He turned and looked upon them, and he wept very sore
As he saw the yawning gateway and the hasps wrenched off the door,
And the pegs whereon no mantle nor coat of vair there hung.
The poem commences with an iconic image of the Cid at the moment of his banishment. His character is immediately connected with the concept of material goods; in this case, the loss of those goods. Banished by the king, he is stripped off his possessions. His heroism will thence be constructed upon a solid foundation of economic equality in which unification of various level of societal strata is accomplished through focusing on a common interest rather than fomenting division among to pursue a divide and conquer strategy.
The ladies and his daughters were likewise all forlorn.
Never had they heard such a din since the day when they were born.
Therewith the great Cid Campeador with his hand he plucked his beard.
"This shall all be to your vantage. Therefore be not afeard.
Ere fifteen days are over, if so God's will it be,
We shall take those drums and show them you. What they are then shall you see.
This is the kind of moment rarely seen in heroic epic poetry like this. Here is a portrait of the Cid in a domestic setting revealing a tender side as loving husband and father. The Cid has a hero diverges from the traditional concept in myriad ways, but perhaps none more so than in his remaining a faithful and committed head of the household.
Forthwith to earth he bends him on the hand and on the knee.
And the grass of the meadow with his very teeth he rent,
And wept exceeding sorely so great was his content.
This scene is one of the stranger moments occurring in the story. Modern readers are doubtlessly flummoxed by the sight of the hero of the story throwing himself face down into the grass and chomping at it like a cow in a pasture. As noted, the Cid bops to the beat of a different a drummer—literally in the above example—and here is a deeply symbolic moment that seems to stand in opposition to much of the rest of the story. The Cid is truly a people’s hero; he is a proto-democratic Man of the People more than a mythic figure like Ulysses or even Roland. But here he does reveal himself to be a loyal subject to the king and an affirmation of the tradition of monarchy.
And now the dawn was breaking and morning coming on,
And the sun rising. Very God! how beautifully it shone!
All men arose in Castejón, and wide they threw the gates;
And forth they went to oversee their farmlands and estates.
This quote serves to link the sun and the Cid in symbolic union. The breaking dawn heralds the arrival of the hero and also serves to implicate his followers as the force of light breaking through the darkness of this period in Spanish history.
His renown afar is spreading. Beyond the sea it sped.
Glad were the companies; the Cid a glad man was he
That God had given him succor and gained that victory.
And they sent forth their harriers. By night they marched away,
They reached unto Culléra, and to Játiva came they.
And ever downward even to Dénia town they bore.
And all the Moorish country by the sea he wasted sore.
Peñacadéll, outgoing and entrance, have they ta'en.
The heroism of the Cid is one based on popularity. He is not some lone mythic warrior alienated from the society around him on a hero’s question; he is an average man—a husband and father—whose scale of heroism rises with the spread of his fame and the support of the many.
