poem, a snowstorm is described as a battle … or is it? By the end of the poem, “It” is also “lost in fleeces,” and it is unclear which is the tenor and which is the vehicle. Dickinson underscores the remoteness of present violence by referring to even more elusive and remote past violence, historical, but also mythical and beautiful, inspiration for an enduring poetic tradition that, she suggests, must both resonate and be renovated in order to make sense of the present violence.
Though many critics and historians have found nature poetry of the period to work in the service of naturalizing and rationalizing state-sanctioned violence, both Dickinson and Allen offer a thoughtful meditation on mass violence via the language of natural phenomena. They forge connections between remote scenes of suffering, largely in the South, and the Union home front.33 The weather is not only a metaphor for war; it is also a metaphor for news. The “simple news that nature told,” as Faith Barrett has suggested, is not that simple once the war begins, and not just for Dickinson.34
“The Snow of Southern Summers”
Though Confederate and Union poetry are usually characterized as discrete, opposed wartime forms of expression that do not enter into communication with one another, Confederate Henry Timrod’s poems are clearly engaged with a tradition of English and New England snow poems as a way of infusing climactic differences between North and South with contrasting symbolic valences. “Ethnogenesis” inaugurated the birth of a new nation on the occasion of “the meeting of the Southern Congress, at Montgomery, February, 1861,” as the extended title tells us.35 Published in the Charleston Daily Courier on February 23, 1861, it was reprinted not only in Southern papers, but also in Littell’s Living Age, a weekly Boston publication.36 Timrod’s nature poetry had been popular enough in the North before the war that he published a volume of poems in the prestigious Ticknor and Fields series in 1860.37 Northern readers of “Ethnogenesis,” curious how secession changed the poet’s outlook, would see that Timrod is quite familiar with poetic traditions that associate winter with war even if, as a lifelong resident of South Carolina, he did not have the substantial experience with blizzards that residents of Massachusetts could claim. Working both within and against that tradition, Timrod broadcasts a new kind of snow that he promotes as superior to the northern sort. This kinder, gentler snow, along with the rest of a more amenable, milder climate, will help the South win the war:
Beneath so kind a sky—the very sun
Takes part with us; and on our errands run
All breezes of the ocean; dew and rain
Do noiseless battle for us; and the Year,
And all the gentle daughters in her train,
March in our ranks, and in our service wield
Long spears of golden grain!
A yellow blossom as her fairy shield,
June flings her azure banner to the wind,
While in the order of their birth
Her sisters pass, and many an ample field
Grows white beneath their steps, till now, behold,
Its endless sheets unfold
THE SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS! Let the earth
Rejoice! beneath those fleeces soft and warm
Our happy land shall sleep
In a repose as deep
As if we lay intrenched behind
Whole leagues of Russian ice and Arctic storm!38
Rather than, like the winter snow, competing against those living in its atmosphere—alienating, isolating, and confusing the human population—Timrod’s summer weather “takes part with us.” Personification is far less ambiguous and more persistent in “Ethnogenesis” than in the poems of Emerson, Allen, and Dickinson: the sky, the sun, the breezes, the year, the months (“all the gentle daughters”), all take human shapes so they can take up arms—fanciful arms—a “fairy shield,” a “spear” of grain—in the name of cotton.39 Cotton, the thing not named, and one of the few things not personified in the passage, behaves atmospherically, like southern snow, rather than like a plant. It blankets the earth in “fleeces,” like Dickinson’s and the Iliad’s snow, only hospitably, nurturing the earth and keeping it warm. Its whiteness becomes the very atmosphere of moral purity that Timrod hopes will inspire the new Southern nation. At the same time, he associates the color of cotton with racial superiority. Timrod thus posits an alternative to northern snow that appeals to the slaveholding South; this snow is far more ideologically saturated, and unlike the Northern poems, it is directly tied to nation building.
There is one strange ambivalence about the Confederate project worth noting, however. The cotton stretches out in “sheets” like clouds, or like Allen’s “winding sheets,” but rather than wrapping the dead, it cultivates an opiate “sleep” that Timrod casts positively. He suggests that cotton inures white Southern populations from Northern criticism as effectively as Russian ice and Arctic storm would deter travel; yet to “lay intrenched” conflicts defensively with the “deep” “repose” of a sleeping “happy land,” suggesting that the white Southern conscience that Timrod constructs and bolsters here might require anesthesia in order for its dream of perfect whiteness to operate properly. “Ethnogenesis” self-consciously works within a Northern tradition in order to oppose it, but in responding to Northern criticisms of Southern slavocracy, Timrod’s poem betrays influences of the positions he opposes.
Timrod clearly hopes his readership will extend beyond his region and sway foreign readers to a Confederate viewpoint of the conflict. While Dickinson’s “even face” stretches grimly around the world from “east to east,” Timrod imagines that markets for cotton, like the Gulf Stream, will transport the warmth of Southern hospitality far and wide, convincing the world that there is a kinder, gentler alternative to the capitalism of the North:
The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe
When all shall own it, but the type
Whereby we shall be known in every land
Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand,
And through the cold, untempered ocean pours
Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores
May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas!40
The Gulf Stream travels from Florida north along the East Coast of the United States to Newfoundland before crossing the Atlantic to warm the western shore of Europe (Timrod is significantly silent about the southern branch of the stream, which circulates off the coast of West Africa). Ocean currents, like news, weather, and desirable commodities, circulate widely; Timrod’s snowy cotton evokes all these currents in its appeal for global acceptance for the new nation, which he promises will be superior to the former United States and its remnant, the Northern states.
A companion piece to “Ethnogenesis,” “The Cotton Boll” (published in the Charleston Mercury on September 3, 1861) underscores the inevitability that Southern cotton trump Northern snow. Its infinitude rivals its competitor’s only as blessed land rivals a wasteland:
To
