Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.20
Emerson briskly condenses Cowper’s elaborate fireside scenario into three lines. “Enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm,” the “housemates” are extraneous rather than central to the poem’s drama. The “mad night wind” replaces the contemplative patriarch in Cowper’s poem as the central agent. Enough traces of the distant wars underpinning Cowper’s meditation remain in Emerson’s poem to signal their active erasure. The wind’s transformation of the landscape is cast in militaristic terms: “trumpets of the sky” herald its arrival, and it quickly wrests the land from its human inhabitants, imprisons them indoors, and lays waste, albeit temporarily and playfully, to the competitors’ territory. Emerson has imported war’s energies into the metaphorical realm of art, purging them of tragic, literal associations so that they may serve to renovate and liberate the imagination.
The intense political discord that culminated in the U.S. Civil War rendered this liberation of the imagination from material circumstances and political exigencies obsolete almost as soon as it was formulated. Many writers of the ’50s and ’60s—including Emerson, eventually—returned to the question of poetry’s social responsibility, particularly to address the question of slavery and the possibility, and then reality, of civil war. This is Elizabeth Akers Allen’s starting point in “Snow,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading pro-Union periodicals, in February 1864, after the battles of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and others had claimed tens of thousands of lives.21 A prolific and popular poet who was perhaps better known under her pen name Florence Percy, Allen published poems in periodicals throughout the war; her “Rock Me to Sleep” was one of the most popular poems to emerge from the war years.22 She marked the climate of the conflict through the changing seasons in poems such as “Spring at the Capital,” in which the speaker imagines seeing blood on white flowers after looking at a “white encampment” in the distance, outside of Washington DC.23 Explicitly working from formally experimental predecessors, both Emerson’s “Snow-Storm” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Snow-Flakes” of 1858, in “Snow” Allen smooths, tames, and shapes their work into tetrameter lines, balanced between iambs and trochees, with an unbroken abaab rhyme scheme. She revises Emerson’s depicted scenario as well, by putting things in their place:
Lo, what wonders the day hath brought,
Born of the soft and slumberous snow!
Gradual, silent, slowly wrought;—
Even as an artist, thought by thought,
Writes expression on lip and brow.
Hanging garlands the eaves o’erbrim,
Deep drifts smother the paths below;
The elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,
And all the air is dizzy and dim
With a whirl of dancing, dazzling snow.
So much for Emerson’s mad wind’s unruly disruption; we seem to have a highly conservative poet here, one who seeks to make her own poem a proper counterpoint to Emerson’s by offering a tidied version of the farm scene that his night wind messed up. Allen’s “soft and slumberous” snow hangs “garlands,” not on chicken coops and dog kennels, but appropriately, on the eaves of a house. Her snow etches an analogous double of the human gradually, silently, and slowly, “Even as an artist, thought by thought / Writes expression on lip and brow.” Less wildly ambivalent and unsettling than Emerson’s poem, Allen’s first stanzas personify nature so fully that he only knows how to sculpt a form as a human artist would. Harnessing and stabilizing Emerson’s night wind’s myriad-handed work, Allen’s poem gives the impression of reaching a conclusion by the end of the second stanza of a six-stanza poem.
A first hint of the return of war from its banishment to metaphor in Emerson’s earlier poem is the comparison of the snow to an artist who “writes expression on lip and brow”; the snow portrait recalls Cowper’s “universal face” from a “Winter’s Evening,” registering a displaced awareness of the numbness inflicted by the remote reception of violence. Upon consideration, the second stanza does not seem so cheery after all: the “dancing, dazzling snow” recedes, and Allen sketches a much starker picture. The “deep drifts smother the paths,” “the elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,” and even the air, “dizzy and dim,” seems unable to breathe. The poem takes a dark turn from there, beyond stasis to death and even killing. Allen’s poem, which at first dramatized the evasion of current events, becomes gripped by them; the whimsical scene of exterior decoration, fully evocative of Emerson’s earlier poem, warps into a nightmare vision in the next three stanzas:
Dimly out of the baffled sight
Houses and church-spires stretch away;
The trees, all spectral and still and white,
Stand up like ghosts in the failing light,
And fade and faint with the blinded day.
Down from the roofs in gusts are hurled
The eddying drifts to the waste below;
And still is the banner of storm unfurled,
Till all the drowned and desolate world
Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.
Slowly the shadows gather and fall,
Still the whispering snow-flakes beat;
Night and darkness are over all:
Rest, pale city, beneath their pall!
Sleep, white world, in thy winding-sheet!
The violence continues “Till all the drowned and desolate world / Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.” Rather than covering to re-create, like Emerson’s night wind, this windless snow smothers to kill, “hurls downward” to make and join “waste.” Allen depicts a total annihilation that wraps the entire world in a winding sheet. Her apocalyptic, depopulated poetic landscape supplants Emerson’s animating personifications.
The Civil War is the not-so-hidden