upon no waste of snow,
The endless field is white;
And the whole landscape glows,
For many a shining league away,
With such accumulated light
As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!41
The “waste of snow” is countered by an “endless” white field that glows with holy light. Timrod could not be more adamant about the righteousness of the Southern cause, which he articulates by turning an inherited tradition of winter war poetry back against itself. In order to accomplish this rhetorical feat, however, he must turn cotton into weather, vaporize its materiality so that it may become a medium of illumination, a means of communication, rather than a substance imbricated in material forms of exploitative labor.
In “The Cotton Boll,” even more than in “Ethnogenesis,” Timrod registers awareness of his evaporation of materiality that renders his poetic logic suspect. The poem begins by drawing attention to the very figure he almost erases: the slave.
While I recline
At ease beneath
This immemorial pine,
Small sphere!
(By dusky fingers brought this morning here
And shown with boastful smiles),42
The poem presents a rhetorical problem from the outset: the white speaker’s “ease” depends upon the labor of the “dusky” other. The cotton he casts as a pure, ethereal symbol—of global interconnectedness (“small sphere!”), of white superiority, of mystical climatic harmony—only underscores the presence of a slave system that removes the speaker from the very thing he claims fully to possess. If leisured white superiority and black servitude were so natural, the slave would either be more fully present—an entire body rather than fingers and smiles—or totally absent, as he is in “Ethnogenesis,” where the sister “months” plant, cultivate, and grow the cotton without visible help or effort. Here the slave leans into the frame of the poem, partially materialized and partially dematerialized. In a poem where white signifies holy illumination, it is not surprising that the slave is the absence of light, but he is not fully turned to night; his “dusky fingers” and “boastful smiles” linger, as a reminder that the dream of the South hinges on a mythology of “the little boll,” “a spell” like that “in the ocean shell.”43 Timrod draws attention to the fantastic element of his reverie even as he seeks to naturalize it, suggesting that the material conditions of slavery are more present and contrary to the vision than he or his readers might longingly wish. The “dusky fingers” hold and support the small, white globe, after all, in much the same way as a divine creator secures the earth. In choosing cotton as his ideal mode of disseminating the good news of the South, Timrod acknowledges that his “trembling line[s]” form a “tangled skein” that he fails to unravel.44
By 1863, snowy cotton has disappeared from Timrod’s poetry. “Spring,” published in the Southern Illustrated News on April 4, tries to celebrate the beauty of the South in springtime, but, as in the Northern poetry of this time, thoughts of the dead and the wounded seep into the images, until the war finally takes over the poem. As in Allen’s “Snow,” the process is gradual; it seems unconscious or accidental at first, and then gains momentum. At the outset, only “pathos” indicates the darker, advancing vision:
Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air
Which dwells with all things fair,
Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain,
Is with us once again.45
Soon, blood appears, at first only as part of a playful personification—“In the deep heart of every forest tree / The blood is all aglee.”46 The tree’s blood rises to the surface in a “flush” it shares with the sky: “the maple reddens on the lawn, / Flushed by the season’s dawn.” The seeds working their way toward the sun, figures of rebirth, unsettlingly recall the myriad war dead:
As yet the turf is dark, although you know
That, not a span below,
A thousand germs are groping through the gloom,
And soon will burst their tomb.
The thousand groping germs are suggestive of future flowers, but also of dead men, who strive uncertainly for resurrection—to “burst their tomb.” Just before facing the submerged topic of violence directly, the viewer sees a flood of purple in anticipation of the imminent profusion of blossoms:
Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn
In the sweet airs of morn;
One almost looks to see the very street
Grow purple at his feet.
Drawing attention to the sense of unbirth summons the possibility of abortion. The purple pool on the street extends that line of thought: though the speaker may be anticipating the blossoming of hyacinths or violets, the figure of the undifferentiated, spreading mass is just as readily associated with blood.
The undertones of morbidity are confirmed retroactively when the poem turns directly to the topic of “war and crime” and “the call of Death” in “the west-wind’s aromatic breath.”47 Unthinkably, Spring may awaken the sap in trees and the song of birds, but she will also “rouse, for all her tranquil charms, / A million men to arms.” Then, the fields will run with real blood rather than the flushed hues of dawn, the purple flowers, and the dark red of just-unfolded maple leaves. Metaphors will become material truths:
There shall be deeper hues upon her plains
Than all her sunlit rains,
And every gladdening influence around,
Can summon from the ground.
Oh! standing on this desecrated mould,
Methinks that I behold,
Lifting her bloody daisies up to God,
Spring kneeling on the sod,
And calling, with the voice of all her rills,
Upon the ancient hills
To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves
Who turn her meads to graves.
Spattered with actual blood, the daisies carry spring’s plea for relief and a return to the pastoral ideal they used to inhabit; the personifications of nature that so blithely populated Timrod’s earlier poems that celebrated the new Confederacy pray for an end to slaughter.
Only in the final stanza does Timrod address the politics of the conflict, and he does so in a cryptic way that suggests, as in “The Cotton Boll,” doubts about the Southern cause. Spring calls for the landscape to “crush the tyrants and the slaves,” but leaves the reader to determine their identity. The slippage leaves the phrase open to overlapping interpretations. Conventionally the Civil War–era rhetoric of the South depicts Northerners as tyrants and white Southerners
