Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "frazar-stearns"
Piles of Solid Moan: The Civil War Poems of Emily Dickinson
Piles of Solid Moan
A contemporary engraving of the Battle of New Bern (March 14th, 1862), printed by Currier and Ives of New York, shows the Union troops on the verge of victory, but still not out of danger. Their blue uniforms are the only bright colour in the picture, echoed only in the thin wash which denotes the mouth of the River Neuse with the distant town beyond it. Most carry bayonets, and are running forward down the hill towards the estuary, goaded on by two officers, one mounted, one on foot, wielding their swords to skyward. A third officer’s horse is rearing, terrified as an explosion rends the earth beside it, and soldiers lurch about – one shielding his eyes from the searing light, one prostrate, reaching for his knee, one flying spreadeagled with his hand on his head, another clutching helplessly at the shrapnel hole in his chest. Other Union soldiers lie bleeding and dying, their gazes fixed in every direction. Their faces are carefully depicted – they might well have been identifiable to their loved ones. A thin stream of blood emerges from the bullet-hole in one man’s chest, joining with the bottom margin of the picture. He stares at the sky. Beneath these flailing, dying victors, lie the Confederate dead in their dun uniforms, jaws thrust towards heaven. A swarm of Union soldiers courses down the hill – a bristling sea of bayonets stretching to the horizon.
One of those mortally wounded Union soldiers might have been Frazar Augustus Stearns, of Amherst, who was killed that day, shot with a rifle as he rallied the troops for the charge. It took him two and a half hours to die from loss of blood. His body came back to Amherst with a Confederate cannon he had helped to capture. Among his mourners was Austin Dickinson, Frazar Stearns’s close friend, and Austin’s sister, Emily. “Austin is chilled – by Frazer’s murder –” she wrote, “He says – his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ – ‘Frazer is killed’… Two or three words of lead – that dropped so deep, they keep weighing -” Frazar’s companions in his last hours were careful to testify as to his demeanour during those one hundred and fifty last minutes. His commanding officer, Colonel William Smith Clark, wrote that he “died without a struggle”.
*
The nineteenth century American craft of dying insisted that it was very important to die without a struggle – to die calmly, reconciled with one’s fate, eagerly anticipating one’s heavenly reward. Emily Dickinson’s own fascination with the moments before death, which often took a macabre direction of its own, doubtless grew out of this concern with the importance of dying a good death, but she found it difficult to stop there. She certainly wanted to know whether Frazar Stearns really did die “without a struggle”:
“To know just how He suffered – would be dear –
To know if any Human eyes were near
To whom He could entrust his wavering gaze –
Until it settled broad – on Paradise –
To know if He was patient – part content –
Was Dying as He thought – or different –
Was it a pleasant Day to die –
And did the Sunshine face His way –
What was His furthest mind – of Home – or God –
Or What the Distant say –
At News that He ceased Human Nature
Such a Day –”
As in the engraving, so in the poem: the gaze of the dying soldier is the first thing to be noticed – but Stearns did not die immediately, and Dickinson wants to know, were there living human eyes to catch his dying gaze – to bridge that gulf of separation one last time as he wavered between this world and the next? She has begun to set up a series of opposites which will toll solemnly throughout the poem. She wants to know if there were “Human eyes… near”, but also to know “What was his furthest mind” – whether it was focused on nearness or on distance, on “Home – or God”. At times, she dips into the conventional well of sentiment, with its references to “Paradise” and “Sunshine”, but she may be reaching into the much deeper pit of existential dread when she apprehends the fact that Stearns’s death means that he has “ceased Human Nature” and become something distant, foreign, unreachable – other. Another word is repeating itself, and reinforcing itself with rhyme. It is “Day” – the Day of death, the Day of divine wrath or mercy, the Day of the Lord from the Book of Revelation.
