Category: Archibald McLeish

As I’ve considered and reconsidered “Conquistador,” I’ve realized that one of my problems with the poem is that I, like Dorothea, am unconvinced that Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs was a “noble” victory as depicted in Diáz’s account and, consequently, in MacLeish’s poem. I generally tend to identify with the native people, particularly when, as in Cortes’ case, the victors seem to have been driven more by a desire for gold than by any noble cause. While reviewing the background of Cortes’ victory I found another very different perspective of the war at “The Aztec Account of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico”, an account that one would surely need to consider to gain a true understanding of the Conquistadors. Luckily, resolving this complex question isn’t vital in order to understanding MacLeish’s poem and his philosophy.

That said, in order for the poem to work MacLeish needs to establish how glorious the victory was and that Bernal Diaz’s was an important member of that victory. An important step in doing so was to show Cortes’ genius in battle. Next he needed to show, just as Diaz had attempted to do, that it was a “just war.” Otherwise, one could easily argue that Diaz’s final misery was God’s just reward for his evil acts. Finally, easiest of all, MacLeish needed to show how truly magnificent this victory was, as a small force of Spaniards defeated hordes of evil enemies in scenes reminiscent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Cortes isn’t the central character in the poem, but he is shown repeatedly as a heroic leader. First, he is shown to be determined leader:

"Did we come to the gate of a ground like this to return from it?
"If he had no writ of Velasquez’s hand let him find one!
"Let him establish a king’s town for the birds

"Taking his writ from the Emperor Charles and the spiders
"And damned to Velasquez’s deed!"

Although he had no orders allowing him to invade Mexico and he was order to withdraw by the governor of Cuba, Cortes never wavered in his determination to explore and conquer Mexico.

Cortes used guile and military genius to defeat a superior enemy. When the emissaries from Montezuma came in an attempt to win Cortes to their side, or at least to prevent his further advance, Cortes pretended to thank the emperor and expressed a desire to meet him personally:

"Now does he send you from his endless thousands
"These and this treasure: in Tenochtitlán
"Armies- are harvested like summer’s flowers":

So did he speak and he pointed with raised hand
Westward out of the sun: and Cortés was silent
And he looked long at his feet at the furrowed sand:

And his voice when he spoke was a grave voice without guile in it-
"Say that we thank him well: say also
"We would behold this Emperor": and he smiled:

Later, in the final victory after having been initially driven out by superior numbers, Cortes planned a siege that defeated the Aztecs:

And we marched against them there in the next spring:
And we did the thing that time by the books and the science:
And we burned the back towns and we cut the mulberries:
And their dykes were down and the pipes of their fountains dry:

And we laid them a Christian siege with the sun and the vultures:
And they kept us ninety and three days till they died of it:
And the whole action well conceived and conducted:

Finally, Cortes was an inspirational leader who wouldn’t allow his troops to give into defeat when they seemed hopelessly outnumbered:

And Cortes was wild with the night’s work –
"Had we brought the
"’Whore of death to our beds and our house to serve us?
"How should we profit by these deeds? And we thought our

"Ills were done! And the wheel of our luck turned!
"And the toss was tamed to our hands!

and

All that day and into dark we fought:
And we lay in the straw in the rank blood and Cortés was
Hoarse with the shouting – "… for a man was wronged and a

"Fool to suffer the Sure Aid but to best it and
"Fight as he might: and he prayed all of us pardon

"And grace if he spoke our hurt: but we were men:

Heroic or not, it’s hard to deny that Cortes was a remarkable leader.

