A SELECTION FROM MY FORTHCOMING ANTHOLOGY, TALES OF TERROR: THE SUPERNATURAL POEM SINCE 1800...REDISCOVERING A LOST GOTHIC FEMALE POET....
FRANCES H. GREEN (1805-1878) -- SONG OF THE NORTH WIND
In the second edition of Rev. Griswold’s massive
anthology, The Female Poets of America, only two or three women poets demonstrate
a knack for the Gothic or supernatural. Frances H. Green, born in Rhode Island
and a descendant of that state’s famed Whipple family, made her mark as
journalist, editor and author on abolition, spiritualism, the Dorr Rebellion,
and even, apparently, a textbook on botany. She had to have been one of the
smartest women to come from Rhode Island, and her poems include an epic on the
Narragansett Indians. Like Longfellow, she was steeped in Norse mythology, and
in the following poem she joins in the line of Norse-inspired poems that Bishop
Percy first collected, and which M.G. Lewis made a point of collecting in Tales
of Wonder. The reference to Lapland with its legendary witches who can command
the winds, shows that she researched her myths well. Her poem also stands out
from the far more conventional poems Griswold gathered from her contemporaries
in that it has an unremitting paganism and a masculine, one might even say,
blood-thirsty, pleasure in depicting the carnage inflicted by storm winds, in
an era when sea travel was hazardous and frequently fatal.
From the home of Thor, and the land of Hun,
Where the valiant frost-king defies the sun,
Till he, like a coward, slinks away
With the spectral glare of his meager day—
And throned in beauty, peerless Night,
In her robe of snow and her crown of light,
Sits queen-like on her icy throne.
With frost-flowers in her pearly zone —
And the fair Aurora floating free,
Round her form of matchless symmetry —
An irised mantle of roseate hue,
With the gold and hyacinth melting through;
And from her forehead, beaming far,
Looks forth her own true polar star.
From the land we love — our native home —
On a mission of wrath we come, we come!
Away, away, over earth and sea!
Unchained, and chainless, we are free!
As we fly, our strong wings gather force.
To rush on our overwhelming course:
We have swept the mountain and walked the main.
And now, in our strength, we are here again;
To beguile the stay of this wintry hour.
We are chanting our anthem of pride and power;
And the listening earth turns deadly pale —
Like a sheeted corse, the silent vale
Looks forth in its robe of ghastly white,
As now we rehearse our deeds of might.
The strongest of God's sons are we —
Unchained, and chainless, ever free!
We have looked on Hecla’s burning brow,
And seen the pines of Norland bow
In cadence to our deafening roar,
On the craggy steep of the Arctic shore;
We have waltzed with the maelstrom’s whirling flood,
And curdled the current of human blood,
As nearer, nearer, nearer, drew
The struggling bark to the boiling blue —
Till, resistless, urged to the cold death-clasp,
It writhes in the hideous monster’s grasp —
A moment — and then the fragments go
Down, down, to the fearful depths below!
But away, away, over land and sea —
Unchained, and chainless, we are free!
We have startled the poising avalanche.
And seen the cheek of the mountain blanch,
As down the giant Ruin came.
With a step of wrath and an eye of flame;
Hurling destruction, death, and wo.
On all around and all below,
Till the piling rocks and the prostrate wood
Conceal the spot where the village stood;
And the choking waters vainly try
From their strong prison-hold to fly!
We haste away, for our breath is rife
With the groans of expiring human life
Of that hour of horror we only may tell —
As we chant the dirge and we ring the knell,
Away, away, over land and sea —
Unchained and chainless — we are free!
Full often we catch, as we hurry along,
The clear-ringing notes of the Laplander’s song.
As, borne by his reindeer, he dashes away
Through the night of the North, more refulgent than day!
We have traversed the land where the dark Esquimaux
Looks out on the gloom from his cottage of snow;
Where in silence sits brooding the large milk-white owl,
And the sea-monsters roar, and the famished wolves howl;
And the white polar bear her grim paramour hails,
As she hies to her tryste through those crystalline vales.
Where the Ice-Mountain stands, with his feet in the deep.
That around him the petrified waters may sleep;
And light in a flood of refulgence comes down,
As the lunar beams glance from his shadowless crown.
We have looked in the hut the Kamschatkan hath reared,
And taken old Behring himself by the beard,
Where he sits like a giant in gloomy unrest,
Ever driving asunder the East and the West.
But we hasten away, over mountain and sea.
With a wing ever chainless, a thought ever free!
From the parent soil we have rent the oak —
His strong arms splintered, his sceptre broke:
For centuries he has defied our power.
But we plucked him forth like a fragile flower,
And to the wondering Earth brought down
The haughty strength of his hoary crown.
Away, away, over land and sea —
Unchained and chainless — we are free!
We have roused the Storm from his pillow of
air,
And driven the Thunder-King forth from his lair;
We have torn the rock from the dizzening steep,
And awakened the wilds from their ancient sleep;
We have howled o’er Russia’s desolate plains.
Where death-cold silence ever reigns,
Until we come, with our trumpet breath,
To chant our anthem of fear and death!
The strongest of God’s sons are we —
Unchained and chainless — ever free!
We have hurled the
glacier from his rest
Upon Chamouni’s treacherous breast;
And we scatter the product of human pride,
As forth on the wing of the Storm we ride,
To visit with tokens of fearful power
The lofty arch and the beetling tower;
And we utter defiance, deep and loud.
To the taunting voice of the bursting cloud;
And we laugh with scorn at the ruin we see
Then away we hasten — for we are free!
Old Neptune we call from his ocean-caves
When for pastime we dance on the crested waves;
And we heap the struggling billows high
Against the deep gloom of the sky;
Then we plunge in the yawning depths beneath,
And there on the heaving surges breathe,
Till they toss the proud ship like a feather,
And Light and Hope expire together;
And the bravest cheek turns deadly pale
At the cracking mast and the rending sail,
As down, with headlong fury borne,
Of all her strength and honors shorn.
The good ship struggles to the last
With the raging waters and howling blast.
We hurry the waves to their final crash,
And the foaming floods to phrensy lash;
Then we pour our requiem on the billow,
As the dead go down to their ocean pillow —
Down — far down — to the depths below,
Where the pearls repose and the sea-gems glow;
Mid the coral groves, where the sea-fan waves
Its palmy wand o’er a thousand graves,
And the insect weaves her stony shroud,
Alike o’er the humble and the proud,
What can be mightier than we,
The strong, the chainless, ever free!
Now away to our home in the sparkling North,
For the Spring from her South-land is looking forth.
Away, away, to our arctic zone,
Where the Frost-King sits on his flashing throne,
With his icebergs piled up mountain high,
A wall of gems against the sky —
Where the stars look forth like wells of light,
And the gleaming snow-crust sparkles bright!
We are fainting now for the breath of home;
Our journey is finished — we come, we come!
Away, away, over land and sea —
Unchained and chainless — ever free!
From: Rufus Wilmot Griswold, ed. The Female Poets of America. Second
edition, 1859. Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, pp. 127-28.
