Piere Vidal Old - Analysis

A mind that can’t stop reliving its own blaze

The poem’s central claim is fierce and simple: the speaker can’t bear being alive after his most intense days are over, because the present feels like a humiliation beside the old heat. That pain comes out sideways, as accusation. When he thinks of the great dead days and their splendid madness, he doesn’t merely grieve; he curse[s] my strength and even blame[s] the sun his gladness. The world’s ordinary brightness becomes an insult, as if the red sun were knowingly mock[ing] him. Right away the tone is unstable: it’s elegiac, but also petulant, theatrical, and proud—like someone who can’t mourn without also demanding applause for what he has lost.

Vidal the hunter: glory built out of pursuit

He introduces himself with a shout of self-mythology: Behold me, Vidal, fool of fools. Even that insult is a kind of crown, because it frames him as a legendary excess. His old identity is pure motion and dominance: Swift as the king wolf, chasing tall stags through alder brakes, known by every jongleur. The repeated fled—the hounds fled and the deer fled—isn’t just about animals; it’s the speaker’s ideal world, where everything else yields to his force and speed. What he calls glory is not calm achievement but the intoxication of being feared, sung about, and obeyed.

Blood, scorn, and the wound that outlasts the hunt

The poem sharpens when it admits that physical triumph didn’t actually satisfy him. He remembers the grey pack and the hind’s blood spurted hot over sharpened teeth, a scene that is both exultant and slightly sickening in its relish. Yet he insists that this heat scorched me not the way human rejection did: first scorn, then lips of the Penautier! That pivot reveals the poem’s key tension: he can master animals and landscapes, but a single person’s scorn can undo him. The boastful hunter is also a man whose selfhood depends on being chosen. His violence, in other words, doesn’t prove invulnerability; it may be a compensation for the place where he is most easily hurt.

The blue night by the Rhone: desire as vigil

Memory then becomes almost religious in its intensity. He swears time cannot blot that blue night, and the sky is rendered as something hard and precious: stars set deep in crystal. The language slows into a kind of watchfulness, and he links sleeplessness to devotion: because my sleep / Rare visitor came not, he says he will guerdon the saints, as if even his restlessness needs a patron and a reward. He keeps One more fool’s vigil among hollyhocks, flowers that suggest softness and domestic color, an odd counterpoint to the hunting scenes. The poem’s emotional weather changes here: instead of chase and kill, there is waiting, longing, and the self-torment of staying awake to prove how real the desire was.

The Loba: conquest, communion, and a disturbing blade

The arrival of the Loba is described like a natural force, quick and soundless: Swift came the Loba, green and silent, her mantle like a mist through which her white form fought and conquered. Even in sex, the poem can’t stop speaking the vocabulary of struggle and victory. The speaker praises a love that is Hot and silent as fate, strong until / It faints. It’s meant to sound like perfect mutuality—taking and giving all—yet the language keeps tipping toward domination and extremity: Stark, keen, triumphant, a passion that plays at death.

Then the poem reveals its most unsettling edge. After her breath Ceased utterly, he waited and drew a dagger from its saffron sheath. The moment is deliberately ambiguous: is he fantasizing about murder, about ritual proof of conquest, about testing whether the ecstasy was real? The dagger doth tremble here, making his desire look like a shaky compulsion rather than a noble appetite. And when she wakes and mocked the less keen blade, the speaker is pierced by a humiliating reversal: even his threat, even his instrument, is not enough to command her. The poem’s erotic energy and its violence are braided so tightly that the reader can’t separate passion from peril.

Old age as public ridicule—and as revenge fantasy

The poem’s major turn is the fall back into the present body. He repeats his earlier grievance—I curse the sun—but now the contrast is explicit: the man who knew strath, garth, brake, dale is shrivelled as an old oak’s trunk, turned into made men’s mock’ry in rotten sadness. It’s not only that he feels weak; he feels watched. Aging is imagined as a kind of social punishment, a stripping of the heroic costume in front of jeering spectators.

So he tries to seize control by turning his memories into an indictment of everyone else. No man hath heard his glory; No man hath dared like him. He spits at the living as niggards who can’t buy what he had: One night, one body and one welding flame! There’s a rage here that’s also fear: if others can’t value his old blaze, then his life becomes merely a private obsession, something that dies with him. He calls his era’s successors stunted followers who mask at passions, and his last boast is almost spiteful: I mock you by the mighty fires / That burnt me to this ash. The contradiction is stark: he hates being reduced to ash, yet he also wants ash to count as proof of having burned hotter than anyone else.

Does he want memory, or does he want to be dangerous again?

The dagger scene and the repeated insistence on being feared suggest a hard question the poem won’t quite confess. When he says love is silent as fate and when he imagines drawing steel after the Loba’s breath stops, is he remembering tenderness—or craving the old power to decide what happens next? The poem’s grief over aging can look, at moments, like grief over losing the ability to dominate.

Cabaret and the animal nose: the self reduced to appetite

The ending breaks into abrupt cries—Ah! Cabaret!—and then physical struggle: Take your hands off me! followed by the bracketed stage direction, Sniffing the air. The voice that began by cursing the sun ends with an almost canine reflex: this scent is hot! It’s as if the grand troubadour-mask collapses into raw sensation. That last detail matters because it doesn’t resolve the poem into wisdom; it exposes what remains when glory, song, and youth are gone: a body still capable of wanting, still responding to heat, still half-mad with appetite—even as it is, in his own words, shrivelled. The poem leaves us with a man whose greatest memory is also his trap: the fire that made him is the fire that keeps him from accepting any quieter kind of life.