Mr. Whittier

It is so much easier to forget than to have been Mr. Whittier.

Though of course no one now remembers him when he was young.

A few old ladies who were little girls next door in Amesbury,

Or practically next door, have reminiscences of pears and apples

Given them by the famous, tamed, white-bearded saint with the

Still inextinguishable dark Hebraic eyes; and

Of course there is the old man-and I for one am grateful-who

Recalls the seedy coat, the occasionally not too clean high collar,

And that like many another he read his paper by the hour in the

privy.

Carl Schurz, finding him rained in by the stove at the village store,

Thought "So superior to those about him, and yet so like them";

and

His official biographer decided that Mr. Whittier's poetry was

the kind

"Written first of all for the neighbors." There are lesser and

worse.

In any case, here is a city, founded in 1630, present population

somewhere about

55,000-has been more in boom times, and has been a lot less;

-say,

In three hundred years has birthed a couple of hundred thousand

people

And one poet. Not bad. And as proof of the title I shall only

remark

It is easier to leave Snow-bound and a dozen other items in or

out of

The school curriculum than it is to have written them. Try it

and see.

Born where the east wind brought the smell of the ocean from

Plum Island up-river,

At a brookside haunted in the foggy dark of autumn nights

By six little witches in sky-blue capes-Uncle Moses had seen

them;-

Born on a farm to the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, a weekly paper,

the Quaker meetinghouse,

To hard poverty, obscure, and a few winters of country school;

To die-though only after there were thirteen for dinner, and

the clock

Suddenly stopped-ancient with fame, with honorary degrees,

and

One hundred thousand dollars all made out of poems-I say

Even this was not easy, though also it is not

What I am talking about, but is really incidental just as

Not liking Walt Whitman and never quite getting married.

Neither, under the circumstances, could it have been easy, and

it was important,

To stand suddenly struck with wonder of old legends in a young

land,

To look up at last and see poetry driving a buckboard round

the bend,

And poetry all the time in the jays screeching at the cats in the

dooryard,

Climbing with the thrush into the August noon out of the boy's

sight

As he dawdled barefoot through poetry among the welts of the

goldenrod;

But nothing is hardest which treads on nobody else's toes.

Let us not begrudge Mr. Whittier his white beard, his saintliness,

his other foibles;

Let us remember him when he was young, not to begrudge his

rise

As a goddam Abolitionist hated not only in the South,

Hated by manufacturers, politicians, his neighbors, our folks,

and all

Who hate the outspoken radical and know a safer way;

Denounced by the clergy-a serious matter in that time; by the

good citizens who

Rotten-egged him in New Hampshire, burned him out in Penn-

sylvania,

Jailed those who read him, and twenty years later immortally

froze

With Webster on whom he turned his scorn of compromise.

It is so much easier to forget than to have been Mr. Whittier.

He put the names of our places into his poems and he honored

us with himself;

And is for us but not altogether, because larger than us.

When he was an old man, the Negroes came to him free to come

and sang to him

"The Lord bless thee and keep thee;

The Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto

thee;

The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."

-No more begrudge their freedom than his tears.