Of that life, and that love, and that early doom

Henry Timrod did all he could to support the Confederacy during the Civil War. Illness forced him to leave the army, as did his attempts to serve as a war correspondent from the war front. Instead, he moved to Columbia, South Carolina and tried to live a domestic life. He married his love Katie Godwin and started a family while serving as a journalist in town.

Then, about a year after his marriage, General William Tecumseh Sherman came to South Carolina and laid waste to Timrod's town. Known as an anti-Union provocateur, Timrod went into hiding. Columbia, the state's capital city, was left in ruins. "The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina," Sherman record. "I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her."

Months later, amid the chaos, on October 23, 1865, Timrod's son Willie died. Willie had been born that previous Christmas. With a father's pride, Timrod reported to a friend, "Everybody wonders at him! He is so transparently fair; so ethereal!" But his son's death left Timrod extremely forlorn; coupled with the destruction of his city, the loss of his job (as his newspaper ceased to exist), the Timrod family fell into poverty and despair. "[He] was the sweetest child," Timrod later wrote, "But every body thought him too ethereal to live." Even after the conclusion of the Civil War, the poet never recovered and died destitute in 1867.

Timrod's four-page poem, "Our Willie," serves both as a memorial to the boy as well as a testimonial of the poet's sinking despair. The poem concludes:

How could we speak in human phrase,
Of such scarce earthly traits and ways,
                What would not seem
                A doting dream,
In the creed of these sordid days?
                No! let us keep
                Deep, deep,
In sorrowing heart and aching brain,
This story hidden with the pain,
Which, since that blue October night
When Willie vanished from our sight,
Must haunt us even in our sleep.

In the gloom of the chamber where he died,
And by that grave which, through our care,
From Yule to Yule of every year,
Is made like Spring to bloom;
And where, at times, we catch the sigh
As of an angel floating nigh,
Who longs but has not power to tell
That in that violet-shrouded cell
Lies nothing better than the shell
Which he had cast aside—
By that sweet grave, in that dark room,
We may weave at will for each other's ear,
Of that life, and that love, and that early doom,
The tale which is shadowed here:
To us alone it will always be
As fresh as our own misery;
But enough, alas! for the world is said,
In the brief "Here lieth" of the dead!

Timrod: with meeker grace

The Southern Illustrated News published Henry Timrod's poem "The Two Armies" on May 30, 1863. The South Carolina poet did not explicitly say which army he was emphasizing in the poem but, as he often did, it's likely his more sympathetic perspective was meant to represent the Confederate Army. In "The Two Armies," he particularly emphasized the humanity and family life of the soldiers but also offers an ending looking forward to peace:

Two armies stand enrolled beneath
The banner with the starry wreath;
One, facing battle, blight and blast,
Through twice a hundred fields has passed;
Its deeds against a ruffian foe,
Steam, valley, hill, and mountain know,
Till every wind that sweeps the land
Goes, glory laden, from the strand.

The other, with a narrower scope,
Yet led by not less grand a hope,
Hath won, perhaps, as proud a place,
And wears its fame with meeker grace.
Wives march beneath its glittering sign,
Fond mothers swell the lovely line,
And many a sweetheart hides her blush
In the young patriot's generous flush.

No breeze of battle ever fanned
The colors of that tender band;
Its office is beside the bed,
Where throbs some sick or wounded head.
It does not court the soldier's tomb,
But plies the needle and the loom;
And, by a thousand peaceful deeds,
Supplies a struggling nation's needs.

Nor is that army's gentle might
Unfelt amid the deadly fight;
It nerves the son's, the husband's hand,
It points the lover's fearless brand;
It thrills the languid, warms the cold,
Gives even new courage to the bold;
And sometimes lifts the veriest clod
To its own lofty trust in God.

When Heaven shall blow the trump of peace,
And bid this weary warfare cease,
Their several missions nobly done,
The triumph grasped, and freedom won,
Both armies, from their toils at rest,
Alike may claim the victor's crest,
But each shall see its dearest prize
Gleam softly from the other's eyes.

Timrod: wait and watch for blood

As the Union's military forces were blockading Charleston, South Carolina, that town's most famous native poet Henry Timrod was composing a verse on the historic Civil War event. "Charleston" was published in the Charleston Mercury on December 3, 1862. The poem is able to express a heroic strength for ordinary South Carolinians who carry on their daily routines, while still maintaining a sense of foreboding and of uncertainty, particularly in its final lines:

Calm as that second summer which precedes
    The first fall of the snow,
In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
    The City bides the foe.

As yet, behind their ramparts stern and proud,
    Her bolted thunders sleep —
Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud,
    Looms o'er the solemn deep.

No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scar
    To guard the holy strand;
But Moultrie holds in leash her dogs of war
    Above the level sand.

And down the dunes a thousand guns lie couched,
    Unseen, beside the flood —
Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched
    That wait and watch for blood.

Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,
    Walk grave and thoughtful men,
Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's blade
    As lightly as the pen.

And maidens, with such eyes as would grow dim
    Over a bleeding hound,
Seem each one to have caught the strength of him
    Whose sword she sadly bound.

Thus girt without and garrisoned at home,
    Day patient following day,
Old Charleston looks from roof, and spire, and dome,
    Across her tranquil bay.

Ships, through a hundred foes, from Saxon lands
    And spicy Indian ports,
Bring Saxon steel and iron to her hands,
    And Summer to her courts.

But still, along yon dim Atlantic line,
    The only hostile smoke
Creeps like a harmless mist above the brine,
    From some frail, floating oak.

Shall the Spring dawn, and she still clad in smiles,
    And with an unscathed brow,
Rest in the strong arms of her palm-crowned isles,
    As fair and free as now?

We know not; in the temple of the Fates
    God has inscribed her doom;
And, all untroubled in her faith, she waits
    The triumph or the tomb.

Timrod: Across a thousand storm swept leagues

On July 25, 1862, the Charleston Mercury published the poem "Field Flowers" by native South Carolina poet Henry Timrod; it was later renamed "Two Field Flowers" about a year later. The poem was at least partially inspired by his wife England-born wife Katie:

Half hidden in a crimson-curtained nook,
   Reclined the radiant girl,
Unconscious that I bent above her book,
   Till — I had kissed a curl!

Then, with a blush that mocked the damask's tinge.
   She held the volume up.
And showed a daisy's faded disk and fringe,
   And one pale butter-cup.

Across a thousand storm swept leagues of sea
   The delicate things had sped;
Since they had fluttered on an English lea,
   But two bright moons were dead.

Realizing that these flowers had traveled all the way from England, Timrod considers their possible connection to Chaucer or that, perhaps, even Shakespeare had written about them. Much like his other poems to his wife, he considers walking with her in the countryside of her native land:

Now in the wheat I marked the whitening tops.
   Now paced some moorland brown.
And the next moment in a hazel copse,
   Was shaking filberts down

Thus as my lithesome fancy ran its rounds,
   It seemed new strength to win,
Till at the last it scorned a county's bounds,
   And took all England in!

Even as he imagines wandering in that country's "mighty cities" and "old cathedral towns," however, his thoughts bring him back to the "one fair English maid," Katie. Still, he remembers his native South and snaps back to reality (and the conflict occurring there):

Not yet the vision from my soul had passed,
   When, for a second's space,
I felt as if three rose leaves had been cast
   By fairies in my face.

Far off, within some magic mountain dell,
   Lay chained the frolic South;
And, therefore, of the touch that broke the spell,
   I charge a woman's mouth.

Timrod: the Southron and his English bride

A poem came to Henry Timrod as an early Christmas gift; as he told a friend on Christmas day, "The Goddess knocked at my door... and handed me a poem titled 'Katie'." Within about a week of its composition The Charleston Mercury for December 28, 1861 published the love poem, "Katie":

It may be through some foreign grace,
And unfamiliar charm of face;
It may be that across the foam
Which bore her from her childhood's home,
By some strange spell, my Katie brought,
Along with English creeds and thought—
Entangled in her golden hair—
Some English sunshine, warmth, and air!
I cannot tell—but here to-day,
A thousand billowy leagues away
From that green isle whose twilight skies
No darker are than Katie's eyes.
She seems to me, go where she will,
An English girl in England still!

