Modern American Poetry

(^450) Bonnie Costello
after the Jamestown settlement. It aims for a different kind of seeing than
“sight seeing.” And it engages in a different kind of historical imagination
than that encouraged by Williamsburg pageantry. With the inclusion of this
1935 poem, the title of Moore’s subsequent volume, What Are Years(1941),
takes on a particular American emphasis, expressing not only lyric’s
traditional meditation on mortality, but a study of history and its meaning as
well. The poem has a special implication when considered not only in the
light of continued racism at home, but also surging, racialist nationalisms
abroad, where nature is used to mask the sinister purposes of power.
“England” had been concerned with a contemporary situation in which
America was seen as rough and backward, inferior to all things “abroad.”
“Virginia Britannia” looks back at the earliest efforts to impose European
culture on American land. What was allegorical in Stevens, the question of
the relationship between the soil and man’s intelligence, becomes in Moore
a literal meditation on New World settlement. The poem exposes the
provisional and contingent character of dominion, undermining imperial
attitudes through the selection and arrangement of details. Neither
dominion nor incarnation, but rather adaptability, intermixture, mimicry,
and mutability prove the strongest traits in the history of this landscape. The
land is not, finally, ours, but we are “the land’s” in the sense that landscape
determines history as much as history determines landscape.
“Virginia Britannia” starts very much as “The Steeple Jack” does,
scanning the scene for curiosities, gathering impressions. Here the poet
begins with the broad prospect, the anticipatory sweep of dominion, then
moves in to complicating detail and anecdote. But while the language is
paratactic and mimics a tourist brochure, Moore wanders away from the
official tour, observing the overlooked and what has been much looked at but
not properly seen. Jamestown was situated on a narrow sandbar linked to the
mainland of Virginia. The poem opens with an approach, in present tense,
which simulates the approach of the first European visitors to the tidewater.
But the Virginia that Moore beholds is no Virgin Land: the new world has
seen an old dominion come and go; historical process quickly imposes itself
on landscape. This nature has been “known” by many and for a long time—
by man and by animal, the wild and tame of each species, though by none in
its totality.
Pale sand edges England’s Old
Dominion. The air is soft, warm, hot
above the cedar-dotted emerald shore
known to the red-bird, the red-coated musketeer,