Everyone has had the daydream in which they are the best at something: the winning goal, the speech that silences the room, the rescue that makes the newspapers. Robert Smithdas's "Hero" takes that universal fantasy and stretches it to absurd, delightful extremes, only to let the air out of it in the final lines. The poem is about the gap between the limitless self we can imagine at night and the ordinary, limited self who wakes up the next day. Its central idea is gentle and honest: dreaming makes us heroes, but waking returns us to being human, and the poem seems to accept that without bitterness.
The first stanza is built as a catalogue of adventures, each one linked by the word "or." The dreamer climbs Everest, dives for "drowned gold in coral caves," and finally rides "flashing wings" through space. Notice how the scale keeps growing: a mountain, then the sea, then the cosmos. The verbs are energetic and physical, "climb," "plant," "plunge," "race," and the sea is "thrashing, storm-swept," which makes the dream sound less like a pleasant fantasy than a thrilling action film. The mention of "drowned gold" is a nice touch, since it adds treasure-hunting to the heroics. Even the dreamer's flying gets a bright, almost cartoonish glow: "the bright hinterlands of space."
The second stanza raises the stakes from physical feats to power and knowledge. Now the dreamer commands an army and builds an empire that "curled / Around the globe, from pole to pole." That image of an empire curling like a vine or a ribbon is quietly funny, as if the whole world were a package being neatly wrapped. Then comes the poem's sly humor: "And, being inordinately wise, / I've read the secrets of the skies." The phrase "being inordinately wise" is the speaker smiling at himself. Wisdom is not something you can simply announce, and the word "inordinately," meaning far beyond any reasonable measure, shows he knows the dream has gone over the top. It is the voice of someone who enjoys his own fantasy while standing slightly outside it.
That self-awareness prepares the turn in the third stanza. The speaker compares himself to the heroes of "myth or song" and claims none could be "so brave and strong / And wise." The sentence breaks across the stanza break and then stops short at "But," which is exactly where the dream collapses. The morning sun "Severs the thread of dreams I've spun," a striking image that treats dreaming as a kind of weaving. The speaker is not merely visited by dreams; he spins them himself, like a craftsman, and the sun cuts the thread with one clean stroke. The last two lines are plain and quiet: "I wake to find myself once more / As mortal as the day before."
The form supports all this. The poem is written in tight rhyming couplets (crest/crest-rhyme with "banner" aside, waves/caves, race/space, and so on), and the lines move at a brisk, regular beat, close to iambic tetrameter, the rhythm of four stresses per line that often feels light and song-like. The couplets give the dream a neat, confident, almost nursery-rhyme bounce, which suits the fantasy. Then the final couplet, "once more / ... before," lands softly, with a drop in energy that mirrors the waking. The rhythm that carried us through mountains and galaxies simply settles back into the everyday.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It would be easy to write a sad poem about failure or a boastful one about greatness. Instead, Smithdas lets us enjoy the fantasy fully and then admits, without drama, that we are mortal. The word "mortal" is the most serious in the poem, and placing it at the very end gives it quiet weight. The dream does not make the speaker foolish, and waking does not make him small. Both belong to being human: the urge to imagine ourselves greater than we are, and the calm acceptance of who we are each morning.