that she must die.” He then wrote out the text of his poem, copying from the broadside he had printed shortly after the accident occurred. According to his journal, he had composed the poem on February 23, 1807, the day after the tragedy.
This after noon I composed the above Mournfull song on the death of the Wife, and child of Nathaniel Night of Windham, and read it after meeting, and a Coppy was requested and I returned home late at night a praising god for his good ness to me. Thursday 26 we had a meeting at the Widdow Stuarts, and Brother Lumbard preached from those words, And I heard a voice saying unto me, arise, for blessed are the dead that die in the lord, &c. and Miss ford, and Brother Sar. Shaw, and Brother Aims exorted, and we had a powerfull meeting indeed, now this night two copies was requested of me, and Brother Lumbard had one for to read to parent of the child that was drowned Wife not found.69
Shaw drew inspiration from both the tragedy itself (which was a major news story, remembered for decades afterward) and the exhortations of the Methodist meeting, which took the tragedy as one of its texts. Shaw read his verses aloud at meetings and then transcribed them on the request of fellow members. Knowledge of the poem spread in the first days, and Shaw wrote out additional copies, one of which was intended for Nathaniel Knight himself. The song began circulating orally and in manuscript through the close circle of the Methodist meeting (which convened in private homes, rather than a church), and while interested readers initially turned to Shaw himself, Brother Lumbard’s example indicates that readers soon began reciting it in settings where Shaw was not present. As news of the accident spread, Shaw realized the song’s potential popularity:
The above mournfull song was wrote the next day after the awfall sean happened, and it the first edition was was [sic] printed the fourth day of March, 10 days after the sean in 1807. Now I had 1444 pamphlets printed and there was such rapped sail for them, that another man took my workes without my leave within five days and printed at five hundred coppies for sail. And then I had a second edition printed the 18th of march; now I had three thousand copies printed at this time, and there is rappid sail for them, both east, and west.70
If we take this account at its word, it offers an unusually specific record of the production of a broadside poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.71 The poem appears in forty quatrain stanzas, divided in two columns and headed with a brief account of the tragedy and a woodcut of two coffins; the broadside looks crude even by the standard of its day. The price listed on the sheet was 6½ cents per copy, or 62½ cents per dozen. The bundle pricing indicates that Shaw or the printer anticipated a market for secondary circulation; in a port city like Portland, sailors or passengers on outbound ships might have carried copies very far indeed (this is the likeliest way that the song reached New York, where it was printed in a different broadside format later that year). Shaw claims that he sold “30 dollars worth” (about 460 copies, going by the face value of the broadside) in the three days after the first edition of the song was printed.72 Later, he “let Josiah Jarmon have 21 one duzon of the watch night songs for four dollars,” and he sold copies after various Methodist meetings in the area south of Portland.73 Shaw was intimately involved with each stage of a process that took the “Mournful Song” from manuscript to recitation to printed broadside to recitation once again and back into scribal transcription.74 The song’s mournful timeliness occasioned a “rappid sail,” which in turn prompted a dispute over ownership: the song quickly slipped beyond Shaw’s control, and in a supplemental stanza inserted at the bottom of the second edition of the broadside, he complained, “Take notice good people of Portland fair town, / I think I’m impos’d on by Printer MC KOWN: / He’s taken my verses and printed the same, / Which I think you’ll agree is much to his shame.”75 This address to readers indicates the complex ways in which familiarity and anonymity were encoded in print. Shaw seeks to shame the printer for taking “my verses and [printing] the same,” by proclaiming himself as the verses’ rightful owner and mobilizing readers’ assent to this claim. But this appeal, and the attendant identification of the verses with Shaw, depends on the same diffuse, anonymous transmission that enables McKown to co-opt them in the first place. Elsewhere, Shaw lamented the barriers keeping his work (and himself) out of print; here the problem is reversed, as he finds himself in print against his will. The dynamics of print circulation destabilize the status of “poet,” keeping it perpetually in transit, along with the recitations, manuscripts, and broadsides moving around the region, and the author following in their wake, trying—unsuccessfully—to control them.
Figure 7. Thomas Shaw, “A Mournful Song on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. Nathaniel Knights” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The year 1807 seems to have been a bad one for travel over water and, consequently, a good year for Shaw’s poetry; his poem “Melancholy Shipwreck,” written after the schooner Charles ran aground at the mouth of Portland harbor (killing sixteen people), proved as popular as his poem on the Knight family tragedy.
[As] I was riding to Portland, I heard the Melencoly news of Capten Adams Shiprack on Richmend Iland, and began a Moun-full song on the accashen. I wrote 9 verces on the rode, and finisht the same in Portland…. I comited my song to the press, and have reached home the third day. The next Saturday I rode to Portland saw to the fixing of the tipe for printing the Shipwreck song, and staid to quarterly meeting on the Saboth & herd Elder Breal, and Brother Wintch preach, and attended the Sacrement there, on monday I took out my Songs and spread them about, which met with great approbation, and returned home at night.76
Figure 8. Thomas Shaw, “Melancholy Shipwreck” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
This broadside was dated July 14, 1807, two days after the accident. This timeliness outcompeted the newspapers, and one of the poem’s primary functions was to convey information about the disaster; a postscript appended to the bottom of the sheet (probably of a later impression) included the names of the drowned, as well as information about the rescue of six surviving passengers. The poem itself works as a news report of the event, a providential interpretation of it, and also a meditation on the social work of poems in communicating information and forming communities. It begins by invoking a collective audience in the service of collective mourning:
Come let us weep with those that weep,
For their lost friends, plung’d in the deep;
And let us all now take some part
In grief which breaks the tender heart.77
Reading the poem (or attending a recitation of it) establishes the medium of a social emotion, communal grief. The news of the accident therefore works within a moral paradigm:
O God! who know’st the wants of men,
Direct my mind, and guide my pen,
That I may bring the truth to light,
On this dread scene, and awful night.78
Elaborating the news of the accident serves as a means to reveal God’s power (“my dear friends pray eye the rod, / And know’tis from a holy God”) while also calling for consolation (“Good Lord send cheering comfort down / To those who mourn in Portland town”), but these revelations and consolations come specifically through the dissemination of the poem. In other words, events do not interpret or reveal themselves but must be revealed through the inspiration, production, circulation, and consumption of poems.
Thus I have some few truths here told
The