“And Wishes – Had He any –
Just His Sigh – accented –
Had been legible – to Me –
And was He Confident until
Ill fluttered out – in Everlasting Well –”
That question of nearness or distance is tolling, too. As his destiny was fixed ever more firmly on the eternal with each gush of haemorrhaging blood, did he have any last earthly wishes? Would anything have alleviated the pain? Had those attending him made sure that his arm was not twisted uncomfortably under him, that he was not thirsty, that he was not hot, or cold? He would not have had to put it into words. I would have been able to read it, Dickinson insists, just from the accent of his sigh. But these are only things of fleeting importance. He is now “ill”, but will soon be “Well”, everlastingly, if the theology of Dickinson’s community is to be believed.
This is where the form of the poem breaks down, and perhaps Dickinson does, too. Perhaps I should take that statement out of the passive voice and write it again: Dickinson systematically smashes up the form of her own poem. Her hesitation over word-choices, denoted by her plus signs, becomes apocalyptic, the tolling of opposites resounding on “last” and “first”, Alpha and Omega:
“And if He spoke – What name was Best –
What + last +first
What one broke off with
At the Drowsiest –
Was he afraid – or tranquil –
Might he know
How Conscious Consciousness – could grow –
Till Love that was – and Love too best to be –
Meet and the Junction +be Eternity +mean”
But it is also tolling on those lingering human concerns about Stearns’s dying emotions – whether of fear or tranquility – and of how his sense of his immediate needs, in those last minutes as blood-loss made him drowsy, interrupted his progress towards “Eternity”: the shutting down of the consciousness of this world as he became conscious of the next.
And what if he was afraid? What if Colonel Clark was merely offering platitudes when he insisted that Frazar Stearns died “without a struggle”? Dickinson doesn’t seem to be sure.
*
‘To know just how He suffered’ may not have been Dickinson’s first elegy for Frazar Stearns. R.W. Franklin has dated ‘Victory comes late’ to 1861, but the poem, written in an anguished free-verse form, seems also to explore the bitter irony of death in a victorious battle, the dying lips growing cold before they can taste the triumph:
"Victory comes late –
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it –
How sweet it would have tasted –
Just a Drop –
Was God so economical?"
Her agnosticism is rarely entirely hidden, but here it erupts into bitter sarcasm. God is too miserly to even grant a “Drop” of the heady liquor of victory to this dying soldier. In ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, Dickinson allows her bird to drink “a Dew / From a convenient Grass’ and even offers “him a Crumb”, but God disdains to do this for Frazar Stearns.
"His Table’s spread too high for Us
Unless We dine on Tiptoe –
Crumbs – fit such little mouths –
Cherries – suit Robins –
The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles – Them –
God keep His Oath to Sparrows –
Who of little Love – know how to starve –"
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promised that his Father, who cares for the birds of the air, would care much more for his people. Hamlet, too, remarked that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Birds have their own natural eucharists of crumbs and dew and cherries – in Dickinson’s garden perhaps – but sometimes, God lets them starve. Sometimes, eagles have them for breakfast. And he starved Frazar Stearns of the taste of victory, by bringing it on just a little too late, even as he fought under the sign of the Union’s Bald Eagle. Instead, as Dickinson wrote later in 1862, he must enter “The Forest of the Dead” and surrender, waving “Eternity’s White Flag”, facing the terrifying, remorseless inevitability of “God – at every Gate -”
*
And then there are those who stay at home, to become helpless witnesses to the remorselessness of Providence. When her uncle Loring Norcross died in 1863, Dickinson sent a poem to her cousins, Louise and Frances, which, whilst it is ostensibly about those who remain behind when others die of natural causes, seems likely to also be obliquely referring to the Civil War.
“ ‘Tis not that Dying hurts us so –
‘Tis Living – hurts us more –
But Dying – is a different way –
A kind behind the Door –
The Southern Custom – of the Bird –
That ere the Frosts are due –
Accepts a better Latitude –
We – are the Birds – that stay.”
Dickinson is thinking of her Robins and other migratory birds again – they go south, and Loring Norcross and Frazar Stearns have migrated into death – but we are the ones who must endure the pain of residence. And how can anyone have read that phrase, “Southern Custom”, in 1863, and not have thought of war, and how it tore communities apart?
“The Shiverers round Farmer’s doors –
For whose reluctant Crumb –
We stipulate – till pitying Snows
Persuade our Feathers Home”
To “stipulate” is to make a contract, or to settle terms. We settle, grudgingly, for our “Crumb” of security. Some birds will return, and some will not. There is nothing we can do but wait. It is an impoverished sacrament indeed.
*
In one other extraordinary poem from 1862, Dickinson wrote in the voice of a defeated soldier, surveying the battlefield in a state of shocked detachment. He admits that he would prefer to face the musket balls themselves than endure this empty silence:
"My Portion is Defeat – today –
A paler luck than Victory –
Less Paens – fewer Bells –
The Drums don’t follow Me – with tunes –
Defeat – a somewhat slower – means –
More +Arduous than Balls - +something dumber"
Suddenly, it is as though Currier and Ives’s engraving comes to life in Dickinson’s imagination. She sees the battlefield through the soldier’s eyes, and describes it in words stripped entirely of sentiment:
" ‘Tis populous with Bone and stain –
And Men too straight to +stoop again - +bend
And Piles of solid Moan –
And Chips of Blank – in Boyish Eyes –
And +scraps of Prayer - +shreds
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible – in stone –"
Currier and Ives left out the splintered bones and spilt brains, but they are here. So is the rigor-mortis, and the laying-out for mass burial – and before it, in a phrase in which Dickinson’s characteristic stylistic economy uncannily seems to anticipate Owen and Sassoon, those layers of broken and dying men, lumped into “Piles of solid Moan”. Their lives, prayers and bodies are reduced to “chips”, “shreds” and “scraps” – crumbs, morsels for birds. Perhaps our narrator is one of these piled-up, dying men. If so, he can see across to where the victorious forces are sounding their trumpets, although a great many of them, too, are dying:
“There’s something prouder, Over there -
The Trumpets tell it to the Air –
How different Victory
To Him who has it – and the One
Who to have had it, would have been
Contenteder – to die –”
*
Could there have been a measure of “contentedness” or “peace” in the death by loss of blood of Frazar Stearns on the battlefield of New Bern? Beyond Dickinson’s anger with a God she was not sure even existed, beyond her seemingly desperate attempt to make his death fit into the conventions of the ars moriendi of her time – and then her decision to smash this notion along with the carefully-constructed poetic form of ‘To know just how He suffered’ in its final stanzas – was there solace to be found in these elegies for the ruptured flesh of a man who had scarcely come of age? Could a dying Confederate soldier, looking out across the desolation and carnage at New Bern at the broken body of Frazar Stearns, really have cause to feel some sort of envy for the fact that his death was at least a victorious one?
It is perhaps easier to answer some of these questions from the vantage-point of history than it was for Emily Dickinson, because the results of that victory are known to us. Before the fall of New Bern, its African American population was 5,400. Of these, 4,700 were slaves. After the Union victory, there was a mass exodus of white oppressors from the town, and the region became a safe haven for thousands of African American refugees and escaped slaves, fleeing from Confederate hegemony, so much so that it became known as the “Mecca of Freedom”. Military victories are often as awful for the victors on the battlefield as they are for the vanquished, but sometimes there is also a moral victory, even if it “comes late”. Dickinson’s poems in response to the death of Frazar Stearns show us a woman who is justly angry with those with the power – whether God or politicians – who could not find another way of achieving this moral victory that did not involve ripping apart young men’s bodies.
Or, we could put it another way. Frazar Stearns died because the Confederates did not wish to be prevented from keeping slaves. There were persons more tangible than God whom Emily Dickinson could blame for the obscenity of his death.
A contemporary engraving of the Battle of New Bern (March 14th, 1862), printed by Currier and Ives of New York, shows the Union troops on the verge of victory, but still not out of danger. Their blue uniforms are the only bright colour in the picture, echoed only in the thin wash which denotes the mouth of the River Neuse with the distant town beyond it. Most carry bayonets, and are running forward down the hill towards the estuary, goaded on by two officers, one mounted, one on foot, wielding their swords to skyward. A third officer’s horse is rearing, terrified as an explosion rends the earth beside it, and soldiers lurch about – one shielding his eyes from the searing light, one prostrate, reaching for his knee, one flying spreadeagled with his hand on his head, another clutching helplessly at the shrapnel hole in his chest. Other Union soldiers lie bleeding and dying, their gazes fixed in every direction. Their faces are carefully depicted – they might well have been identifiable to their loved ones. A thin stream of blood emerges from the bullet-hole in one man’s chest, joining with the bottom margin of the picture. He stares at the sky. Beneath these flailing, dying victors, lie the Confederate dead in their dun uniforms, jaws thrust towards heaven. A swarm of Union soldiers courses down the hill – a bristling sea of bayonets stretching to the horizon.
One of those mortally wounded Union soldiers might have been Frazar Augustus Stearns, of Amherst, who was killed that day, shot with a rifle as he rallied the troops for the charge. It took him two and a half hours to die from loss of blood. His body came back to Amherst with a Confederate cannon he had helped to capture. Among his mourners was Austin Dickinson, Frazar Stearns’s close friend, and Austin’s sister, Emily. “Austin is chilled – by Frazer’s murder –” she wrote, “He says – his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ – ‘Frazer is killed’… Two or three words of lead – that dropped so deep, they keep weighing -” Frazar’s companions in his last hours were careful to testify as to his demeanour during those one hundred and fifty last minutes. His commanding officer, Colonel William Smith Clark, wrote that he “died without a struggle”.
*
The nineteenth century American craft of dying insisted that it was very important to die without a struggle – to die calmly, reconciled with one’s fate, eagerly anticipating one’s heavenly reward. Emily Dickinson’s own fascination with the moments before death, which often took a macabre direction of its own, doubtless grew out of this concern with the importance of dying a good death, but she found it difficult to stop there. She certainly wanted to know whether Frazar Stearns really did die “without a struggle”:
“To know just how He suffered – would be dear –
To know if any Human eyes were near
To whom He could entrust his wavering gaze –
Until it settled broad – on Paradise –
To know if He was patient – part content –
Was Dying as He thought – or different –
Was it a pleasant Day to die –
And did the Sunshine face His way –
What was His furthest mind – of Home – or God –
Or What the Distant say –
At News that He ceased Human Nature
Such a Day –”
As in the engraving, so in the poem: the gaze of the dying soldier is the first thing to be noticed – but Stearns did not die immediately, and Dickinson wants to know, were there living human eyes to catch his dying gaze – to bridge that gulf of separation one last time as he wavered between this world and the next? She has begun to set up a series of opposites which will toll solemnly throughout the poem. She wants to know if there were “Human eyes… near”, but also to know “What was his furthest mind” – whether it was focused on nearness or on distance, on “Home – or God”. At times, she dips into the conventional well of sentiment, with its references to “Paradise” and “Sunshine”, but she may be reaching into the much deeper pit of existential dread when she apprehends the fact that Stearns’s death means that he has “ceased Human Nature” and become something distant, foreign, unreachable – other. Another word is repeating itself, and reinforcing itself with rhyme. It is “Day” – the Day of death, the Day of divine wrath or mercy, the Day of the Lord from the Book of Revelation.
