Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 199even more captivating in their rhythms and repetitions. A “play-party song” such as
“Cindy,” for instance, was meant to be danced to without musical accompaniment.
The song itself had to get feet tapping, itching to dance: as in the chorus, which
simply repeats the line, “Get-a-long home, Cindy, Cindy” three times followed by the
swinging rhythm of the declaration, “I’ll marry you some day.” In turn, what were
known as “answering-back songs” were meant to be sung and danced to in a call and
response manner by young men and women. In one of the most famous, “Paper of
Pins,” for example, each of the many verses sung by the boys plays variations on the
theme of offering something by way of a marriage gift. “I’ll give to you a paper of
pins, / If you will tell me how our love begins, /” the boys sing in the first verse, “If
you marry, if you marry, / If you marry me.” The girls respond by declining each
offer of “a paper of pins,” “a pink silk gown,” or whatever – until the final offer, and
final acceptance. Songs like these depend even more than most on performance: in
this case, a communal reenactment that would almost invariably involve revisions
inspired by the moods and interactions of the moment. Only rarely, in any event, did
white folk song pass over from the process of popular transmission to the status of
self-conscious, literary product. On one famous occasion it did, though. Hearing a
band of Union troops singing a popular song in praise of the hero of Harper’s Ferry,
“John Brown’s Body,” the writer and lecturer Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) rewrote
the song, using its melody, rhythms, chorus, and fundamental drive, and then had it
published. The result was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).American poetic voices
Another woman poet who achieved at least as much fame during her lifetime as
Howe did with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was Lydia Howard Huntley
Sigourney (1791–1865). Her work encompassed thousands of periodical publications
and more than fifty books of poetry, autobiography, children’s literature, advice
writing, sketches, history, and travel. And her poetry addressed a variety of issues,
many of them public ones such as slavery, the treatment of Indians, and current
events, from a standpoint of compassionate Christianity and devout republicanism.
Her most widely anthologized poem, “Death of an Infant” (1827), is characteristic in
its use of familiar language and conventional imagery to offer a consoling portrait of
a tragic event. “Death found a strange beauty in that polish’d brow / And dash’d it
out,” the poem begins. “He touched the veins with ice,” but “there beam’d a smile, /
So fix’d, so holy, from the cherub brow, / Death gazed and left it there.” The smile on
the face of the dead infant offers the consolatory assurance, to the believer, that
even the power of death is circumscribed by faith: that smile is “the signet-ring of
Heaven,” the poet suggests, and, being so, death “dar’d not steal” it. Other poems by
Sigourney deal with more public issues but always, as in “Death of an Infant,” in a
way that consolidates faith and reassures. Any gentle interrogation of individual
tragedies, or acts of injustice, is invariably framed within a fundamental acceptance
of conventional Christian piety and the benevolence, the rightness of the American
way, the domestic and the familial. “The Indian’s Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers”GGray_c02.indd 199ray_c 02 .indd 199 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM