“[Beyond] These [Lifeless] Things”

I am not a big fan of Procol Harum; in fact, I usually have to remind myself to check to make sure I am not misspelling it “Procul Harum”—the supposedly Latin phrase from which the band derived their name—which, incidentally, does not mean “beyond these things” (or “far from those things”), even if Gary Brooker, the founder of the band, thought it did. To bring a quantum level of nitpicking accuracy to bear, the group’s “Latin-inspired” name is even more error-laden: In addition to the misspelling, the Latin demonstrative pronoun “hic” is declined incorrectly, “'harum' being the feminine genitive plural 'of these things'” when it ought to be the ablative, “his”. In other words, to make sense in Latin, Procol Harum’s name ought to be “Procul His”.

Be that as it may, there are a couple of Procol Harum songs I like, my favorite being, no, not “A Whiter Shade of Pale” but rather “Conquistador”. I have nothing against "AWSoP" other than that it is overplayed and -praised. But it's still an outstanding song. My reasons for being slightly fatigued by it have less to do with the song itself than with the fact that it got played seemingly every ten minutes on FM radio—back when FM radio was a thing (some) people cared about—and seems to be the default signifier for every film or TV show that wants to stake a claim to being “hip”. Most people I know who have an opinion on this matter favor “AWSoP” and consider me willfully perverse for being partial to “Conquistador”. Nonetheless, preferring “Conquistador” is not exactly going out on a limb: It was Procol Harum’s second-most popular single, after—you guessed it—“A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

To me, “Conquistador” is the better song; I'm sure I’d prefer it to “AWSoP” even if the latter weren't so overexposed. I like both versions of “Conquistador”—the original, slower, bluesier studio version as well as the one featured above, a far superior version, performed live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The live version is the one you typically hear, and with good reason: The song is vastly enhanced by the inclusion of orchestration. The staccato strings that open the song are distinctive, and help to set a tone of edgy urgency that I consider thematically apropos for the song; and the inclusion of the mariachi-style horns brings to the fore the Latin flavor that’s far less prominent in the studio version. I also derive a weirdly inexplicable pleasure from the fact that an English band and a Canadian orchestra blend together so well here to produce such an improbable result: a Latin-flavored musical contemplation of colonial history and the ravages of time.

And in fact, the real Conquistador, the true conqueror, in the song is not some unnamed Spanish explorer/plunderer but rather Time Itself. The song is at heart a rumination on the inevitability of death, which brings everyone low, regardless of standing or stature: Death is the great equalizer and Time is Death’s inexorable minion. When it comes to death, there are no conquerors, only the many vanquished, among whom, the song makes clear, must be included the storied Conquistador himself.

It is unclear whether the song’s narrator is looking at a statue of a Spanish Conquistador or some other simulacrum or if he is merely addressing an image in his mind's eye.  However he may be seeing this Conquistador, it is from a vantage point that spans a sea of time and through a prism that reveals to him the ravages that time visits upon both the meek and the mighty, indiscriminately: The Conquistador's stallion stands alone, riderless, almost forlorn, the apostrophized Conquistador having been laid low, his “armour-plated breast ... [having] long since lost its sheen”, his face a “death mask ... [where] ... there are no signs which can be seen.”

No signs of life? Or no signs of a meaning to life?

And as the gloom begins to fall,
I see there is no, only all

But what the narrator does find that ties all of humanity together is the inevitability of death. The refrain

And though I hoped for something to find
I could see no maze to unwind

suggests that the narrator is in search of some sort of ultimate meaning, a path through the labyrinth of ambiguity and uncertainty; but instead of something, he finds nothing; instead of some meaning to life, he finds the certainty of death that awaits us all.

Historically speaking, the Conquistadors were (not to put too fine a point on it) ruthless killers who (arguably) perpetrated a form of genocide, bringing whole civilizations down and plundering the wealth of those civilizations along the way, while sowing death wherever they went in the New World. These truths are barely alluded to in the song, though. We do know that the narrator originally “came to jeer at you [the Conquistador]”—perhaps for the Conquistador's historical crimes against humanity when he “came with sword held high”?—but ultimately pays his respects to the dead man because the narrator, from his vantage point far removed temporally from the epoch of the Conquistadors, soberly realizes that the Conquistador “did not conquer, only die”. The Mighty Conquistador ultimately suffered the same fate as his victims, the same fate as everyone who ever lived—the fate that will be shared by everyone who ever will live: death.

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Time, the song emphasizes, conquered the Conquistador as it will conquer us all.
To me, it’s striking how close the theme of this Procol Harum song is to the famous Percy Bysshe Shelley sonnet “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!‘
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

We tend to think of sonnets as love poems, but there is nothing of love in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, unless we count the self-love of the boastful “King of Kings” Ozymandias himself, who expects his “Works” to last forever and inspire awe and even “despair” in the subsequent generations of the “Mighty” that the inscription on his statue addresses. Ozymandias’ expectations are doubly thwarted: His “Works” have not survived; and his statue, intended as a monument to his transcendent grandeur, instead lies broken, half-buried, and “lifeless”, a memorial to his arrogance and the transience of the works that he thought would make him immortal.

It’s telling that Shelly structures the poem so that the narrator himself has not seen the ruins of Ozymandias’ statue nor read his boastful words. They are reported to him orally by an anonymous “traveller” as opposed to, say, by an eminent antiquarian in a respected historical tome. Oxzymandias’ feats, that is to say, are communicated as rumor, “lifeless” hearsay, instead of as the timeless historical deeds the hubristic king thought would be his legacy. Everything in the poem undermines proud Ozymandias’ presumptuous words: his relative anonymity, his forgotten accomplishments, and, of course, the ultimate non-monument, the broken, pathetic, ruined statue.

And, indeed,

Nothing beside remains.

Note the trochaic stress of the first word in that phrase, NOthing, itself a deviation from the typical iambic meter of the sonnet form, accentuating the disjunct between Ozymandias’ expected legacy and the actuality of his irrelevance. The caesura in line 12 underscores the abruptness of the ending of Ozymandias’ claim to greatness, as well. His statue and his “Works” were supposed to transcend, defeat, Time, but, needless to say, they do not.

In both poem and song, the sands of time appear and have a similar symbolic role: In the conquistador’s “rusty scabbard” “the sand [that] has taken seed” takes the place of that emblem of conquest, the sword; whereas in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias’ broken statue is utterly overrun and encompassed by “[t]he lone and level sands [that] stretch far away”, like time itself.

The sands of time go on; they endure; and time brings even the mighty and powerful low.

It should be noted that Shelley wrote his poem in competition with his friend Horace Smith, a poet probably best-known for this very competition. Smith’s sonnet on the topic of Ozymandias’ pride is virtually identical in theme to the more famous Shelley sonnet, but Smith does Shelley one better, by projecting the theme into an imagined future, when England’s own great city of London will be in ruins and the “powerful but unrecorded race” of Britons will also be as forlorn and forgotten as Ozymandias and his works.

- Tom G., Hopewell Bramch

Sources of Interest

Bloom, Harold.   Percy Bysshe Shelley Biographical profile of the poet and critical analysis of his poems.
Procol Harum.  Greatest Hits (CD). “Conquistador (Live)” is Track 1. (This hits album is also available on hoopla .)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe.  The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley, Percy Bysshe.  The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley hoopla ebook