Read quickly, Rolfe Humphries' "Vae Victis" looks like a poem about a Roman invasion. Read a little more slowly, it turns out to be about the arrival and collapse of autumn. The clues pile up fast: the "green batallions" of summer are slain, the invaders wear "purple, orange, gold, / Maroon, magenta, madder, carmine, wine," and in the final lines a scarlet cloak lies "under a maple, on the frozen ground." The Romans are leaves, and the poem stages the whole season as a short-lived military occupation, brilliant, arrogant, and doomed.
The title is the first hint of this. "Vae victis" is Latin for "woe to the conquered," a phrase traditionally associated with the sack of Rome by Gauls, where it is the conqueror who speaks. Humphries turns it around. In the poem's opening, the invaders conquer summer, so the "victis" are the green leaves and the "luxurious easy army" of the warm months. By the end the invaders themselves are the conquered, routed by a northern cold. The title therefore applies twice, and the poem's real subject is how victory sets up defeat.
What keeps the poem from being a simple extended metaphor is the Romans' character. They are "decadent," haunted by "melancholy / Under the ostentation and the bronze," "dressed in attitudes of scorn." That is a remarkably psychological portrait for a handful of falling leaves. The splendor of autumn, Humphries suggests, has something fevered and self-consuming about it, a beauty that knows it is temporary. Even the word "Misgivers" carries the idea: these conquerors are uneasy at the height of their glory. Their colors are the colors of a fading empire, and the long catalogue of reds and golds ("madder, carmine, wine, / Vermilion, umber") reads like a roll call of banners, delighting in sheer vocabulary as the leaves delight in color.
The form quietly supports the story. The first stanza is blank verse, an unrhymed iambic pentameter that sounds like a confident, rolling march. In the second, rhyme begins to creep in ("shine" and "wine," "gold" and "bold"), and the lines tighten as if the army were forming ranks. Then the poem shifts into couplets: "forth" with "north," "lives" with "knives," "breath" with "death." The chiming pairs have a clipped, rapid feel suited to a panicked retreat. The couplets also let Humphries land his sharpest images with a click, as when the Scythians' breath "Sets in the crimson vein the blue of death." That line is the poem's cleverest stroke, since it describes frost creeping into a red leaf and a cold blue pallor spreading through a wounded soldier at once.
The enemy has its own cast of mythic strangers: the "keen barbarians, armed with knives." The Scythians were known in the ancient world as fierce nomads from the northern steppe, and here they stand in for winter wind and frost. The "rumor from the north" that sends the Romans fleeing has the sound of real military panic, and the reader feels the speed of it, a whole season giving way overnight.
The ending is a small masterpiece of restraint. The legions "vanish and are gone, / Leaving no monument," a phrase that nods to the idea that empires fade without a trace. Yet the poem undercuts that claim at once, since they leave behind "the hue of blood, the deep red stain." The last image, a scarlet cloak dropped under a maple on frozen ground, is both a battlefield relic and a single fallen leaf, and the hedge "or, it may be" makes the speaker sound like someone sifting through the aftermath of a rout.
What makes the poem memorable is how it lets two kinds of ending overlap. We expect nature poems to be gentle about autumn; Humphries makes it violent, theatrical, and a little tragic, and in doing so he suggests that all splendor, whether natural or imperial, carries its own defeat inside it.