200 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865(1838), for example, explores the irony of a “red-brow’d chieftain” welcoming those
who would eventually supplant him and his kind. The poet invites sympathy for the
Indian, “poor outcast from thy forest wild.” It implicitly asks for better treatment of
those who have been “swept from their native land.” But it does not question either
the justice or the necessity of the westward movement, white appropriation, and
Indian dispossession. Neither does “The Western Emigrant” (1827). On the contrary,
the gentle tear here is shed, not for the Native American, but for the emigrant family,
torn from the cosy comforts of their old, New England home into the vastness of the
West. The poem domesticates the westward movement both by focusing on the pains
and pieties of an individual family and by offering the reassurance, finally, that
“wheresoe’er our best affections dwell, / And strike a healthful note, is happiness.”
For Sigourney, clearly, poetry was a form of public service. She wrote in a way that
would be accessible to her large audience; she wrote of the public and the typical; she
wrote of injustice in terms that invited her many readers to anticipate the possibility
of quiet reform, amelioration. Her work appeals to the patriotic feelings of her
public (“Niagara” (1835)). It assumes, and sometimes even argues, that the arts of
the hearth and home, and the measures brought about by friendly persuasion, are
the best – that the needle and the pen are mightier than the sword (“The Needle,
Pen, and Sword” (1849)). It is not afraid of nostalgia, an affectionate glance at the
American past (“In a Shred of Linen” (1849)). Nor is it afraid to remind the reader
of how the past lives in the present – how, for instance, “the Red men” can never be
forgotten since “their memory liveth on your hills, / Their baptism on your shore,”
the entire landscape is “indelibly stamped by names of their going” (“Indian Names”
(1838)). That Sigourney was no revolutionary, in either her poetic idiom or her
argument, is obvious enough. She attacked individual acts of cruelty, against women,
for instance (“The Suttee” (1827)), but she remained a firm believer in a separate
sphere where women could act as guardian angels. And she expressed that belief in
forms that her female audience, in particular, brought up on the popular domestic
writing of the day, could readily digest and accommodate.
Two other poets of the period who explored different possibilities of expression for
women were Frances Sargent Osgood (1811–1850) and Lucy Larcom (1820–1893).
Osgood, a friend and quite possibly a lover of Edgar Allan Poe, was best known during
her lifetime for sentimental pieces such as “The Lily’s Delusion” (1846) and “The
Cocoa-Nut Tree” (1846), or for more didactic works like “A Flight of Fancy” (1846),
which uses an elaborate allegory to explore the relationship between Reason,
Conscience, and “the gay little innocent” Fancy. In work that remained unpublished
until long after her death, however (in fact, until 1997), Osgood revealed a much
bolder spirit, and a much more acid tongue, in writing of the vagaries of love. “The
Lady’s Mistake,” for instance, deals sardonically with both the falsity of man and the
flippancy of women, sometimes, in matters of the heart. In “Won’t you die & be a
spirit” the narrator caustically suggests that the best way to keep her lover faithful is
to have him die: “If you only were a spirit / You could stay,” she declares. “The Wraith
of the Rose,” in turn, a poem carrying the subtitle “An impromptu written on a visiting
card,” deals in an extraordinarily frank way with the thoughts of the poet, when herGGray_c02.indd 200ray_c 02 .indd 200 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM