Belatedly Snow-Bound with John Greenleaf Whittier

Last week, right before the big snowstorm, I wrote a blog post and posted it. While I was then proofing and editing it, I lost most of it in one of those computer things that happens, and I thought it was gone forever. But it turns out that the people who get e-mail notifications when I post something get the entire post as an e-mail message, so my friend Joann was able to send it to me. It's about ten days late, but here it is:

Everybody's getting all hunkered down for the blizzard, though we seem to still be on the first trailing edge of it; nothing too dramatic seems to have happened outside, snow-wise. I have kind of a holiday feeling, knowing we're going to be snugged into the house tomorrow. I don't know why this feels different from any ordinary day; the kids and I spent the day at home today, after all, for no good reason but that we had nowhere to go. But it does feel different.

I can't help thinking about John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Snow-Bound, which you might have heard of in school but probably haven't read. Does anybody read Whittier anymore? I recently did a little reading project on him in preparation to teach some of his poetry in Adult Religious Education at my Quaker meeting (Whittier was a Quaker), and was amused that even scholars who were interested enough to write a whole book about him don't claim he was a great poet. In fact, they are inclined to say, "Whittier was by no means a great poet," in so many words. Often more than once. They claim "competence," instead, or cultural significance, since he was such a popular poet in his day. Time was every schoolchild could recite "Blessings on thee, little man / barefoot boy with cheek of tan." Not so much anymore.

I find I could say a lot about Whittier, and Snow-Bound. I was just going to pop in to say that the poem is a nostalgic remembrance of being snowed-in with his family at Haverhill, the farm the Whittiers had lived on since at least 1647. He wrote Snow-Bound in 1866, when he was almost 60 years old, and as well as being about nostalgia for a lost boyhood, it also takes its place in a culture that was very conscious of the past slipping away. Technological changes were affecting the way people lived, their mobility, their family relations, and it was frightening. The central images of Snow-Bound are about the family gathered around the hearth:

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

One of the technological changes taking place in the 19th Century was that stoves were replacing hearths as the primary way of heating homes. They were more efficient and more effective, but commentators feared the decay of family life, which had so often centered around the hearth in the evenings. Who can gather around a stove? And why would they have to, if the stove can make the whole room warm? Their homes heated by stoves, what could there be to keep families together? It's all sort of quaint and hilarious, but also familiar, if you read excerpts from some of these writings (and I'm sorry I don't have some for you; it's in my brain from some old piece of criticism I read a long time ago). It seems there is always something threatening to atomize the nuclear family. A few years ago I read a book about the Schoolroom Poets of the 19th and early 20th century (appropriately enough, the book is called Schoolroom Poets). One of the arguments of the book is that the notion that an educated child ought to be able to recite poetry by heart is one of the things that paved the way for free verse to become the dominant poetic form in the 20th century. Whittier was a prominent Schoolroom Poet, along with Lowell, Longfellow, and some other guys I don't remember right now. Their poetry was perfect for memorization: strongly rhythmical and tightly rhymed. No assonance for these boys, by golly! Here's Longfellow. Listen to the absolutely inflexible marching rhythm here; and is there any rhyme more pure than the single syllables he ends all these lines with?

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
are strong as iron bands.

(Why do I know that? Does Laura's little sister Carrie Ingalls recite it at the school exhibition in whichever Little House book that is? Some book I read over and over as a child featured a character saying those first four lines nervously over and over. In any case, can't you just see some cute little 8-year-old standing by her desk reciting that?)

Anyway, I have often seen the rise of free verse attributed to Whitman, who pretty much invented it and showed what it could do (free verse does not have to have either rhyme or meter, though our former poet laureate Robert Pinsky argues in The Sounds of Poetry that the iambic pentameter is so fundamental to the poetic line in English that it permeates even free verse in unexpected ways. Still: free verse, no set rhyme or meter). But the author of Schoolroom Poets argues that the imposition of memorization on children created in the generation that came of age in the 20th century an association of strong rhyme and meter with immaturity. So poets and readers turned away from childish-seeming metrical verse, to something that seemed more mature, and more modern. Again, we get the theme of a time and a culture passing away, though this time it's a deliberate turning forward and away from the past, away from a poet like Whittier who is associated with childhood schoolrooms and who is a bridge to an even earlier time that looks ever more benighted to the modern sensibility. Hence, free verse.

Ten years ago, I wrote a good paper on Walt Whitman and thought about turning it into a master's thesis. But then I had a baby, and got kind of busy and didn't do that. Another reason I didn't do it is my advisor wanted me to do Whittier, too, and I just never loved Whittier. I should have listened to my advisor, though, because when I did some reading on Whittier for this ARE program, a kind of interesting guy emerged. The poetry is still pedestrian; the word "doggerel" wants to force itself upon one's consciousness as one reads. But Whittier the man: very interesting. His biographers believe he was celibate his whole life and died a virgin. And yet he had many flirtations with women, and was known for stringing them along and taking gifts from them, leading them to believe something might happen which never did. One biographer kept saying, "If he were a woman, they'd have called him a coquette." Look at this face: a flirt, really? A coquette? So hard to believe. And yet so they say. Whittier was also tirelessly politically active. He was an ardent abolitionist (in this, we modern Quakers can embrace him, whereas we have to bear our disappointment in our beloved Walt Whitman, he of the so-very-superior poetry and the distressingly retrograde opinions on abolition and equality between the races). Whittier was deeply involved in politics, often exerting a great deal of influence from behind the scenes; he worked tirelessly to elect abolitionist candidates and served in the legislature himself. Here's a broadside he wrote for the cause: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

This is all probably much more than you ever wanted to know about John Greenleaf Whittier (though if you come to ARE at Red Cedar Friends Meeting on February 27 you will learn more! Or maybe you'll just hear all this again. But we'll read more of his poetry). But I will end by saying that sometimes, in his poems about Quakerism, he gets at something that rises above doggerel and feels like he is saying something I recognize, putting an experience into words. His poem The Meeting is about bringing a friend to Quaker worship; I like the friend's palpable relief when the silent worship ends, and his incredulous questions. "What part have you," his friend asks, "in these dull rites of drowsy-head?" "Dull rites of drowsy-head" indeed; who has not dozed during Quaker meeting?

I like Whittier's answer. It's long, but listen to this little excerpt. This is the very essence of Quaker worship, I think:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

(note: I was being hyperbolic when I said "no assonance for these guys." The not-quite-rhyme of "come" and "room" is an example of slant, or half, rhyme. Which is not assonance, per se, since assonance depends on the vowel sounds, but is still not perfect rhyme, either.)