Of course it matters little how heroic your leaders are if you are fighting an unjust war. Such leaders may become infamous, but they can never truly be heroic. The poem does not provide a formal argument over the justification of the war, but MacLeish uses several passages from Diáz, to support the idea that it was a just war, if not a holy one. One of the earliest passages in the poems cites the Spaniards’ reaction to the priests’ sacrifices:

New-spilled blood in the air: many among us
Seeing the priests with their small and arrogant faces:

Seeing the dead boys’ breasts and the idols hung with
Dried shells of the hearts like the husks of cicadas
And their human eyeballs and their painted tongues

Cried out to the Holy Mother of God for it:

Diáz notes that in their earliest meetings that Indians who were oppressed by the Aztecs hated them:

"Montezúma the king’s land! Of our people
"Clear to the sea’s edge was the river corn:
"And they came from the west with their hard eyes and their eagles:

"Once we were short of spears: once were the fords deep:
"Now they take what they will in the whole land:
"They rut in our daughters’ beds: it is evil fortune:

"We have no name of a man now: our ancestors –
"They that planted the orchards: they were Totónacs:
"I that speak this was a free-born man:

"Beware of the land Colúa you that go to it!"

Several epithets identify the Aztecs as a force of evil (perhaps Bush could increase his appeal to intellectuals simply by borrowing epithets from MacLeish’s poem):
“The falsifiers of things seen!/ The defamers of/ Sunlight under the name of our sky!/ and we slew them” and one that seems uniquely MacLeishean, “And they would have destroyed us in that place: the debasers of/ Leaves! of the shape of wild geese on the waters!”

The Tenth Book which begins with the description of a virtual Paradise, and ends with a sacrifice of a young boy by the Aztec priests, the apparent price of maintaining this heathen paradise offers the most convincing argument that the Spaniards saw the Aztec priests as ministers of the Devil. The book begins:

O halcyon! 0 sea-conceiving bird!
The bright surf breaking on thy silver beaches

continues:

We were like those that in their lands they say
The steers of the sun went up through the wave-lit orchards
Shaking the water drops and those gold naked

Girls before them at their dripping horns!

Despite their feeling that this is paradise, the Spaniards were unwilling to pay the price for continuing to live here:

And they passed with their cries at dawn and their deep
drums:

And we saw them go by the stone courts and the cages:
And all clean and with coarse lime and the temple
Steep in the reach of the sky
and the boy was slain!

No matter how hypocritical or greedy the Conquistadors may have been, it is difficult to justify the sacrifices that the Aztecs demanded of the other tribes they had conquered.

Finally, the battle scenes depicted in the poem would be a movie director’s delight. It was a real High Noon where, for those still capable of such illusions, the “good guys defeated the bad guys:”

And they came like dogs with their arms down: and their
faces

Painted and black and with death’s eyes and their breasts
Quilted with cotton and their naked arms:
And the hard hammer of sun on the gold: and their crests like a

Squall of rain across the whitening barley –
We that were mortal and feared death – and the roll of the
Drums like the thud in the ear of a man’s heart and the

Arrows raking us: rattle of metal: the goad
Stuck in the fat of the hand: and we standing there
Taking the sting of it. .
No! we were good soldiers –

And in a later battle:

They fell by scores and they came again by their hundreds:
And the blood of our veins was run in the earth with our victories:
Day after day we fought and we always won!
And we sent them word they were well wealed: and to think of it:

And they came again with their crow’s cry and their feathers:
And they fought us back in the brake: and our bellies sickened:

And we saw soon how our bodies were near death
And how we should take that battle with our lives
And pass them by with our bare bones into Mexico –

No matter what we might personally believe, Diaz seemed convinced that with the Grace of God that the Conquistador’s were able to defeat the forces of evil:

And the plumes sawed in the sun like maize: and we feared them and
Fought blind and with God’s grace we came out of it:
And we lay beyond the mountains for that year.

In many ways Cortes’ victory seems like the kind of victory that only happens in fantasies. Little wonder that he and his men may have felt that they were blessed by God.

Although at first appearance Archibald MacLeish’s "Conquistador" seems merely an accurate recreation of Bernál Diáz’s history, further analysis reveals some subtle conflicts that are not evident at first but that reflect themes developed in other MacLeish poems.

On one level, the poem can be perceived as more sophisticated version of Bruce Springsteen’s "Glory Days." Diáz is looking back at a glorious heroic event he participated in, but we, the reader, already know that he wil end up living in the land he conquered with an Indian wife who he certainly does not love and with children who he disdains, and a feeling that his efforts have been denigrated because he is merely a commoner. At first these events may seem unrelated, but as we read we discover that the heroic conquest of Mexico contained within it the very seeds of his destruction. The poem might well be called the "Tragedy of Bernál Diáz," commoner.

