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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.
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Editors
Ron Smith's Poetry Month Pick, April 22, 2009
"The Indian Burying Ground"
by Philip Freneau (1752–1832)
In spite of all the learn’d have said,
I still my old opinion keep;
The posture that we give the dead
Points out the soul's eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands—
The Indian, when from life released,
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.
His imag’d birds, and painted bowl,
And ven’son, for a journey dressed,
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.
His bow for action ready bent,
And arrows with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the old ideas gone.
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
No fraud upon the dead commit—
Observe the swelling turf, and say,
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
Here still an agéd elm aspires,
Beneath whose far projecting shade
(And which the shepherd still admires)
The children of the forest played.
There oft a restless Indian queen
(Pale Shebah with her braided hair),
And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer—a shade!
And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason's self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.
Ron Smith Comments:
I love the confidence of this poem’s first stanza, its ironic deistic interpretation of European burial practices, its reliable iambic stride.
For all the assertion and rejection of the poem’s beginning, Freneau’s tone all through is good-humored. Freneau, “the Poet of the Revolution” and Jefferson’s hatchet-man in the Federalist propaganda wars, was famous for savage satire, but this Graveyard School meditation is, I think, his best poem. For a post-Wordsworthian reader, the essence of the poem’s drama is probably its deft evasion of both mere condescension toward and predicable acquiescence to the Indian’s powerfully attractive faith.
Freneau provided a note to “The Indian Burying Ground”: “The North American Indians bury their dead in a sitting posture; decorating the corpse with wampum, the images of birds, quadrupeds, &c: And (if that of a warrior) with bows, arrows, tom[a]hawks, and other military weapons.” It’s no accident that Freneau chose to envision a warrior’s grave; despite the ostensible romantic languor of the poem, the speaker is, I choose to believe, a man of action. Charmed but unconvinced by faded vestiges of native art, by the fancies he has lingered to entertain, this guy (like the other Founding Fathers) has miles to go before he sleeps. It’s true the speaker bends the knee at the end, but acknowledging enchantment and giving in to it are not the same thing. The poem is a chronicle of temptation lightly felt and firmly resisted. The smoothness of the meter all through signals that the issue was never really in doubt. The speaker knows all along these are “shadows and delusions.” But his willingness to open just a bit his skeptical mind and what turns out to be a responsive heart wins me over every time. As does the simple beauty of the language.
Through numerous personal shifts in philosophical belief and religious experience over the decades, I have continued to love this poem. It has endured my theistic and atheistic certainties as well as my involuted, multiform doubts.
I have even come to accept that fifth stanza, which has made me wince or guffaw more than a few times over the years.
One day, I came to suspect that Freneau had a reason for feeling something in that stanza that I was missing, a reason for feeling a special dignity in that image of sitting. And rereading Livy not too long ago, I thought maybe I had stumbled onto it. Freneau was not only theologically trained, he was classically educated. He damn well knew his Livy.
Freneau’s speaker never genuinely wavers from his belief that Indians, like “the learn’d,” old-fashioned metaphysicians, are just wrong; still, he aligns himself emotionally not with the white man, the Christian, hyper-educated European, but with the vigorous, incorruptible pagan—as Livy does in a famous passage about “the ancients” of his own land.
In Freneau’s mind, I wonder if his Indian sits bolt upright not so much to deny oblivion as to face it, like Livy’s Roman elders during the sack of Rome in 390 BC, where the men who were too old to fight “returned to their homes firmly resolved to die, awaiting the arrival of the enemy. [They] sat on their ivory chairs in the middle of their homes, clothed in the most august garb they had worn when escorting the [statues] of the gods or celebrating a triumph . . . .” The blood-thirsty Gauls encountered “beings who, in addition to the adornments and garments that were more august than those of men, seemed more like gods in the majesty of their faces and gravity of expression.” The old men were nevertheless soon “butchered in their seats.” Which is, I guess, what Freneau, for all his good humor, does to Indian spiritual beliefs in his last line. But, if the souls of Freneau’s noble savages don’t survive death, their virtues do, as do indeed the republican and stoic ideals of Livy’s Romans, as adopted by Freneau’s heroes Washington and Jefferson. In this lovely poem the bowing/bending posture is finally a refusal either to lie down or sit up, as well as being a standing man’s brief tribute to human vigor and courage—a tribute to those virtues, rather than to what the poem sees as archaic, childish beliefs.
I’m more of a spiritualist than I usually like to admit. Because I want to believe that Freneau’s speaker is being seduced by the Indian’s vision of ongoing life, part of me always finds the last line shocking.
In other words, I think it’s just right.(Livy’s The History of Rome, Books 1-5, here quoted, is translated by Valerie Warrior. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006.)
About Ron Smith:
Winner of the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry and the Guy Owen Award, Ron Smith is the author of the Moon Road: Poems 1986-2005 from LSU Press (2007). The title poem of his first book, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, has recently been reprinted in Southern Poetry Review and in the anthology Don't Leave Hungry from University of Arkansas Press. Ron Smith's most recent prose and verse can be found in The Georgia Review and Blackbird (online); Blackbird also hosts his occasional poetry column Red Guitar. Smith is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia, where he also teaches courses in poetry at the University of Richmond.
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