11 Classic Poems Featured in Contemporary Comics (with Accompanying Commentary)
1. “Ozymandias” (The Avengers #57, 1968)
Say the word “Ozymandias” to most comic fans and they’ll think of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons character who first appears in 1986’s Watchmen. But that wasn’t the only time the sonnet by English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was referenced in a mainstream comic.
In 1968’s The Avengers #57, the same issue that introduces the Vision, our heroes team up with their newest ally to defeat Ultron. After a battle with the Vision leads to Ultron’s explosive demise (“No…NO! AAARRH!”), Wasp asks — and not without good reason — “But… can we be sure he was really destroyed?” Of course, she’s told, look at the “twisted remnants of his once-gleaming form” and notice how his head is missing. “We can only assume that it… and its electrodes… were disintegrated by the explosion… for, if they somehow remained intact, we would all be in deadly danger…!”
Cut to an epilogue in which a young boy finds the aforementioned head, kicks it around like a soccer ball, and then discards it like the piece of litter that it is. While we see this short interaction play out, the lines of Shelley’s famous poem appear above the panels.
As legend has it, scripter Roy Thomas didn’t start out planning to include this poem in this story, but as it went along he had the idea to include it as an epilogue and worked with artist John Buscema to get it just right on the page. The idea that Thomas, a former high school English teacher before going into comics, would spring a bit of classical literature on his readers doesn’t seem that far-fetched… but why this poem in particular?
Shelley’s sonnet is often interpreted as a meditation on power and its transient nature, with Ozymandias serving as a stand-in for all those rulers and high achievers who think their empires will endure long after they’re gone. One scholar called the poem “a lesson to tyrants”; it’s often invoked by those who want to remind their audiences of the fleeting nature of power, of how even the most powerful figures of our own time will themselves someday be represented by nothing more than “the decay of the colossal wreck, boundless and bare.”
There’s definitely that theme, the idea that the ruined statue is a monument to one man’s hubris, a statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. But I think there’s also a more hopeful thread to be pulled out of it as well.
While everything else that Ozymandias treasured is long gone, notice the two pieces of evidence of his existence that are still present for the traveler to witness: a work of art and some words once uttered by him, both suggesting that the art and language we create or inspire will outlast anything else signifying our brief physical presence on this earth. (Notice, too, how the poem is framed as a story told to the poem’s subject by someone else, another sign the stories that are told about us will have more longevity than any monument to our greatness we erect to ourselves.)
This being superhero comics, this page wouldn’t be Ultron’s final appearance; like any good evil artificial intelligence, he would come back again and again to bedevil our heroes. But in this one moment, his “shattered visage” with “sneer of cold command” is all that’s left of his dreams of conquest. Too bad no one seemed to upload a love for Shelley’s work into his programming; he might have seen the folly of his actions.
2. “If” (Secret Origins Annual #2, 1988)
I couldn’t tell you with certainty the first time I came across a poem in a comic book. But if I had to guess, this page featuring Rudyard Kipling’s best-known poem was probably it.
The mid- to late 1980s was a heady time for young comic fans. DC had just released its Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it was using that mini-series as an excuse to revamp and reboot virtually its entire lineup.
Nowhere was this “changing of the guard” attitude more evident than in the pages of The Flash. Barry Allen’s heroic death during the groundbreaking event left an opening for a new speedster in the DC roster, and Wally “Kid Flash” West was called up to fill Barry’s sizable shoes. The first issue of the brand-new Flash series (with script by Mike Baron and art by Butch Guice and Larry Mahlstedt) hit comic racks in March 1987.
Shortly after “The Unforgiving Minute” appeared in this 1988 issue of Secret Origins, writer William Messner-Loebs took over scripting chores on The Flash, and his tenure on the title (starting with this story) often tackled a subject that would become a common theme in Flash stories over the years: legacy.
Legacy isn’t just about what we leave behind; it’s also about how we respond to the legacies handed down to us. A legacy can be a good thing (like an inheritance passed on to your children) or it can be a bad thing (like a parent passing on disease-prone genes or abusive behaviours that are perpetuated down through the generations). And in some cases, just the idea of having to live up to the image we create of a deceased parent or mentor can be a burden that’s too much to bear.
