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Friends United Meeting |
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June 2000
John Greenleaf Whittier
Passionate Voice of Freedom and Faith
Introduction by William Jolliff
J ohn Greenleaf Whittier-at one time America's best loved poet-was
born on a farm in Essex County, Massachusetts, in 1807. The demanding
work of the farm-which permanently injured Whittier by the time he was
seventeen-was tempered by the softness of the landscape, the simplicity
of life, and the warmth of his Quaker home.
Here, excerpts from William Jolliff's introduction to the new collection
of Whittier poems from Friends United Press, frames his life and work.
Barbara Mays, editor
Friends United Press
[Whittier] came of age in that "Era of Good Feelings" that
followed the War of 1812, and his boyhood provided material for much of
his best poetry. Captured in thousands of winsome, rhyming lines-most
memorably his popular masterpiece, Snow-Bound-Whittier's images remain
the most enduring portrait of domestic life during that idyllic time.
Nearly two hundred years after his birth, his romantic vision remains
the type that informs the stereotype. His boyhood persists as part of
the American mind: whether you have read his poems or not, his picture
is your picture.
What kind of man emerges from such a childhood? Rufus Jones tells us that
the mature Whittier was surrounded by "a peace beyond comprehension"
and "a radiance of nature such as we attribute to the saint."
Certainly such testimony bears weight; after all, Jones not only studied
Whittier's work but met him and spoke with him. His witness certainly
corresponds to the impression the portrait artists have given. It fits
the image of the dark-eyed, snowy-bearded, mystical grandpa whose portrait
once levitated above so many American school rooms. That he achieved the
graceful contentment his painters and admirers have portrayed seems likely
enough, but such an end came only as the last mile of a difficult journey.
Far from contented, a better adjective to describe Whittier for most of
his life is determined, or, to put it less kindly, driven. He was driven
first by his own ambition to discover a life beyond the Haverhill farm-a
selfish goal by his own standards. And he was driven by a controlling
need, encouraged by his Quaker heritage, to do good: to serve God by serving
his fellow humans. Yet his inward struggle was more complex than that
simple dialectic. To rightly consider the young poet's turmoil within,
we need to keep in mind the fact that in his Quaker expression itself
were two fundamental drives. His faith tradition had a moral passion that
demanded action in the world; and his faith had a contemplative passion
that invited an inward, mystical turning. Into this difficult mix, too,
must be stirred the fact that he was a man of intense creative passion,
and that he, like so many artists, wanted his work to reflect "eternal
goodness."
But even this analysis is simplistic. In reality, these areas are not
discrete; quite the contrary, they are all religious expressions. Quaker
Christianity was the dominant informing and integrating force in his life,
and beyond any particular struggle was the grander struggle to achieve
and maintain the integration of the passions of his life and his faith.
The fruit of the inward conflict, as well as the conflict itself, can
be seen in the progression of his poetry. When his work began to mature
in the 1850s, what characterized it was the thoroughness of his Christian
vision, whether he was writing about abolition, his boyhood, the New England
past, or his theology.
[Whittier acknowledged the "lasting influence" his early exposure to Robert Burns's poetry had on his work. It was his first editor, radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who eventually drew Whittier away from his drive for fame as a poet and into the heat of the abolitionist fervor in the spring of 1833.]
Some years later he wrote to the British abolitionist Joseph Sturge,
"This cause [abolition] has been to me what the vision on the house-top
of Cornelius was to Peter-it has destroyed all narrow sectarian prejudices,
and made me willing to be a man among men."…
Whatever his formal occupation, his vocation was focused toward a single
purpose. When he edited, it was for the abolitionist cause; when he lobbied,
it was on behalf of the slave; even when he applied rather un-Quakerly
pressure to certain politicians, it was for that single holy purpose.
And, most importantly, when he wrote, whether poetry or prose, his work
was not the faded copy of a distant, romantic model; he composed with
the courage and authenticity of a man whose every energy is integrated
in the service of his ultimate concern….