The "Katie" in question was Katie Godwin, a British woman who was also the sister of his own sister's husband. According to the poem, as she walks, nature responds and comes to life. They walk together through this pictorial scene, "through rippling waves of wheat" and "mats of clover sweet," first in an Ancient Saxon town, then in the town where she was born. Together they visit a church and other scenes from her youth ("Some spot that's sacred to her Past"). All the while, the world around is an ideal paradise:

Has not the sky a deeper blue,
Have not the trees a greener hue,
And bend they not with lordlier grace
And nobler shapes above the place
Where on one cloudless winter morn
My Katie to this life was born?
Ah, folly! long hath fled the hour
When love to sight gave keener power,
And lovers looked for special boons
In brighter flowers and larger moons.
But wave the foliage as it may,
And let the sky be ashen gray,
Thus much at least a manly youth
May hold—and yet not blush—as truth:
If near that blessed spot of earth
Which saw the cherished maiden's birth
No softer dews than usual rise,
And life there keeps its wonted guise,
Yet not the less that spot may seem
As lovely as a poet's dream...

Timrod, in the form of his narrator, soon realizes that he is a stranger in these lands across the sea and they are transported to his own native land in the American South. Bewitched by her beauty, he barely recognizes his homeland, however, and mistakes it for another town in England. This, he realizes, is precisely why he hopes she will join him there:

Such is the land in which I live,
And, Katie! such the soul I give.
Come! ere another morning beam,
We'll cleave the sea with wings of steam;
And soon, despite of storm or calm,
Beneath my native groves of palm,
Kind friends shall greet, with joy and pride,
The Southron and his English bride!

Timrod excused himself for the poem's highly romantic notions. As he described in a letter, "Katie and I are by no means on the lover-like terms implied in my verse. Nor indeed are we likely to become so." The real-life Katie was equally modest, noting that the poem "invested me with attributes I never possessed. Many is the time, that I have urged him to see me as I really was." Even so, Timrod and Katie Godwin married in February 1864.

Timrod: whispers round the body of the dead

The Charleston Mercury's October 7, 1861 issue included the poem "I Know Not Why" (also published as "Sonnet IX") by South Carolina-born poet Henry Timrod:

I know not why, but all this weary day,
Suggested by no definite grief or pain,
Sad fancies have been flitting through my brain:
Now it has been a vessel losing way
Rounding a stormy headland; now a gray
Dull waste of clouds above a wintry main;
And then a banner drooping in the rain,
And meadows beaten into bloody clay.
Strolling at random with this shadowy woe
At heart, I chanced to wander hither! Lo!
A league of desolate marsh-land, with its lush,
Hot grasses in a noisome, tide-left bed,
And faint, warm airs, that rustle in the hush
Like whispers round the body of the dead!

After teaching in other towns, Timrod returned to his native Charleston when the Civil War broke out. He became the unofficial Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, and wrote many war-related poems. The war imagery in the sonnet above is unmistakeable. Timrod served in the Confederate army for only a short time due to chronic illness and, less than a year after this poem, he became a war correspondent on behalf of the Charleston Mercury, inspired by the bloody encounter at Shiloh. Again, his service was short-lived. By the end of the war, his family was left impoverished, despite his fame.

150 years ago: Timrod and Harper

 The Daily Courier in Charleston, South Carolina published "Ethnogenesis" in its February 23, 1861 issue. The poem, written by Henry Timrod, was immediately republished and celebrated throughout the South. Also known as "Ode on Occasion of the Meeting of the Southern Congress," asks that the date signifying the birth of the new Confederate States of America be marked in Heaven. At their first meeting of Congress, held in Montgomery, Alabama, Timrod was inspired to write his poem then and there. "At last, we are a nation among nations," he writes. Amid his rejoicing, however, Timrod considers the possibility of a violent response from the North:

What if, both mad and blinded in their rage,
Our foes should fling us down their mortal gage,
And with a hostile step profane our sod!
We shall not shrink, my brothers, but go forth
To meet them...

