Part I

1) Before I wrote these opening lines, or any of the new parts of "Map of My Country", I had discovered a need and a satisfaction in giving my voice lines to say aloud in my own natural cadences. It was, in fact, not very long before; this poem was one of the first, and the most ambitious attempts to write for the ear that I made. Thus, in these first six lines, the first four are one sentence, with the first and fourth whole runs, the second and third broken with commas. The fifth line is deliberately abrupt, then staccato, and the sixth only a little less so, to prepare for the seventh.

2) Having in mind that I would draw in words, (i.e.,) name only what I knew, on this empty map, I sought the largest, the most obvious first map-things, edges, then named the most obvious geographical features, as if in a glance, or easy memory. But the seventh line brings the eye closer, to particulars. I think I had to check on an actual map for them.

3) A generality, not a specific memory; but true enough, of myself, and of many others, and of course it is actually a step in the argument, swiftly taken, toward the important claim that the map about to be drawn is different from those schoolroom maps. I am aware, making these notes in 1953, that much may be lost from mind; that I worked and re-worked my drafts many times, and do not have them at hand now; and that I may have invented, after the composition, explanations I have come to believe true.

4) When I put in the "tall letters" I know, even now, that I felt the first satisfaction: this was myself, no one else, something I had noticed always - that is, how the largest lettering on a map, having to be spread across a whole state or nation, will seem to isolate a huge W or B, the nearest letter like it being several cities and valleys distant. If I read the big letters all in one word, they said W I S C O N S I N, and I knew that anyway. I wanted this word, of which I had discovered one mid-letter, to be some surprise, something for me alone. It never was.

5) I was dubious later about being able to see a hundred miles, even in clear air, but have not been contradicted. I think the cadence needed the long-drawn word, to be followed by the short half-lines.

6) The picture in my mind's eye of "the long hillsides" was not a New England picture, but somewhere parallel to a highway in the Delaware Water Gap. I used the drive alone there in a yellow Model A Ford convertible two-seater, when I was an instructor at Lafayette College; it was autumn 1931. Somehow I felt geographically disloyal, and so brought in laurel, and bayberry, from my native New England. But again, it was partly the need for change of pace in the cadence; I think my composition-book would show laurel inserted late.

7) Here is a literary allusion, or echo: Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, in which Christian says almost the same thing, when he realizes he must set forth on his own journey and be his own guide. I had by no means planned this allusion. It was an accidental reading, at that time, of a few pages that happened to include those words. The fact is, and has often been stated, that in the creative time, everything is useful, anything can be transmuted. This was merely unusually apt for the purpose.

8) Working hard and dying for the wrong reasons was an impression from letters and other records by Holmes great-grandfathers and uncles, on which I drew several times later on. My father was compiling the Holmes genealogy, and showed me these letters and related material; much of it was of no interest whatever to me, but I took what I wished to and liked.

9) My country experience is highly limited, and the references, in their quantity, to growing things and the out-of-doors, may be, but should not be, misleading. I know the names of a few ordinary trees and flowers. I do not like to walk in the open. A little of birds, weather, cloud-formation, and stars goes a long way with me. But Dudley and Jeannette Cloud, now of the Atlantic Monthly Press, had given us their summer house in southern Vermont, for part of July in 1938 or 1939, and in the sloping field near the house I found the tiny wild strawberries in the grass. One day they were green, a day or two later they were ripe, the next day gone. The Clouds were happy that we had been there for the brief season of the wild strawberries, about the 12th or 15th of the month. What struck me, and stayed in my mind, was the predictability, and the brevity, of the ripening. For that time and that place it was a calendar.

10) Two night-sounds here were memories of one place, separated for the story's sake. It was Parker River, and Marston Sargent's cottage at the inner edge of the Newburyport marshes, back of Plum Island. "Letter to Three Men," a long poem in the same book, MAP OF MY COUNTRY, describes it all better and more fully. We could not, I think, hear bell-buoys, but we could hear and sometimes see the surf miles away. I used that sound because I needed far-off, evocative sounds, and a pair of sounds at that place.

11) I'm not sure there are any places on a real map of this country where there were never wars. I had not been west or south; the difference in speech and food is an obvious one, but I was seeking the sort of thing the maps do not show.

12) The sight of the State House, floodlighted, seen from the train at the Providence station, was what I thought of; another instance of change because of the needs of the cadence, and I think also because there are more courthouses that there are statehouses, and less particularized.

