The argument against McGavock Confederate Cemetery is that it’s holds the dead from the barrow of Franklin, and Tate mentions Virginia battles. Then again, Franklin was closer to Nashville.
Wonderful post. Yvor Winters said that Tate wrote 12 to 15 great passages but not a single successful poem. Perhaps his reach exceeded his grasp but he remains interesting. Haven’t all his Southern peers also sunk in their reputations?. E.g. Ransom. Perhaps these writers only need an advocate.
The Confederate of the Dead, though not stated that way, appears at the end, The Snake. A snake is almost always an image of death embodied in a bite away, who better to be a Confederate to the Dead?
The poem also made me think of "Le Cimetière marin" "Cemetery by the Sea" by Valéry. It was published before Tate's poem, so there might be a connection between them. I've skimmed through it in French and an English translation. Valéry also mentions Zeno ("Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Êlée!") and is supremely self-conscious ("Ô pour moi seul, à moi seul, en moi-même," O for me alone, to me alone, in myself). But the end accepts life with its energy that overwhelms for the moment the writer's self-conscious craft:
The wind is rising…. We must try to live!
The immense air opens and closes my book,
The wave gushes in a spray from the rocks!
Fly away, pages dazzling in the sun!
Break, waves. With joyful waters break
That tranquil roof where white-winged boats are sailing. [The second half of last line is more interpretation than translation.]
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run."
These lines remind me of a stanza or two in Geoffrey Hill's "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy," though perhaps it's a trick of memory that depends more on impression than text. "At Villeroy the copybook lines of men / rise up and are erased." Or this: "the weird storm-light / cheap wood engravings cast on those who fought / at Mars-la-Tour, Sedan."
The self-consciousness of Tate's poem is beautifully captured near the conclusion in the image of the jaguar that "leaps / For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim." (Sidenote: I wonder why it's a jaguar, not a beast I expect to encounter in the old Confederacy. Hill's poem unexpectedly includes "English Gordon / stepping down sedately into the spears," so I guess poets will not be limited by geography or nationality).
Perhaps it's Tate's self-consciousness that limits my willingness to embrace the poem. He stands outside the cemetery, as you astutely observe, probably watching an observance of Confederate Memorial Day: we "bow / Our heads with a commemorial woe / In the ribboned coats of grim felicity."
He also seems to stand outside the history--slavery goes unmentioned, but Dreyfus and French antisemitism are part of Hill's poem; the sickly emotions of the Lost Cause are treated to the almost parodic lines quoted above about "commemorial woe." His language is distancing and cool, as Hill's (equally self-conscious and highly wrought) is not.
I initially connected the jaguar to the jungle -- an almost intuitive (and maybe by the time of this poem explored?) symbol of the mystery of our unconsciousness and consciousness -- the ego-predator would be a jungly beast ...
While we’re on American history and jaguars, one of Nelson’s units was reported to have been attacked by a Jaguar in 1780 during his siege of the Spanish Fortress of the Immaculate Conception located on the San Juan river in Nicaragua.
My great great grandfather died at the infamous Andersonville prison and his son marched with Sherman to the sea so the poem prompted me to revisit Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead.
Lowell's poem feels to me much more successful as a poem. There is somewhere to stand and something to grasp, where Tate's Ode swirls around, a wind I can never catch hold of.
The argument against McGavock Confederate Cemetery is that it’s holds the dead from the barrow of Franklin, and Tate mentions Virginia battles. Then again, Franklin was closer to Nashville.
Wonderful post. Yvor Winters said that Tate wrote 12 to 15 great passages but not a single successful poem. Perhaps his reach exceeded his grasp but he remains interesting. Haven’t all his Southern peers also sunk in their reputations?. E.g. Ransom. Perhaps these writers only need an advocate.
The Confederate of the Dead, though not stated that way, appears at the end, The Snake. A snake is almost always an image of death embodied in a bite away, who better to be a Confederate to the Dead?
The poem also made me think of "Le Cimetière marin" "Cemetery by the Sea" by Valéry. It was published before Tate's poem, so there might be a connection between them. I've skimmed through it in French and an English translation. Valéry also mentions Zeno ("Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Êlée!") and is supremely self-conscious ("Ô pour moi seul, à moi seul, en moi-même," O for me alone, to me alone, in myself). But the end accepts life with its energy that overwhelms for the moment the writer's self-conscious craft:
The wind is rising…. We must try to live!
The immense air opens and closes my book,
The wave gushes in a spray from the rocks!
Fly away, pages dazzling in the sun!
Break, waves. With joyful waters break
That tranquil roof where white-winged boats are sailing. [The second half of last line is more interpretation than translation.]
"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."
These lines remind me of a stanza or two in Geoffrey Hill's "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy," though perhaps it's a trick of memory that depends more on impression than text. "At Villeroy the copybook lines of men / rise up and are erased." Or this: "the weird storm-light / cheap wood engravings cast on those who fought / at Mars-la-Tour, Sedan."
The self-consciousness of Tate's poem is beautifully captured near the conclusion in the image of the jaguar that "leaps / For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim." (Sidenote: I wonder why it's a jaguar, not a beast I expect to encounter in the old Confederacy. Hill's poem unexpectedly includes "English Gordon / stepping down sedately into the spears," so I guess poets will not be limited by geography or nationality).
Perhaps it's Tate's self-consciousness that limits my willingness to embrace the poem. He stands outside the cemetery, as you astutely observe, probably watching an observance of Confederate Memorial Day: we "bow / Our heads with a commemorial woe / In the ribboned coats of grim felicity."
He also seems to stand outside the history--slavery goes unmentioned, but Dreyfus and French antisemitism are part of Hill's poem; the sickly emotions of the Lost Cause are treated to the almost parodic lines quoted above about "commemorial woe." His language is distancing and cool, as Hill's (equally self-conscious and highly wrought) is not.
I initially connected the jaguar to the jungle -- an almost intuitive (and maybe by the time of this poem explored?) symbol of the mystery of our unconsciousness and consciousness -- the ego-predator would be a jungly beast ...
Jaguars still inhabited parts of North America at that time.
Here’s a confederate captain who wore jaguar skin trousers: https://youtube.com/shorts/ilzOB5-lL4o?si=6nkKUS42dqeOuC4R
Thanks for that!
While we’re on American history and jaguars, one of Nelson’s units was reported to have been attacked by a Jaguar in 1780 during his siege of the Spanish Fortress of the Immaculate Conception located on the San Juan river in Nicaragua.
What does ‘wring’ mean? Writing? Wrong?
fixed!
My great great grandfather died at the infamous Andersonville prison and his son marched with Sherman to the sea so the poem prompted me to revisit Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57035/for-the-union-dead
Lowell's poem feels to me much more successful as a poem. There is somewhere to stand and something to grasp, where Tate's Ode swirls around, a wind I can never catch hold of.