In the twenty-five years between the success of Snow-Bound and his death
in 1892, he published another half-dozen original collections of poems,
edited several more volumes, and saw the Riverside Edition of his Collected
Works through publication. Though such a full success had been a long
time in coming, the farmer boy-who had struggled with his own ambition
to make a place for himself beyond the Haverhill homestead-had succeeded:
his name was a household word. The partisan editor who felt called to
do God's will by turning his every energy to the abolitionist cause had
seen his efforts come to fruition: slavery was done. And most importantly,
the driven Christian who had felt persistently that calling to artistic
excellence, but suppressed it for the sake of a cause, suddenly found
himself the master of a powerful artistic instrument. His romantic passion
had been disciplined, his craft refined: at last the Quaker mystic had
the time, the financial security, and the mastery to transform the fruit
of his inward journey into art.
Little wonder, then, that a devotional depth began more explicitly to
characterize his work in the maturity of his career. It is safe to say
that his faith had been informing his art from the time he turned his
energy toward the most worthy cause he could discover. His dedication
to justice allowed him to experience an integrity of art and faith, regardless
of the topic considered. But as secular concerns at last began to fall
away, his works became clearly spiritual not only in intention but in
subject matter as well. The best religious poems of his final decades
came as compensation for a long and strenuous inward journey.
William Jolliff
Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier
Although the 200th anniversary of Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier's birth is seven years off, two new selections of his poetry have been published in the last few months.
The Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier:
A Reader's Edition
Edited and introduced by William Jolliff.
Friends United Press
101 Quaker Hill Drive
Richmond IN 47374
2000, 275 pages. $18.00
Jolliff has selected 56 of Whittier's best poems from the full range of his themes.
Selections from the Religious Poems
of John Greenleaf Whittier
The Tract Association of Friends
1515 Cherry Street
Philadelphia PA 19102
1999, 83 pages. $5.00
Both books are available from:
The Quaker Hill Bookstore
(800) 537-8838 or Bookstore@FUM.org
Selected Poems
The Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier:
A Readers' Edition
Headnotes by William Jolliff (WJ) and Whittier (JGW), are reproduced from the Friends United Press Reader's Edition.
The Christian Slave
Whittier's poems reveal that he found it easier even to excuse slave-owners for their misguided practice than to forgive those elements of the church that would lend religious support to such barbarism. "The Christian Slave" is powerfully imbued with his righteous indignation. That a child of God would be sold-and for a higher price-because she is a Christian-that was the most bitter of ironies. Little wonder his sarcasm turns to prayer, and finally to the question, "How long, O God, how long?" (WJ)
In a publication of L. F. Tasistro-Random Shots and Southern Breezes-is a description of a slave auction at New Orleans, at which the auctioneer recommended the woman on the stand as "A GOOD CHRISTIAN!" It was not uncommon to see advertisements of slaves for sale, in which they were described as pious or as members of the church. In one advertisement a slave was noted as "a Baptist Preacher." (JGW)
A CHRISTIAN! going, gone!
Who bids for God's own image? for his grace,
Which that poor victim of the market-place,
Hath in her suffering won?
My God! can such things be?
Hast Thou not said that whatsoe'er is done
Unto Thy weakest and Thy humblest one
Is even done to Thee?
In that sad victim, then,
Child of Thy pitying love, I see Thee stand;
Once more the jest-word of a mocking band,
Bound, sold, and scourged again!
A Christian up for sale!
Wet with her blood your whips, o'ertask her frame,
Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame,
Her patience shall not fail!
A heathen hand might deal
Back on your heads the gathered wrong of years:
But her low, broken prayer and nightly tears,
Ye neither heed nor feel.
Con well thy lesson o'er,
Thou prudent teacher, tell the toiling slave
No dangerous tale of Him who came to save
The outcast and the poor.
But wisely shut the ray
Of God's free Gospel from her simple heart,
And to her darkened mind alone impart
One stern command, Obey!
So shalt thou deftly raise
The market price of human flesh; and while
On thee, their pampered guest, the planters smile,
Thy church shall praise.
Grave, reverend men shall tell
From Northern pulpits how thy work was blest,
While in that vile South Sodom first and best,
Thy poor disciples sell.
