“Oh Bury Me Not…” on William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies:”By Laura Holder
Laura Holder
InsomniacEel@msn.com
On April 30, 1803, the United States signed a treaty with France to acquire the Louisiana Territory, about 800,000 square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains for about $15 million dollars. With that one treaty, the U.S. doubled its size and renewed the sense of exploration that had epitomized the first push westward to the Mississippi River. Two months later, that sense of exploration would be gratified when President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on a three-year survey of the vast Louisiana Purchase. What they reported was both heartening and exciting. The land was open and waiting, ready for those brave and eager enough to venture out into it.
Almost thirty years later, William Cullen Bryant would write a poem that spoke of the interest that still abounded about this new stretch of land. “The Prairies” sparked desire and interest, both in geographical location and the mystery of its past and would later serve as the basis on which James Fennimore Cooper would write some of his best known works. Bryant’s “The Prairies” put forth a picture of a beautiful, welcoming landscape that would later be contradicted by those who suffered its dangers as well as its beauties. To examine this contradiction, I will discuss Bryant’s view of the prairies followed by the more desolate view given in the old western ballad “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.”
In Bryant’s opening section, lines 1-34, the prairies are described with great detail. Bryant opens by creating an almost otherworldly image of the prairies. He does this in line 3 by emphasizing the fact that the word that describes the landscape is actually derived from a French word for meadow: “For which the speech of England has no name –.” He then follows this image by combining descriptions of air and ocean to explain the rolling hills and waving grasses of the prairie lands. Bryant’s description of the land brings it to life with his word choice. “And motionless forever. – Motionless? – /No – they are all unchained again.” “Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase/ The sunny ridges.” The use of “unchained” offers an image of freedom while his description of the “dark hollows” seems to compare them to some kind of bird, perhaps the prairie hawk, which he uses later in this passage.
The bold and powerful uses of color also help to bring this image into startling clarity. Bryant calls the flowers “golden” and “flame-like” and claims their beauty could “rival the constellations.” In this manner, Bryant references something that is visible the world over and gives his readers a point of comparison. Bryant also goes on to offer the impression that God created this space with extra care and a special touch, calling it a “temple of the sky.” Once again, he also compares aspects of the prairies to his own eastern home, saying the prairie sky is more “of a tendered blue” than back at home. Not only does this give the readers a point of reference, but it also encourages that sense of separateness and exploration because it is not truly comparing the two places but rather holding them up in contrast to one another.
Another way in which Bryant romanticizes the prairies is to play up the history of the area. Some have considered this Bryant’s own version of America’s Aeneid. He also reinforces the idea that white settlers own the land, as opposed to the Native Americans. He does this by offering the theory that the civilizations that were responsible for the “mighty mounds” of the mid-west were actually built by a highly advanced, civilized race that was eradicated, or in Bryant’s words, “butchered” by the Native Americans. This choice to present the Natives as heathen aggressors that were responsible for wiping out this past society reinforced the idea that this land belonged to the Americans rather than the Natives. Bryant even goes so far to state that it is the natural order of things in lines 86-89: “Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise/ Races of living things, glorious in strength,/ And perish, as the quickening breath of God/ Fills them, or is withdrawn.”
Bryant also plays up the “majestic” feel of the prairies by using words and phrases that remind his readers of the grandness of Europe. In lines 47-50, Bryant relates the mound builders to the Greeks and their construction of “the glittering Parthenon.” While his first reference is not necessarily a direct comparison between Europe and the prairies, but it definitely brings that area to mind and gives the impression that grandness is part of the landscape. Later, Bryant describes a beaver’s dam as a “little Venice.” Once again, this offers an image of grandness and majesty to the landscape.
The ending of Bryant’s poem offers a sense of the vast emptiness of the prairies, which is quite welcoming to those looking for more room to spread out as compared to the crowded eastern shore. Bryant does this by using obvious words like “solitude” and “alone,” but he also does it by emphasizing the presence of the wildlife of the area. By discussing the prevalence of the wildlife, Bryant emphasizes the absence of man. He describes being able to hear the buzzing of the bees, indicating the silence. By ending his poem with this inviting, open sense, Bryant makes the prairies seem available, inviting and ready for the taking.
About ten years after “The Prairies” was written and published, after the prairies saw the invasion of the eastern pioneers, the prairies were regarded in a less favoring view. In the 1840s, a song, which had originally begun as an ocean ballad, was adapted to fit the open emptiness of the prairies. This transition seemed only fitting since so many times the prairies were compared to the ocean, even by Bryant himself. The song had been a young, dying sailor’s lament, begging not to be buried at sea. The newer version was switched to a dying cowboy, begging his friends to not bury him in the open prairies.
“Oh bury me not on the lone prairie.’ Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free.” This depiction of the prairies offers an image of a wild place of scavengers. While the song only makes this one open description of the prairies, the entire song can be construed to describe them. By not mentioning them again, directly, at all, the song offers the image that they are empty wastelands with nothing to offer. The prairies are also described by the inferred contrast that is offered. When the cowboy speaks of a “green hillside” where he wishes to be buried, the inference is that the prairies offer no such places, which is in direct contrast to Bryant’s description of them as “verdant.”
A repeated line in the song offers another view of the prairies. “In a narrow grave, just six by three.” The cowboy states he does not wish to be buried in such a grave on the prairies, and yet, it is the same size grave he would receive where he to be buried in his green churchyard. Two reasons for his reluctance can be garnered from this. First, the prairies are so vast and endless, a small space of six by three would only reinforce how small and insignificant people feel in it. They are not in control.
The second reason is that, unlike an orderly churchyard, a grave, of any size, in the prairies would be, at best, difficult to find. The cowboy says he wishes to be where his family and loved ones can come to mourn him. Burials on the prairie were often unmarked, or if they were, they received a crudely made cross or perhaps a pile of stones. Names were often merely scratched on the markers or not even included at all. There was rarely time for proper burials, especially in the life of a cowhand on the trail and to be buried on the prairies meant to be lost in them with little to no hope of your grave being found again later on.
These two pieces offer consistently different views of the prairies. Bryant wrote about the prairies on the verge of romanticism. He wrote as a visitor to them, seeing them with “dilated sight.” The anonymous author of “Oh Bury Me Not…” wrote from a decidedly different standpoint. This song was written from the view of someone who had lived and experienced all the hardships that were to be seen on the prairies. Bryant spoke of death on the prairies as something that occurred in ancient civilizations. The song showed death on the prairies as something harsh, fast and unpleasant.
Where both pieces agreed was on the vastness of the prairies. They were wide, open and empty. They showed that perspective of the viewer influenced the perspective of the object being viewed. The prairies were either a land full of life, beauty and the chance of exploration, or they were empty, desolate wastelands. Or, perhaps the two pieces could exist together. Perhaps, the prairies were both.
© Laura Holder |