SPEARING1
Alfred B. Street2, Author of “The Forest-Walk”, etc.3
[Edited and Annotated by Max Cunningham for the University of Arizona Antebellum Magazine Project, April 14th, 2015]
The lake’s gold and purple have vanished from sight,
And the glimmer of twilight is merged into night.4
The woods on the borders in blackness are massed,
And the waters in motionless ebony glassed;
The stars that first spangled the pearl of the west,
Are lost in the bright blazing crowds of the rest;
Light the torch! – launch the boat! – for to-night we are here
The salmon, the quick-darting salmon, to spear.
Let us urge our light craft, by the push of the oar,
Through the serpent-like stems of the lilies near shore:
We are free – turn the prow to yon crescent-shaped cove
Made black by the down-hanging boughs of its grove.
The meek eddy-gurgle that whirls at our dip,
Sounds low as the wine-bead which bursts on the lip.
On the lake, from the flame of our torch, we behold
A pyramid pictured in spangles of gold,
While the marble-like depths, on each side of the blaze,
Is full of gray sparkles, far in as we gaze.
From his bank-sheltered nook, the loon utters his cry,
And the night-hawk darts down with a rush, from on high:
In gutturals hoarse, on his green, slimy log,
To his shrill piping tribe, croaks the patriarch frog;
And the bleat and the bark from the banks mingle faint
With the anchorite whippoorwill’s mournful complaint.
We glide in the cove – let the torch be flared low,
And the spot, where our victim is lurking, ‘t will show;
Mid the twigs of this dead sunken tree-top he lies,
Let the spear be poised quick, or good-bye to our prize.
Down it darts – to the blow our best efforts are bent,
And a white bubbling streak shows its rapid descent;
We grasp it, as upward it shoots through the air,
Three cheers for our luck! – our barbed victim is there!
Give way, boys! give way, boys! our prow points to shore,
Give way, boys! give way, boys! our labor is o’er.
As the black mass of forest our torch-light receives,
It breaks into groups of trunks, branches, and leaves:
On his perch in the hemlock, we’ve blinded with light
Yon gray-headed owl – see him flutter from sight!
And the orator frog, as we gild with the glow,
Stops his speech with a groan, and dives splashing below,
One long and strong pull – the prow grates on the sand,
Three cheers for our luck, boys! as we spring to land.5
1 This printing of “Spearing” from 1840 was not actually the first time the work was published. In the same year, the work was also published in The New-Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, and in 1841 it was printed in The American Magazine and Repository of Useful Literature. The amount of spotlight Street received makes sense, as he had already gained some small fame from some of his earlier works, like “The Forest-Walk”.
2 Street was born in in December of 1811 in New York, the son of Randall Street and Cornelia Billings. Street would go on to practice law and live in the scenic country of Monticello, NY, where large portions of Street’s poems were inspired. After a life of law, poetry, and other professions, Street died in 1881, at the age of 69.
3 “The Forest-Walk” was a poem previously published by Street, containing similar, nature-filled imagery that’s also found in “Spearing”. Street’s knack for this kind of writing was well known, described by a New York Times article of the time as a poet possessing the “rare gift of nature-painting”.
4 In the years following The Knickerbocker’s run as a periodical, it has become recognized as one of the first American journals to advocate for the preservation and protection of the environment. A number of pieces were published that swayed to the side of the natural world, including a serialization of a book entitled The California and Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, Jr. Works like this heavily advocated for the protection of forests, helping place The Knickerbocker as one of the earliest environmentalist publications in the US.
5 Street published a number of different collections of poetry throughout his life, starting with a volume entitled The Burning of Schenectady and Other Poems, which “Spearing” can be found in. He continued to publish collections throughout his life, culminating with The Poems of Alfred B. Street, released in 1867. This final work contained poetry from his previous collections, adding up to over 90 poems in all.
When written about today, The Knickerbocker is typically remembered as a periodical that not only published editorials and news, but also fictional pieces. Along with this, The Knickerbocker is also known as one of the first publications in the US to take an environmentalist stance on the state of the country at the time, trying to caution citizens about the “vanishing wilderness” (Nash, p. 97-99). The Knickerbocker created this kind of attitude by running various pieces that reflected on the natural world; some of them seemed to be obviously pro-environmental, while others served as almost cautionary tales against man’s attempts to control and conquer nature. Works like Thomas Cole’s “Lament of the Forest” was a work The Knickerbocker published that belongs in the latter category, written through the perspective of the forest as it’s brutalized by man’s industrialization and construction. Publishing this kind of work was certainly not the most accepted thinking of the time, and The Knickerbocker was ahead of its time when it came to this kind of work.
