Forgotten Ground Regained
Tropos: An Étude
Tropos: ‘Turn’; trope. wordum wrixlan… —Beowulf, 874a
This poem was first published as "Tropos: A Norse Étude" in Alexander Adams (Ed.), Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry, Bournbrook Press, 1922, and reprinted in Dennis W. Wise (Ed.), Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024.
It is but hours after inaugurals—roughvoiced ravens— of rich pickings;when the heavens murked with —as hosts musteredthe edge-banesmen for Odin’s choosing—heralds hungering for haft’s-talk-with-shield.
Harsh harbingers of the hazelled groundflashed fingered wings, fierce beak and clawawoke for work, and from the wold prowling,grisly Greyhame, the gorging wolf,hoary-hackled… The horny-nebbedcrow of carnage called out hoarsely:
Flanged arrows as flinder- Fledges leapt from edges Of shields, the bows shrilling, When shank-deep was dankness Of gore. Then, steel-geared, they Girded, after murders, Blades amidst the bloody Blend of that foe-spending.
And thus on the fallen the fowl and beasts of battle shall bloat. Birds choose the slain.Flocks are flurrying to flesh talons—whirl of wingbeats— wheeling, stooping,swart-shadowglossy: swoop plumb downward,cries clamouring with cackles of gleeto earn offal. Erne and ravendive, and dangle on their doomed perches,blademoisture-birds, battlesweat-thirsty,whom heroes sate: the hoodie-crow,cranes-of-corpses; in a clotted dewswim swans-of-war. They swarm bodies that,sluggards from swords, sleep quite deeply.Carcass-clingers cluster jostling,their gaping bills gralloch and howk,frenzied to feed in feast’s parody—guests are greedy— gourmandizingon men for meat. Mayhem over,from points’-parley, poets’ wages:wend smiths-of-war, by wordsmiths’ craft,from hammers’-leavings, to harp-music,notes numbfingered from noise and pain;raw flesh caressed by the rhetor’s gloze.Stark streeked sinews are strummed to lays. As on eagles’ acre in the aftermathof the head-harvest —the hawk-of-woundsstruts dancing steps on his stage of bones;scaldcrows will scoff amid skulls and throes,corbies carping at the corpse-banquet;and the blood blesses the blanched faces as they mouth the dead, dainty morsels,their prize of preys— praise-singing bards—scavengers’ screams— skalds, turn strophes.
Plectrum can pluck what the pegs tensioned;tone-taut the string tunes the slaughter;the random to rigor. Raxed over framesfixed fibres sing. Form tunes parlanceand the tribe’s dialect turns to measures.Stylized to strains, from the stricken wire,temper-tightened by turns of the key,Ode’s ordered choice. The art of verseplays poems forged by ply-weldingthe twining strands. In the twist-patterns—laboured by lyres from life’s chaosto locked letters loyally rhymed—etched out with venom: the adder-markings.
Thus they fashioned. These staves I shapeare as words woven from that web of swords.
Copyright © Rahul Gupta, 2023-2025
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