Philip Freneau American Literature Analysis
As an undergraduate poet, Freneau imitated the standard British poets; in his Poems (1786), he conveniently dated many of his compositions, so one can see his progression of interest from John Dryden and Alexander Pope to John Milton as models in both subject matter and technique. One of his best early lyrics, “The Power of Fancy” (dated 1770), suggests a conscious imitation of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” in its use of tetrametrical couplets, variously iambic and trochaic, although Joseph Warton’s poem of the same title, written in 1746, may well have been an inspiration.
“The Power of Fancy” is a long poem for a beginning poet, though its 154 lines hardly exceed the limitation Edgar Allan Poe would impose in his theory of verse composition, for it can, with ease, be read at a single sitting. The poem is noteworthy for its fusion of the elements of the classical (in form and allusions) with those of the Romantic writers, whose philosophy and technique were not yet enunciated. There is praise for fancy as a transforming force; there is the introduction of dreaming as a device; there is the use of the distant and hence exotic; and there is a pervasive mood of melancholy. Furthermore, Freneau offers in this poem an early glimpse of his slowly developing Deist (or Unitarian) tendencies, which are perhaps most clearly stated in his poem “On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature,” one of his last. None of his other early poems has similar interest or quality.
In “The American Village,” Freneau imitates the British poet Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (which had been published two years earlier), but whereas Goldsmith’s poem is melancholy, Freneau’s is optimistic and confident of the future of America and speaks of “this land with rising pomp divine” and “its own splendor.” Thus, by 1772 Freneau was expressing his regional chauvinism; he was already displaying his special attachment to his American homeland.
Before long, Freneau’s poems expressing simple pride and faith in the American colonies gave way to somewhat bellicose political verse, to statements of the theme that the North Americans valued the “godlike glory to be free” (a phrase in his “American Liberty”). By 1778, Freneau was writing the verse that earned for him the title “poet of the American Revolution”: “American Independence” likened King George III to Cain, Nero, and Herod. In couplets that must have reminded some readers of the work of Thomas Gray, Freneau wrote: “Full many a corpse lies rotting on the plain,/ That ne’er shall see its little brood again.” Here the juxtaposition of images of the battlefront campaigns and the violated domestic tranquillity shows Freneau at his most brilliant achievement as a patriotic and propagandistic poet.
The poet was somewhat ambivalent about engaging in the military conflict himself, and, in his “The Beauties of Santa Cruz,” written during his privateering period, he both urged his fellow colonials to leave “the bloody plains and iron glooms” for “the climes which youthful Eden saw” and praised those who remained to “repel the tyrant who thy peace invades.” Similarly, within the poem he vacillates between viewing the island of Santa Cruz as an edenic refuge and seeing it as a source of evil—slavery, avarice, indolence, and the annihilation of the native inhabitants.
From 1780 to 1790 Freneau produced some of his most commendable and lasting verse, both political and lyric. “The British Prison Ship,” occasioned by the poet’s capture and imprisonment in New York Harbor aboard the British ships Scorpion and Hunter , has the immediacy of a personal cri de coeur yet also offers detailed...
(This entire section contains 2506 words.)
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and reliable eyewitness evidence of the maltreatment of his fellow prisoners. It closes with a rousing appeal for revenge. No less rousing are the poems that memorialize the victory of John Paul Jones over the British warshipSeraphis (September 23, 1779) and to the memory of those who fell in the action of September 8, 1781, under General Greene in South Carolina. In the first poem are the lines,
Go on, great man, to daunt the foe,And bid the haughty Britons knowThey to our thirteen stars shall bend.
The second poem praises the “conquering genius,” General Greene, and commends to “A brighter sunshine of their own” the “patriot band” who fought with him.