Oh shame! the Moslem thrall,
Who, with his master, to the Prophet kneels,
While turning to the sacred Kebla feels
His fetters break and fall.
Cheers for the turbaned Bey
Of robber-peopled Tunis! he hath torn
The dark slave-dungeons open, and hath borne
Their inmates into day:
But our poor slave in vain
Turns to the Christian shrine his aching eyes;
Its rites will only swell his market price,
And rivet on his chain.
God of all right! how long
Shall priestly robbers at Thine altar stand,
Lifting in prayer to Thee the bloody hand
And haughty brow of wrong?
Oh, from the fields of cane,
From the low rice-swamp, from the trader's cell;
From the black slave-ship's foul and loath-some hell,
And coffle's weary chain;
Hoarse, horrible, and strong,
Rises to Heaven that agonizing cry,
Filling the arches of the hollow sky,
How long, O God, how long?
1843
In the "Old South"
Though he often spun poetry from legend, Whittier sometimes grounded his work on stories he loved for their historical truth. And his knowledge of Quaker history was a ready supply of fact as strange as fiction. The early days of the Friends movement in America offered many instances in which believers were moved to outrageous methods of speaking the truth, and certainly the story of Margaret Brewster is one of the more compelling. "With a look the old-time sibyls wore, / Half-crazed and half-divine," she responds to the Holy Spirit's promptings by dressing in sackcloth and ashes and railing against the evils of clericalism. And where better to do so than squarely in the middle of a "steeple-house"? (WJ)
On the 8th of July, 1677, Margaret Brewster with four other Friends went into the South Church in time of meeting, "in sackcloth, with ashes upon her head, barefoot, and her face blackened," and delivered "a warning from the great God of Heaven and Earth to the Rulers and Magistrates of Boston." For the offence she was sentenced to be "whipped at a cart's tail up and down the Town, with twenty lashes." (JGW)
SHE came and stood in the Old South Church,
A wonder and a sign,
With a look the old-time sibyls wore,
Half-crazed and half-divine.
Save the mournful sackcloth about her wound,
Unclothed as the primal mother,
With limbs that trembled and eyes that blazed
With a fire she dare not smother.
Loose on her shoulders fell her hair,
With sprinkled ashes gray;
She stood in the broad aisle strange and weird
As a soul at the judgment day.
And the minister paused in his sermon's midst,
And the people held their breath,
For these were the words the maiden spoke
Through lips as the lips of death:
"Thus saith the Lord, with equal feet
All men my courts shall tread,
And priest and ruler no more shall eat
My people up like bread!
"Repent! repent! ere the Lord shall speak
In thunder and breaking seals!
Let all souls worship Him in the way
His light within reveals."
She shook the dust from her naked feet,
And her sackcloth closer drew,
And into the porch of the awe-hushed church
She passed like a ghost from view.
They whipped her away at the tail o' the cart
Through half the streets of the town,
But the words she uttered that day nor fire
Could burn nor water drown.
And now the aisles of the ancient church
By equal feet are trod,
And the bell that swings in its belfry rings
Freedom to worship God!
And now whenever a wrong is done
It thrills the conscious walls;
The stone from the basement cries aloud
And the beam from the timber calls.
There are steeple-houses on every hand,
And pulpits that bless and ban,
And the Lord will not grudge the single church
That is set apart for man.
For in two commandments are all the law
And the prophets under the sun,
And the first is last and the last is first,
And the twain are verily one.
So long as Boston shall Boston be,
And her bay-tides rise and fall,
Shall freedom stand in the Old South Church
And plead for the rights of all!
1877
At Last
As a "people's poet," Whittier gave voice to what many of his neighbors and countrymen were thinking and feeling. His contemporaries were deeply interested in life beyond the grave, and his era experienced a swelling of interest not only in millennial understandings of Christianity, but in seances, mediums, and all kinds of paranormal research. Almost everyone, it seemed, sought some kind of proof, emotional or empirical, that death was not the end. In "At Last," Whittier addresses this concern with a poem that is a prayer, a simple request that God be present in death as God has been in life. The final stanza, however, hints at something more. It reveals Whittier's sense that we long for something that can never be attained in our life, that we have tasted a hint of something better that can never be fully realized here. That realization can only come in the life to be found "beneath [God's] trees of healing." (WJ)
WHEN on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown,
Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
Be Thou my strength and stay!