That same day, the Anti-Slavery Bugle published "To the Cleveland Union-Savers," a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Subtitled "An Appeal from One of the Fugitive's Own Race," the poet notes that Union men who believed in freedom had yet to act strongly on behalf of enslaved people:

Men of Cleveland, had a vulture
   Clutched a timid dove for prey,
Would ye not, with human pity,
   Drive the gory bird away?

...On your Union's bloody altar
   Was your helpless victim laid;
Mercy, truth, and justice shuddered,
   But your hands would give no aid.

And ye sent her back to torture,
   Stripped of freedom, robbed of right, —
Thrust the wretched, captive stranger
   Back to Slavery's gloomy night!

Sent her back where men may trample
   On her honor and her fame
And upon her lips so dusky
   Press the cup of woe and shame.

There is blood upon your city, —
   Dark and dismal is the stain;
And your hands would fail to cleanse it,
   Though you should Lake Erie drain.

There's a curse upon your Union!
   Fearful sounds are in the air;
As if thunderbolts were forging
   Answers to the bondman's prayer...

But ye cannot stay the whirlwind,
   When the storm begins to break;
And our God doth rise in judgment
   For the poor and needy's sake.

And your guilty, sin-cursed Union
   Shall be shaken to its base,
Till ye learn that simple justice
   Is the right of every race.

Timrod: peace in all our hearts!

How would one celebrate a holiday when war has torn your world apart? That is the question South Carolina-born poet Henry Timrod asked in his poem "Christmas." Timrod, whose own enlistment in the Confederate Army was short-lived, recognizes that his battle-torn home land of the South can not look at their sacred holiday the same way:

   How grace this hallowed day?
Shall happy bells, from yonder ancient spire,
Send their glad greetings to each Christmas fire
   Round which the children play?

...How shall "we grace the day?
With feast, and song, and dance, and antique sports,
And shout of happy children in the courts,
   And tales of ghost and fay?

"Dread shapes of battle" will appear in our mind's eye, no matter how much we try to celebrate. We will sadly remember "some loved reveller" who now lies mute beneath the snow "in cold Virginian earth." Timrod, later nicknamed the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, comes to the conclusion that there is only one way to celebrate Christmas now: pray for peace. The message is substantially different from his earlier sentiment to prepare for battle. The poem is almost heart-wrenching in its sincere plea:

...Pray for the peace which long
Hath left this tortured land, and haply now
Holds its white court on some far mountain's brow,
   There hardly safe from wrong!

   Let every sacred fane
Call its sad votaries to the shrine of God,
And, with the cloister and the tented sod,
   Join in one solemn strain!

...He, who, till time shall cease,
Will watch that earth, where once, not all in vain,
He died to give us peace, may not disdain
   A prayer whose theme is—peace...

   Oh, ponder what it means!
Oh, turn the rapturous thought in every way!
Oh, give the vision and the fancy play,
   And shape the corning scenes!

   Peace in the quiet dales,
Made rankly fertile by the blood of men,
Peace in the woodland, and the lonely glen,
   Peace in the peopled vales!

   Peace in the crowded town,
Peace in a thousand fields of waving grain,
Peace in the highway and the flowery lane,
   Peace on the wind-swept down!

   Peace on the farthest seas,
Peace in our sheltered bays and ample streams,
Peace wheresoe'er our starry garland gleams,
   And peace in every breeze!

   Peace on the whirring marts,
Peace where the scholar thinks, the hunter roams,
Peace, God of Peace! peace, peace, in all our homes,
   And peace in all our hearts!

