if occasion e’er doth call,
The world at large shall have it all.
And now good people I must close
This solemn scene that since arose.
Then take the truth in this my song,
And overlook where I am wrong.79
The concluding disclaimer shifts responsibility to the reader, who ultimately must filter the poem’s truths from its errors (a standard trope in disaster poems like this). In the context of the poem’s exchanges through recitation and the dissemination of printed or handwritten copies, this conclusion also links poet and reader in a community grounded in the work of poetry. The broadside thereby offers an occasion for audiences to reflect on the occasion that brings them together, which is not the sinking of the Charles but the recount of that tragedy in the distribution of the poem, its sale in song and sheet by a balladmonger.
Here, too, Shaw has left a very specific record of his travels and travails hawking this poem. His peddling circuits wound through a large piece of southern Maine. After printing the song in Portland, he peddled it around town before following a sales route that went from Portland to Saco on the south and west and then to Buxton, Windham, and Gorham on the north and west, an itinerary of roughly 80 miles. According to Shaw’s record, the trip took a week, during which “I had four thousand & and five hundred copies printed of, and disposd of nigh three thousand.”80 The next week, he rode a circuit northeast from Portland to Bath and New Gloucester, traveling around 90 miles. In August, Shaw followed a trade route west, to Limington, Maine, and Effingham, New Hampshire, southwest to Wolfeboro, and then back through Buxton to Standish, a journey of more than 100 miles. Along the way, he stayed with Methodist friends and elders, attended meetings, and listened to much “lively exortation.”81 While his diary emphasizes his successes, he also mentions setbacks on the road, such as one near Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where “the colledge Boys beset me devil like, and I told them that they were burning to preach the gospel, & I told them that if they did not mend there ways, the devil would have them.”82 The community imagined in the poem did not necessarily materialize in the way that the poem envisioned, for the crowds gathering to listen and buy were not always docile. The abuse also indicates the widely different responses that the itinerant poet could anticipate. When distributed in the Methodist meeting, poems like the “Mournful Song” on the Knight family tragedy elicited communal grief, godly exhortation, and the desire to recirculate the poem in other contexts. The “colledge boys,” however, beset Shaw when they met him in the street. The derisive abuse he suffered shows how fragile the poet’s right to perform in public could be, especially when presented in the guise of the balladmonger peddling his wares. Publication and publicity did not necessarily meliorate Shaw’s marginal relation to public culture, for while so much of his work expresses his inability to be recognized as a poet, even when such recognition came, it could easily be used against him.
The incident rankled and perhaps happened on other occasions as well, for Shaw complained about this sort of harassment in a poem, “To Those that Cry Me Poet,” which he recorded in another of his daybooks sometime around 1837.
To all of you, that ofton due
At me both laugh and hout
For all you say, this is my way
My Rhyems for to throw out
I make a Rhyem, in little time
As fast as I can say
A song by heart, and never start
On jot out of my way—
You that hant wit, do say poet
And at me you do hollow
With your mouth wide so one can slide
Clear down into your swollow
Is not it shame, that some by name
Beset me in the street
And at me yell, which is not well
Such languge to repeate—
As true as I, cant pass you by
Without that word you Poet
You cry aloude, like man thats proude
And thus I think you shoe it—
What have I dun, that makes your fun
At me to fly so harsh
When I to you, prove always true,
But you throw out your trash.83
This mournful address shows that attaining the name of “poet” was not all Shaw thought it would be. The crowd’s mockery is a bit hard to parse: hooting and shouting “you Poet” at Shaw might undermine his claim to the title by derisively (if implicitly) contrasting his “Rhyems” with an idealized sense of poetry as elevated language, or “you Poet” might itself just be a term of contempt, like “get a job!” Either way, the public performance of the Poet is the source of conflict (“Is not it shame, that some by name / Beset me in the street”). Such a performance is, of course, enacted through the making of verses: Shaw “throws out” his rhymes (which could variously mean that he produces, disseminates, or discards them) “as fast as I can say / A song by heart.” These acts of song making in the street prompt retaliatory verbal acts from his antagonists: “You that hant wit, do say poet / And at me you do hollow.” And this retaliation prompts from Shaw his recurring resentment about status and schooling:
Ye Silly Fools, go to your schools
Pay for your entrence in
Your night-cap darn, an manners lern
Before I come agin—84
In this case, though, it is the allegedly superior college boys who prove their ill breeding by harassing Shaw in the street; schooling and status are revealed as structures of power that merely enforce existing hierarchies rather than reflect inherent worth. Shaw is decried as “you Poet” not (or not only) because his poems are bad or his intentions impure, but because in issuing them publicly, he steps out of his place; literariness colludes with public decorum to push a poet like Shaw off the street, if not off the page. One final, poignant example encapsulates the conflicted place of poetry in the social world of the early nineteenth century, which Shaw’s example makes manifest.
Then took my pen & ink in hand
Here in this Book I did it land
So any one may reade the same
And so take it from whence it came
Its Author never went to school
To lern to spell & write by Rule
As men of lerning are made great
By Schooling, both for Church & State—
But I a poore old Ignorent Man
At first when I for self began
Livd