It is this tension between the heroic victory and the personal failure that gives this poem its power.

The Dedication of Archibald MacLeish’s “Conquistador” is a line from Dante’s Inferno “O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand/ Perils,’ I said, ‘have come unto the West,” and the poem, if we are to believe the electronic World Book, does describe most of the perils that Bernál Diáz faced while accompanying Cortéz in the conquering of the Aztec Empire.

But the poem obviously attempts to do much more than that. The Prologue to the poem raises the question:

And the way goes on in the worn earth:
and we (others) –
What are the dead to us in our better fortune?
They have left us the roads made and the walls standing:
They have left us the chairs in the rooms:
what is there more of them –

Suggesting that we owe an obligation to those who have preceded us, an obligation the poet feels bound to explore.

One of MacLeish’s aims that seems to coincide with Bernál Diáz’s goal in originally writing is history is to show the conquest from the perspective of one who participated rather than from a latter historian’s viewpoint. In “Bernál Diáz’s Preface to His Book” MacLeish has BD say:

I am an ignorant old sick man: blind with the
Shadow of death on my face and my hands to lead me:
And he not ignorant: not sick –
but I

Fought in those battles! These were my own deeds!
These names he writes of mouthing them out as a man
would
Names in Herodotus – dead and their wars to read –

These were my friends: these dead my companions:
I: Bernál Diaz: called del Castlilo:
Called in the time of my first fights El Calán:

In fact, according to an article by Rolena Adorno, one of Diáz’s main goals was to refute the histories that were being written by others, histories that some times questioned the morality of the conquest of the Aztecs. Diaz, because he was there, argues that his history is merely the record of his life:

I: poor as I am: I was young in that country:
These words were my life: these letters written

Cold on the page with the split ink and the shunt of the
Stubborn thumb: these marks at my fingers:
These are the shape of my own life

When accused of merely writing his own history in order to protect his fame, MacLeish has Diáz reply:

"The tedious veteran jealous of his fame!"
What is my fame or the fame of these my companions?
Their tombs are the bellies of Indians: theirs are the
shameful

Graves in the wild earth: in the Godless sand:
None know the place of their bones: as for mine
Strangers will dig my grave in a stony land:

Even my sons have the strangeness of dark kind in them:
Indian dogs will bark at dusk by my sepulchre:
What is my fame!

In other words, he has no fame, instead he lives in Mexico surrounded by children by an Indian mother who seem strange to him. He expects nothing more than to have “Indian dogs” bark as his “sepulcher,” for he, like most of his compatriots will end up in an unknown grave in a “foreign” land.

Later he remarks:

Where have they written our names? What have they
said of us?
They call the towns for the kings that bear no scars:
They keep the names of the great for time to stare at –
The bishops rich-men generals cocks-at-arms:

Those with the glaze in their eyes and the fine bearing:
The born leaders of men: the resonant voices:

They give them the lands for their tombs: they call it
America!

(And who has heard of Vespucci in this soil
Or down by the lee of the coast or toward the Havana?)
And we that fought here: that with heavy toil

Earthed up the powerful cities of this land –
What are we? When will our fame come?

raising the question of why it is that the “common man,” the man who really does all the fighting is forgotten, while the names of kings or bishops who have done nothing are predominant in the land the comman men died to conquer. When will the common man be recognized for his true contribution to history?

Although Diáz seems resigned to his fate:

We were the lords of it all. .
Now time has taught us:
Death has mastered us most: sorrow and pain
Sickness and evil days are our lives’ lot:

It is not a fate that he welcomes or accepts readily, still a warrior at the end of his life.

