[In the following essay, Kyle discusses Freneau's attempt to create an American myth in the form of an epic poem about Christopher Columbus.]

In American letters the impulse to write the great American novel has been dwarfed only by the impulse to write the great American epic: larger than both of these is the compulsion to create the great American myth. The earliest attempt in American literature to do all three at once occurs in Philip Freneau's “The Pictures of Columbus” (1774).¹ This study suggests that “The Pictures of Columbus” is neither neoclassical epic, nor folk legend, nor myth although it is certainly all these things. In fact, it is much more; Freneau's work is first of all a poem and that poem reconstructs through a series of images a myth that includes and supercedes even the Edenic myth in its exciting legendary and epic possibilities: Christopher Columbus in the act of discovering America. What has never been examined is the image of this discovery theme as an act realized through a reenactment in the form of poem. Freneau's creative translation of concept to act to language to image appears most energetically in the poem's large formal device announced in the title: the “Pictures” of Columbus convey the thematic direction of the poem from imagined vision to actualized reality through the imagistic reconstruction of the discovery of America: Columbus finds his prepictured land to be in fact the new world.²

Of the eighteen “pictures” or sections of the American colonial epic, the first seven comprise a picture as an idea or as the conception of a vision by the imagination, the image-making faculty of the mind; the picture of the world that emerges is “unreal” but derives its substance from known facts about the “real” world. Columbus, quite literally, in Picture I, “The Genoese,” appears as a mapmaker. It soon becomes clear that this Genoese is no copier of maps, but a maker of maps just as a poet is a maker of words. The planning of the new world occurs on several analogous levels: Columbus sees the then present world as out of proportion; to effect a balance between art and nature, he must artfully draw a land plan to fill the natural void in the ocean and to balance the vast land mass of Asia in the East. So the cosmographer “mimics” a globe and “draws” a new world, speculating that perhaps in this new land “dwell / Forms wrought like man” (I, 14-15). God, the original platonic maker of maps, “Has trac'd his great idea too” (I, 31). So nature imitates art, and art imagines and creates nature in a reproduction of the original divine act: but these ideas are still in their formal stages; “idle charts” are not yet “real seas.” Freneau has centered us in the Platonic world of forms by describing the dilemma of the ideal country:

But how shall I this country find!
Gay, painted picture of the mind!

(I, 36-37)

As “Gay” as an idea may appear, the picture remains locked in the mind until released by some kind of magic.

To effect this release, Columbus proceeds to a reader of minds, an enchantress of magic spells in Picture II, “the cell of an Inchantress.” Reflecting God's reading of the earth like a crystal ball, “In the clear void, and governs all / On those dread scenes, remote from view” (I, 28-29), the sorceress imitates His power. From a “gloomy grove,” remote and isolated, the witch reads Columbus' fortune from a picture of a man in chains. Unlike The Aeneid, where pictures on the Temple wall of Dido's Carthage reveal the past, the Inchantress' glass in the form of a mirror in a vault glimmers only the future. Again, the architectural frame of a visual picture appears only in Book I of The Aeneid, but dominates the entire structure of its American epic counterpart.

“The Mirror” in Picture III yields reflections of reflections as human shapes resemble strange visions of the future dressed in allegorical form. Perseverance, calumny, “Erudition in a scholar's garb” and “Hypocrisy, clad in a doctor's gown” join the “princes, kings, and nobles of the land” [who] “Smile at [the] projects [of Columbus], and report [him] mad” (III, 8-9). It is a veritable “mirror for magistrates” and the satiric list of personified virtues and vices soon includes Columbus' friend the queen: as every school child knows Isabell yields to avarice by generously bestowing her jewels upon Columbus. The fantasy forms within the mirror of the famous legend; the three barques at the Canary Islands, poised with fear, hesitate at the gateway to the new world seas:

Awhile we linger at these islands fair
That seem the utmost boundaries of the world,
Then westward aiming on the unfathom'd deep
Sorrowing, with heavy hearts we urge our way.

