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Popular Culture Review
tongue in cheek, the poet tells us that Eben is a shadowy compatriot of Roland’s
ghost, that like the tragic Roland, he too is a scarred and armored knight, that he
too has managed to hold on “as if enduring to the end”. He writes of Eben that,
Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
This chivalric costuming of the old man, while sympathetic enough, is also
fraught with overstatement and melodrama. In truth, of course, Eben could not
possibly be a knightly shadow of Roland: his “end” involves no great epic; it em
braces no chivalric battle. While he raises his jug up to his mouth, that very jug
hardly resembles the silent, epic horn that Roland raised to his, nor is the old
fellow engaged in princely combat for a sacred cause like his ghostly compatriot.
Admittedly, his situation does indeed appear rather hopeless; and, perhaps, as with
Roland, it may be too late for much hope, but this is in an alcoholic sense, not from
the standpoint of chivalric combat. In point of fact, while the old man is something
of a gentleman and addresses himself to himself by his last name, he is no liege.
He is only a tired and befuddled old intoxicant who has wrapped himself in such a
haze of booze and melancholia that his thin shield of armor, such as it is, offers
very little protection from the pains of a reality check or loneliness or the insults of
aging.
Back down the road where he might find an element of sanity and fellowship
in the common ground of humanity, we learn that the village has closed its doors
and that Eben has become something of a pariah. He can expect no living wel
come. Only its dead are perceived as offering him a phantom salutation:
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim
Old Flood might fancy that he is hearing a sentimental ovation. In his intoxi
cated state and through his alcoholic tears, he would probably love a sentimental
ovation — especially one that was rather morbid, for that is a characteristic of the
intoxicated perception. In truth, however, the phantom ovation — like the phan
tom ghost of Roland—is histrionic, a pathetic and rather sentimental hallucination
that only confirms the old man’s loneliness and the depths of his overcharged sen
timentality and intoxication.