Modern American Poetry

(^452) Bonnie Costello
parishioner” as “a deer,” since he has wandered into the church; but of course
the wild parishioner is also the colonial himself, that “great sinner.”) From
here it is but a deer-step into the church; all boundaries are permeable. The
accident of the hoof print claims as much posterity as the careful engraving.
Nature itself inscribes this struggle for dominion as the vine encompasses the
“tremendous” hackberry that now “shades” the “tall tower.” Moore’s later
imagining of the “strangler figs choking / a banyan” dispels the myth of
nature’s innocence. The struggle for dominion is natural and nature is
neutral, co-present with man, and available to model man’s moral life in its
graces and faults. Moore expropriates and diverts the pious rhetoric of the
past. As the eye moves from the landscape’s “edge” to its presumed human
center, we encounter a grave: “A great sinner lyeth here” is a period
quotation, but the spiritual accounting takes on new direction as the words
share church walls with “tobacco crop records.” Here is a land of “cotton
mouth snakes” and “cotton fields,” of “wolf design” on Lawrence pottery, a
land far from Eden and still in need of grace. Even Jefferson’s picturesque
curving brick wall is “serpentine.”
The great sinner “awaits a joyful resurrection” (presuming election), but
a complex history intervenes, as Moore makes the transition from the
subversion of the nature/culture hierarchy to challenge the dominion of one
race over another. It is clear in this poem that the Indian represents culture, not
nature—he is not “all brawn and animality.” Moore introduces the story of
Captain Smith, Christopher Newport, and Powhatan, compressing much
American lore into a stanza’s worth of anecdotal fragments (such as a tourist
might gather, but only an artist could meaningfully arrange). The founders are
not predestined leaders but “odd” figures, reminding us that all norms are
embedded in history. Indeed, the term “odd” and its more flattering companion
“rare” recur throughout the poem and become the primary descriptive
adjectives for the phenomena of this place from the modern point of view:
We-re-wo
co-mo-co’s fur crown could be no
odder than we were, with ostrich, Latin motto,
and small gold horse-shoe:
arms for an able sting-ray-hampered pioneer—
painted as a Turk, it seems—continuously
exciting Captain Smith
who, patient with
his inferiors, was a pugnacious equal, and to