ABSTRACT
Vainglory presents a world divided between good and evil, clean souls versus devilspawn. The narrator reaches back into the past, as far as the Old Testament, to uncover the workings of the world, representing a fi ght in an English beer-hall as a day-to-day refl ex of the war that started in heaven. The moral choices are the same; the men who make them, different; but at all times we must know which side we are on. The poet, working like a Khalil Gibran of the mid-tenth century, which is the assumed date of Vainglory, seems immersed in the Bible and the phrases of sermons. On this account, at least one reader thinks ‘elegy’ is out of the question as the poem’s generic marker (McKinnell 1991: 83-9), it seems less prescriptive to treat Vainglory as a giedd, a poem on the meaning of life, just like the other ‘elegies’.
