The Indian Burying Ground By Philip Freneau
Submitted by:
Mhel Antonette Espiritu Dyann Garcia
Submitted to:
Professor Belen Z. De Asis
I. Biography of Phillip Freneau
Phillip Freneau, poet, was born in New York City, 2 January 1752 and died near Freehold, New Jersey in 1832. After he graduated from Princeton in 1771, he was author, editor, government official, trader, and farmer. He tried teaching and soon found that he hated it. As regards the genesis of his poems, two facts in his life are especially important. His newspaper work encouraged a fatal production of the satirical and humorous verse that gave him reputation; and his trading voyages inspired poems descriptive of the scenery of the southern islands, and made possible what is perhaps his most original work, his naval ballads. He decided to settle down and he married Eleanor Forman and tried to withdraw to a quiet job as an assistant editor in New York. After another decade of feverish public action, Freneau withdrew again in 1801, when Jefferson was elected president. He retired to his farm and returned occasionally to the sea. During his last thirty years, he worked on his poems, wrote essays attacking the greed and selfishness of corrupt politicians, and sold pieces of his lands to produce a small income. He discovered that he had given his best years of literary productivity to his country, for it had been in the few stolen moments of the hectic 1780s that he found the inspiration for his best poems, such as The Indian Burying Ground and The Wild Honeysuckle. He has one strong conviction that runs through all of his poetry. He believes in an ideal America, one that would take the best from European civilization (commerce and science) and the best from Nature and the Indian. Freneau is not concerned with how this will happen, he is merely sure that it will happen and the Englishman and Indian will cease to exist in any physical way in the new United States of America. In his writing the British are simply dismissed as foreigners and invaders of America. Philip Freneau was known as "the poet of the American Revolution" because of the many ballads and satires he wrote during this period. His verse, prose and partisan essays appeared in numerous periodicals, and several volumes of his works were published over a half-century. "The Indian Burying Ground" was first published in the American Museum, November, 1787
II. Poem
THE INDIAN BURYING-GROUND
Here still a lofty rock remains, In spite of all the learned have said,
On which the curious eye may trace
I still my old opinion keep;
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The posture that we give the dead
The fancies of a ruder race.
Points out the soul's eternal sleep. Here still an aged elm aspires, Not so the ancients of these lands;--
Beneath whose far projecting shade
The Indian, when from life released,
(And which the shepherd still admires)
Again is seated with his friends, And shares again the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl, And venison, for a journey dressed, Bespeak the nature of the soul, Activity, that wants no rest.
The children of the forest played.
There oft a restless Indian queen (Pale Shebah with her braided hair), And many a barbarous form is seen To chide the man that lingers there.
His bow for action ready bent,
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
And arrows with a head of stone,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
Can only mean that life is spent,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
And not the old ideas gone.
The hunter and the deer -- a shade!
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
And long shall timorous Fancy see
No fraud upon the dead commit,-Observe the swelling turf, and say, They do not lie, but here they sit.
The painted chief, and pointed spear, And Reason's self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.
III. Analysis
The poem describes the spirituality of Indians surrounding death, which is seen as a happy occasion, unlike Western white culture. The poem is about an Indian culture, especially and Indian funeral. It describes death in this tradition, which is looked at as rude and savage. Still, the speaker reveals a lot about its strength and beauty as the poem goes on. It is a message inviting people to understand this culture as it is without prejudices. Unlike the white man's tradition, in the Indian's, the dead Indian is dressed in special clothes as though celebrating a happy event. Death in the Indian tradition has a different meaning. It is no longer that sad and dreadful event that everyone is afraid of. The dead person becomes a warrior who protects the land. This explains his posture and the way he is dressed in. The conception of death in this culture makes of it a different one from the white man's. The Western white culture thinks that just because you are buried laying down that you will be in an eternal sleep. The Indian culture is just the opposite of this. They believe that when you die your soul still lives on and you are reunited with all things that have passed on before you. His poem wants to tell us that Native Americans’ attitude towards life and death, which is seen in stanza ten, “And reason’s self shall bow the knee”. By this he is saying that the truth, the white man is living by, has to knuckle under to the Native Americans way of life. He sees the Native Americans’ as a very spiritual people, and by pointing out the Native Americans as the superior thinkers in connection to life and death he dissociate himself from materialism. Even though he praises nature, which is materialistic, he actually praises the creation and life.