“The House of Night,” written while Freneau was in the West Indies, was initially published in 1779 in seventy-three six-line iambic pentameter stanzas; it was subsequently expanded to 136 stanzas (816 lines). In an “Advertisement” (an authorial statement), Freneau indicates that the poem was founded upon Scripture (“the last enemy that shall be conquered is death”); he sets the poem at midnight in a solitary place that was once “beautiful and joyous”—perfectly suited for “the death of Death.” The poem concludes, he notes, “with a few reflexions on the impropriety of a too great attachment to the present life.” Throughout his life, Freneau toyed with the poem, adding lines and removing stanzas until, in its 1786 version, the death of Death was totally expunged. This remarkable composition was the first significant American poem to be written on the abstraction Death. It anticipates Poe in its pervasive Romanticism, its tone and atmosphere, though it is also in a direct line of descent from the “graveyard poets” of Britain of the immediately preceding years.
Several “reform” poems were written in the same decade; of them, “To Sir Toby,” which describes and condemns the practices of slave owners in Jamaica, is a good example. “If there exists a hell,” Freneau opens, “Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here.” Branding, whipping, chaining, imprisonment, and starvation—all the indignities and punishments inflicted upon the “black herd” are listed and condemned. “On the Anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille” is another of the poems that resulted from Freneau’s intense interest in reform causes, but it is somewhat more philosophical and indicates a developing serenity in the poet’s disposition.
That serenity became more apparent when Freneau took as subject matter the themes of nature, transience, and personal identity; it gave rise to some of his most pleasing lyrics, poems truly personal in essence, informed by a genuine rather than a spurious religious concern, and demonstrating his highest gifts in imagination and statement. Among those must be included “The Wild Honey Suckle”—generally agreed to be his most accomplished lyric—“The Indian Burying Ground,” and “On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature.” Hardly inferior are “To a Caty-did” and “On a Honey Bee Drinking from a Glass of Wine and Drowned Therein,” in which there is an unaccustomed levity to be found within the generally austere and mordant lines.
From the trenchant critic of the status quo before the American Revolution, Freneau became the true voice of the stalwarts of the rebellion. Toward the end of his life he again became evangelical—but for the status quo ruled over by Nature rather than by Britain. “No imperfection can be found/ in all that is, above, around,” he wrote, and concluded that in the dominion of Nature, “all is right.” In this conclusion he predated Robert Browning.
“On Mr. Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’”
First published: 1791 (collected in Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War, 1809)
Type of work: Poem
The monarchy is inconsistent with the rights of the common person, and the new republic in North America will be the guardian of such rights.
This poem, which is sometimes published under the title “To a Republican, with Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man,” was written immediately after the publication of Thomas Paine’s great and influential book in defense of the French Revolution. It was later included in Freneau’s Poems (1809). In many ways, the poem is uncharacteristic of Freneau: While trenchant in its criticism of monarchy and enthusiastic in its endorsement of Paine’s thinking, it is neither overtly satiric nor especially lyrical, though it does make reference to the laws of Nature and to personified Virtue. As might be expected, it makes no allusion to God: It is, therefore, essentially a rationalist-Deist poem on the morality of the national polity.
Further, the structure of the poem is a departure from the usual forms that Freneau used: The fifty lines are divided into four stanzas of ten, fourteen, ten, and sixteen lines of iambic pentameter that are end-rhymed—that is, in closed couplets. The first three stanzas bemoan the ugly fate of the “sacred Rights of Man” as they have been travestied by monarchs; the final two celebrate the great plan for the enunciation and protection of the natural rights of the common person that was contained in Paine’s treatise and was being worked out in the new Constitution of the United States, which is addressed as “Columbia.”
Just as “A Political Litany” and “To Sir Toby” are characterized by catalogs of deficiencies and shortcomings, so too is “On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man.” Kings are presented as the source of discord, murder, slavery, knavery, plunder, and—worst of all—the restraint of freedom and “Nature’s law reversed.” The indictment is detailed and extensive. For example, after complaining that ships are ordered to sail the distant seas on royal orders, Freneau states that the benefits of these voyages, the proceeds of the “plundered prize,” are used not to benefit humankind but “the strumpet,” or they serve “to glut the king.” These abuses of royal prerogatives are neither unusual nor passing: The reader is invited to scan the record of history for confirmation, for the poet is sure that he will be inflamed “with kindling rage” to see human rights aspersed and freedom restrained. The “manly page” of Paine and the reasoned argument of his treatise will not fail to convince any reader of the soundness of his thesis.
