Back in 2007, in celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s 200th birthday, Brian Kologe visits the Homestead and recalls the poet’s influence on his youth.
This past December, only days from the exact bicentennial of John Greenleaf Whittier’s birth, I attended a reenactment of “Snow-Bound,” often cited as the poet’s masterpiece. The event was staged at the Whittier Homestead in Haverhill where the poet was born in humble circumstances to Quaker parents. The house and 69 acres of farmland that inspired many of his most famous poems remain intact.
Parking at Biggart’s Ice Cream, we were motioned into a waiting school bus by a suspiciously attired gentleman in a black cape and top hat. The affable specter turned out to be Raymond Comeau, president of the Homestead’s Board of Trustees. His brief introduction to Whittier emphasized that it was difficult to overstate “Greenleaf’s renown during his own life and after his death in 1892.” Across the nation, schools and even a city have been named in his honor. His hymns are sung in churches, and his poems are collected in the Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Best Loved Poems of the American People.
“Some states had holidays on his birthday,” said Comeau. “We’re talking about someone who was a major force in our country’s history in the 19th century. In the 1830s, when no one was doing much about slavery, Whittier spoke out about it, putting his very life in peril.”
A familiar sight in Amesbury, the Whittier mural on Main Street. Photo by Brian Kologe
In 1826, when Whittier was 19-years-old, he apprenticed to be a cobbler. However, his reading of Robert Burns and other poets created a secret aspiration to follow in their footsteps. That year, William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Newburyport Free Press, accepted Whittier’s first poem for publication and encouraged him to further his education at Haverhill Academy.
Garrison’s influence and Whittier’s Quaker upbringing steered him toward a passionate cause: the abolition of American slavery. With prose and verse, as editor of several newspapers including the Haverhill Gazette, Whittier wrote inspired denunciations of an institution that was a cornerstone of the American economy.
Those under the misapprehension that Northern abolitionists were preaching to the choir might consider that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a fellow abolitionist and commander of the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War, was removed as minister of Newburyport’s First Religious Society for his anti-slavery sermons. Whittier himself had his carriage peppered withbullets at a rally in Concord, NH, in 1835. Three years later, his newspaper offices in Philadelphia were burned to the ground by an angry mob. Unlike many with his convictions, however, Whittier deplored armed force, and it has been suggested that his public pleas for civil disobedience antedated those of Henry David Thoreau.
A significant portrait of Whittier, one of the very few he actually sat for, painted by Robert Peckham in 1833. Courtesy John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace
In 1840, in ill health, he retired from the fray, retreating to a cottage he had purchased four years earlier in Amesbury. He turned to mining the landscape of his childhood for themes. In 1866, “Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyll” made him a household name for generations.
Today, Whittier’s verse is no longer held in the same esteem. Lewis Leary, one of his biographers, contends that Whittier modestly conceded he wasn’t much of a poet, “then put together four solid volumes of collected verse to prove it.” My ambivalence toward the poet’s work had earlier sources.
Many and many a year ago, I was one of those elementary school children marched to the head of the class to recite poetry. To a boy of ten, poetry’s salient characteristic was rhyme, and rhyme was only half a word. The other half was nursery.
Rhyme and rhythm were diabolical adhesives designed to make slippery verses memorable. Our texts were limited to the likes of Longfellow, Poe, Riley, Bryant, and, of course, John Greenleaf Whittier.
Behold the erstwhile barefoot boy, back to the blackboard, his cheek of tan gone chalky, reciting Whittier’s “The Merrimac.” Growing up in New York, my only association with “Merrimac” was the Confederate ironclad of that name.
And clearly on the calm air swells
The twilight voice of distant bells.
The barefoot boy hesitated.
The teacher prompted: “From…”
“From,” quoth the barefoot boy.
