Moore’s America 449origin stands continents away. The hero’s foil is the “fearless sightseeing
hobo” (who is implicitly not at home), the hobo of contemporary tourism;
she checks off her list of sights and domesticates historical meaning. “What’s
this, what’s that,” she asks, demanding of history that it be named and
pinpointed, rather than contemplated.
In an understated fashion, while presenting a contemporary image,
Moore introduces here the major struggles of our heritage, the “deeds of
war,” as Frost called them in “The Gift Outright.” These connect us to the
land: the revolution and founding of a nation, and the civil war and near
foundering of a nation, which continues in a struggle for racial justice. These
are parts of the historical landscape that the sightseeing hobo cannot
penetrate. For this obnoxious woman, such transforming events are nothing
but a collection of monuments. This “hero”—never named—is merely a
“frock coated Negro,” a park attendant at a national cemetery
(Williamsburg) dressed in revolutionary costume. He is invisible to the
tourist, part of the background. She addresses her question (“where’s Martha
buried?”) not to this informed guide but to “the man she’s with,” so unheroic
as to have no other designation in the poem. Yet the guide has a “sense of
human dignity and reverence for mystery” which his visitor lacks. Ignored by
the tourist, probably because he is black, he nevertheless provides the
information required: “Gen-ral Washington / there; his lady, here.” He is
more authentic in his response than she is in her question, though he is
“speaking / as if in a play,” on the stage of history. The guide has a historical
imagination rather than a tourist’s curiosity, and sees with an inner light. We
might recall that the 1930s, when this poem was written, was a dormant
period in the struggle for civil rights. A complacent attitude toward Jim
Crow laws prevailed. Many of Moore’s poems of this period feature the
unheralded heroism and nobility of the black race. There may be some
racialism in this attitude, as Cristanne Miller has pointed out (128–166), but
it stands as a direct retort to the racism of the time. “Standing in the shadow
of the willow,” his figure acknowledges that the past is not a “sight” but a
mystery that continues to inform the present.
Throughout her poetry Moore sustained an admiration for the natural world
that reckoned with the story of humans in it. This is perhaps most apparent
in Moore’s poems of the South. Moore’s visits to her brother in Virginia
inspired three poems in the 1930s, “Smooth-Gnarled Crepe Myrtle,” “Bird-
Witted,” and “Virginia Britannia.” Together they form a sort of updated
“Notes on the State of Virginia.” “Virginia Britannia” (CP, 107–111) looks at
landscape through the lens of history and vice versa, more than one hundred
and fifty years after Jefferson’s account, and more than three hundred years