Then comes the bifurcation in the poem: In rather traditional Enlightenment manner, Freneau, having presented the present condition, offers a glimpse of the corrections to be obtained by pursuing the course proposed by Paine. Though the final stanza has sixteen lines, it is in the form of a rather loosely constructed sonnet. It opens with an apostrophe to Columbia and then lists some of the future’s great boons: Without a king, the colonists—now American citizens—will peacefully and profitably till the fields to their own advantage. They have already “traced the unbounded sea,” and they have instituted the rule of law, which is honored by one and all.
Freneau does not conclude with a listing of the immediate advantages of the new social order, however; he offers a list of responsibilities for the newly independent Americans. These include the restraint of the politically ambitious and the propagation of a few basic truths: that rulers are vain, that warfare inevitably brings ruin to a republic, and that monarchies subsist by waging war.
Then, in the concluding four lines, Freneau offers a magnificent view of the goals and future of the United States in language of undoubted sincerity. There is no suggestion of cliché or slogan, no inflated or bombastic vocabulary, no circumlocution or literary idiom—only the simple language of the new citizen of the new republic enunciating the rights of everyone to such things as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness:
So shall our nation, form’d on Virtue’s plan,Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man,A vast Republic, famed through every clime,Without a king, to see the end of time.
“The Wild Honey Suckle”
First published: 1786 (collected in The Poems of Philip Freneau, Written Chiefly During the Late War, 1786)
Type of work: Poem
The wild honeysuckle growing in the country grieves the poet because its beauty is so short-lived.
Although “The Wild Honey Suckle” is now the most frequently reprinted and quoted of Freneau’s poems, it was seldom reprinted in the poet’s lifetime. The consensus both in the United States and abroad is that this is the poet’s best lyric and is perhaps his most accomplished verse composition. It is a comparatively short poem: It has only four six-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter arranged in the quite traditional rhyme scheme ababcc. The first two stanzas sing of the joys of growing in the country (“this silent, dull retreat”), where no careless bypasser will threaten the flower’s gentle existence, its comeliness in the gentle shade of the woods. The poet stresses that this secluded location is “Nature’s” design: The shade is to guard the plant, which is to “shun the vulgar eye”; that is, it is personified and admonished to assume an attitude of modesty despite its beauty.
The third stanza develops the image introduced in the penultimate line of the second stanza, that “quietly the summer goes.” That is, an analogy is proposed between the life and death of the honeysuckle and the life and death of humankind; in both, one can see existence “declining to repose” (death). As if to place the death of the individual flower in perspective, Freneau suggests that even the flowers that bloomed in the Garden of Eden—which were no more beautiful than the native flower of the North American countryside—were killed off by the “[u]npitying frosts” of autumn. Of Eden’s flowers there is no vestige; of the wild honeysuckle, also, there will be no trace.
The concluding stanza offers the traditional philosophical observation, or resolution of the situation presented in the preceding stanzas. It notes that the flower had its origins in morning suns and evening dews, developing from a pre-Edenic void. It will have its death knell from the same natural moisture and light—the ultimate paradox of life. Further, to place the life span of flower or person in perspective, the poet concludes with admirable logic that because the flower came from nothing, it can have lost nothing at death. It (and humankind) moves only from void to void, and “[t]he space between is but an hour”—the twinkling of an eye of “[t]he frail duration of a flower.”
Decay and death are immutable and universal, are irreversible, yet the disappearance of a thing of beauty, whether a wild honeysuckle or a beautiful young woman, is a melancholy phenomenon. In fact, the tone of the entire poem is one of melancholy; the use of personification (which is used in even the opening apostrophe, “Fair flower,” and continues unabated throughout the poem) makes the analogy between flower and individual inescapable. The poet goes further, however, and makes the particular universal: The wild honeysuckle appropriately represents all the unseen, unacknowledged things of beauty that have ever existed and have died.
The poem has more than the traditional sense of the loss of beauty to recommend it, however. It has a serenity, a sense of awe and loss that is rare, and it combines native subject matter with the poet’s personal philosophy of the transience of all human experiences without being circumscribed by the language of the English pre-Romantics such as William Collins and Thomas Gray and the great Scottish poet Robert Burns.