In this story, Wally — whose identity as the Flash is no secret to the world — is talking to a therapist, and as he relates events from his past we see the story of his life via flashbacks. Cutting back to the present, we learn that Wally has had a rough go of it lately; not only has he lost his mentor and most of his speed powers, he’s also lost all his money from a recent lottery win and he recently found out his father was a sleeper agent for a murderous robot cult (long story). It’s enough to rattle any young man, even a superhero, and he tells the therapist that he thinks Barry would be disappointed in him for the way his life has turned out.
“I want to try an experiment,” his therapist says. “I want you to write down the number of people whose lives you’ve saved in the past ten years. We won’t even count things like interdimensional invasions… just kids pulled out of rivers… old men snatched out of the path of hurtling cars… stuff like that.”
After Wally speed-tallies 172, his stunned therapist says, “You know, I once stopped a guy from taking a bottle of pills… the glow from that still warms me at night. You saved 172 people and you shrug it off. Those 172 people are important. They mean something. Maybe they mean you can let yourself off the hook a little.”
When Wally resists this advice, the therapist hauls out a passage from “If”: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…” He says it’s from a poem he learned in school, “a recipe for being successful, moral and a man… I did my damnedest to follow it… but I was depressed all the time. It was just too much. I couldn’t live up to it.”
That’s when he hits Wally with the idea of impostor’s syndrome, “what boys feel who lose impressive father figures… a sense that nothing they earn is really theirs… that they will be revealed as ‘frauds.'” His advice to Wally? “Ease up on yourself. You’re allowed to be happy. You’re allowed to be alive when Barry’s dead.”
The story ends with Wally holding a picture of him and Barry in one hand, and a notepad tallying 172 lives in the other before he breaks down on the therapist’s couch; Kipling’s full poem runs down the story’s final page.
It’s a fitting piece to share. The speaker, presumably Kipling, keeps a positive and upbeat tone throughout each stanza, advising his son about what actions and attitudes he should strive for in order to be a successful person in life. It has often been cited not just as a personal guide to dealing with both success and adversity, but also as the very essence of Victorian England itself, a distillation of that famed British “stiff upper lip” that allowed a small island nation to become a global empire while its citizens happily bore all of life’s burdens with grace and equanimity.
Except… we know that’s not entirely true, right? And I’m not picking on just the Victorian Brits here; regardless of which historical figures we’re talking about, there’s a natural tendency among us modern-day folk to look back and assume all those people from the past were tougher, kinder, more resilient, more moral, more community-minded, more adventuresome… basically more of everything that we wish we could see in ourselves today.
But maybe we should follow the advice of Wally’s therapist and cut ourselves some slack. We shouldn’t read a poem like “If” and be bummed because we can’t live up to the lofty ideals written down and celebrated by our ancestors; we should read it and take comfort in the fact that we have a lot more in common with our ancestors than we thought — that they were imperfect just like us, and they wrestled with the same basic questions (What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to be good? How do we define success? What does mean to be a man?) we ask ourselves today.
“If” we can do that, if we can go a little easier on ourselves by not placing our ancestors up on pedestals… well, maybe that might help with some of the bigger issues we’re dealing with these days.
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — what is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!”
3. “Rootsong” (Black Panther #3, 2016)
Sometimes you just have to step back and cede the floor to a master of the craft. Here’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates once said about his choice to quote Henry Dumas’ “Rootsong” in the pages of 2016’s Black Panther #3:
“Black Panther #3 drops today [June 29, 2016] and I thought I’d say something about the poetry that both opens and closes the book. The poem we used is Henry Dumas’ ‘Rootsong.’ I first encountered this piece during one of my many study sessions with the poet Joel Dias-Porter. This would have been somewhere around 1995 or 1996. Joel is a tremendous poet in his own right, but at that point (and perhaps even today) he was mentoring a whole crop of young writers — Terrence Hayes, Yona Harvey, Jelani Cobb — who happened to be in the D.C. area. Terms like ‘study session’ and ‘mentor’ make all of this sound more formal than it was. Usually it was a crew of us at a restaurant or a cafe discussing anything from sports to politics to poetry. At one of these sessions, Joel whipped out a collection of Dumas’ work and turned to the poem ‘Rootsong.’ What stunned me about the poem is how it used black myth to construct a narrative of the diaspora before and after colonialism and enslavement:
Once when I was tree
flesh came and worshiped at my roots.
