
symbolical embodiment of some psychic/existential monster. Just a dragon. And,
okay, I have to laugh as well—the foulest of all the potential foes is lust, which
they’ve defeated together, and now they ride chastely forward into the next
battle like brother and sister. I’ll tell you what else defeats lust in a goat-horned
old geezer: Age, lubricated by gin-and-vermouths. You’re not fooling me.
It’s funny, and if it’s from a dream, there is import in the
humor—the poet as hero, for heaven’s
sake!—and if it’s goofing around, it’s goofing around, but there’s more than a
touch of narcissistic self-glorification either way. But that’s no matter. Like
with way back on DS 4, it’s not the message or the philosophy or the embarrassing
psychology of the poem that matters, it’s the impact and really the fact that
it even exists that matters. But this isn't that ground-breaking. I’ve fantasized more blush-worthy stuff than this, if you want to pin me down. Like that time me—handsome midshipman in
this great cool blue uniform with 30 brass buttons, and tall black boots and white breeches—sailed into Tahiti and got that
week of shore leave from the captain, in the days before smallpox and syphilis
and mosquitoes arrived to the islands, and I met this beautiful exotic native princess…yeah, that was a good one. Or,
or that time I made first contact with the entire tribe of the Sioux, and they adopted me, and I got to
fall in love with that gorgeous exotic maiden…all right, all right, I admit it, Keven
Costner got to that fantasy before me. ("Feathers in his hair and feathers in
his head"…) Same thing. Hey, he was dancing with a wolf, wasn’t he? Maybe there’s more to that movie than I thought…Nah.
But I love the scenery and the costumes and hearing the Lakota language.
Anyway, there was this Tahitian princess, see…
I liked this one better before reading your comments. But, you're right, it is to laugh.
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