1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
Scarcely knew your own abode!
How you battled with the rock!
Gave my willows such a shock
As to menace, by its fall,
Underwood and bushes, all:
Now you are again at peace:
Time will come when that will cease;
Such the human passions are;
—You again will war declare.
Emblem, thou, of restless man;
What a sketch of nature’s plan!
Now at peace, and now at war,
Now you murmur, now you roar;
Muddy now, and limpid next,
Now with icy shackles vext—
What a likeness here we find!
What a picture of mankind![16]
This was the valedictory of Philip Freneau. His life was bitter and turbulent, cast in a bitter and turbulent age; yet he found some grains of comfort in the contemplation of nature and the exercise of the poet’s craft. Through it all his heart remained clean and his hands unstained. If he was not a great poet whom all the critics praise, he loved beauty and served it in a careless world among an indifferent people, and it ill becomes America to forget his contribution or deny him some portion of the honor that has fallen generously to others no more deserving.