John Brown's Body E-Book

Stephen Vincent Benét

• Herausgeber: Stephen Vincent Benét
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

American muse, whose strong and diverse heartSo many men have tried to understand​But only made it smaller with their art,Because you are as various as your land,As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

Leseprobe

Stephen Vincent Benét

John Brown's Body

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Table of contents

Note

INVOCATION

PRELUDE--THE SLAVER

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

BOOK FOUR

BOOK FIVE

BOOK SIX

BOOK SEVEN

BOOK EIGHT

Note

As this is a poem, not a history, it has seemed unnecessary to me to encumber it with notes, bibliography, and other historical apparatus. Nevertheless--besides such original sources as the Official Records, the series of articles in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and the letters, memoirs, and autobiographies of the various leaders involved--I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Channing's The War for Southern Independence and McMaster's The United States under Lincoln's Administration, to Oswald Garrison Villard's John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After, to the various Lives of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood, Carl Sandburg, and Ida Tarbell and the monumental work of Nicolay and Hay, to Natalie Wright Stephenson's Abraham Lincoln:An Autobiography, and finally, my very particular debt to that remarkable first-hand account of life in the Army of the Potomac, Four Brothers in Blue, by Captain Robert Goldthwaite Carter, from which the stories of Fletcher the sharpshooter and the two brothers at Fredericksburg are taken.In dealing with known events I have tried to cleave to historical fact where such fact was ascertainable. On the other hand, for certain thoughts and feelings attributed to historical characters, and for the interpretation of those characters in the poem, I alone must be held responsible.The account of the defeated Union Army pouring into Washington after the first Bull Run is founded on a passage in Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect.The Black Horse Troop is an entirely imaginary organization and not to be confused with the so-called Black Horse Cavalry. In general, no fictional character in the poem is founded upon a real person, living or dead.STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

INVOCATION

American muse, whose strong and diverse heartSo many men have tried to understandBut only made it smaller with their art,Because you are as various as your land,As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.Swift runner, never captured or subdued,Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,That half a hundred hunters have pursuedBut never matched their bullets with the dream,Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorryAnd mortal snare for your immortal quarry.You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghostWith dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,And you are the clipped velvet of the lawnsWhere Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,The grey Maine rocks--and the war-painted dawnsThat break above the Garden of the Gods.The prairie-schooners crawling toward the oreAnd the cheap car, parked by the station-door.Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumesOf stranded smoke out of a stony mouthYou are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,And you are ruined gardens in the SouthAnd bleak New England farms, so winter-whiteEven their roofs look lonely, and the deepThe middle grainland where the wind of nightIs like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.A friend, an enemy, a sacred hagWith two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.They tried to fit you with an English songAnd clip your speech into the English tale.But, even from the first, the words went wrong,The catbird pecked away the nightingale.The homesick men begot high-cheekboned thingsWhose wit was whittled with a different soundAnd Thames and all the rivers of the kingsRan into Mississippi and were drowned.They planted England with a stubborn trust.But the cleft dust was never English dust.Stepchild of every exile from contentAnd all the disavouched, hard-bitten packShipped overseas to steal a continentWith neither shirts nor honor to their back.Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vainTo make you God and France or God and Spain.These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.And each one married with a dream so proudHe never knew it could not be the truthAnd that he coupled with a girl of cloud.And now to see you is more difficult yetExcept as an immensity of wheelMade up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweatAnd glittering with the heat of ladled steel.All these you are, and each is partly you,And none is false, and none is wholly true.So how to see you as you really are,So how to suck the pure, distillate, storedEssence of essence from the hidden starAnd make it pierce like a riposting sword.For, as we hunt you down, you must escapeAnd we pursue a shadow of our ownThat can be caught in a magician's capeBut has the flatness of a painted stone.Never the running stag, the gull at wing,The pure elixir, the American thing.And yet, at moments when the mind was hotWith something fierier than joy or grief,When each known spot was an eternal spotAnd every leaf was an immortal leaf,I think that I have seen you, not as one,But clad in diverse semblances and powers,Always the same, as light falls from the sun,And always different, as the differing hours.Yet, through each altered garment that you wore,The naked body, shaking the heart's core.All day the snow fell on that Eastern townWith its soft, pelting, little, endless sighOf infinite flakes that brought the tall sky downTill I could put my hands in the white skyAnd taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongueAnd walk in such a changed and luminous lightAs gods inhabit when the gods are young.All day it fell. And when the gathered nightWas a blue shadow cast by a pale glowI saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.And I have seen and heard you in the dryClose-huddled furnace of the city streetWhen the parched moon was planted in the skyAnd the limp air hung dead against the heat.I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant,Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound,Enormous metal, shaking to the chantOf a triphammer striking iron ground.Enormous power, ugly to the fool,And beautiful as a well-handled tool.These, and the memory of that windy dayOn the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire,When all the orange poppies bloomed one wayAs if a breath would blow them into fire,I keep forever, like the sea-lion's tuskThe broken sailor brings away to land,But when he touches it, he smells the musk,And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.So, from a hundred visions, I make one,And out of darkness build my mocking sun.And should that task seem fruitless in the eyesOf those a different magic sets apartTo see through the ice-crystal of the wiseNo nation but the nation that is Art,Their words are just. But when the birchbark-callIs shaken with the sound that hunters makeThe moose comes plunging through the forest-wallAlthough the rifle waits beside the lake.Art has no nations--but the mortal skyLingers like gold in immortality.This flesh was seeded from no foreign grainBut Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat,And it has soaked in California rainAnd five years tempered in New England sleetTo strive at last, against an alien proofAnd by the changes of an alien moon,To build again that blue, American roofOver a half-forgotten battle-tuneAnd call unsurely, from a haunted ground,Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.In your Long House there is an attic-placeFull of dead epics and machines that rust,And there, occasionally, with casual face,You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;Neither in pride not mercy, but in vastIndifference at so many gifts unsought,The yellowed satins, smelling of the past,And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.I only bring a cup of silver air,Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.Receive the dream too haughty for the breast,Receive the words that should have walked as boldAs the storm walks along the mountain-crestAnd are like beggars whining in the cold.The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill,The patchwork colors, fading from the first,And all the fire that fretted at the willWith such a barren ecstasy of thirst.Receive them all--and should you choose to touch themWith one slant ray of quick, American light,Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,Even the worst will glitter in the night.If not--the dry bones littered by the wayMay still point giants toward their golden prey.

PRELUDE--THE SLAVER

He closed the Bible carefully, putting it downAs if his fingers loved it.Then he turned."Mr. Mate.""Yes, sir."The captain's eyes held a shadow."I think, while this weather lasts," he said, after a pause,"We'd better get them on deck as much as we can.They keep better that way. Besides," he added, unsmiling,"She's begun to stink already. You've noticed it?"The mate nodded, a boyish nod of half-apology,"And only a week out, too, sir.""Yes," said the skipper.His eyes looked into themselves. "Well. The trade," he said,"The trade's no damn perfume-shop." He drummed with his fingers."Seem to be quiet to-night," he murmured at last."Oh yes sir, quiet enough." The mate flushed. "NotWhat you'd call quiet at home but--quiet enough.""Um," said the skipper. "What about the big fellow?""Tarbarrel, sir? The man who says he's a king?He was praying to something--it made the others restless.Mr. Olsen stopped it.""I don't like that," said the skipper."It was only an idol, sir.""Oh.""A stone or something.""Oh.""But he's a bad one, sir--a regular sullen one--He--eyes in the dark--like a cat's--enough to give you--"The mate was young. He shivered. "The creeps," he said."We've had that kind," said the skipper. His mouth was hardThen it relaxed. "Damn cheating Arabe!" he said,"I told them I'd take no more of their pennyweight kings,Worth pounds to look at, and then when you get them aboardGo crazy so they have to be knocked on the headOr else just eat up their hearts and die in a weekTaking up room for nothing."The mate hardly heard him, thinking of something else."I'm afraid we'll lose some more of the women," he said."Well, they're a scratch lot," said the skipper, "Any sickness?""Just the usual, sir.""But nothing like plague or--""No sir.""The Lord is merciful," said the skipper.His voice was wholly sincere--an old ship's bellHung in the steeple of a meeting-houseWith all New England and the sea's noise in it."Well, you'd better take another look-see, Mr. Mate."The mate felt his lips go dry. "Aye aye, sir," he said,Wetting his lips with his tongue. As he left the cabinHe heard the Bible being opened again.Lantern in hand, he went down to the hold.Each time he went he had a trick of tryingTo shut the pores of his body against the stenchBy force of will, by thinking of salt and flowers,But it was always useless.He kept thinking:When I get home, when I get a bath and clean food,When I've gone swimming out beyond the PointIn that cold green, so cold it must be pureBeyond the purity of a dissolved star,When I get my shore-clothes on, and one of those shirtsOut of the linen-closet that smells of lavender,Will my skin smell black even then, will my skin smell black?The lantern shook in his hand.This was black, here,This was black to see and feel and smell and taste,The blackness of black, with one weak lamp to light itAs ineffectually as a firefly in Hell,And, being so, should be silent.But the holdWas never silent.There was always that breathing.Always that thick breathing, always those shivering cries.A few of the slavesKnew English--at least the English for water and Jesus."I'm dying." "Sick." "My name Caesar."Those who knewThese things, said these things now when they saw the lanternMechanically, as tamed beasts answer the whipcrack.Their voices beat at the light like heavy moths.But most made merely liquid or guttural soundsMeaningless to the mate, but horribly likeThe sounds of palateless men or animals tryingTo talk through a human throat.The mate was usedTo the confusion of limbs and bodies by now.At first it had made him think of the perturbedBlind coil of blacksnakes thawing on a rockIn the bleak sun of Spring, or Judgment DayJust after the first sounding of the trumpWhen all earth seethes and crumbles with the slowVast, mouldy resurrection of the dead.But he had passed such fancies.He must seeAs much as he could. He couldn't see very much.They were too tightly packed but--no plague yet,And all the chains were fast. Then he saw something.The woman was asleep but her baby was dead.He wondered whether to take it from her now.No, it would only rouse the others. Tomorrow.He turned away with a shiver.His glance fellOn the man who said he had been a king, the manCalled Tarbarrel, the image of black stoneWhose eyes were savage gods.The huge suave musclesRippled like stretching cats as he changed posture,Magnificence in chains that yet was ease.The smolder in those eyes. The steady hate.The mate made himself stare till the eyes dropped.Then he turned back to the companionway.His forehead was hot and sweaty. He wiped it off,But then the rough cloth of his sleeve smelt black.The captain shut the Bible as he came in."Well, Mister Mate?""All quiet, sir."The