Summary
The poem opens with a statement on hero narratives. The speaker claims that all of those stories always have the central figure rushing to the next major event. He references the labors of Hercules as well as Aeneas's journey to the underworld. He then goes on to describe an instance of humanness in Virgil's Aeneid, making reference to a scene in which Aeneas asks the priestess Sibyl for instructions on visiting his father in the underworld. She tells him that going there is easy; it is returning that is hard.
Analysis
"Heroes" is a poem that seeks to reframe traditional narratives of hero mythology. Creeley seems keenly interested in deconstructing and remaking the images of the heroes he alludes to in the poem. From the beginning, he gives the distinct sense that there is a problem with the way these figures have commonly been rendered in famous works of poetry. He seeks out a way to capture a different side to these stories and, in doing so, apply them in new contexts.
The poem starts with a general claim that hero narratives tend to move from one major action to another ("In all those stories the hero / is beyond himself into the next / thing,"). Creeley categorizes these dramatic moments as "the next thing." He suggests that this approach to writing about heroes renders them almost inhuman as they act "beyond" themselves. For Creeley, these big moments fail to provide much in the way of human insight into these individuals. Performing nearly impossible tasks makes them appear far outside the scope of an average reader's life. He then makes allusions to two major hero stories: Hercules ("be it those labors / of Hercules,") and Aeneas ("or Aeneas going into death."). The "labors of Hercules" refers to the twelve labors that Hercules was required to carry out as penance for the murder of his wife and child. Most of these involved slaying intimidating creatures like Cerebrus, the three-headed dog, or the fearsome Nemean lion. The phrase "Aeneas going into death" is an allusion to a scene in the Aeneid in which Aeneas visits the underworld. Creeley expands on this reference later in the poem. The central idea of this first stanza is that these stories are written in such a way that makes them outsized and inaccessible. These great feats, while admirable in the eyes of the poem, are too massive to be humanly relatable.
In the second stanza, the poem unpacks a specific scene from the Aeneid. Creeley finds that there is a single moment in the Aeneid were he locates vulnerability ("I thought the instant of the one humanness") and makes reference to Virgil, the author of the aforementioned epic poem ("in Virgil's plan of it"). He then mentions a scene ("was that it was of course human enough to die, / yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.") in which Aeneas asks how he can visit his father in the underworld. A priestess named Sibyl proceeds to inform him that going to the underworld (in other words, dying) is easy, but returning is the real difficulty. Her words translate to, approximately, "that is the task, that is the labor." He seems to choose to quote directly from Latin to demonstrate his own deep knowledge of the text and subject matter. Creeley thinks this moment is human, as it shows Aeneas as "human enough to die." He uses this scene to highlight how a hero's humanity can be rendered and how it actually makes the hero a more relatable figure to a reader.
The poem is written in free verse and is made up of four quatrains with lines of varying length. It features enjambment throughout, which helpfully allows Creeley to weave together his thoughts and connect various impressions. The segmentation of his various ideas allows him to build his main argument slowly. The poem itself attempts to break the mold of traditional hero stories and offers a different way of understanding this legendary characters. This idea is very much in line with Creeley's intentions to dismantle closed poetic forms in the service of a more sensory poetic style.