From Ocean’s bosom, white and thin,
The mists come slowly rolling in…
In high school “Ocean’s bosom” would be revealed as personification. In college, it was pathetic fallacy. In the fifth grade, while hardly the most salacious word in my vocabulary, uttering “bosom” before my peers was like facing a firing squad for a grade.
Despite my rocky introduction to poetry, I majored in English. Upon moving to Amesbury in 1980, I discovered that my education qualified me for an unexpected variety of opportunities.
While driving trucks for Eastern Lumber and hefting 100-pound feed bags for North Shore Grain, I made my acquaintance with the region’s back roads and salt air towns. I spent hours lost on county roads crossing and re-crossing the Whittier Bridge, passing Whittier Tech, making a left or right on Whittier Avenue. I couldn’t fail to notice the mural in downtown Amesbury nor the bronze Barefoot Boy in the Haverhill library.
The Merrimack Valley Library Consortium catalog lists 147 entries for Robert Frost, 164 for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a staggering 530 for John Greenleaf Whittier. One of these, Samuel T. Pickard’s 1904 literary tour guide (with copious photos and a map), confirmed that I was living in Whittier-Land. Though Whittier-Land supplies its readers with electric streetcar directions to Union Cemetery where the poet is buried, most of its text seems pretty up to date. It describes the poet’s house on Friend Street in Amesbury, Garrison’s house in Newburyport, and identifies dozens of sites—Kenoza Lake, Curzon’s Mill, even some rocks and trees—mentioned in Whittier’s verse. The poet’s spectacles, walking stick, volume of Burns, and the desk upon which he composed “Snow-Bound” seem to have remained where Pickard last saw them a century ago.
I discovered that without realizing it I had been passing the Captain’s Well, subject of a Whittier poem, on my way to the Amesbury Post Office, not to mention the home of Thomas Macy, the subject of two more. I attended concerts at the Amesbury Friends Meeting House where Whittier had worshiped and upon whose building committee he had sat.
Like Whittier and Thoreau, the more widely I traveled in my new neighborhood, the less inclined I became to wander elsewhere. I became more curious about the region’s history and legend. My diversions took unexpected turns. I tended an acre of vegetables, raised chickens, and split firewood. I fished the Artichoke and rode horses in Maudsley. While paddling down the Merrimack from Lawrence to the mouth, I found myself trying to picture it through Pennacook eyes, wondering if Norsemen had wandered this far south, and imagining colonial shallops fishing for salmon, shad, and sturgeon. And, I became, like Whittier, protective of the place. Hearing that a hotel was planned for Deer Island he wrote:
Reenactment of “Snow-Bound,” staged at the Whittier Homestead in Haverhill. Photos by Kate Harper
I heard, me thought, a murmur faint,
Our River making its complaint:
What’s all this pother on my banks –
Squinting eyes and pacing shanks –
Peeping, running, left and right,
With compass and theodolite?
Would they spoil this sacred place?
Well, not if you judge it by the Homestead. When our bus arrived, Mr. Comeau surrendered us to other anachronistically dressed souls who fortified us with hot cider and ushered us into what had been Whittier’s low dim kitchen. A fire blazed in the hearth. As the weather hadn’t given snow, we were treated to a tape-recorded blizzard. Passages of the poem were read and we were introduced to the family and its guests. As with the last time I had read the poem, I felt unimpeded by footnotes. I had come to know the Salisbury marshes, the Isles of Shoals, the Powwow, Mt. Agamenticus, and Rocks Village. I had even seen a gundalow replica—one of the shoal-draft barges used on the marsh.
If you live in New England, sooner or later a good northeaster knocks out your power. The phone goes dead. Your computer and television become extravagant paperweights. The disorderly conduct of celebrities and professional athletes seems strangely remote. If you have a fireplace or woodstove, even a couple of candles, you find the matches. The wind and cold herd your family into a single room, usually the kitchen. What you mistook for a catastrophe is revealed as winter’s ultimate gift: an unassailable excuse to do absolutely nothing. You can talk or play Scrabble. Or you might even dust off that neglected volume of Whittier.
