Philip Freneau Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Philip Freneau’s poetry gave rise to no school, and it fired no tradition. At all points, however, it celebrates the American quest for freedom—freedom of the individual to choose a political and intellectual identity, to pursue creative and artistic imagination, and to discover religious or spiritual commitment. Even America’s rugged natural terrain seemed to promise limitless possibilities of achieving social and cultural independence. The principal subjects of Freneau’s poems, then, include politics, the imagination, theology, and nature. His poems reveal the inner struggle of a man who refused to settle into the security of dogma (whether of a particular church or of societal codes) and who determined to find his own explanations for the human predicament. This determination to search for his own answers anticipates the attitude of later writers from the American Renaissance onward.
Political poetry
Jefferson’s statement that Freneau “saved our constitution” readily identifies the trenchant role this citizen of the new republic played in politics. In addition to his numerous, biting essays that strike out against British cruelties and Hamilton’s Federalism, Freneau wrote poetry dealing with various controversial political issues. In “The British Prison-Ship,” Freneau exposes British inhumanity to American prisoners. Among Freneau’s many political poems is a particularly strong indictment of slavery; “To Sir Toby” is as forceful a condemnation of traffic in human cargo as any of its time. After isolating the central motive for the practice of slavery—greed—the poet then describes the plight of the innocent victims of this avarice as the unwitting and certainly unwilling participants in a veritable hell on earth. In this description, Freneau makes effective use of his classical training; the pictures of the black man’s torture call up horrible scenes “thatVergil’s pencil drew.” The captains of the slave ships become“surly Charons,” while the slave masters who put to torture the new ranks of “ghosts” are “beasts, . . . Plutonian scourges, and despotic lords.”
The imagination
Freneau’s poems on the force of the imagination may seem to be light-years away from his political poetry; such, however, is hardly the case. His poems on politics and the imagination merely represent two sides of the same coin whose mint is freedom. Those poems dealing with politics address problems of freedom in the actual world; those centering on the imagination treat of the ideal world produced by artistic creativity whose freedom is apparently boundless. It is fitting that one of this poet’s earliest works is devoted entirely to the subject of the imagination; “The Power of Fancy” was composed in 1770 while Freneau was still an undergraduate at Princeton. In this piece, the young poet delineates the fancy as “regent of the mind,” the mental faculty that derives its power from divine inspiration. By the power of fancy, the mind can set out on a cosmic journey, exploring distant stars, the moon, and even hell. From this journey through the cosmos, the fancy then takes the poet out into the Atlantic and on to such exotic sites as the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean. In the final lines of the poem, the young Freneau calls the fancy “the muses’ pride” wherein “reside/ Endless images of things.” These images are of “Ideal objects such a store,/ The universe could hold no more.”
The sort of imagination Freneau describes in “The Power of Fancy” clearly owes much to Plato’s theory of ideal forms; it is the function of the poet, so Freneau maintains, to tap this realm of forms for his own poetic images. The fancy then serves the poet as a mode of memory and is closely aligned with Lockean associative psychology....
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The view of the fancy or imagination that Freneau advances in this poem looks back rather than forward; it more nearly approximates the operation of the imagination explored by Mark Adenside inThe Pleasures of Imagination, an immensely popular book-length poem first printed in English in 1744, than it points ahead toward the Romantics of the early nineteenth century. The mode of fancy that Freneau depicts in “The House of Night,” however, looks to the future; written some nine years later than “The Power of Fancy,” this poem suggests an affinity for some of the poems of John Keats. In the later poem, Freneau maintains that the power of fancy can in sleep play a “wild delusive part so well/ you lift me into immortality,/ Depict new heavens, or draw scenes of hell”; Keats’s immortal nightingale sings a similar strain.
