Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In "Hunting Horns," Guillaume Apollinaire crafts a narrative that touches upon themes of love, nostalgia, and transience. The poem, compact yet laden with rich allusions and imagery, illustrates the complex relationship between memory and the present, the tangible and the ephemeral.

The opening lines, "Our story is noble and tragic / As a tyrant's mask," immediately cast a tone of gravity. Apollinaire positions the love story as one that bears both nobility and tragedy, likening it to a "tyrant's mask"-a symbol that conveys a balance of grandeur and darkness. The idea of a "mask" also hints at an inherent duality or a concealed reality, asking the reader to probe beyond the surface of things.

The narrative structure is punctuated with a reference to Thomas De Quincey, a 19th-century British writer known for his work "Confessions of an english Opium-eater." De Quincey represents a persona that embodies excess, longing, and a sort of aimless wandering fueled by "his opiate hippocras." By invoking him, Apollinaire complicates the fabric of the poem, connecting his own love story to a larger human experience of love, longing, and the mental fog that sometimes accompanies these intense emotions.

"Let us pass, since all things pass / I shall return at my ease," evoke the theme of transience. The idea that "all things pass" is a universally acknowledged truth, a nod to the impermanence of human experiences and feelings. Yet there's a tone of resignation rather than sorrow, captured in the phrase "I shall return at my ease." It implies a certain peace with the passing of things, an acceptance that renders the "love-dream" neither overly romantic nor bitterly tragic but rather, simply "pathetic," in the sense of being full of pathos and humane understanding.

The concluding lines, "Memories are hunting horns / Whose sound dies on the breeze," serve as a poignant metaphor for the fading nature of memories. Hunting horns, instruments designed to carry sound over great distances, here serve as an emblem for memories that may start strong but eventually fade, carried away and dispersed by the "breeze" of time.

Thus, in "Hunting Horns," Apollinaire achieves a multilayered exploration of love's complexities, wrapped in historical and literary allusions that enrich its texture. He engages with the paradoxes of love-its ability to be at once "noble and tragic," its susceptibility to the distortions of memory, and its enduring yet fading imprint on the human psyche. It is a poem that captures the essence of existential reflection, framed within the scope of personal emotion and broader human experience.

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...