Re-discovering Whittier – Jan/Feb 2008
This past December, only days from the exact bicentennial of John Greenleaf Whittier’s birth, I attended a reenactment of “Snow-Bound,” often cited as the poet’s masterpiece. The event was staged at the Whittier Homestead in Haverhill where the poet was born in humble circumstances to Quaker parents. The house and 69 acres of farmland that inspired many of his most famous poems remain intact.
Parking at Biggart’s Ice Cream, we were motioned into a waiting school bus by a suspiciously attired gentleman in a black cape and top hat. The affable specter turned out to be Raymond Comeau, president of the Homestead’s Board of Trustees. His brief introduction to Whittier emphasized that it was difficult to overstate “Greenleaf’s renown during his own life and after his death in 1892.” Across the nation, schools and even a city have been named in his honor. His hymns are sung in churches, and his poems are collected in the Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Best Loved Poems of the American People.
“Some states had holidays on his birthday,” said Comeau. “We’re talking about someone who was a major force in our country’s history in the 19th century. In the 1830s, when no one was doing much about slavery, Whittier spoke out about it, putting his very life in peril.”
A familiar sight in Amesbury, the Whittier mural on Main Street. Photo by Brian Kologe
In 1826, when Whittier was 19-years-old, he apprenticed to be a cobbler. However, his reading of Robert Burns and other poets created a secret aspiration to follow in their footsteps. That year, William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Newburyport Free Press, accepted Whittier’s first poem for publication and encouraged him to further his education at Haverhill Academy.
Garrison’s influence and Whittier’s Quaker upbringing steered him toward a passionate cause: the abolition of American slavery. With prose and verse, as editor of several newspapers including the Haverhill Gazette, Whittier wrote inspired denunciations of an institution that was a cornerstone of the American economy.
Those under the misapprehension that Northern abolitionists were preaching to the choir might consider that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a fellow abolitionist and commander of the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War, was removed as minister of Newburyport’s First Religious Society for his anti-slavery sermons. Whittier himself had his carriage peppered withbullets at a rally in Concord, NH, in 1835. Three years later, his newspaper offices in Philadelphia were burned to the ground by an angry mob. Unlike many with his convictions, however, Whittier deplored armed force, and it has been suggested that his public pleas for civil disobedience antedated those of Henry David Thoreau.
A significant portrait of Whittier, one of the very few he actually sat for, painted by Robert Peckham in 1833. Courtesy John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace
In 1840, in ill health, he retired from the fray, retreating to a cottage he had purchased four years earlier in Amesbury. He turned to mining the landscape of his childhood for themes. In 1866, “Snow-Bound, A Winter Idyll” made him a household name for generations.
Today, Whittier’s verse is no longer held in the same esteem. Lewis Leary, one of his biographers, contends that Whittier modestly conceded he wasn’t much of a poet, “then put together four solid volumes of collected verse to prove it.” My ambivalence toward the poet’s work had earlier sources.
Many and many a year ago, I was one of those elementary school children marched to the head of the class to recite poetry. To a boy of ten, poetry’s salient characteristic was rhyme, and rhyme was only half a word. The other half was nursery.
Rhyme and rhythm were diabolical adhesives designed to make slippery verses memorable. Our texts were limited to the likes of Longfellow, Poe, Riley, Bryant, and, of course, John Greenleaf Whittier.
Behold the erstwhile barefoot boy, back to the blackboard, his cheek of tan gone chalky, reciting Whittier’s “The Merrimac.” Growing up in New York, my only association with “Merrimac” was the Confederate ironclad of that name.
And clearly on the calm air swells
The twilight voice of distant bells.
The barefoot boy hesitated.
The teacher prompted: “From…”
“From,” quoth the barefoot boy.
From Ocean’s bosom, white and thin,
The mists come slowly rolling in…
In high school “Ocean’s bosom” would be revealed as personification. In college, it was pathetic fallacy. In the fifth grade, while hardly the most salacious word in my vocabulary, uttering “bosom” before my peers was like facing a firing squad for a grade.