Be near me when all else is from me drifting;
Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine,
And kindly faces to my own uplifting
The love which answers mine.
I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
Nor street of shining gold.
Suffice it if-my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace-
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
Unto my fitting place.
Some humble door among Thy many mansions,
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease,
And flows forever through heaven's green expansions
The river of Thy peace.
There, from the music round about me stealing,
I fain would learn the new and holy song,
And find at last, beneath Thy trees of healing,
The life for which I long.
1882
The Quaker of Olden Time
THE Quaker of the olden time!
How calm and firm and true,
Unspotted by its wrong and crime,
He walked the dark earth through.
The lust of power, the love of gain,
The thousand lures of sin
Around him, had no power to stain
The purity within.
With that deep insight which detects
All great things in the small,
And knows how each man's life affects
The spiritual life of all,
He walked by faith and not by sight,
By love and not by law;
The presence of the wrong or right
He rather felt than saw.
He felt that wrong with wrong partakes,
That nothing stands alone,
That whoso gives the motive, makes
His brother's sin his own.
And, passing not for doubtful choice
Of evils great or small,
He listened to that inward voice
Which called away from all.
O Spirit of that early day,
So pure and strong and true,
Be with us on that narrow way
Our faithful fathers knew.
Give strength the evil to forsake,
The cross of Truth to bear,
And love and reverent fear to make
Our daily lives a prayer!
1838
What the Voice Said
MADDENED by Earth's wrong and evil,
"Lord!" I cried in sudden ire,
"From Thy right hand, clothed with thunder,
Shake the bolted fire!
"Love is lost, and Faith is dying;
With the brute the man is sold;
And the dropping blood of labor
Hardens into gold.
"Here the dying wail of Famine,
There the battle's groan of pain;
And, in silence, smooth-faced Mammon
Reaping men like grain.
"Where is God, that we should fear Him?"
Thus the earth-born Titans say;
'God! if Thou art living, hear us!'
Thus the weak ones pray."
"Thou, the patient Heaven upbraiding,"
Spake a solemn Voice within;
"Weary of our Lord's forbearance,
Art thou free from sin?
"Fearless brow to Him uplifting,
Canst thou for His thunders call,
Knowing that to guilt's attraction
Evermore they fall?
"Know'st thou not all germs of evil
In thy heart await their time?
Not thyself, but God's restraining,
Stays their growth of crime.
"Couldst thou boast, O child of weakness
O'er the sons of wrong and strife,
Were their strong temptations planted
In thy path of life?
"Thou has seen two streamlets gushing
From one fountain, clear and free,
But by widely varying channels
Searching for the sea.
"Glideth one through greenest valleys,
Kissing them with lips still sweet;
One, mad roaring down the mountains,
Stagnates at their feet.
"Is it choice whereby the Parsee
Kneels before his mother's fire?
In his black tent did the Tartar
Choose his wandering sire?
"He alone, whose hand is bounding
Human power and human will,
Looking through each soul's surrounding
Knows it good or ill.
"For thyself, while wrong and sorrow
Make to thee their strong appeal,
Coward wert thou not to utter
What the heart must feel.
"Earnest words must needs be spoken
When the warm heart bleeds or burns
With its scorn of wrong, or pity
For the wronged, by turns.
"But, by all thy nature's weakness,
Hidden faults and follies known,
Be thou, in rebuking evil,
Conscious of thine own.
"Not the less shall stern-eyed Duty
To thy lips her trumpet set,
But with harsher blasts shall mingle
Wailings of regret."
Cease not, Voice of holy speaking,
Teacher sent of God, be near,
Whispering through the day's cool silence,
Let my spirit hear!
So, when thoughts of evil-doers
Waken scorn, or hatred move,
Shall a mournful fellow-feeling
Temper all with love.
1847
"The Quaker from Olden Time" and "What the Voice Said" were reprinted by permission from Selections from the Religious Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Tract Association of Friends.
Copyright (c) 2000 Friends United Meeting