Moore’s America 453Powhatan as unflattering
as grateful. Rare Indian, crowned by
Christopher Newport!
(CP, 107)Moore alludes here to Smith’s unconventional leadership and love of
adventure. Captain Smith was an Englishman who joined Hungarians in
fighting the Turks, beheading three before being taken as slave and later
escaping, only to be poisoned by a sting-ray he lived to consume; his motto
was vincere est vivere,to vanquish is to live. But this fetishized coat of arms
has become an emblem of audacity. Moore also conveys Powhatan’s pride,
who, when offered a coronation as emperor of Indian tribes and vassal to the
English king, replied “I also am a king and this is my land,” instead giving his
fur crown and cloak to Christopher Newport, who returned with them to
England. (Moore probably saw them in the Ashmolean Museum when she
visited Oxford as a young woman.) Odd perhaps is Pocahantas with a bird-
claw earring, but even odder her cross-dressing as an English lady. History
exposes the truth of exchange over the presumption of dominion, where the
English spout Latin mottoes and paint themselves as Turks, endlessly
posturing and naming counties after English lords while adopting Indian
names for rivers, sporting French finery, and importing Andalusian flowers.
Assertive identity defeats itself in acts of appropriative mimicry.
A garden is not only an aesthetic arrangement, it is a language, by
which historical cultures express their desires and social arrangements
(splendor, pride, in the language of flowers). Moore’s gardens are eccentric
allegorical spaces. Here the poem borders the garden with the human
story—the stanza form slides one into the other without transition. History
shapes nature just as nature shapes history. The long lists of flora and fauna
convey the convergence and struggle of these disparate cultures. Moore
records that struggle in her own thematic shaping, the index of scent and size
(“dwarf” and “gigantic” recur in the description of plants), but especially, as
we saw in the opening passage, in the vocabulary of color. The green
propriety of the sculptured boxwoods established by the English colony and
their uniformly “white roses” asserted against “unEnglish” (malarial) “insect
sounds” nevertheless have tough stems, “thick as Daniel Boone’s grapevine,”
a sign of their adaptation to the challenging American soil.
The “jet-black pansies” and “African violet” mark the presence of the
Negro “established”—as the euphemism goes—on the banks of the
Chickahominy. “Established” like imported plants, not willing humans, in
this post-lapsarian garden, they nevertheless become integral to the