13) I had seen enough, even if not much, of houses and barns in eight or ten eastern states to know that regions produce different styles in both. Not much stone in the houses in New England, but much flat stone in Pennsylvania houses. In a book about English domestic architecture, which I read a year or so ago, I became aware of how immediate availability dictated the style, as well as the materials , of houses, and of how exactly a house could be named by region because of its stone. House architecture changes in western Massachusetts. Eastern New York state barns are very large, and likely to have Dutch roofs. Pennsylvania barns are built on higher and thicker stone foundations than in New England, and the same stone encloses pig-pens and yards. Vermont barns are more often red than anything else; sometimes yellow, or white.

14) Walden Pond, a real place and near my home, and Huck's island in the Mississippi River, stand for the literary or legendary places I would put on the map. To me monuments, and to me famous. I wonder a little now why I did not greatly expand this list. But the opening section had to be kept moving fast, only touching on the many kinds of things; it was to be an introduction, a miniature of the whole poem. And long catalogs in my poems have always been a weakness.

15) For some reason I do not know, this line pleases hearers of the poem. It must be that it is one of those generally evocative things; all boys have climbed hills, making history only for themselves. Mine was Red Hill, not far from Center Harbor, on Lake Winnepesaukee, N. H., and Dick Walsh and I had been invited by Stanley Teele, all of us living in Somerville, Mass., to the Teele farm for a few days. Dick is now and attorney in Boston, and Stan a professor at the Harvard Business School.

16) Here suddenly my first thought is guilty: that I said I would draw these lines, and never did. But of course, I never drew the map. I had to keep myself from drawing it, so that I could use all the images and urges in words. These journey-lines, and letter-lines, would have become another catalog.

17) This passage seems to me still one of the most compact and complex and most suggestive graphically, and biographically, of Part 1. With effort, I kept the three images to a line apiece, with extra for the music, for sound and sadness. The three words lead the lines: forest, ocean, music. If I were to draw them, then the particular music, ocean and forest I meant would stand for all of their kind everywhere and for everyone. The would have to be located, in terms of drawing, somewhere hung in he air above the map, or in set-off panels. Perhaps this is why I never drew the map. Sometimes I would have visions so complicated of the map that I had to stop thinking about it: a map parts of which would be drawn on eight or ten transparent sheets, one laid over the other, layers of visible time: a map vertical and horizontal: a map with faces blended: a map that could hugely enlarge at one place while all the other areas shrank, the way the microfilm reader-screens work on newspaper sheets (which at that time I had never seen): an impossible map, but not in words.

18) As the prose preface to MAP OF MY COUNTRY says, I had thought for a while of calling the poem and the book THE KNOWN WORLD, having in mind the oldest maps, on which the shores of the Mediterranean were labeled "terra cognita" and all beyond "terra incognita." It suited my purpose well, and perhaps I made a mistake in not using that title, although I had it always in mind as a visual image, and a concept. My opening section was to be a definition, and a sample, the items to be expanded later

Thus the man who died too young was Albert Kahn, a lawyer of Easton, Pa., who appears in Part VIII with others who in my life died too young. The two towns were the only two I had then known very well, Somerville, Mass., and Easton, Pa.,

As footnote to a footnote, I should say about the forest that the picture in my mind's eye, essential forest for me, was a spot part way up Mt. Belknap near Lake Winnepesaukee, very tall bare-trunked trees, all the great foliage at the tips, and underfoot fern and in between sunlight. I was a camper or a junior leader at Camp Belknap; we were off on a one-day hike, nothing spectacular, no great achievement. About the ocean I should say that again it is the long empty beach at Plum Island. About the music I should say or write a novel about it, that a man and a woman I knew well and cared for deeply, older than I was, had fallen in love, both being married to someone else. Only I, and these two, knew that at the big parties they talked to one another by playing Brahms endlessly in the swirl of highballs and chatter, steaks and stunts and - now that I think of it - probably a number of other heartbreaks, without benefit of Brahms.

19) The controlling effect of the cadences on my deplorable tendency to enumerate, to swell, to pile up associations, cannot be insisted on too often. As I have gone through this section, I am again amazed, and feel some admiration for that working self of more than twenty years ago, at the severity with which I allowed myself two or three instead of eleven or seventeen examples. But each smaller passage has a rhythm, a swell and fall, of its own, its own set of contrasting long and shorter breaths and phrasing. To lengthen the catalog would have been to blur and smother the lines of sound, and of picture.

It was not until I had read this opening section aloud many times (and, sad to say, after I had made a recording of it) that I discovered an emphasis that had certainly been in my mind when I worked out the forest ocean and music lines, but that I had not given with my voice, Now, when I read the lines, I stress me in the first line, I in the second, and I in the third - not too much, and in slightly diminishing force. But enough, I think, to show that these are symbols, my symbols, one standing for all.

20) Writing these notes, I have been strongly tempted to try to find my old notebooks, and perhaps to retrace some of the versions of some of these passages. But first I mean to fill in the private allusions, and indicate the more general intent.