captainLooked at him sharply. "Sit down," he said in a bark.The mate's knees gave as he sat. "It's--hot down there,"He said, a little weakly, wanting to wipeHis face again, but knowing he'd smell that blacknessAgain, if he did."Takes you that way, sometimes,"Said the captain, not unkindly, "I rememberBack in the twenties."Something hot and strongBit the mate's throat. He coughed."There," said the captain.Putting the cup down. "You'll feel better now.You're young for this trade, Mister, and that's a fact."The mate coughed and didn't answer, much too gladTo see the captain change back to himselfFrom something made of steam, to want to talk.But, after a while, he heard the captain talking,Half to himself."It's a fact, that," he was saying,"They've even made a song of me--ever heard it?"The mate shook his head, quickly, "Oh yes you have.You know how it goes." He cleared his throat and hummed:"Captain Ball was a Yankee slaver,Blow, blow, blow the man down!He traded in niggers and loved his Saviour,Give me some time to blow the man down."The droning chanty filled the narrow cabinAn instant with grey Massachusetts sea,Wave of the North, wave of the melted ice,The hard salt-sparkles on the harder rock.The stony islands.Then it died away."Well," said the captain, "if that's how it strikes them--They mean it bad but I don't take it bad.I get my sailing-orders from the Lord."He touched the Bible. "And it's down there, Mister,Down there in black and white--the sons of Ham--Bondservants--sweat of their brows." His voice trailed offInto texts. "I tell you, Mister," he said fiercely,"The pay's good pay, but it's the Lord's work, too.We're spreading the Lord's seed--spreading his seed--"His hand made the outflung motion of a sowerAnd the mate, staring, seemed to hear the slightPatter of fallen seeds on fertile ground,Black, shining seeds, robbed from a black king's storehouse,Falling and falling on American earthWith light, inexorable patter and fall,To strike, lie silent, quicken.Till the SpringCame with its weeping rains, and the ground boreA blade, a shadow-sapling, a tree of shadow,A black-leaved tree whose trunk and roots were shadow,A tree shaped like a yoke, growing and growingUntil it blotted all the seamen's stars.Horses of anger trampling, horses of anger,Trampling behind the sky in ominous cadence,Beat of the heavy hooves like metal on metal,Trampling something down. . . .Was it they, was it they?Or was it cold wind in the leaves of the shadow-treeThat made such grievous music?Oh Lordy Je-susWon't you come and find me?They put me in jail, Lord,Way down in the jail.Won't you send me a pro-phetJust one of your prophetsLike Moses and AaronTo get me some bail?I'm feeling poorlyYes, mighty poorly,I ain't got no strength, Lord,I'm all trampled down.So send me an angelJust any old angelTo give me a robe, Lord,And give me a crown.Oh Lordy Je-susIt's a long time comin'It's a long time co-o-min'That Jubilee time.We'll wait and we'll pray, Lord,We'll wait and we'll pray, Lord,But it's a long time, Lord,Yes, it's a long time.The dark sobbing ebbed away.The captain was still talking. "Yes," he said,"And yet we treat 'em well enough. There's no oneFrom Salem to the Guinea Coast can sayThey lose as few as I do." He stopped."Well, Mister?"The mate arose. "Good night sir and--""Goodnight"The mate went up on deck. The breeze was fresh.There were the stars, steady. He shook himselfLike a dog coming out of water and felt better.Six weeks, with luck, and they'd be back in portAnd he could draw his pay and see his girl.Meanwhile, it wasn't his watch, so he could sleep.The captain still below, reading that Bible. . . .Forget it--and the noises, still half-heard--He'd have to go below to sleep, this time,But after, if the weather held like this,He'd have them sling a hammock up on deck.You couldn't smell the black so much on deckAnd so you didn't dream it when you slept.

BOOK ONE

Jack Ellyat had been out all day alone,Except for his new gun and Ned, the setter,The old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes,Who stepped the fallen leaves so delicatelyThey barely rustled. Ellyat trampled them downCrackling, like cast-off skins of fairy snakes.He'd meant to hunt, but he had let the gunRest on his shoulder.It was enough to feelThe cool air of the last of Indian summerBlowing continually across his cheekAnd watch the light distill its water of goldAs the sun dropped.Here was October, hereWas ruddy October, the old harvester,Wrapped like a beggared sachem in a coatOf tattered tanager and partridge feathers,Scattering jack-o-lanterns everywhereTo give the field-mice pumpkin-colored moons.His red clay pipe had trailed across the landStaining the trees with colors of the sumach: