Chapter IV: Narrative and Legendary Verse

Whittier’s instinct drew him irresistibly to native themes. He believed that the American poet should write about America. ‘New England is full of Romance,’ he had said in his sketch of Brainard. ‘The great forest which our fathers penetrated--the red men--their struggle and their disappearance--the Powwow and the War-dance--the savage inroad and the English sally--the tale of superstition, and the scenes of Witchcraft,--all these are rich materials of poetry.’ And it is safe to assume that Whittier never questioned the wisdom of his own choice of subjects, though he was often dissatisfied with the treatment.

Much of Whittier’s early verse died a natural death. More ought in his opinion to have done so. He marvelled at the ‘feline tenacity of life’ exhibited by certain poems and thought it flat contradiction of the theory of the survival of the fittest. He destroyed every copy of _Legends of New England_ that he could get his hands on. He would have been glad to suppress _Mogg Megone_. ‘Is there no way to lay the ghosts of unlucky rhymes?’ he asked, when the question was raised of reprinting the story in the ‘blue and gold’ volumes of 1857. It had appeared in the first collected edition (1849), and again in 1870; but when the definitive edition was published (1888), _Mogg Megone_ was consigned to ‘the limbo of an appendix,’ and printed in type small enough to make the reading a torture.

The plot is imaginary, but the characters are for the most part historical. The outlaw Bonython sells his daughter to the Saco chief Hegone, or, as he was commonly called, Mogg Megone. The girl murders the savage as he lies drunk in her father’s hut. For Mogg had boasted of killing her seducer. She flies to the settlement of the Norridgewock Indians to confess to the Jesuit Sebastian Ralle, and is repulsed by the angry priest, whose plans are thwarted by Megone’s untimely death. Wandering about in agony, she sees the attack by the English on Norridgewock, when Ralle was shot at the foot of the cross, and later is found by Castine and his men, dead in the forest. The poem is spirited and abounds in incident, but it is melodramatic. It lacks the magic of Whittier’s art. Nevertheless he unjustly depreciated it.

A better performance is ‘The Bridal of Pennacook,’ with its strongly marked characters of Passaconaway, Weetamoo, and Winnepurkit, its contrasting pictures of the rich Merrimac valley and the wild Saugus marshes. Along with this story of Indian life may be read ‘The Fountain’ and the musical stanzas of the ‘Funeral Tree of the Sokokis.’ ‘The Truce of Piscataqua’ and ‘Nauhaught, the Deacon’ are later poems illustrating Indian character.

Living in what had been for many years one of the border towns of Massachusetts, Whittier was naturally drawn to themes, partly historic, partly legendary, touching the struggles between French, English, and Indians. ‘Pentucket’ commemorates Hertel de Rouville’s night attack on Haverhill. ‘St. John,’ a ballad of Acadia, describes the sack of La Tour’s fortress by his rival, D’Aulnay. ‘Mary Garvin’ and ‘The Ranger’ are ‘border’ ballads.

Now and then he rhymes ‘a wild and wondrous story,’ such as ‘The Garrison of Cape Ann,’ which he found in the _Magnalia Christi_:--

Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of old,
Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean and coarse and cold;
Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar clay,
Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden gray.

A number of the poems turn on the witchcraft persecutions: ‘Mabel Martin,’ ‘The Witch of Wenham,’ and the fine ‘Prophecy of Samuel Sewall.’ In _The Tent on the Beach_ are two more: ‘The Wreck of the Rivermouth’ and ‘The Changeling.’

Whittier was always ready to speak on the injustice of injustice. His Quaker ancestors used to receive gifts of forty stripes save one. They were martyrs for the cause of religious liberty. And the sufferings of the New England Quakers was a subject always to the poet’s hand. He contemplated the wrongs that had been righted and was grateful therefor; but it was a part of his mission to teach his readers what progress had been made since the days in which state and church united to persecute a harmless if sometimes extravagant people. The lesson may be found in such poems as ‘How the Women went from Dover’ and ‘The King’s Missive.’ Whittier knew that injustice is always ridiculous, and a grim humor plays at times about his treatment of events in that dreadful day, as in the story of Thomas Macy. The most characteristic setting of his general theme is to be found in the spirited ballad of ‘Cassandra Southwick.’ The incident is told dramatically by the heroine herself, but the passion which glows through the verse is true Whittier.