My ancestors slept in my outstretched
limbs and listened to flesh
praying and entreating on his knees.
There is an Edenic, utopian quality to Dumas’ depiction of precolonial Africa. ‘Rootsong’ always struck me as romance — not so different from the kind of romance than you’d see in Marvel’s Thor. Poetry is a natural cousin to comic books. Comic book writing, like poetry, requires a ruthless efficiency with words. The art is the hero and if I may say so myself, the art in Black Panther #3 — particularly in the pages using ‘Rootsong’ — is heroic.
Dumas was killed at the age of 34 by New York city transit cop. But his legacy endures through the strivings of the poet Eugene Redmond and the great Toni Morrison. It was Redmond who posthumously edited Dumas’ poems into a book. It was Morrison, then an editor at Random House, who ultimately published them. At the time she wrote of Dumas:
‘In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.’
That Dumas wrote the words, that Morrison and Redmond made it possible to read those words, that I was exposed to those words during my tenure at the Mecca, and that those influenced my own words points to the deep and enduring power of tradition and lineage. Indeed as an atheist, tradition and lineage are the closes thing I have to any notion of afterlife. The work outlives us, and the work exerts power long after we are gone.
I hope you feel that power in Black Panther #3.”
4. “The Spell of the Yukon” (Alpha Flight #14, 1984)
I live in Canada, and being Canadian comes with a lot of neat perks. “Easy access to world-renowned poets” is not one of them.
Oh, we do all right in the poet department; you could easily fill a good-sized Canadian Lit syllabus with the likes of Lampman, Pratt, Purdy, Roberts, Layton, Atwood, Ondaatje, Clarke… but our relatively small population size and our youth as a nation means our poets typically take a back seat to the Kiplings, Shelleys, and Longfellows of the poetry world, and so we northern folk tend to focus on other cultural forms (ice sculpting, sketch comedy troupes, Zamboni blooper videos) to make our mark.
It wasn’t always thus, though. In the first part of the 20th century, there were few bigger names in the poetry world than Robert Service (1974-1958), a young Brit who emigrated to Canada in his early 20s and worked a succession of jobs in the Canadian West until the Canadian Bank of Commerce sent him north to the Yukon to work in their Whitehorse branch.
At that time, Whitehorse was a frontier town less than 10 years old, and not far removed from the frenzy of the Klondike gold rush. Inspired by the tales told by the prospectors and other rowdy types, Service wrote such poems as “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and collected them in a 1907 volume titled Songs of a Sourdough. Renamed The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses when it was published in the United States, it was an immediate success, with the wealth he earned from its many printings allowing him to quit his bank job and travel the world.
Not everyone was a fan, though; Service’s own church minister took him aside and gave him a scolding for telling such wicked stories about his neighbours… but when the tourists started coming north in search of the famous poet and the mystical lands he described, I’m guessing all was forgiven.
Much like Service, comic writer/artist John Byrne was born in England and moved to Canada during his younger years (though being a child at the time he probably didn’t have much say in the matter). Breaking into comics in the 1970s after studying at Calgary’s Alberta College of Art and Design, he became a fan favourite with his work on such titles as X-Men and Fantastic Four before writing and drawing Alpha Flight, a book starring a team of Canadian superheroes that first debuted in X-Men during Byrne’s stint on that book.
Of all the team members, Snowbird has the deepest connection to Canada’s Far North, being the demigoddess offspring of Nelvana, the Inuit goddess of the Northern Lights. At the start of this issue, she’s returning home in a troubled state of mind, having just experienced something during a trip to southern lands that shakes her. As someone who grew up in one of the country’s more northern places, I can attest to the healing powers of that “cussedest land” to soothe one’s soul.
5. “I Sing the Body Electric” (Renfield #1, 1994)
From comic publisher Caliber Entertainment: “In this haunting and sophisticated mini-series, Renfield tells a tale of madness as it delves into the story of the bug-eating prophet of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the original novel, Renfield was the insane inmate who foretold the coming of the evil vampire and served somewhat as a disciple of Dracula. This story explores not only the relationship of Dracula and Renfield but the torment that Renfield felt as a man possessed by almost demonic forces. Impassioned with the zeal of a religious fanatic, Renfield struggles to grasp the overwhelming need to serve the darkness against his humanity. Staying true to the original story in chronological order and events, the comic storyline focuses primarily prior to Dracula’s actual arrival in England.”