(III, 30-33)

These lines achieve the splendor of Miltonic blank verse—a largeness rivalling the classical epic and a rhythm echoing both cosmic setting and the fleeting excitement of a glimpse into a mirror. The scene in the mirror changes swiftly and the Canary Islands become the West Indies; the heavy hearts lift with the sight of land—and one of the first depictions of Paradise in the poetry of the new world appears:

The scene is chang'd—Fine islands greet mine eye,
Cover'd with trees, and beasts, and yellow men;
Eternal summer through the vallies smiles
And fragrant gales o'er golden meadows play!—
Inchantress, 'tis enough!—now veil your glass—
The curtain falls—and I must homeward pass.

(III, 53-58)

This pictured scene suggests not just the idyllic lands of classical legend, not just a veritable Garden of Eden as The American Adam has been reborn in a new land, but a particular kind of land, a land of “Eternal summer” tinted yellow by the sun and reflected in the yellow men and meadows and the heavy perfumed air of a tropical zone; these new lands are golden isles in many ways, but the most important is the climactic pressure of the glitter and splendor of lands belonging to the sun god. This “youthful Eden,” “so near heaven's blasing lamp … court[s] the beam that sheds the golden day” (“The Beauties of Santa Cruz,” ll. 80-82). These “children of the sun” play with taste that rivals Keats's and Eve's:

Sweet, spungy plums on trees wide spreading hang,
Bell-apples here, suspended, shade the ground,
Plump grenadilloes and guavas grey,
With melons in each plain and vale abound.

(Ibid., ll. 152-55)

Like the lotos land of Ulysses, Freneau tells us, the country allures and seduces, strong enough in its attraction to entice Columbus to set sail across an unknown sea.

Thus armed with desire, “Columbus addresses King Ferdinand” in Picture IV and Freneau reconstructs the argument by philosophy: Platonic logic, form, and rhetoric govern this explicit summarical statement of the theme of the first major part of the poem.

Platonic dreams, and reason's plainer page
All point at something that we ought to see
Buried behind the waters of the west,
Clouded with the shadows of uncertainty.

(IV, 39-42)

The three remaining Pictures V, VI, and VII are really anticlimactic to this first phase, more tedious than charming. One is tempted to say that they reflect the tedium of Columbus' wait for approval. But such a position would be too easy; what is difficult about these sections is that they are staggering to a turning point, technically, while thematically and rationally they deal with the debate already dramatized between dream and reality, a conflict that is irresolvable and intangible. The sections simply lack substance in action but are overextended in argument. Ferdinand's Minister thinks that Columbus' “fancied isles are turned to real lands” (V, 18) in his mind; by VI Columbus is guilefully persuading Isabell to win for the world another Eden just as a woman lost Eden for the world; Ferdinand himself debates the possible alliance of Columbus with the devil as the temptor of Eve. In Picture VII, Queen Isabell gives her real consent and the real arguments against the journey begin.

II

Pictures VIII through XIII comprise a second major part of the poem: the translation of imagination to reality. Columbus stands at the crossroads between vision and realization at the outset of the poem:

          In three small barques to cross so vast a sea,
Held to be boundless, even in learning's eye,
And trusting only to a magic glass,
Which may have represented things untrue,
Shadows and visions for realities!—
It is a bold attempt!

(VIII, 1-6)

Pictures X, XI, and XII counterdevelop Columbus' attempt with argument and disbelief in the character of a sailor, a friar, and a mathematician: the practical, religious, and scientific men withhold support for the project of Columbus. The sailor fears loss of wages, the friar heresy, and the mathematician the line of demarcation where the sea falls into an abyss of monsters. The tableau between Thomas the sailor and his wife Susan is in dialogue form with a stress on the colloquial and the commonsensical: Columbus is “running in debt,” and the “devil may take him.”³ Allen the friar speaks through a monologue, citing the Pope with the authority of an ex cathedra tone: “He says, our world is not orbicular” (X, 10). But the most precise and persuasive is the mathematician, Orosio. After speaking learnedly of framing problems, drawing parallels, and measuring the subtension of an angle, he clinches his point: Now, every pretender “Shall … have ships to make discoveries” (XI, 12). The persuasion of his rhetoric is so powerful that it ought to be quoted in full:

