Today’s Poem: Ode to the Confederate Dead

The high modernist project

Caspar David Friedrich, The Cemetery Entrance, c. 1825 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Ode to the Confederate Dead

by Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumor of mortality.                  ◦ to sough (saʊ)  = to make a
                                                                                          moaning or rushing sound
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not 
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone! — 
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

     Dazed by the wind, only the wind
     The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know — the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision — 
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. 

     Seeing, seeing only the leaves
     Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.

     Cursing only the leaves crying
     Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

                               The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
     
                    Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl’s tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

     We shall say only the leaves
     Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge 
Carried to the heart?  Shall we take the act
To the grave?  Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house?  The ravenous grave?

                                   Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush, 
Riots with his tongue through the hush — 
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
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I long assumed that the fading of “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” the 1927 poem by Allen Tate (1899–1979), was due to the word “Confederate” in the title. A work once supposed a monument of high modernism is now little mentioned and rarely discussed — and an easy explanation is that the poem is taken as Southern praise for the lost Confederacy.

Think, for example, of the 1866 “Ode” by Henry Timrod (1828–1867) — which opened “Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, / Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!”[1] Dubbed “The Poet of the Confederacy” after one of his poems was read aloud at the first meeting of the Confederate Congress in 1861, Timrod was among the first and most complete casualties of the turn against any praise for the racist Confederacy that began gathering way in the 1990s.

And if we don’t let Timrod get away with that Lost Cause nonsense, why would we let Tate? The culture of literary criticism in recent decades has used racism as a primary lens of analysis, and overwhelmingly so when a poem touches on Southern slavery or, as in the case of “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” revealingly fails to take up that evil when referencing the slave-owning era.

But thinking recently about Hart Crane (whose 1926 poem “At Melville’s Tomb” we offered as Today’s Poem last spring), I began to wonder whether the decline of Tate isn’t also partly from a general turn against a certain kind of high modernism. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) still bestrides the world as something more than trunkless legs of stone, but those who were deeply influenced by him have survived less well. Tate and Crane were both born in 1899, with Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” appearing in 1927 and Crane’s The Bridge in 1930. (Yvor Winters, for another American example, was born in 1900.)

Allen Tate (Wikimedia Commons)

So perhaps it’s worth weighing “Ode to the Confederate Dead” simply as a piece of modernism. Certainly, on its own terms, the poem is not much about the Confederacy. “And where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them completely out of sight — with them yourself and me,” Donald Davison complained to Tate in a letter about the poem, and the objection is fair enough (for a Southern agrarian Fugitive poet).

Indeed, the poem opens by observing the “strict impunity” with which “The headstones yield their names to the element,” with no sense that these dead are spared the wearing away of time. (The place that prompted Tate may have been the McGavock Confederate Cemetery in Franklin, Tennessee.)

In his 1938 essay about the poem, “Narcissus as Narcissus,” Tate himself declared that he was writing about the self — and the consequent solipsism that requires the self to “invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.”

The poet may “praise” the dead who lie buried in the cemetery, but it for is a strange thing: “the arrogant circumstance” of their time, in which men could have a “vision” of their deaths as meaningful. The complaint about modernity is a fixture of English poetry, and in Tate’s hands, the modern age becomes “the silence which / Smothers you, a mummy, in time” — with modern life now no more than a “hound bitch / Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar.”

It’s important to note that the narrator stands outside the wall and does not enter the cemetery. And what remains for him is only death — death without even the chance of belief in meaningful action that had been held by those dead young men. The vocabulary with which Tate opens the poem is thick with rich words: zeal, sacrament, inexhaustible, impunity. That density of vocabulary seems to stand against the poem’s interjection that there is “only the wind / The leaves flying, plunge.”

But though he can reference a density, the poet sees no way to share it. If we turn our eyes “to the immoderate past,” we can gesture toward its figures: “Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, / Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.” But that “thick” world is not actually available for us to live in. (As perhaps witnessed by the fact that Tate uses the North’s names for Civil War battles, although I may be over-reading there.) “Lost in that orient of the thick and fast / You will curse the setting sun.”

Think of it this way: Man differs from nature because of history — the human sense that time’s passing is not merely the cycle of seasons, unchanging and indistinguishable from year to year. We have instead difference in time. We have history and thus the possibility of meaning.

Time as an arrow (“muted Zeno and Parmenides”), time as something aimed, gives us gifts we do not obtain from time as an endless cycle — a significance to action and a richness to the sense of self. The significance of life comes from the future, while the richness of life comes from the past. We look ahead, we plan, we scheme, and all of it matters because we can see the future roaring down upon us and our children like a freight train. But the past is what extends us in time, thickens us with memory, and joins us to the human parade.

The narrator of “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” however, cannot find his way into either the future or the past (which is why, unjoined to humanity, Tate says the poem is about solipsism). He asks, “What shall we say of the bones” in the cemetery? And answers, “The gray lean spiders come, they come and go.”

All that can be seen is nature and nature’s time: “The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush.” Even the fantasy of meaning is not on offer.

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[1] I’ve also long suspected that the 1894 foundation of the Daughters of the Confederacy — and their subsequent smattering of the landscape with monuments and memorial plaques (as far away as Helena, Montana) — began with Timrod’s stanza:

Meanwhile, your sisters for the years
Which hold in trust your storied tombs,
Bring all they now can give you — tears,
And these memorial blooms.