The story by Gary Reed and Galen Showman begins with a pleasant day in a London park, where residents of Queen Victoria’s realm are enjoying the live entertainments, including a puppet show, a man hawking bicycles, and a wild-eyed orator with his shirt half-untucked reciting — as a concerned onlooker notes —Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.”
It’s a fitting piece for a fictional 19th-century madman to commit to heart. For those who only know Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from its show-stealing cameo in the TV series Breaking Bad, the 1855 collection of poems celebrates the American poet’s sensualist approach to life, praising nature and the individual’s place within it.
Though now considered a classic of American poetry and one of the first great works of free verse, in its time Leaves of Grass was considered an immoral piece of work for its discussion of sensual pleasures and the idea that people might (gasp) take delight in embracing all aspects of their fleshly existence.
“I Sing the Body Electric,” for instance, explores various parts of the human body with its function as a whole and as an individual part. He describes a swimmer as “naked in the swimming-bath” and young male wrestlers as “quite grown, lusty, good-natured” while also having an eye for the “bosoms and heads of women” and “the contour of their shape downwards.” He ends the poem by saying “the parts and poems of the body” and not just of the soul, they are the soul — and that perhaps denying your own body’s desires for the purpose of saving your soul risks losing both.
Pretty racy stuff for the 19th century, and sure enough Whitman lost his government job after publishing Leaves of Grass, and saw contemporary critics describe his work as “a mass of stupid filth” and something “not to be mentioned among Christians.” (And don’t get me started on the multiple fainting spells surely caused by lines like “The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings”…)
It’s easy to see how someone from the Victorian age hearing the poem recited on the street by someone as much a sensualist as Whitman might have thought they were listening to the ravings of a lunatic. But just as Leaves of Grass suggested there was likely something bubbling beneath the surface of “proper” society in the mid-1800s, so, too, did the 1897 publishing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and other gothic horrors of the time) suggest people near the end of the 19th century were also harboring some deep desires that found an outlet in their popular literature… though it should be noted Dracula received a much better reception from critics at the time than Whitman did for his works. Maybe audiences by then were ready to embrace literature with some bite (sorry not sorry).
6. “The Arrow and the Song” (Green Arrow 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1, 2021)
I would be surprised if this story was the first time a comic writer worked a “I show an arrow in the air” reference into a Green Arrow story. It seems like such a natural pairing.
Consisting of three quatrains (stanzas containing four lines), the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow goes like this:
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
The poem makes a comparison between an arrow shot into the air without any particular target in mind, and a song that’s “breathed” into the air. The arrow is later found embedded in an oak tree while the song is found “in the heart of a friend.”
Both the arrow and the song (and, by extension, any composition) are presented as metaphors for actions that are committed without any particular consequence in mind.
An arrow aimed at a target is far different from an arrow shot into the air without any concern for where it lands, in that the second arrow has a much higher chance of causing an unknown (and unwelcome) result.
Similarly, a song composed as, say, a romantic gesture to a partner has a specific audience and intent, while a song that’s “breathed… into the air” is one that the song’s creator has no control over in terms of how it’s interpreted or how it affects other people. Who has “sight so keen and strong” that they can know with certainty what impact a composition will have on the world? The implied answer is no one — just as no one can say with absolute certainty where a wildly shot arrow will eventually land.
This story, which borrows its title from the poem, follows the life of Oliver Queen from his beginnings as a spoiled trust-fund kid to a superhero to someone who understand and embraces what the poem is saying. That all our actions have consequences — sometimes far beyond what we intended — and that if we want to ensure our actions don’t have the kinds of consequences that might hurt others or ourselves, then we have to take ownership of our actions and perform them with the best of intentions even when we can’t know for certain what the outcome will be.
“When I learned the art [of archery], some said you have to see the target in your mind before you can hit it,” Oliver says in the story. “I don’t know anymore if that’s true. It’s not about hitting the target… it’s about releasing each arrow with such fervent hope that it will at last find what it must.” Truth.