The final argument developed in the poem is what Rolena Adorno called the argument that the conquest of the Aztecs was a “just war,” not just a war fought to steal the Indians’ gold:

New-spilled blood in the air: many among us
Seeing the priests with their small and arrogant faces:

Seeing the dead boys’ breasts and the idols hung with I
Dried shells of the hearts like the husks of cicadas
And their human eyeballs and their painted tongues

Cried out to the Holy Mother of God for it:

If we are to believe Diáz, the war was also fought to put an end to the ghastly sacrifices that the Aztec Empire demanded of both surrounding tribes and of their own people. Cortéz’s soldiers were so offended by the rituals they witnessed that they felt compelled to destroy the Aztec empire, and the preface ends with:

And none of us all but had his heart foreknown the
Evil to come would have turned from the land then:
But the lives of men are covered and not shown –

Reading the entire works of a poet from beginning to end is in some ways like reliving the poet’s life, even a little like growing with him as his insights and philosophy grow. In addition, you gain insights into his poetry because you can follow shifts in his style while simultaneously seeing how his style was influenced by those around him. You can also follow the development of images and symbols that become vital to a fuller understanding of the poet’s work.

“Baccalaureate” is the oldest poem in Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems 1917-1982:

BACCALAUREATE

A year or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go, –
All shall be shard of broken memories.

And there shall linger other, magic things, –
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotten harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our hearts’ rememberings.

And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth’s four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are youth’s symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.

While I found it only mildly interesting in itself, I found the symbols, the “magic things” that lie at the heart of his poetry quite interesting. Of course, the idea that symbols will live while the ideas of great writers like Socrates and Quixote will disappear could merely be attributed to the fact that MacLeish is a poet and not a philosopher or novelist. On the other hand, the “symbols” he chooses are “experiences” that are “eternal” precisely because they are a part of nature and do not rely on human interpretation. In terms of MacLeish’s poetry itself, the symbolism of “the sunny green” and, in particular, “moonlit elms” become increasingly significant as you read his works.

While I was not particularly impressed by most of MacLeish’s early poems, there are several interesting lines and images to be found in them. The following images appear in from the long poem The Happy Marriage (1924):

Man is immortal for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever — why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree: we are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own
And fall and rot when summer’s overblown

Now though I’m not sure it’s politically correct today to ascribe the child only to the woman, I found the comparison of woman to the tree and man to the leaves particularly interesting, considering the constant reference to trees and leaves in MacLeish’s poems. Strangely enough, Germanic creation myths also suggest that woman was derived from the elm tree. Of course, in Germanic myth man is also a tree, an ash, and not the leaves of the elm tree. But it is always the poet’s personal adaptation of myths and symbols that is most interesting, not the use of myth per se.

Even this MacLeish poem about death contains references to trees, in particular “elm” trees:

SOME ASPECTS OF IMMORTALITY

The alley between the elm trees ends
In nothing, abruptly, as a life ends.

Down that straight avenue I stare
At the final blank, the abyss of air.

A nursemaid with a carriage steers
Across the vista, pushes, nears
The brink, goes over, disappears.

Too ignorant, think I, for fears.

There’s a startling contrast between the ancient elms and the nursemaid with the child in the carriage, but even more startling is his perception of the end of the row of elms as the final abyss, death. When we go beyond the trees we encounter the nothingness of death. Of course, this fear is balanced against the irony of the final line, for we surely know that it’s not the nursemaid that’s “too ignorant,” but, rather, the narrator that has been overcome by an “irrational” fear.

MacLeish’s poetry from 1917 to 1928 seems largely derivative. His long early poems seem to owe much to T.S.Eliot, even going so far as to borrow an opening line from The Golden Bough. Ezra Pound is also a major influence. Even the much-anthologized “Ars Poetica” seems derivative and atypical, somehow borrowed from the imagist movement that was sweeping the world of poetry.

In fact, it is only in the section serendipitiously named “from New Found Land (1930) that MacLeish seems to have discovered his own voice. It is, to be sure, a melancholic voice that has been echoed in many of his earlier poems, but finally MacLeish seems to have discovered his “own” vision. He effectively combines two of the images from the earlier “Baccalaureate” to create a vision of beauty underlaid by an impending sense of loss: