Moore’s America 451the trumpet-flower, the cavalier,
the parson, and the wild parishioner. A deer-
track in the church-floor
brick, and a fine pavement tomb with engraved top, remain.
The now tremendous vine-encompassed hackberry
starred with the ivy-flower,
shades the tall tower;
And a great sinner lyeth here under the sycamore.The sense of manifest destiny in “Dominion” is immediately qualified by
“Old” and “edges.” “Pale” initiates a vocabulary of color that will later
scrutinize racial attitudes throughout the poem; “pale sand,” in the context
of the whole, suggests the white man’s presumption of natural dominion in
this place. But the colors remain primarily aesthetic here. In presenting “red
bird” next to the “red coat,” aesthetically equalizing nature and man, Moore
deliberately delays reference to “red skin,” which appears in stanza 10,
though the Indian presence in this place is central to its history, beginning in
stanza 2. Perhaps Moore knew that “red skin” was itself a convention, based
not on the natural pigmentation of the Amerindian but on his bear-grease
decorative paint, which the earliest European visitors mistook for racial
essence. What is “natural” and what is “cultural” or man-made collide and
overlap one another from the outset, belying presumptions of dominion.
The Earthly Paradise of imperialist lore, with its “soft, warm” air and lush,
welcoming flora and fauna must give way to the truth of a “hot” climate
where “unEnglish insect sounds” suggest not just aesthetic diversity but a
relentless struggle against malaria. “Care” has formed the roses, but also the
“yew” in the poem; suffering underlies but does not consecrate dominion.
When Moore later remarks on the “outdoor tea-table, ... the French mull
dress with the Madeira- / vine-accompanied edge” and other “luxuries,” she
is struck by how paradoxically “stark” they seem “when compared with what
the colonists / found here”—a far from nurturing environment met a far
from godly invader. The material “glory” of these Old Dominion grounds is
itself now only a replica of a hard-won, genteel past, the unlikely outgrowth
of a morally and physically rough frontier whose conquest is less than certain
or heroic.
The past is written into the face of the present, not as its original and
enduring glory but as a conglomeration. The juxtapositions of human and
natural inhabitants work here as leveling parody (“the trumpet flower, the
cavalier”), especially as the man/nature opposition of the list influences the
“parson/wild parishioner” pairing. (The lineation makes us read “the wild