7. “For Want of a Nail” (JLA: The Nail #1, 1998)
This story by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer begins with a recitation of “For Want of a Nail,” a simple poem the book attributes to English poet George Herbert’s 1651 collection of proverbs titled Jacula Prudentum. But the origins of that verse might go back even further.
Different versions of the text have been found in several languages dating back to at least the 13th century — including perhaps the most famous version, the one that appears in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack — but in every form the idea is the same: the loss or malfunction of a seemingly insignificant item (like the nail in a horseshoe) leads to a cascade of breakdowns that ultimately results in a catastrophic outcome.
The message behind this verse is pretty straightforward: be aware of the little challenges and setbacks that might happen, and prepare for their eventuality before they can cause big problems. For instance, if you live on a farm and you rely on a truck to get to nearby places, then it makes sense for you to keep a spare tire on your vehicle at all times — since you never can know when it will be vital to the future of the entire world that you go on that drive.
In JLA: The Nail, a simple nail causes the Kents to miss the rocket that brings young Kal-El to Earth, and he is discovered by someone else. That one small change in the timeline results in the absence of Superman from the DC universe, which is now a much different place. In some respects, things are much the same as they were before: Batman still loses his parents, Diana still ventures into Man’s World, Barry Allen is still doused in chemicals in his lab, J’onn J’onzz is still brought to Earth by a scientist’s accidental actions.
But this is also a world where Lex Luthor is mayor of Metropolis, Perry White is a prominent media voice leading the charge against unsanctioned vigilantes, and there’s a general feeling of distrust and fear among the public against all these masked and super-powered beings (even among themselves) that have seemingly sprung up everywhere. It’s a world that’s very different from the more hopeful world that most DC fans would recognize. And behind the scenes, someone has decided to take advantage of that loss of hope…
The idea of “one small change that ends up affecting everything” is a common trope in literature, especially in works of popular fiction that seek to explore the “what if” of someone within an established universe making a different fateful choice, or even not existing at all. The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a good example of this, in that one man gets to see what one small change (i.e., him never being born) might do to everyone else in the town where he grew up.
In reality, though… well, reality can be a little more complicated. Take the idea of a plane crash; while we might say that “pilot error” or a piece of malfunctioning equipment caused the crash, in truth a lot of other factors have to line up in precisely one way for that one small action to cascade into a crash-level event. Plane crashes are rare for the simple reason that it takes more than, say, a burned-out wire to take down an entire 747.
Same with The Nail — while it might feel satisfying from a thematic point of view to suggest Superman’s absence is the sole reason why this version of the DC universe turns out so differently, the reality is a lot of other factors and decisions involving a lot of different people had to happen for us to get to the story’s jarring climax. (For starters, there’s nothing that says one of the other Justice League members couldn’t have stepped into the “beacon of hope” role left empty by Superman’s absence from the clubhouse.)
That said, Davis and Farmer tell a fun story about what might have been, and even if some familiar faces have to come off looking less heroic to make their point it’s still a nice reminder of why a character like Superman works best when he’s seen as a symbol of hope — as someone who naturally brings out the best in all of us. Let’s hope future story-tellers keep that in mind.
8. “High Flight” (The Outsiders #10, 1986)
From the moment the first caveman looked up at a bird in flight, humans have had a deep longing to slip “the surly bonds of Earth” and soar through the sky. That desire is captured in “High Flight,” a poem in which John Gillespie Magee Jr. celebrates the exhilarating feeling of flight amid “the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds.”
The poem’s focus on flight and the joyous feelings it can cause has led to the poem becoming a favourite of pilots and astronauts; it’s the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the UK’s Royal Air Force, and it’s often read at funerals for aviators. U.S. President Ronald Reagan quoted the poem when paying tribute to the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion; the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery has the complete poem inscribed on the back of the marker.
It’s fitting that the poem has become so inextricably tied to fallen aviators since it was written by one who didn’t live long enough to see his poem get published. Born to an American father and British mother working as missionaries in Shanghai, Magee (1922-1941) would join the Royal Canadian Air Force at the onset of the Second World War with the intention of learning to fly and joining the fight.
He passed his wings test in Ottawa in June 1941 and achieved his goal, transferring to a British air base and logging his first flight in a Spitfire in August 1941; it’s believed a flight at 33,000 ft., his highest to that date, is what inspired his poem.
Tragically, in his tenth week of active service, he was killed at age 19 during a training exercise when his plane struck another in the skies above Lincolnshire. After his death, his poem — which he had included in a letter to his parents in September 1941 — was included in an exhibition of poems called “Faith and Freedom” at the Library of Congress in February 1942 (the original copy of his poem remains at the Library).
Some 45 years after Magee’s death, Mike Barr and Jerry Ordway presented “High Flight” as a back-up story in this issue of The Outsiders. There are no words or dialogue save for the poem quoted in its entirety, but the plot is clear enough.
We see Prince Brion Markov (aka the Outsiders’ Geo-Force) as he starts his day, with a retinue of servants to help him dress and serve him breakfast as he notices a songbird outside the window. Cut to him sitting in the back of a limousine in traffic and he spies what appears to be the same songbird perched on his car window. Later, as he sits in his office and deals with a superhero’s greatest nemesis (paperwork), the same bird shows up again, singing a song that appears to say, “Dude, come on, what are you waiting for?” Cue the entering assistant finding an empty chair and an open window.
There are many reasons why the superhero archetype has taken hold of the public imagination for nearly a century now. I would submit their ability to allow us to imagine ourselves flying high above all our troubles up there in the “long, delirious, burning blue” is one of them.
9. “The Waste Land” (DC house ad for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, 1988)
So why is April the cruelest month?
Published in 1922, the T.S. Eliot’s 434-line poem — a central work of modernist poetry — is a dense collection of literary and cultural allusions, drawing on everything from Shakespeare to the Upanishads. You could easily spend an entire semester trying to make sense of it all… and making sense of everything is likely what Eliot had in mind.
In the years before the poem was published, the First World War had just ended only to be immediately followed by the 1918-1920 flu pandemic that killed millions. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, both caught the Spanish flu in December 1918, and he wrote much of the poem during his recovery. The poem was also composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot: his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from a number of physical and mental disorders that would lead to their divorce and Vivienne’s confinement to a mental hospital until her death.
Because of all this, a lot of critics tend to see “The Waste Land” as a sign of Eliot’s disillusionment with his situation — even though Eliot himself called that interpretation of his poem “nonsense.” It’s one way to see it; I think there’s another.
Look at the first four lines of the poem:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
In the northern hemisphere where Eliot lived, April is a springtime month, a time of fertility and renewal. Lilacs are mentioned because they tend to bloom sooner than other flowers and as a result have become a symbol of love and renewal in our culture. “Memory” (i.e., the past) and “desire” (i.e., feelings of want representing the future) mingle once again after a cold winter where survival is more top of mind. The “dull” in “dull roots” means less “uninteresting” and more “insensate,” and some “spring rain” is all it takes for those roots to feel alive again.
April isn’t a cruel month in spite of its association with springtime and renewal; it’s a cruel month because of its association with things like hope and renewal.
“In the Waste Land, nothing can be crueler than hope, since it can only lead to disappointment,” writes English professor Michael Austin. “It always leads to disappointment. In the Waste Land, hope hurts, and April hurts most of all by mocking us with possibilities that can never be realized… The more I have read the opening lines of Eliot’s great poem, the more I have realized just what a dangerous emotion the great theological virtue of hope can be. Cynicism and irony are safe. To hope, one must open the door to disappointment, rejection, and disbelief.”
Disappointment, rejection, and disbelief are three things I didn’t experience when I first encountered Gaiman’s Sandman stories. This house ad takes another famous line from “The Waste Land,” substituting “terror” for “fear” in “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
The “handful of dust” is apt considering how one of Dream’s symbols of power is his bag of sand; the dust reference also alludes to one of the other Endless (as in “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”).
Beyond that, though, there are many similarities between “The Waste Land” and Gaiman’s series. Both use many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon and other literary cultures. Both shift seamlessly between genres, locations, speakers, and eras in an attempt to show connection between seemingly dissonant ideas and forms of literature. You can even see Eliot’s influence in the way that Sandman story arcs are structured and titled (“Preludes and Nocturnes,” “The Doll’s House,” “A Game of You”, etc. vs. the poem’s “The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “What the Thunder Said,” etc.)
