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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 9113371" data-attributes="member: 50987">It's not epic, but it was the poem that inspired my first D&D games.The Splendor FallsAlfred, Lord TennysonThe splendor falls on castle wallsand snowy summits old in story;The long light shakes across the lakes,and the wild cataract leaps in glory.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,and thinner, clearer, farther going!O, sweet and far from cliff and scarThe horns of Elfland faintly blowing!Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,Blow, bugles; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying.O love, they die in yon rich sky,They fain on hill or field or river;Our echoes roll from soul to soul,and grow forever and forever.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.I loved the imagery and rhythm of this poem so much that I convinced my teacher to let me do a whole "book report" on it (instead of, you know, a book).  It was 6th grade; I'm sure she was just thrilled to have a kid who was interested in poetry in her class.  Fortunately she let me stick to just this one poem, and not the entire "The Princess" Medley that it comes from...Apparently, Alfred wrote this poem after a visit to a glacial lake in Switzerland, where he watched fishing boats bringing in their nets in for the day.  They used bugles to communicate with each other, and each blast of a bugle set off a chain of musical echoes that seemed to last forever.  It inspired him to write this poem.The poem is about bugle music and the way it transports the listener to a magical place.  So he gave this poem a musical cadence and structure, and wrote it such that it mimics a fading echo when read aloud.  The music is magical and reaches forever, all the way to the Elf kingdom, where the elves respond with horns of their own.  But more than that, "The Splendor Falls" is a poem about the "echo" of a person's life, and the fading memories that they leave behind when they die, echoing "from soul to soul...forever and forever."Soon after I finished that book report, I started looking for a D&D setting for my friends that would use the same town as a "home base" for all of the adventures the characters would have.  (Remember, this was the 1980s...the idea of a "campaign" wasn't really a thing yet.)  It was serendipitous that the Town of Threshold, in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos (of the Mystara setting) was a lake town at the foot of a mountain range, complete with a "wild cataract" (waterfall).Anyway.  Thanks for the trip down memory lane, [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER] .  I love poetry, and this one is especially dear to me.</blockquote>

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