Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "History," Christopher Howell takes on the weighty subject of the Battle of Agincourt, a significant historical moment that, under his pen, becomes an examination of the absurdity, grotesqueness, and forgotten ironies in the stories that construct history. Howell presents this famous English victory not as a moment of glory or heroism but as a visceral, chaotic, and darkly comedic scene. Through the interplay of humor, historical irony, and a blunt presentation of battlefield realities, Howell critiques the romanticized narratives of history, illuminating the often brutal, unfiltered nature of human experience.

The opening line places the reader in the harsh reality of war, with King Henry purportedly threatening, “First bastard who runs gets his jewels on a plate,” an unsentimental assertion of authority. Howell immediately dismantles the lofty, mythic portrayal of Henry V as Shakespeare had it, replacing it with an image of a crude, desperate king rallying his men through intimidation rather than inspiration. In Howell’s portrayal, the legendary figure of Henry becomes a pragmatic leader acutely aware of his soldiers’ fear and mortality. His offhand threat reduces the grand purpose of battle to a raw struggle for survival, where honor is coerced rather than freely given.

Howell’s portrayal of the Duke of Gloucester’s casual observation of birds in a nearby “spinney of winter birches off to the left” highlights the dissonance between the natural world and human violence. In the midst of preparation for slaughter, a quiet, incidental moment of natural beauty unfolds unnoticed, suggesting that nature itself remains indifferent to the absurdity of human conflict. Howell further deepens the farcical atmosphere with the soldiers “farting into the pre-combat silence,” a crass but humanizing detail that strips the moment of any elevated or heroic pretense. This unfiltered portrayal underscores the base realities of life on the battlefield, far removed from any sanitized, epic rendering of war.

The archers’ mockery of “the Queen’s fey scribe” continues Howell’s dissection of history as a construct, with the archers fully aware that their gruesome reality will be reshaped by the writer into something palatable for posterity. These soldiers, reduced to eating dead horses and suffering the consequent “distressing of their bowels,” reflect the dehumanizing, relentless nature of battle. Their camaraderie, expressed through jokes and jibes in the face of horror, serves as both a coping mechanism and a testament to their shared suffering. Howell’s raw, vivid depiction invites the reader to consider how these gritty, uncomfortable details are omitted in historical accounts that favor heroic or noble narratives.

In a darkly humorous detail, Howell describes the archers’ improvisational efforts to fortify their position with a “bristling breastwork of sharpened stakes,” which the “fuzzily chivalric Frenchmen would later try to charge through.” The archers’ ingenuity is contrasted with the French knights’ reliance on outdated notions of chivalry, creating a scene of brutal pragmatism pitted against romantic ideals. Howell presents the English soldiers as neither heroes nor villains but rather as survivors, adapting to their desperate circumstances in ways that history often neglects to acknowledge.

One of the most striking moments in the poem is Howell’s depiction of a “clutch of white doves,” which emerge and circle between the two armies, “a-cryed out as one voyse fore to taken eych mann merci on hys enymys.” This image introduces a sense of transcendence and unexpected beauty, as if nature itself intervenes in an attempt to mitigate the violence about to unfold. Yet, Howell’s rendering of this moment in archaic language, reminiscent of medieval chronicles, lends an ironic distance. The plea for mercy, whether imagined by the scribe or genuinely felt by some soldiers, is ultimately futile, overwhelmed by the ensuing carnage. This fleeting vision of peace, absurdly out of place, underscores the tragic senselessness of war and the way human beings often ignore or defy calls for compassion in favor of their baser instincts.

In the aftermath of the battle, Howell recounts how “the English archers had laid down their bows and with giant mallets set to the beturtled knights in all their shit-stained iron,” a gruesome image that strips away any remaining illusions of gallantry. The juxtaposition of the knights’ once-noble armor with excrement and the brutal bludgeoning by common soldiers highlights the collapse of the ideals of chivalry. These knights, encased in their once-proud armor, now become almost comical figures, immobilized and humiliated, their honor and nobility reduced to a grim mockery in the face of the archers’ blunt violence. Howell presents this as a moment of leveling, a reduction of all combatants to mere bodies on the field, devoid of status or dignity.

The poem concludes with the image of the doves “turned mute, crow-like and aimless as playbills fluttering from the darkened galleries of the next six-hundred years.” This haunting closing line reflects the way history, despite its weight and impact, ultimately becomes like discarded theater programs, relics of a performance long since ended. The doves, once symbols of peace and mercy, now take on a more ominous, crow-like quality, their silence a testament to the disregard for the compassion they briefly represented. Howell’s analogy to playbills emphasizes the performative nature of history, where the events are staged, recorded, and then forgotten or reinterpreted over time.

"History" by Christopher Howell ultimately presents war not as a glorious or honorable endeavor but as a chaotic, brutal, and deeply human experience. Through the contrast between the grim realities of battle and the sanitized versions preserved in official records, Howell challenges the reader to confront the sanitized narratives that construct our understanding of the past. By blending humor, historical detail, and poignant imagery, Howell critiques the romanticization of conflict, revealing instead the absurdity, horror, and dark beauty that lie just beneath the surface of the stories we choose to tell.

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