Winona, a Dakota Legend; and Other Poems. E. L. Huggins
and yet
I know not if ’twere matter for regret.
Thou wast a maid untried, with yielding heart,
With flowing hair, and ample sheltering arms,
And unabashed contours, whose rosy charms
Were all untrammelled by the hand of art,
And eyes of dreamy mystery, wherein
E’en then thy triumphs dimly were foreseen;
A worldly-wise and queenly woman now,
Adorned with spoil of many victories,
And flush of further conquest on thy brow;
Jewels cannot thy native charms enhance,
Nor can thy robes, too tightly laced perchance,
The matchless beauty of thy form disguise.
Through every change, by every tongue confessed,
Peerless amid thy sisters East or West;
Like her of whom the master-singer wrote,
“Age cannot wither her nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.”
Thus float
My wandering thoughts, as on the balcony
I sit alone bathed in the moonlight pale,
And musing thus the scene changed suddenly:
Hotel and cottage vanished; to the shore
The prairie sloped a green unbroken floor.
Eight lustrums back, through rosy summers fled,
Adown a dwindling vista far I sped,
A careless youth; again my hoary head
Bloomed with the sunny wealth of twenty years.
A day came back, a day without compeers,
When with a bright companion long since dead,
In my canoe I flitted o’er the lake,
And our swift paddles scattered pearly tears
Upon the smiling ripples in our wake.
She, my companion, was a little maid
Of somewhat rustic garb, of English speech,
Yet something in her accents quaint and rich,
And the warm tinge upon her cheek, betrayed
The mingling crimson of a darker shade—
Her kinship to the remnant lingering still,
Whose cone-shaped lodges picturesquely stood,
Dotting the hither base of yonder hill,
Like late leaves clinging, spite of growing chill,
Upon the boughs of a November wood.
Changing our mood, we idly drifted there,
Two happy children in a cradling shell
Poised ’twixt two azure vaults; the mystic spell
Of Indian summer brooded in the air,
Filling with human love and sympathy
E’en things inanimate; the earth and sky
Leaned to each other, and the rocks and trees,
Like brothers, seemed sharing our reveries.
“Tell me some legend of the lake,” I cried,
“For in a spot that breathes on every side
Such air of poesy, whose influence
Subdues with such a charm our every sense,
How many loving hearts have loved and died!
How many souls as lofty and intense
As those whose names throughout the whole world ring,
In the high songs the olden minstrels sing!
Who hears those voices e’en but for a day,
The sound remains a part of him alway:
Penelope the constant; Hero sweet;
Briseis weeping at Achilles’ feet;
Andromeda by wingèd Perseus found—
Bright blossom to the sea-girt rock fast bound;
The Lesbian queen of song, but passion’s slave,
Who quenched her burning torch beneath the wave;
Helen, whose beauty, like a fatal brand,
Lit up the towers of Troy o’er sea and land;
And Juliet, swaying at her window’s height,
What slender lily in the wan moonlight.”
“I do not know,” the little maid replied,
“The names of which you speak, but ere she died
My mother told me many stories old,
Some joyous and some sad, of warriors bold,
And spirits, haunting forest, plain, and stream.
Each had its god, and creatures of strange form,
Half beast, half human; all these figures seem
Mingling away in a fantastic swarm,
Dim as the faces of a last year’s dream,
Or motes that mingle in a slant sunbeam.
The legends vanish too; among them all
This one alone, distinctly I recall.”
The tale she told me then I now rehearse,
Set in a frame of rude, unpolished verse.
PART I.
Winona,[2] first-born daughter, was the name
Of a Dakota girl who, long ago,
Dwelt with her people here unknown to fame.
Sweet word, Winona, how my heart and lips
Cling to that name (my mother’s was the same
Ere her form faded into death’s eclipse),
Cling lovingly, and loth to let it go.
All arts that unto savage life belong
She knew, made moccasins, and dressed the game.
From crippling fashions free, her well-knit frame
At fifteen summers was mature and strong.
She pitched the tipi,[3] dug the tipsin[4] roots,
Gathered wild rice and store of savage fruits.
Fearless and self-reliant, she could go
Across the prairie on a starless night;
She speared the fish while in his wildest flight,
And almost like a warrior drew the bow.
Yet she was not all hardness: the keen glance,
Lighting the darkness of her eyes, perchance
Betrayed no softness, but her voice, that rose
O’er