          This simple man would sail he knows not where;
Building on fables, schemes of certainty;—
Visions of Plato, mix'd with idle tales
Of later date, intoxicate his brain:
Let him advance beyond a certain point
In his fantastic voyage, and I foretell
He never can return: ay, let him go!—
There is a line towards the setting sun
Drawn on an ocean of tremendous depth,
(Where nature plac'd the limits of the day)
Haunted by dragons, fond of solitude,
Red serpents, fiery forms, and yelling hags,
Fit company for mad adventurers.—
There, when the sun descends, 'tis horror all;
His angry globe through vast abysses gliding
Burns in the briny bosom of the deep
Making a havoc so detestable,
And causing such a wasteful ebullition
That never island green, or continent
Could find foundation, there to grow upon.

(XI, 13-32)

In technique, Freneau emphasizes the alteration between an oblique parallelism of a measured couplet—“Haunted by dragons, fond of solitude,” and the eloquent metrical freedom of a line of blank verse: “(Where nature plac'd the limits of the day).” It would be tempting to say that in support of the form, the thematic conflict of the poem lies between the authority of tradition and reason and the boldness and courage of a new, heroic step. But only a subtle suggestion of that should apply; heroes are made only by a careful reconstruction of very fragile dreams and a very creative and positive realization of thought into action. Poets then complete the process through the word: language reconstructs the progress of the translation of the heroic deed from action back to thought.

The remaining two pictures of this section present real paintings within word pictures: the first Picture XII shows a conversation between “Columbus and a Pilot” when Columbus agrees to take prisoners as crew since noblemen prefer to “revel in the shade / Of painted ceilings” (XII, 9-10). The ceiling fades into the unknown, unlimited sky of the next part that abruptly takes us out beyond the beginning of the voyage and to the point of mutiny as uncertain, frightened sailors prepare to rebel at this extreme point of the landscape of the sea.

No land appearing yet, nor trace of land,
But distant fogs that mimic lofty isles,
Painting gay landscapes on the vaporish air. …

(XIII, 36-38)

The delusion here assumes the form of the legendary mirage common to travelers. Antonio delivers this mirage soliloquy in a magnificent way that tempers the possible melodrama of the scenes. Earlier his soliloquy pictured an antimirage, a vision of fear characterized and allegorized by a ghost ship prophetic of the ghost ship of Columbus himself in the legends to follow, piloted by a dead crew and lost in the tropics. The needle of the poem's compass wavers in dream and reality; finally steadied by Columbus, the crew agrees to wait three more days.

III

It is probably impossible to describe adequately the imagined discovery of America. The description in Columbus' soliloquy about the actual fact suffers the pains of reality in relation to Antonio's earlier description of a landscape mirage of the sky. In fact, all the prefigurements of the reality of the discovery—the dreams of discovery—exceed the real thing not only in the excitement of anticipation but also in the aesthetic of order. “Picture XIV, Columbus at Cat Island” presents a world that disintegrates immediately and concomitantly with the act of discovery. More convincing than any speech is the first act of the new world: as Columbus offers the island to God (San Salvador), Hernando kills a native Indian for his golden earrings! Then as Columbus wanders in meditation reflecting on the beauties of this free island (“Sweet sylvan scenes of innocence and ease, / How calm and joyous pass the seasons here!” [XIV, 40-41]), and the purity of nature unsullied by human hand, he stumbles upon the murdered Indian; the innocence of the new America is lost. Says Columbus, “Is this the fruit of my discovery!” (XIV, 56) and the poem changes once more.

