From Europe's proud, despotic shores
Hither the stranger takes his way,
And in our new found world explores
A happier soil, a milder sway,
Where no proud despot holds him down,
No slaves insult him with a crown.
Freneau was one of the first poets to write about America as a concept and an ideal that transcended mere borders. This poem composed in 1785 set the tone for untold tens of thousands to follow seeking to glorify America as a land of opportunity where people immigrants could escape the social and oppressive bondage of birth to stake out a dream and pursue equally alongside anyone else from any other country.
No pleasant fruit or blossom gaily smil’d.
Nought but unhappy plants or trees were seen,
The yew, the myrtle, and the church-yard elm,
The cypress, with its melancholy green.
There cedars dark, the osier, and the pine.
Shorn tamarisks, and weeping willows grew,
The poplar tall, the lotos, arid the lime,
And pyracantha did her leaves renew.
In addition to being the foremost poet of the Revolution, Freneau was a gifted contributor to the Graveyard School of verse; what might well be considered the Goths of their time. These poems were unrelievedly obsessed with morbid ruminations on death, dying and immortality. This long work features an assortment of appropriately macabre characters like skeletons, imps and Death himself weaving a path among tombstones and would definitely be fitting for a Halloween performance. The lines quoted above, however, reveal the depth of artistry that Freneau brought to the genre with is recurring imagery of “unhappy plants or trees” each being chosen precisely because of their longstanding symbolic allusion in literary works of the past to concepts associated with death and long, fitful slumber.
“Oh! Fatal day, when to this peaceful shore,
European despots sent this doctrine o’er,
That man’s vast race was born to lick the dust,
Feed on the winds, or toil thro’ life accurst;
Poor and despis’d, that others might be great,
And swoln to Monarchs to devour the state.”
In addition to be totally committed to the concept of American democracy like Thomas Paine, Freneau was also like the great pamphleteer in his vocal and strident support of the French Revolution’s overthrow of monarchy. The “doctrine” which the poet bemoans here is one he and Paine both found anathema to democracy as a general convention, but most especially the American version which was forged through rebellion against the most powerful of European despots. The successful Revolution among the colonies against the great power of the British monarchy thus could become a beacon for an insurrection capable of targeting every monarch on every throne in Europe.
“If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between, is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.”
The concluding lines of what is often considered the finest example of Freneau’s lyric poetry follows upon three stanzas in which the poet compares destiny of title flower to that of man, even drawing a parallel between the brief mortality of the flower growing in the wild to that of mankind following the fall from grace with banishment from the Garden of Eden. Ultimately, the poet is led to consider that while the honeysuckle may live out its entire life cycle unseen and unrecognized by human eyes, it nevertheless seeks and achieves a moment of beauty and glory. Man, by contrast, often is content to live out an infinitely longer expanse of existence without even making an attempt toward self-expression of aesthetic beauty.
