(^456) Bonnie Costello
intimation of immortality, but the focus of the poem is not on immortality.
The expanding clouds suggest the absorptive power of change; the mini-
conflagration of the sunset at the end of the poem reminds us not only of
God’s power dwarfing man’s, but perhaps also of the tragic history of the
South, the consequence of arrogant dominion. History tells a story not just
of origins but of convergences and disappearances, of forces that thought to
dominate but ultimately had to succumb, identities absorbed that were once
imposed.
Moore revisited the subject of Jamestown in 1957, after a U.S. Air Force
celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Jamestown landing. “Enough:
Jamestown 1607–1957” (CP, 185–187) retains a frankness, in the midst of
cold war ideology, about America’s origins: “Marriage, tobacco, and slavery,
/ initiated liberty.” The poem repeats the story of the failed colony, its
starvation, the subjugation of Indians, the craving for quick wealth that
resulted in neglect of husbandry and pervasive death. Again she contrasts a
cultivated garden, lush and seductive to the contemporary visitor, to the
unforgiving conditions of early Virginians, whose colony “did not flower,”
who were not heroic but “tested until so unnatural / that one became a
cannibal.” But ultimately Moore does not pass judgment on the past (“who
knows what is good”) and finds room to endorse the celebration. America’s
origins are “partial proof” that must be renewed by “present faith” in the
yet-unrealized ideals of the nation.
For Moore the genuine is historical; it cannot be held in place.
Landscapes are framed and mediated, subject to both human and natural
flux. But a place can be made for the genuine even in a world that is
increasingly mediated and abstracted. That is perhaps why the attitude of
contempt must accompany all efforts to represent it. Moore’s America is an
ongoing project that has no telos; a confluence of presences, images, and uses
makes up the phenomenal world. We keep making and unmaking landscapes
on the site we call America. Rather than exalt an ideal of what America once
was, she expresses an idea of what it might be, “home to a diversity of
creatures,” not a collection of icons, slogans, and national attributes, not a
“dime novel exterior,” but a land remarkable for “accessibility to experience.”
NOTES
- Elisa New begins her important book The Line’s Eyeby putting aside this Emerson
essay and attending, instead, to his “Experience.” But Moore, a great admirer of Emerson,
did not distinguish these phases of his work. Many of the precepts that Emerson
enumerates in “Nature” are central to Moore’s emblematic poetry, and it is the advent of