Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) was hetman of Zaporizhian Host and the first modern leader of Ukraine to stand against Russia. Born in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he rose to Ukrainian rank originally as an officer for the tsar. Yet when Russia failed to live up to its obligations under the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement, he joined Charles XII of Sweden in war against Russia — before their joint defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. In 1819, the English Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) wrote a narrative poem called “Mazeppa.”

An editorial in the Sun on Saturday looks back at a 1918 Sun editorial about Ukraine that mentions Mazepa as a hero of Ukrainian independence from Russia and references Byron’s poem. Set as Hetman Mazeppa (in Byron’s spelling) is dying after Pultowa (again, in Byron’s spelling), the poem tells in couplet- and quatrain-rhymed (abab) tetrameters the once famous Romantic story of how Mazepa, caught in an affair, was tied naked to a horse and whipped into the countryside. The horse, a Ukrainian breed, raced home to Ukraine — bearing the man who thereby both learned to be a great rider and found his true home.

from Mazeppa 
by Lord Byron

’Twas after dread Pultowa’s day,
When fortune left the royal Swede—
Around a slaughtered army lay,
No more to combat and to bleed.
The power and glory of the war,
Faithless as their vain votaries, men,
Had passed to the triumphant Czar,
And Moscow’s walls were safe again—
Until a day more dark and drear,
And a more memorable year,
Should give to slaughter and to shame
A mightier host and haughtier name;
A greater wreck, a deeper fall,
A shock to one—a thunderbolt to all.…

A band of chiefs!—alas! how few,
Since but the fleeting of a day
Had thinned it; but this wreck was true
And chivalrous: upon the clay
Each sate him down, all sad and mute,
Beside his monarch and his steed;
For danger levels man and brute,
And all are fellows in their need.
Among the rest, Mazeppa made
His pillow in an old oak’s shade—
Himself as rough, and scarce less old,
The Ukraine’s hetman, calm and bold:
But first, outspent with this long course,
The Cossack prince rubbed down his horse,
And made for him a leafy bed,
And smoothed his fetlocks and his mane,
And slacked his girth, and stripped his rein, 
And joyed to see how well he fed;
For until now he had the dread
His wearied courser might refuse
To browse beneath the midnight dews:
But he was hardy as his lord,
And little cared for bed and board;
But spirited and docile too, 
Whate’er was to be done, would do.
Shaggy and swift, and strong of limb,
All Tartar-like he carried him;
Obeyed his voice, and came to call,
And knew him in the midst of all.
Though thousands were around,—and night,
Without a star, pursued her flight,—
That steed from sunset until dawn
His chief would follow like a fawn.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.