Other Romantic elements occur in “The House of Night,” especially those projecting gothicism. Freneau achieves some gothic effects by use of the element of surprise. At one point in this poem about a young man’s encounter with the personification of death (a gothic effect in itself), for example, the youth (as persona) describes darkness in terms of Apollo and his chariot of the sun. Rather than a blazing chariot, “darkness rode/ In her black chariot.” Some lines of the poem strongly suggest Poe. Seduced by Death into attending him as he approaches his own “death,” the youth describes his predicament in unsettling lines. In such phrases as “sad chamber,” languishing “in despair,” and breathing “loathsome air,” one might fully expect to find Poe’s “The Raven” or in such short stories as his “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Ligeia.”
Theology and nature
The power of the imagination enabled Freneau to explore much more than his tendency to create strange, even perverse images and characters; indeed, in his poetry, he appears to pursue the construction of a personal theology. This pursuit is always punctuated by the poet’s awestruck fascination for and appreciation of nature. These last two important subjects of Freneau’s poetry, theology and nature, can therefore most profitably be examined together.
The pictures Freneau draws of nature are not always attractive. “The Hurricane” depicts an actual storm at sea that Freneau experienced on a voyage to Jamaica in 1784. The poem opens with this arresting couplet: “Happy the man who, safe on shore,/ Now trims, at home, his evening fire.” Rather than being safe and enjoying the warmth of the hearth, Freneau finds himself exposed to a merciless cold storm at sea. At one point, he presents a vividly terrifying image of the small ship on whose fragile deck burst “mountains . . . on either side.” He draws a picture of “death and darkness,” which engulf the ship with tempests raging “with lawless power”; in such a pass, “What friendship can . . . be/ What comfort?” The dark and doom of this unhappy predicament foreshadow the destruction of Ishmael’s ship, the Pequod, in Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851).
The contrast the poet establishes in “The Hurricane” between the security of the land and the peril of the sea is identified by Richard C. Vitzthum as a major key to the personal symbolism that Freneau develops in his poems; but while “The Wild Honey Suckle” and “The Indian Burying Ground,” both wholly landlocked poems, do develop less precarious scenes, these poems of the land also resound with poignant notes of regret at life’s transience. “The Wild Honey Suckle” celebrates the beauty of that plant’s white flower, which is nevertheless doomed to a brief span of life. The lives of men correspond to the short duration of the flower; indeed, from birth to death, as Freneau writes in one of the most effective couplets in American literature, “The space between, is but an hour,/ The frail duration of a flower.” “The Indian Burying Ground” describes the somber, sitting position of the dead, but Freneau sees promise of great spiritual and intellectual hope in such a posture. To him, the sitting position bespeaks “the nature of the soul,/ Activity, that knows no rest.” Although “life is spent,” so the poet explains, the old ideas that supported and breathed life into these honored dead are not gone.
“On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature”
The one poem of the Freneau canon that most clearly articulates his attitudes toward his religious consciousness is the often-overlooked piece “On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature.” Written in 1815 when Freneau was sixty-three, the poem represents a crystallization of his theology. It is arranged into seven quatrains of iambic tetrameter. A reading aloud reveals that its fairly regular rhythm echoes common speech; the only variations of the iambic pattern occur in the occasional trochees and one spondee (in the twentieth line). In each case where a variation occurs, the word “all” appears and always receives a primary stress (emphasized word or syllable); “all” occurs fourteen times. These variations do indeed prevent the rhythm from becoming monotonous, thus holding the listener’s attention.
The variations accomplish more, however, than merely holding one’s attention. To be sure, Freneau’s repeated use of the word “all” underscores the poem’s emphasis on the universal; the persistence of this word then serves as a sort of incremental repetition that restates the poem’s concern with the universal attributes of God in each of the seven stanzas; “all” appears twice in each of the first two, only once in each of the next two, but twice again in the fifth, and then three times each in the climactic sixth and seventh stanzas, establishing a pattern that enhances the meaning of the poem. The poem opens with the rhetorical question, “All that we see, about, abroad,/ What is it all, but nature’s God?” The next couplet maintains that this God of nature may be seen in God’s meaner works of the earth, such as human beings, animals, and plants, as well as in the heavens: “In meaner works discover’d here/ No less than in the starry sphere.” Implicit in these lines is the idea of the Great Chain of Being, whereby creation may be viewed as a great ladder, the lowest rungs of which include elements of inanimate matter, while the highest hold the higher animals, and finally humans, closest to God; but more seems to be at work here.
