I’m still thinking about places this week, and what they mean to the human heart. Maybe the saddest words in Scripture are what Job, in his suffering, utters about the transience of human life: “As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to the netherworld does not come up; he returns no more to his house, nor does his place know him any more.” But the memory of God does not fade with time, and all places are present to him, for whom there is no past. J. R. R. Tolkien felt keenly the goodness of place and devotion to it, which is why his hobbits are so powerfully bound to the Shire, and their dwellings, fittingly enough, are in the ground itself, warm and snug and fine for breakfast twice a day.
The Romans, who had a god for everything, had an important one for the boundary-marker, the god Terminus. It was a feature of their piety. After all, for three hundred years at least they were an agrarian people. There is a deep truth in the legend of Cincinnatus, who after he was appointed to the always temporary office of dictator, and then routed the neighboring Aequi, resigned his charge after a few weeks and returned to what he was doing when the Senate sent for him in the beginning. He was plowing his field — which meant holding the plowshare steady by main strength as the oxen drag it through the earth. We sense that that is exactly what a good man should do. The point was not lost on George Washington and the American people. Hence the Society of the Cincinnati, made up of officers who had fought in the war — whose first president was Washington himself, and for whom that busy city on the Ohio River is named.
In that war, the Americans had at least one considerable advantage over the British, who were their superiors in military training, in numbers, in firepower, and in money. They were fighting for the places they knew and loved. It wasn’t just that they knew the terrain. It was theirs in a way that could not apply to Englishmen or Hessians (though of course it did apply to the Loyalists). Think of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, fighting the British along the upper Hudson, their native land. Remember, that’s where we were last week, for our film Drums Along the Mohawk. Or we may think of Francis Marion, called the Swamp Fox, and his dashing guerilla warfare in and out of the woods and the swamps of his native South Carolina, harassing the British at every pass, at last joining up with the brilliant tactician Nathanael Greene, to cut through the Carolinas and sever the south from British control.
That is the subject of our Poem of the Week, by one of America’s first lights of poetry, William Cullen Bryant, one of the so-called “Fireside Poets,” along with Longfellow, Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (not the deeply problematic Supreme Court justice). Bryant was but a teenage boy when he first took pen in hand to write the poem “Thanatopsis,” to my mind one of the most serene and serious meditations upon death ever written in English. Somehow he must have known, even as a young man, what he wrote much later on, concerning how the greatest poetry instructs us in wisdom: “The elements of moral truth are few and simple, but their combinations with human actions are as innumerable and diversified as the combinations of language.”
And one of those truths is this: we should love the land of our birth. That’s what Francis Marion, in Bryant’s poem, was fighting for, and that was the not-so-secret secret of his success. But listen to the verses, because I think that Bryant chose a form that beguiles us into believing that it is the simple 8-6-8-6 “common meter” of English ballads — but it is not so. It is an odd 8-6-7-6 meter — I am referring to syllables here, as we do when we log the meter of a hymn, to make sure that the number of notes in phrases are consistent from stanza to stanza. The truncated third line of every four seems to hang a bit in space and time — to pause — before the fourth line completes the rhyme and the thought. A good choice, when the poem itself is about quiet and careful military surprise.
Our band is few but true and tried, Our leader frank and bold; The British soldier trembles When Marion's name is told. Our fortress is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us, As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the dark morass. Woe to the English soldiery That little dread us near! On them shall light at midnight A strange and sudden fear: When, waking to their tents on fire, They grasp their arms in vain, And they who stand to face us Are beat to earth again; And they who fly in terror deem A mighty host behind, And hear the tramp of thousands Upon the hollow wind. Then sweet the hour that brings release From danger and from toil; We talk the battle over, And share the battle's spoil. The woodland rings with laugh and shout, As if a hunt were up, And woodland flowers are gathered To crown the soldier's cup. With merry songs we mock the wind That in the pine-top grieves, And slumber long and sweetly On beds of oaken leaves. Well knows the fair and friendly moon The band that Marion leads -- The glitter of their rifles, The scampering of their steeds. 'Tis life to guide the fiery barb Across the moonlit plain; 'Tis life to feel the night-wind That lifts his tossing mane. A moment in the British camp -- A moment -- and away Back to the pathless forest, Before the peep of day. Grave men there are by broad Santee, Grave men with hoary hairs; Their hearts are all with Marion, For Marion are their prayers. And lovely ladies greet our band With kindliest welcoming, With smiles like those of summer, And tears like those of spring. For them we wear these trusty arms, And lay them down no more, Till we have driven the Briton, Forever, from our shore.
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