Birth of Henry Timrod

The only son of William and Thyrza Timrod was born on December 8, 1828. They named him Henry Timrod. He would spend most of his life in the state of his birth, South Carolina. One day as toddler, young Henry stared stared out the window at a lightning storm. The boy said the thunder was like God's voice. His father (himself a binder and amateur poet) predicted, "That boy will, if he lives, be a poet." His father was right.

Henry Timrod was later nicknamed the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, though he died in poverty in 1867. In 1901, he was memorialized with a public monument in the city of his birth. Ten years later, his poem about his home state was adapted to become the official song of South Carolina. Yet, today, he remains relatively forgotten — which, perhaps, he predicted in his poem "A Vision of Poesy." The poem refers to a boy of humble parentage: "The stars that shone upon his lonely birth / Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— / Yet no tradition hath preserved his name."

His poem "The Past":

To-day's most trivial act may hold the seed
   Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;
Oh, cherish always every word and deed!
   The simplest record of thyself hath worth.

If thou hast ever slighted one old thought,
   Beware lest Grief enforce the truth at last;
The time must come wherein thou shalt be taught
   The value and the beauty of the Past.

Not merely as a warner and a guide,
   "A voice behind thee," sounding to the strife;
But something never to be put aside,
   A part and parcel of thy present life.

Not as a distant and a darkened sky,
   Through which the stars peep, and the moonbeams glow;
But a surrounding atmosphere, whereby
   We live and breathe, sustained in pain and woe.

A shadowy land, where joy and sorrow kiss,
   Each still to each corrective and relief,
Where dim delights are brightened into bliss,
   And nothing wholly perishes but Grief.

Ah, me!—not dies—no more than spirit dies;
   But in a change like death is clothed with wings;
A serious angel, with entranced eyes,
   Looking to far-off and celestial things.

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves

On June 16, 1866, Henry Timrod stood before the graves of more than 600 Confederate soldiers at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina. Thousands boarded carriages, wagons, and railroad cars despite heavy rain, passing by store fronts which closed at noon in honor of the ceremony. As the program was about to begin at 5:00 p.m., rain finally stopped.

A melodeon and choir provided the music for the ceremony overseen by the Charleston Ladies' Association. The poem which Timrod presented is generally acknowledged as his most famous, "Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead":

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
  Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
  The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
  The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
  The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
  Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
  And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
  More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
  Shall overlook this bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
  There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
  By mourning beauty crowned!

Timrod's poem became incredibly famous, and quite rapidly. His work, among that of others, helped establish the "Lost Cause" image of the South: fallen, but proud. Timrod, himself a Charleston-born Confederate veteran,  earned the honorary title "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy." He died within two years of presenting this poem. His dirge certainly contrasted with northerner Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Hymn of Peace," presented three years later, almost to the day. Timrod was later memorialized himself, 35 years later.

Henry Timrod memorialized

Charleston, South Carolina memorialized the poet Henry Timrod on May 1, 1901 with a large statue in Washington Square. Timrod, who was born in Charleston, gained notoriety as "The Poet Laureate of the Confederacy."

A trained lawyer and teacher, Timrod published poetry here and there as early as 1848. However, it was not until the outbreak of the Civil War that he achieve significant fame. Illness kept him from serving as a soldier for long so he turned to editing a newspaper in his hometown. He became prolific as a poet but never earned much money; he died poor of tuberculosis in 1867.

Proceedings for the memorial began at 5:00 p.m. that "glorious May day with rays aslant," as one newspaper reported. It was unveiled from beneath an oversized United States flag. The massive crowd ("a scene of rare beauty," according to the newspaper) saw a tall pedestal of gray granite, surmounted by a bronze bust sculpted by Edward V. Valentine. Children presented wreaths and flowers, enough that the base of the monument was no longer visible. If Timrod himself had been there, perhaps he would have humbly yet graciously thanked the crowd by reciting this sonnet of his:

I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,
Less for the gifts than for the love you send,
Less for the flowers than what the flowers convey,
If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,
And not unto myself ascribe, unduly,
Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,
Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?
And am I flattered by my own affection?
But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced
Something above a short-lived predilection,
And which, for that I know no dearer name,
I designate as love, without love's flame.