Another similarity: “The Waste Land” appeared at the beginning of Eliot’s poetry career, and has come to be defined as his signature piece. While Gaiman has enjoyed a long and fruitful career in several media, I think it’s fair to say his Sandman work is similar in that it also appeared early in his career as a comic writer — and, like “The Waste Land,” it has been blowing minds and inspiring new visions ever since.
10. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Namor the Sub-Mariner #44, 1993)
The 1990s was an interesting period in comics history. Often derided as the “pecs, pouts, and pouches” era of mainstream comics when artists of varying talent levels imitated each other’s stylistic excesses, the reality is there was a lot of interesting experimentation happening at the time — not just at the independent and alternative presses but also within mainstream publishers as well. To demonstrate that, I would submit as Exhibit A this issue, a story-long take on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
By the time this issue came out, the Sub-Mariner was going through a bit of an identity crisis. John Byrne, who launched the book, provided scripts and pencils for the first two years or so, repositioning Atlantis’s avenging son as a businessman superhero with an environmental focus.
As Byrne stepped away from both tasks, the book fell to a succession of fill-in writers and artists, with the likes of Jae Lee, Bob Harras, Shawn McManus, and Jimmy Palmiotti filling in for one or a few issues at a time; even Roy Thomas stepped in to guest-write a couple issues. It wasn’t any of the artists’ worst work, but there was a palpable sense of “keeping the lights on” until Glenn Herdling and Geof Isherwood debuted as the book’s new regular creative team with this issue (a title they would hold until the book’s cancellation with #62 in 1995).
This being the Nineties, no one would have been surprised if Herdling and Isherwood announced the start of their run with all guns blazing (literally and metaphorically). But they zigged where most readers expected them to zag, giving Marvel fans hepped up on pin-up poses and issue-long fistfights the last thing they might have expected: a poetry lesson.
When he was once asked where the idea for his character came from, writer/artist Bill Everett said he was inspired to create an aquatic character when he had heard that Carl Burgos had created the Human Torch, and he liked the idea of playing with the contrast between fire and water. As for the name, he said he came up with “Namor” by spelling “Roman” backwards and the “Sub-Mariner” part was inspired by the famous 1798 poem written by Coleridge.
Clearly, Herdling had those origins in mind when he scripted “The Rime of the Ancient Sub-Mariner,” a book-long adaptation (“with apologies”) of Coleridge’s verse. And while the idea sounds like a bar bet that went too far… it actually kind of works.
The poem begins with a gray-bearded sailor — our Ancient Mariner — stopping a guest at a wedding to tell him a story of a sailing voyage he took a long time ago. The guest (and the reader) learn of a ship that gets stuck in Antarctic ice, an albatross that leads them out of the ice jam, and the mariner shooting the bird even as the crew credits it with bringing the south wind that saved them from the ice.
While the crew forgives his crime as the weather gets warmer, they soon hit waters near the equator where no wind blows and they blame the mariner for their torturous thirst (“Water, water every where/Nor any drop to drink”), eventually forcing him to wear the dead albatross around his neck as punishment for his crime.
After the ship encounters a few more misfortunes, including a meeting with Death itself, the Mariner arrives back in his homeland alone on a ship; as penance for shooting the albatross, he now wanders the earth to tell his story over and over to anyone who will hear his lesson:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Sub-Mariner’s “rime” is similar — an aged Namor approaches “one of three” about to set sail on a ship, a man known only as “the young oil-recruit” who is about to join other oil-drillers on a boat trip to their next job (presumably an ocean oil rig).
Coleridge’s verse is condensed and updated where necessary — for instance, the albatross in Namor’s story is not a bird but a masked flying man who helps Namor and his Atlantean subjects steer through the Antarctic ice (it’s best not to dwell on questions like why an aquatic race that needs helmets full of sea water to breathe above the waves would choose to travel by ship, or why they would ever consider themselves trapped in the middle of the ocean).