IV

In the “terrible” pictures that remain, the disintegration is fast and sure. In XV, “Columbus in a Tempest on the Return to Spain,” a ghostly storm foreshadows Columbus' destruction, and a Corposant, that superstitious relic of the measure of a storm, perhaps the wandering soul/body of a dead sailor, haunts the ship. Already, a vision returns to replace reality and the picture Columbus paints now is of a “painted casket, / (Caulk'd, pitch'd, secur'd with canvas round and round)” (XV, 24-25), that may float round the ocean mimicking the discovery of America. Perhaps in time, in reverse of the ordinary, islands may discover the casket or

The western winds in time may bear it home
To Europe's coasts: or some wide wandering ship
By accident may meet it toss'd about,
Charg'd with the story of another world.

(XV, 30-33)

In Picture XVI, although the victorious Columbus has reached court, with jewels and Indians, and all looks deceivingly well as he sets out again to repeat his discovery with the subsequent voyages to America, the vision of the casket has preempted any chance for success. The picture shifts so quickly to Columbus in chains that the reader is almost unprepared and must be advised in a footnote that the captain was dismissed for bad conduct after the third voyage. But for himself, says Columbus unhappily in the concluding line of the short stanza, the “new worlds” “had still been empty visions.” The last Picture XVIII, “Columbus at Valladolid” is full of grief. “No dreams disturb the slumbers of the dead” (XVIII, 2), he muses. Were these dreams ever, in fact, real or nothing more than “painted pageants,” “this life's phantoms by delusion led?” (XVIII, 5-6). Only memory now “paints,” and there is “one other world remains” (XVIII, 7). He asks for an epitaph:

You liv'd to find new worlds for thankless kings.

(XVIII, 21)

EPILOGUE

Besides the memory of the legend of Columbus and the poem which Freneau has painted in tribute, one other surprising thing happens outside of the poem: Freneau prints elsewhere a tale of the discovery of the bones of Columbus back in the new world. Freneau claims in “The Bones of Columbus,” that an ex-Jesuit has furnished him with details relative to the

original discovery of America, and which he said, might be relied upon as authentic.—It is well known that Columbus … died … at Valladolid, in Old Spain, on the 20th of May, 1506. His body, enclosed in a double coffin, was carried to Seville, and there had a temporary interment. … The coffin was deposited under a plain marble with the two following lines engraved thereon, which, it is said, are legible to this day:

A Castilla Y Arragon
Otro mondo dio Colon,

I.e., Columbus gave a new world to the kingdoms of Castile and Arragon.—It is not generally known, said my venerable informant, that from the Cathedral of Seville the bones of this illustrious man were, not long afterwards, conveyed across the Atlantic to the Cathedral of the river Ozama, towards the eastern extremity of the island of Hispaniola. …

In the month of February, 1783, at a time they were making some repairs in a wall of the Church, the identical coffin of Christopher Columbus was discovered; but only the leaden one, the other having mouldered away by time. There was no plate or inscription found, as that had probably been fixed on the exterior wooden coffin, long since decayed. The bones found in this coffin had nearly crumbled into dust but some bones of the arms remained sound. The officers of The Cathedral asserted that the tradition had constantly been, from times immemorial, that the body of Columbus had been sepultured in the cell thus accidentally discovered. …⁴

This fable that I have placed as epilogue to the poem completes the epic of return. It is not the casket of the dream of Columbus, but the casketed bones of Columbus that in reality find a way back to Latin America charged with the potency of the heroic act. The act is continual, self-renewing by its own energy, eternal: Columbus has rediscovered America. Without the epilogue, the reality of the discovery is as strong as the imagined Platonic vision of the act; with the epilogue, the reality is as strong as the recurrent actualization of the discovery of America in American myth.

Notes

1. The text used for this study is “The Pictures of Columbus” in Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York, 1929), pp. 230-59. This edition is based on the edition of 1809 which contains the two original initial sketches or pictures. The Pictures of Columbus first appeared in The Miscellaneous of Mr. Philip Freneau … Philadelphia: Printed by Francis Bailey … MDCCLXXXVIII. Lewis Leary suggests that the poem, first printed in 1788, one year after Barlow's The Vision of Columbus, was backdated by Freneau to 1774 in order to indicate that he had been at the idea before Joel Barlow.