Alfred B. Street was a poet whose work often fell into this category, focusing on topics of nature, and man’s interaction with it. “Spearing” is no exception, as the author opens the poem with a picture of nature that is calm, idyllic, and undisturbed. Here, the waters sit “motionless” and “glassed”, and are free from any kind of interruption (line 4). However this peace is short lived as man shows up quickly, carrying torches and searching for “the quick-darting salmon” (8). This moment in the poem is key to understanding a great deal of the poem’s underlying theme: the disturbance and destruction of nature upon man’s intrusion. Once the fishermen arrive with their torches, the imagery of the calm and perfect nature vanishes, as “The stars that first spangled the pearl of the west, / Are lost in the bright blazing crowds of the rest” (5-6). The men themselves are not the only part of this journey however; the torches also stand in as a tool of their mission. Each time the torches are used, something about the natural world around them changes. Towards the end of the poem, “the black mass of forest” is illuminated in the same way, and this time it causes the forest to “break into groups of trunks, branches, and leaves” (35, 36). This illumination of the forest breaks down the almost mystical density of the “black mass of forest” into something that’s almost economical in its form. The “trunks, branches, and leaves” are listed here like items, carrying a connotation that they can be managed and controlled, juxtaposed to the “black mass” noted before
These ideas help display the work’s cautionary theme against man’s almost oblivious intrusion upon nature, fitting this work among some of the environmentalist ideas of The Knickerbocker. In the environmentalist discussions of today, much of the focus is on global warming, mass pollution, and other topics that refer to issues on a global scale. In The Knickerbocker, the main concern is the simple preservation of the forests, which illustrates how much the environment has changed and escalated in the last 150 years. There are still those who advocate for the preservation of nature in different forms today, but the concerns have grown much larger. This could simply be because the public sphere has increased with the digital age and rapid spread of information and technology, or it could be because the expansion of industry has started to cripple the environment in a way the writers of The Knickerbocker never could imagine. In either case, a change in attitude towards the environment has occurred that indicates how quickly the state of the natural world is shifting as time continues to go by.
Works Cited
"ALFRED B. STREET." ALFRED B. STREET. Northern Illinois University Libraries. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://www.ulib.niu.edu/badndp/street_alfred.html>.
Street, Alfred B. The Poems of Alfred B. Street. Hurd and Houghton, 1867. 83-85. Print.
"Alfred B. Street." The New York Times 14 Feb. 1862. The New York Times. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/1862/02/14/news/alfred-bstreet.html>.
Nash, Roderick F (2001). Wilderness and the American Mind (4th ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 97–99.
The Northern Light 4.1 (1844): 5. Google Books. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <https://books.google.com/books?id=Pq8RAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP5&lpg=PP5&dq=alfred b street northern lights&source=bl&ots=1Q61KRw8b1&sig=icsdxIwgq9LbpUoAXcSPSw6o6eQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F5shVdCiCYGqggSuwIPwAQ&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=alfred b street northern lights&f=false>
"Poems of Alfred B. Street.: I. The Burning of Schenectady and Other Poems. 1842.--2. Drawings and Tintings. 1844. Angling. The Settler." The Southern and Westerly Monthly Magazine and Review 1.5 (1845): 330. American Periodical Series. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/americanperiodic....
"Preserving the Wilderness!" Wilderness and The American Mind. 5th ed. Yale UP, 2014. 87-121. Print.
Street, Alfred B. The Poems of Alfred B. Street. Hurd and Houghton, 1867. 83-85. Print.
Street, Alfred B. "Spearing." The New - Yorker 8.19 (1840): 293. American Periodical Series. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/americanperiodic....
Street, Alfred B. "Spearing." The American Magazine and Repository of Useful Literature (1841): 76. American Periodical Series. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/americanperiodic....
Street, Alfred B. "Spearing." The Knickerbocker 15.1 (1840): 16. American Periodical Series. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/americanperiodic....
Street, Alfred B. "Spearing." The Saturday Evening Post 19.967 (1840). American Periodical Series. Web. 5 Apr. 2015. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/americanperiodic....
"Street, Alfred." Street, Alfred. Web. 7 Apr. 2015. <http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/lp-2001/street.html>.
Issue:
- February 1840