“And Wishes – Had He any –
Just His Sigh – accented –
Had been legible – to Me –
And was He Confident until
Ill fluttered out – in Everlasting Well –”
That question of nearness or distance is tolling, too. As his destiny was fixed ever more firmly on the eternal with each gush of haemorrhaging blood, did he have any last earthly wishes? Would anything have alleviated the pain? Had those attending him made sure that his arm was not twisted uncomfortably under him, that he was not thirsty, that he was not hot, or cold? He would not have had to put it into words. I would have been able to read it, Dickinson insists, just from the accent of his sigh. But these are only things of fleeting importance. He is now “ill”, but will soon be “Well”, everlastingly, if the theology of Dickinson’s community is to be believed.
This is where the form of the poem breaks down, and perhaps Dickinson does, too. Perhaps I should take that statement out of the passive voice and write it again: Dickinson systematically smashes up the form of her own poem. Her hesitation over word-choices, denoted by her plus signs, becomes apocalyptic, the tolling of opposites resounding on “last” and “first”, Alpha and Omega:
“And if He spoke – What name was Best –
What + last +first
What one broke off with
At the Drowsiest –
Was he afraid – or tranquil –
Might he know
How Conscious Consciousness – could grow –
Till Love that was – and Love too best to be –
Meet and the Junction +be Eternity +mean”
But it is also tolling on those lingering human concerns about Stearns’s dying emotions – whether of fear or tranquility – and of how his sense of his immediate needs, in those last minutes as blood-loss made him drowsy, interrupted his progress towards “Eternity”: the shutting down of the consciousness of this world as he became conscious of the next.
And what if he was afraid? What if Colonel Clark was merely offering platitudes when he insisted that Frazar Stearns died “without a struggle”? Dickinson doesn’t seem to be sure.
*
‘To know just how He suffered’ may not have been Dickinson’s first elegy for Frazar Stearns. R.W. Franklin has dated ‘Victory comes late’ to 1861, but the poem, written in an anguished free-verse form, seems also to explore the bitter irony of death in a victorious battle, the dying lips growing cold before they can taste the triumph:
"Victory comes late –
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it –
How sweet it would have tasted –
Just a Drop –
Was God so economical?"
Her agnosticism is rarely entirely hidden, but here it erupts into bitter sarcasm. God is too miserly to even grant a “Drop” of the heady liquor of victory to this dying soldier. In ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, Dickinson allows her bird to drink “a Dew / From a convenient Grass’ and even offers “him a Crumb”, but God disdains to do this for Frazar Stearns.
"His Table’s spread too high for Us
Unless We dine on Tiptoe –
Crumbs – fit such little mouths –
Cherries – suit Robins –
The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles – Them –
God keep His Oath to Sparrows –
Who of little Love – know how to starve –"
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promised that his Father, who cares for the birds of the air, would care much more for his people. Hamlet, too, remarked that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Birds have their own natural eucharists of crumbs and dew and cherries – in Dickinson’s garden perhaps – but sometimes, God lets them starve. Sometimes, eagles have them for breakfast. And he starved Frazar Stearns of the taste of victory, by bringing it on just a little too late, even as he fought under the sign of the Union’s Bald Eagle. Instead, as Dickinson wrote later in 1862, he must enter “The Forest of the Dead” and surrender, waving “Eternity’s White Flag”, facing the terrifying, remorseless inevitability of “God – at every Gate -”
*
And then there are those who stay at home, to become helpless witnesses to the remorselessness of Providence. When her uncle Loring Norcross died in 1863, Dickinson sent a poem to her cousins, Louise and Frances, which, whilst it is ostensibly about those who remain behind when others die of natural causes, seems likely to also be obliquely referring to the Civil War.
“ ‘Tis not that Dying hurts us so –
‘Tis Living – hurts us more –
But Dying – is a different way –
A kind behind the Door –
The Southern Custom – of the Bird –
That ere the Frosts are due –
Accepts a better Latitude –
We – are the Birds – that stay.”