But just like in the poem, the Sub-Mariner kills the Albatross in a fit of madness and contends with a number of trials and misfortunes as he atones for his sin (fortunately, he’s not forced to wear a grown man’s carcass around his neck; he just has the dead man’s blood smeared on his chest in the shape of a trident).
(Another mark in the “creative license” column: Thanos shows up with Lady Death at one point to roll some dice. I’m pretty sure Coleridge left the mad Titan out of the original poem… though now I’m wondering how far Marvel could have let Herdling and Isherwood go if they really wanted to have fun with the line in the poem that mentions a “naked hulk”.)
As weird as it might look to base a comic script on an 18th-century poem, there’s a nice symmetry to the idea. Coleridge was an English poet and philosopher who helped found the Romantic Movement in England; a religious man, he saw nature and God as interconnected, and he argued that nature — rather than something to be conquered or catalogued, as others advocated during the Enlightenment — was more of a teacher, something wondrous that could teach concepts like love, freedom, and piety to mortal souls in need of those qualities.
The monsters and trials the Ancient Mariner encounters can be seen as literal or metaphorical, but in either case they fact they’re presented as products of the Mariner’s natural surroundings suggests that the salvation he sought could only be achieved by confronting and embracing the natural world, and by accepting one’s own place among “all things both great and small.”
Namor is not often depicted as someone who accepts his place in the grand scheme of things — “haughty” is a word that comes to mind here — but an ancient version of the man? Given all the trials he’s been put through over the course of his career, it’s easy to see an older and grayer version finding that inner peace that evaded him for all those years — and making it his purpose to help others find theirs as well.
“Farewell, farewell!” he says at the end of the story. “But this I tell you, young oil-recruit — you will live best when loving best all things in your pursuit! You will live well when loving those above and ‘neath the tide; for all things are designed equal, none should be forced to hide.”
11. “Fleas” (Archie Giant Series #191, 1972)
Not every poem has to be about the big themes in life, or come in several attractive volumes. Sometimes you just want to have a laugh — or get off the stage real quick. Ask Forsythe P. “Jughead” Jones about that.
In this issue, Archie and the gang are helping out at the Riverdale orphanage, bringing presents and entertainment (all paid for by Mr. Lodge) to less fortunate folks for the holidays. After Sabrina’s magic act and Moose’s feats of strength, Jughead recites “the shortest poem ever written” for the kids.
The story doesn’t credit anyone for coming up with this flea-sized frivolity — probably because writer/artist Al Hartley had just as hard a time confirming who wrote it as I did. Most sources credit American humorist Ogden Nash (1902-1971) for coming up with this ditty, and it certainly sounds like one of the 500+ light verses he came up with during his lifetime (“The cow is of the bovine ilk/One end is moo, the other, milk”). But other sources attribute it to cartoonist/children’s writer Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) or Strickland Gillilan (1869–1954), an American poet/humorist who’s probably best known for his poem “The Reading Mother.”
Regardless of who came up with the poem, there’s no question this is an Al Hartley story. After becoming born again in 1967, the freelance comic artist started infusing his Archie stories with his Christian beliefs; in this one, for instance, he has Betty comfort a sobbing orphan wishing for a father by telling her that “if Ronnie’s father, who is only human, can do such things, how much more can our father in heaven provide for us!”
Hitting the spinner racks during the 1971 Christmas season, this story came out at a pivotal time in Hartley’s life. Not long after he was asked to dial back the overt Christianity in his Archie works, he was approached by publisher Fleming Revell asking if he would be interested in doing a comic book version of The Cross and the Switchblade. Seeing it as a sign, Hartley agreed to produce a comic adaptation of the 1963 novel, followed by adaptations of God’s Smuggler and The Hiding Place.
Hartley then pitched Revell on the idea of a line of Christian titles that would become Spire Christian Comics; his connections at Archie Inc. helped Spire license Archie and the gang for 19 Christian-themed titles, starting with 1973’s Archie’s One Way. In all, Hartley did somewhere around 60 Christian comics that, along with Archie’s pious adventures, depicted Bible stories and other stories reflecting Hartley’s faith.
By the way, for what it’s worth the Guinness Book of Records says the world’s shortest poem is a one-letter poem by Aram Saroyan comprising a four-legged version of the letter “m”. To which I can only say: “!”
A Dispensable List of Comic Book Lists 