Andrew Lang’s Ban and Arrière Ban is a collection that rallies poems previously scattered through magazines, newspapers, and other books, bringing together history, legend, love, loss, literature, and the pleasures of ordinary life in varied lyrical forms. Lang recalls Joan of Arc and her Scottish allies, the defenders who held the Bass for King James, and the exiled Prince Charles, expressing sympathy for defeated causes, old loyalties, and vanished hopes. He also invokes Helen, Omar Khayyám, Aesop, and Greek poetry, pays tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, and humorously writes about golf, university life, difficult rhymes, and the demands of readers. Haunted towers, lost love, Christmas merriment touched by melancholy, death, graves, and enduring memory complete a collection in which literary playfulness exists beside sincere nostalgia and sorrow.