Dickinson is thinking of her Robins and other migratory birds again – they go south, and Loring Norcross and Frazar Stearns have migrated into death – but we are the ones who must endure the pain of residence. And how can anyone have read that phrase, “Southern Custom”, in 1863, and not have thought of war, and how it tore communities apart?
“The Shiverers round Farmer’s doors –
For whose reluctant Crumb –
We stipulate – till pitying Snows
Persuade our Feathers Home”
To “stipulate” is to make a contract, or to settle terms. We settle, grudgingly, for our “Crumb” of security. Some birds will return, and some will not. There is nothing we can do but wait. It is an impoverished sacrament indeed.
*
In one other extraordinary poem from 1862, Dickinson wrote in the voice of a defeated soldier, surveying the battlefield in a state of shocked detachment. He admits that he would prefer to face the musket balls themselves than endure this empty silence:
"My Portion is Defeat – today –
A paler luck than Victory –
Less Paens – fewer Bells –
The Drums don’t follow Me – with tunes –
Defeat – a somewhat slower – means –
More +Arduous than Balls - +something dumber"
Suddenly, it is as though Currier and Ives’s engraving comes to life in Dickinson’s imagination. She sees the battlefield through the soldier’s eyes, and describes it in words stripped entirely of sentiment:
" ‘Tis populous with Bone and stain –
And Men too straight to +stoop again - +bend
And Piles of solid Moan –
And Chips of Blank – in Boyish Eyes –
And +scraps of Prayer - +shreds
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible – in stone –"
Currier and Ives left out the splintered bones and spilt brains, but they are here. So is the rigor-mortis, and the laying-out for mass burial – and before it, in a phrase in which Dickinson’s characteristic stylistic economy uncannily seems to anticipate Owen and Sassoon, those layers of broken and dying men, lumped into “Piles of solid Moan”. Their lives, prayers and bodies are reduced to “chips”, “shreds” and “scraps” – crumbs, morsels for birds. Perhaps our narrator is one of these piled-up, dying men. If so, he can see across to where the victorious forces are sounding their trumpets, although a great many of them, too, are dying:
“There’s something prouder, Over there -
The Trumpets tell it to the Air –
How different Victory
To Him who has it – and the One
Who to have had it, would have been
Contenteder – to die –”
*
Could there have been a measure of “contentedness” or “peace” in the death by loss of blood of Frazar Stearns on the battlefield of New Bern? Beyond Dickinson’s anger with a God she was not sure even existed, beyond her seemingly desperate attempt to make his death fit into the conventions of the ars moriendi of her time – and then her decision to smash this notion along with the carefully-constructed poetic form of ‘To know just how He suffered’ in its final stanzas – was there solace to be found in these elegies for the ruptured flesh of a man who had scarcely come of age? Could a dying Confederate soldier, looking out across the desolation and carnage at New Bern at the broken body of Frazar Stearns, really have cause to feel some sort of envy for the fact that his death was at least a victorious one?
It is perhaps easier to answer some of these questions from the vantage-point of history than it was for Emily Dickinson, because the results of that victory are known to us. Before the fall of New Bern, its African American population was 5,400. Of these, 4,700 were slaves. After the Union victory, there was a mass exodus of white oppressors from the town, and the region became a safe haven for thousands of African American refugees and escaped slaves, fleeing from Confederate hegemony, so much so that it became known as the “Mecca of Freedom”. Military victories are often as awful for the victors on the battlefield as they are for the vanquished, but sometimes there is also a moral victory, even if it “comes late”. Dickinson’s poems in response to the death of Frazar Stearns show us a woman who is justly angry with those with the power – whether God or politicians – who could not find another way of achieving this moral victory that did not involve ripping apart young men’s bodies.
Or, we could put it another way. Frazar Stearns died because the Confederates did not wish to be prevented from keeping slaves. There were persons more tangible than God whom Emily Dickinson could blame for the obscenity of his death.
