"Orgullo" is the Spanish word for pride, and Anthony Borrow's English-language poem turns that single quality into a hillside. A speaker climbs, boasting about every step, and never stops to ask what exactly is being conquered. By the end the hill has won, and the speaker lies with his face against the dirt. The central idea is that pride is a kind of blindness. The proud person is so absorbed in the act of conquering that he never understands the thing beneath his feet.
The opening stanzas give the speaker a pompous voice. The word order is inverted ("never question I"), and "Ne'er" is archaic, as if he were delivering a hero's speech. "Triumphantly - proudly" says the same thing twice, with a dash that works like a drumroll, and "proclaiming every step" makes even walking an announcement. Yet the hill is addressed as "you" and called "old, steep." Its age quietly tells us it was here long before the climber and will remain long after.
The second stanza is built on a double meaning. The speaker never stops "to look down on / that which I step." Literally, he doesn't glance at the ground. But "look down on" also means to feel superior, and that is exactly his attitude. The grammar is as careless as he is, since "that which I step" leaves out the "on," treating the ground as something not worth finishing a sentence for. Then comes the idea of digging for "mysteries untold / of what the hill has conquered." Judging by the wording, the hill may already have beaten earlier climbers, so what lies under the speaker's feet could be a history of other proud people. He doesn't dig, and so he doesn't know.
The third stanza turns the poem around. The word "Conquer" gets a capital letter in the middle of a sentence, and the line break after "shall" holds the sentence in suspense before it drops. Then the speaker asks the hill the questions he never asked himself: "from where I have come / or ask what I've done?" The one clear rhyme in an otherwise unrhymed poem is "come" and "done," and it lands here, on the question of what a life amounts to. Everywhere else the free verse has no pattern, which makes the stray chime stand out.
The rhythm does a lot of the storytelling in the fourth stanza. "Strong and arrogant is my stride" is balanced and steady. Then the speaker looks "out beyond the hill," meaning past the thing he is climbing, and the line breaks into short, hissing words: "I step and slip." The stumble is in the sound. Notice also that until this point the speaker is the subject of nearly every verb: I climb, I proclaim, I step. In "the hill brings me to my knees," the hill finally becomes the one who acts. The idiom for humbling becomes literal as well.
The final stanza is the most physical. The speaker "grasp[s] at my own footprints," and this image is bleak. The steps he proclaimed so loudly are now just dents in the slope, and they give him nothing to hold. "Nails tear back," and his hands and knees are "bloodied and soiled," with "soiled" hinting at shame as well as dirt. The poem stays in the present tense even as he falls, so the failure feels unfinished and immediate. He ends with his face on "the cold ground," the very thing he refused to look at, and the last word, "surrender," is the opposite of everything he said at the start. The cold ground may also suggest a grave, though that is an inference and the poem never says so.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts its lesson instead of just stating it. We don't hear a sermon about humility. We watch a voice that begins by commanding the grammar of its sentences lose that command as the climber loses his footing. The hill is never explained, and that works in the poem's favor: it could be ambition, success, or life itself. Whatever we climb, the poem asks us to look down before we are made to.