Part III
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
III.
Big as a table-top, the white map lies under my right hand,
Scrawled over, sketched on, dense with memory as the hand moves. 25.
Arrows run west.
My eastern grandfather ploughed two farms there,
Built houses twice, lost one, and a green crop with it in wind,
But sent home for his brother, writing in rusty ink,
"Tell all our friends they need not die indoors." 26.
I have written names outdoors, large in the northeast,
For my father's fathers, and all their sons' children,
Good and the same, using the same names often, dying old.
Here I have drawn, from a family memory moving my fingers,
Their square, big, plain, many-windowed houses,
Built round a fieldstone fireplace chimney for the warmth,
The back doors closed upon a valley-view. 27.– -
Their names were Webster, Upham, Robinson, Nash.
They knew green days, and warm roofed-over nights of love,
Knew rage, delight, despair not found in the town clerks' records.
One struck his wife down, ran in a hundred-year-old night
Over the lake ice, fell in the black water, was drowned and damned.
Some owed too much money, some fought too long in the wars,
All dreamed, bought, worked, hated and hurried well.
But there must have been singers in the clover, in the pines,
Shouters to the mountain echo, listening. 28.– -
Shall I draw crossed knives on this crowded map?
And near which names the shivering edge of joy,
Near which the shrewd point stuck in the back? 29.– -
What heaven did they believe in, what good, what gods,
As I believe the life in words is as long as heaven to live in?
"I hereby give and bequeath
To my Beloved Sone William Holmes
My Gun, my clock, and my Writing Desk." 30.
They gave their sons Death Ready, Time Passing, the Word Written.
I shall not give my own son more, but hope to tell him
I had my heaven on earth, as they had theirs, and knew it.– -
They buried their kind in Kansas and Vermont,
And the tombstones put down roots.
25) I had planned that there would be sections of the poem on my father's family (which is this one) and on my mother's family (which follows it) and on my childhood, college years, and so on. But I can feel now how these opening lines felt, or how I felt, as I wrote them: 'Come on, Holmes, get back to that map. Keep that map in mind. Let them see you drawing it, 'get your head and hand right down to it, and get to work. The map.'
26) The source is again the Holmes genealogical studies, and original letters, happily for me going on at about the same time as the poem. The fact is that it was my great-uncle who went west, and wrote to my grandfather back in western Massachusetts. I don't know whether I had a reason for changing it, or took the idea and didn't care who did what. The line from the letter is exact, and struck me as one of those rare and beautiful and moving expressions that could sometimes occur in the letters of the unlettered. I knew, too, what he meant: the New England farms, small, hilly, hard to work, the short distances, the snug house-walls he had come from to the incredible expanses of the plains, and the rich soil that without tending grew barn-bursting crops; the abundance after the meagerness; the plains, not the walled fields; all outdoors. I had written a poem about it earlier, p. 65 in ADDRESS TO THE LIVING.
BROTHER TO BROTHER, 1859
We are in Illinois again. Two years ago
We went to Kansas, fifteen hundred miles
That summer, out by wagon in the spring,
And back in the late autumn, tired and poor.
I built a house there, and I broke the land
For corn, but. nothing green cane up that year.
The wind blew hard in Kansas, cruel gales
That punished farm and farmer senselessly.
Hay was a withered harvest, but I mowed
Even the short dry grass for winter feed,
And it was while I sweat in the flat field
That a whirling summer storm blew down my house,
Making a rubbish-heap of all we owned.
The children both escaped, but both were hurt,
And Lida grieves when she remembers now
Our wedding chinaware flung down and smashed.-
In six weeks we were back in Illinois.
This is the place to farm. The rain comes right,
The soil is rich, and I have built a house.
The south wind blows tonight.
Come out to us. Our hearts and house have room.
You work the year round all your lives to die
There in the eastern mills.
You need not die beside the looms. I work
In summertime, and both my barns are full.
Tell all our friends they need not die indoors.
I think I shall not come back east again
-
Sometimes I dream, and Lida says she dreams,
Of hills around Northampton, and the brook,
Stony and steep, beyond the wooden bridge,
But most of all, she says, the hills.
I think I shall not come back east again,
Or see my friends again this side of heaven.
-
Be faithful and be blest.
Or if you have not given your heart to God,
Do so at once. Delays are dangerous.
But if you come to farm this western land,
And see, as I have seen, the corn corns up
On rolling acres green and all your own,
And feel the western sunlight and the rain
Giving you God's abundance for a crop,
And reap it under the infinite western sky,
You will not need my prayers.
The excited pride, and the homesickness, and the piety, were all in the letter, if not in such detail. The facts of the Illinois-to-Kansas experiment, and the wind-storm, were all told; I invented some of the rest. My great-uncle modified his homesickness into an invitation to his brother. "Tell all our friends..." were his actual words, and in iambic pentameter, no less. The piety was new, and the words not his, but taken from the sermons, tracts, prayer-meetings that were solace to that hard-worked generation.
27) The record shows that some names persisted, John with monotony. Any New Englander knows that in houses in the country the best view is from the kitchen window. The never-used front door respectably faced the road.
28) What was not in the town clerks' records was what would be on my map; a sort of definition of the poem. It is true that an ancestor, or at least someone in the family record, killed his wife, and was drowned. The possible singers in the clover were my own hope, or speculation.
29) This is insistence again on a graphic image for the map, and a kind of summing-up, symbolically, of the preceding lines. It strikes me, too, that it is another recurrence in my poetry, the acknowledgment of light and dark, good and evil, to be looked at with equal intentness and understanding. It comes in the early lines of Part II, it was the main idea of the poem "Address to the Living," and later of "The Double Root."
30) And gave me the perfect symbols I needed just here in the poem. The quotation is exact, and all I could wish. I have no idea now which old Holmes this was, but obviously old enough that those three items were precious, and worthy of bequest by the head of the family to his son. Since he had a Writing Desk, perhaps he was the shouter in the pines, the singer in the clover I had been inquiring for.