Philip Morin Freneau
3. Compare the personification of Death in Freneau’s poem to its appearance in Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death.”
“On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country” (1785) The poem begins with the imagined journey and encounters of an emigrant recently departed from “Europe’s proud, despotic shores” (7). This modern-day Palemon, a young male traveler who appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, distinguishes himself by departing from the crowd and seeking “where nature’s wildest genius reigns” (2, 3). Freneau adheres to conventional—one might even suggest propaganda-fueled—depictions of the American landscape as the phrases “so long concealed, so lately known” echo the language of discovery and entice the reader, as they do the emigrant, to gain familiarity and mastery (20). Freneau does depart somewhat from this traditional view of an American landscape by noting how the democratic form of government has imprinted itself onto the land: “In our new found world” the explorer discovers a “happier soil, a milder sway” (9–10). It is as though the absence of a despotic presence, so recently felt in the Revolutionary War against Britain and King George III, impacts the foundation or core of the land, its soil. Freneau quickly moves from democracy’s influence on the landscape to a celebration of its two central rivers at the time: the Ohio and the Mississippi. Freneau praises the Ohio River, a “savage stream,” as an enduring natural work of art that demonstrates nature’s authority (13–14). The sheer force and immortal quality of this particular river “outvie / the boldest pattern art can frame,” meaning that the river’s beauty overwhelms the museum or art gallery attempts to corral or contain the art in a frame. The Mississippi River also receives praise, but not for its natural grandeur. Freneau promises that “no longer through a darksome wood / advance, unnoticed, to the main” (33–34). These lines can be interpreted in two
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different but compatible ways: The poem itself provides notoriety to this river, whose course to the ocean, “the main,” was previously unmarked, or “unnoticed,” or, because of the plans to use the Mississippi’s waterways for trade and commerce, its course will be navigated by ships whose crews will take note. The native inhabitants of the New World also appear, albeit briefl y, in Freneau’s poem, but rather than the noble savage who appears in “The Indian Burying Ground,” the “unsocial Indian far retreats / To make some other clime his own” (21–22). Freneau falls into the convention of the “vanishing American” that JAMES FENIMORE COOPER would canonize in the next century. The concept here is that the American Indian will simply vanish, or willingly and voluntarily relocate, to make way for the incoming flux of Europeans. Such a notion is at odds with the portrait of African slaves Freneau paints just a mere fi ve stanzas later. He anticipates “the day / when man shall man no longer crush,” but this sentiment is only reserved for African slaves and does not apply to the American Indians, who are native to this “happier soil.”
For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare Freneau’s depictions of an American landscape with those offered in THOMAS MORTON’s New English Canaan, JOHN SMITH’s A General History of Virginia, or CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS’s descriptions of the Americas. 2. Drawing on other poems from Freneau that address American Indians and African slaves, write an essay in which you account for the different treatments of the two races.
“Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) Freneau’s lyrical poem fi rst appeared in the Columbia Herald in 1786. The biographer Philip M. Marsh believes that “at its most tender, the lyric genius . . . cultivated and elaborated, might have given the author a far greater fame” (105). The