Despite my rocky introduction to poetry, I majored in English. Upon moving to Amesbury in 1980, I discovered that my education qualified me for an unexpected variety of opportunities.
While driving trucks for Eastern Lumber and hefting 100-pound feed bags for North Shore Grain, I made my acquaintance with the region’s back roads and salt air towns. I spent hours lost on county roads crossing and re-crossing the Whittier Bridge, passing Whittier Tech, making a left or right on Whittier Avenue. I couldn’t fail to notice the mural in downtown Amesbury nor the bronze Barefoot Boy in the Haverhill library.
The Merrimack Valley Library Consortium catalog lists 147 entries for Robert Frost, 164 for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a staggering 530 for John Greenleaf Whittier. One of these, Samuel T. Pickard’s 1904 literary tour guide (with copious photos and a map), confirmed that I was living in Whittier-Land. Though Whittier-Land supplies its readers with electric streetcar directions to Union Cemetery where the poet is buried, most of its text seems pretty up to date. It describes the poet’s house on Friend Street in Amesbury, Garrison’s house in Newburyport, and identifies dozens of sites—Kenoza Lake, Curzon’s Mill, even some rocks and trees—mentioned in Whittier’s verse. The poet’s spectacles, walking stick, volume of Burns, and the desk upon which he composed “Snow-Bound” seem to have remained where Pickard last saw them a century ago.
I discovered that without realizing it I had been passing the Captain’s Well, subject of a Whittier poem, on my way to the Amesbury Post Office, not to mention the home of Thomas Macy, the subject of two more. I attended concerts at the Amesbury Friends Meeting House where Whittier had worshiped and upon whose building committee he had sat.
Like Whittier and Thoreau, the more widely I traveled in my new neighborhood, the less inclined I became to wander elsewhere. I became more curious about the region’s history and legend. My diversions took unexpected turns. I tended an acre of vegetables, raised chickens, and split firewood. I fished the Artichoke and rode horses in Maudsley. While paddling down the Merrimack from Lawrence to the mouth, I found myself trying to picture it through Pennacook eyes, wondering if Norsemen had wandered this far south, and imagining colonial shallops fishing for salmon, shad, and sturgeon. And, I became, like Whittier, protective of the place. Hearing that a hotel was planned for Deer Island he wrote:
Reenactment of “Snow-Bound,” staged at the Whittier Homestead in Haverhill. Photos by Kate Harper
I heard, me thought, a murmur faint,
Our River making its complaint:
What’s all this pother on my banks –
Squinting eyes and pacing shanks –
Peeping, running, left and right,
With compass and theodolite?
Would they spoil this sacred place?
Well, not if you judge it by the Homestead. When our bus arrived, Mr. Comeau surrendered us to other anachronistically dressed souls who fortified us with hot cider and ushered us into what had been Whittier’s low dim kitchen. A fire blazed in the hearth. As the weather hadn’t given snow, we were treated to a tape-recorded blizzard. Passages of the poem were read and we were introduced to the family and its guests. As with the last time I had read the poem, I felt unimpeded by footnotes. I had come to know the Salisbury marshes, the Isles of Shoals, the Powwow, Mt. Agamenticus, and Rocks Village. I had even seen a gundalow replica—one of the shoal-draft barges used on the marsh.
If you live in New England, sooner or later a good northeaster knocks out your power. The phone goes dead. Your computer and television become extravagant paperweights. The disorderly conduct of celebrities and professional athletes seems strangely remote. If you have a fireplace or woodstove, even a couple of candles, you find the matches. The wind and cold herd your family into a single room, usually the kitchen. What you mistook for a catastrophe is revealed as winter’s ultimate gift: an unassailable excuse to do absolutely nothing. You can talk or play Scrabble. Or you might even dust off that neglected volume of Whittier.