In 1785 or 1786, Freneau came across a book by the Swedish scientist, mystic, and scholar of the Bible Emanuel Swedenborg; the poet records his experience of reading Swedenborg in the poem “On a Book Called Unitarian Theology.” He remarks that God “Illumes all Nature” and “Bids towards itself all trees and plants aspire.” Swedenborg had himself outlined in his Principia rerum naturalium (1734) an elaborate doctrine of series and degrees that he claimed accounted for each distinct link in a universal chain stretching from inorganic substance to humans and thence to God. Regarding this doctrine of degrees, Freneau appears to have changed his mind little between 1786 and 1815.
In the second stanza, Freneau asserts that God “lives in all, and never stray’d/ A moment from the works he made.” If one includes the notion of an “absentee God” as a necessary tenet of a Deist, then at this point Freneau clearly denies his sympathy with Deism. The God whom he describes “Bespeaks a wise creating cause;/ Impartially he rules mankind.” This last line suggests Freneau’s strong support of religious freedom, for an impartial God is hardly selective about how he is worshiped. The poet expresses his unqualified commitment to religious freedom in “On the Emigration to America” (written in 1784), in which he describes the political and religious conditions in Europe as “half to slaves consigned”; Europe herself is a place “Where kings and priests enchain the mind.” In “Reflections on the Gradual Progress of Nations from Democratical States to Despotic Empires” (written in 1799), he quips of priests per se that they “hold the artillery of the sky.”
The last stanza of “On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature” contains one of the simplest and at the same time one of the finest lines in American poetry. The line states the thesis on which Freneau bases his theology: “He all things into being loved.” In the Swedenborg piece, he draws a parallel picture of God as “One Power of Love” who “Warms into life the changeful race of man.” This idea of God as a God of warmth and love is far distant from the cold, Deistic Clockmaker who left his machine to run itself down. Freneau’s God, who is by virtue of his “attributes divine” unlimited and therefore universal or ubiquitous, brings into existence “all things”; this achievement he brings about out of unselfish love. “Things” take on form, then, as less perfect renderings of him. Freneau’s God “never stray’d/ A moment from the works he made.” Quite contrary to the Deist Clockmaker, the poet’s God “still presides” over all he has created, and “For them in life, or death provides.”
The line “He all things into being loved,” then, is hardly simple. Contained within its eight syllables is the whole of Freneau’s sophisticated and humanitarian theology. Although his identification of God as “of Nature” seems to align him with Deism (or, as some would undoubtedly hold, with pantheism), his insistence on a God of love denies this classification. His assertion that God provides for all in death may suggest to some a belief in an afterlife of heavenly bliss. Such is not the case, however, for in one of his last poems, “On Observing a Large Red-Streak Apple,” Freneau defines the afterlife of the apple as the “youngsters . . . three or four” who will rise “from your core.” This sort of afterlife whereby continuation is accomplished through successive generations resembles more closely Greco-Roman ideas of afterlife than it does Deism. Surely Freneau’s classical training served him in arriving at his position. It is probably more accurate to label Freneau a unitarian than a Deist, though one senses that he would himself resist all labels.
Certainly his theology is liberal and not limited by dogma. So, also, his attitudes toward politics, the creative imagination, and nature are unencumbered by a dogmatic or didactic perspective. Rather, his poems describe the career of a man who found the world about him fascinating and who consequently used his poetry to record his experience of that world. Freneau’s poetry is intensely personal, heralding the individuality that characterizes Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.