2. The imitative relationship of Freneau to the literature of the eighteenth century in England has been more than adequately explored in several studies:

   • a. The works which treat Freneau's interest in epic as well as his inseparable neoclassical-romantic conflict include the following: In Hudson Review, 12 (Autumn, 1959), 362-77, Roy Harvey Pearce notes the compulsion to write a national epic.
   • b. Fred Lewis Pattee, Side-Lights on American Literature (New York, 1922), p. 287. Pattee stresses Freneau's desire to write an epic that is truly American, as do many of the major Freneau scholars and critics. Besides dreaming of Columbus as a “greater Aeneas,” in his use of his native land and his familiar surroundings as a background for art, “Freneau discovered the poetical side of the Indian, and thus became the literary father of Brockden Brown, Cooper, and the little school of poetry which in the early years of the century fondly believed that the aboriginal American was to be the central figure in the poetry of the New World” (p. 288).
   • c. Harry Hayden Clark in “What Made Freneau the Father of American Poetry,” in Studies in Philology, 21 (1929), 1-22, sees Freneau's love of the concrete in American life as part of his “naturalism.” I agree, yet disagree, with this point of view as the paper will show.
   • d. Harry Hayden Clark in “The Literary Influences of Philip Freneau,” Studies in Philology, 26 (1925), #1, 1-33, claims that Freneau's “The Dying Indian” came from Joseph Warton's The Dying Indian (Dodsley's Collection of Poems, London, 1782, IV, 220), i.e., Joseph Warton, “who had never seen an Indian” (p. 21), and that he read such pieces as Addison's Spectator #50, “The Four Indian Kings” for his stories. Joseph M. Beatty, in “Churchill and Freneau,” American Literature (May, 1930), 121-30, sees in Freneau's “Discovery,” traces of Churchill's Gotham, Book I “in which the English satirist discusses the doubtful blessings Europe had bestowed upon the savage” (p. 122). Benjamin Bissell's The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1925) sees an inherent connection between the glorification of the savage in eighteenth-century literature and the beginning interest in the discovery of America—an important correlation. The distinction between the practical interest associated with the North American Indians and the romantic interest afforded the Indians of Peru or Mexico is likewise significant. Unfortunately Mr. Bissell does not treat The Pictures of Columbus.
   • e. Only one work treats the Indian alone in all of Freneau's works: Philip Marsh's “Indian Folklore in Freneau,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society (April, 1953), 125-35 traces the chronological order of the appearance of Freneau's “Indian” poems and prose; the treatment is accurate, thorough, and historical, not particularly literary although Mr. Marsh elsewhere does a good job of a different kind with the legend of the bones of Columbus (see n. 4).
   • f. Despite the negative and always surprising subtitle, Lewis Leary in That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure (New Brunswick, N.J., 1941) has only praise for The Pictures of Columbus, calling it “one of the first original and sustained poems of which America may be proud” (p. 48).
   • g. R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam (Chicago, 1955) sees the Edenic myth as inherent to American culture; while praising the study as exciting, I see the concept as too universal and not applicable to America unless the Columbian myth is somehow accounted for. Freneau posited the original American sin in an Edenic setting long before Hawthorne.

3. Gay Wilson Allen in American Prosody (New York, 1935) accurately summarizes Freneau's contribution to the history of metrics in the United States and characterizes the above dialogue between the sailor and his wife Susan as a kind of limerick, comic relief that is also important: “As early as 1774, Freneau wrote one of his best poems, Pictures of Columbus, in stanzas. In fact, in this poem the poet displayed almost all the devices of versification that he ever used. It even contains a little song, a sort of interlude in anapestics, Freneau's most important contribution to American metrical history” (p. 2).

4. Philip Marsh, “Freneau and the Bones of Columbus,” Modern Language Notes, 60 (1945), #1, 121-24, speculates that this piece which first appeared in the Trenton True American for August 17, 1822, was, in fact, written by Freneau. This depends mostly on Philip Freneau's knowledge of the traditional epitaph from Alcedo's Diccionario Geografico-Historico de las Indias Occidentales O America (Madrid, 1786), I, 72—which lines he rendered into a stanza of American poetry.