Guest Posting: The Poetry of Patchwork

Reading between the lines of text and textile, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Adam Bradford writes in about mid-19th-century mourning poetry and the poetic wrap (not rap) that Eliza Howells quilted to help stave off the chills of death and grief.

When Mark Twain set about lampooning what he felt was an overly-morbid 19th-century culture of mourning, he did so (in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) via the character of Emmeline Grangerford. As folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office may recall, Emmeline was known for her “crayons” (hand-drawn pictures of people mourning at the tombs of their deceased) and “tributes” (poems depicting the deceased “sport[ing] aloft in the realms of the good and the great”). Twain’s satire gained traction because some of the age's “popular” poets like Lydia Sigourney and Julia Moore had made their reputations (not to mention a respectable sum) filling best-selling books such as 1847's The Weeping Willow with line after line of “consolation verse.” Consider, for example, Sigourney’s “The Consenting Mother":

"I see the green fields, and glowing flowers;
I see bright streamlets flow,
Sweet voices call to glorious bowers;
Dear Mother! Let me go.”
His cheek grew pale. Had hasting death
Dealt the last final blow?
List! List! Once more the fainting breath,
“Oh Mother! let me go.”
How could her love the soul detain,
That struggled to be free?
Or, leaguing with that tyrant Pain,
Obstruct its liberty?
“Lord! Not my will,” she said, “but Thine,”
And high her darling soar’d,
And from the skies that ever shine
An angel’s descant pour’d.

Sigourney’s poem may strike contem- porary readers as trite or contrived, but for many people in 19th century America — people such as Eliza Howells, whose quilt square appears to the left—such poetry was an important tool for dealing with grief. Sometime in the 1840s, Eliza Howells began accumulating a number of quilt squares as gifts from family and friends. Largely commemorative, these squares mark important events in Eliza’s life such as her wedding in 1843 and her Grandmother’s death in 1845. The same grandmother whose death is commemorated on one square, in fact, produced the square celebrating Eliza’s marriage.

Eliza produced the central, "capstone" square of the quilt herself. The images she penned here—the heavy curtains, the urns with emerging flowers, the clock, the dark dress—are all contemporary symbols of mourning, and the voice she gives the object is, perhaps fittingly for the time, a rather poetic one that testifies to the power of this rather curious text-ile and provides insight into how it became meaningful for Eliza. Together, the poems show that the quilt connected her in two ways to a “spiritual community” of loved ones whose physical presence she no longer enjoyed. The first, which seems the most “memorial” of the two, is entitled “Friendship” and reads:

In Vain—in different paths we tread—
And though no more mayest soothe or cheer;
Yet we have those hours of friendship shed,
A sweetness that still lingers here;
Thy form & look, in memory’s glass,
I still distinctly see;
Thy voice and words, in fancy’s ear
Are whispering still to me.

"Friendship" is followed by the second, more consolatory piece entitled “Eternity":

When the dream of life is fled,
When its wasted lamp is dead,
When in cold oblivion’s shade,
Beauty, power, wealth are laid;
Where immortal spirits reign,
There may be all we meet again;
On the tree of life eternal
Man, let all the hope be staid
Which alone, for ever vernal,
Bears a leaf that shall not fade.

Together, these poems suggest how the quilt enlivens the people who helped produce it while simultaneously prefiguring Eliza's reunion with them in the "ever vernal" afterlife. Crafted as it was by hand (or hands), it quite literally served as a site where Eliza could stitch, bind, and tie herself to those, like her grandmother, who had not only helped produce the blanket's other squares but who were commemorated there as well. Morbid? Maybe. But for Eliza, who could wrap herself in the combination of image, text, and material—and perhaps for more than just a few people in our current day—it was one way to keep warm against chills borne of gale or grief.

Adam Bradford writes in from the University of Iowa where he is finishing a dissertation on the literature of 19th century American mourning practices.

"Thankful for What?": A Scrapbook for Thanksgiving 2008

Between the Civil War and World War II, Americans were fanatical scrapbookers, cutting and pasting their way through all of print culture—magazines, newspapers, trade cards, advertisements, greeting cards, playbills, almanacs, broadsides, booklets, brochures and the like—and archiving any and all material of interest or even potential interest. Families sat down to scrapbook together. Louisa May Alcott said she read "with a pair of scissors in my hand," and her literary brothers and sisters kept pace: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Jack London, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amy Lowell, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Vechten, and Vachel Lindsay all kept scrapbooks of various sizes, stripes and sophistication.

Of course, less celebrated Americans kept scrapbooks as well, and one of the more surprising things to learn about American scrapbooking is that it very often included poetry. Not just included, but centered around, focused on, and devoted itself to good, bad and ugly verse of all kinds. Americans sometimes maintained these personal anthologies for years, sometimes from generation to generation, sometimes working in concert with other scrapbookers. The resulting albums are fascinating artifacts from America's literary past.

Over the past several years, I've managed to collect about 100 such poetry scrapbooks, some of which are beautiful, some of which are falling apart, some of which are 200 or 300 pages long, and some of which I've been able to post online for your viewing pleasure at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive. As Thanksgiving approaches, however, I thought I'd shine an autumnal light on one poetry scrapbook in particular, a veritable cornucopia of clippings which was likely assembled during the Depression or World War II and which contains the page pictured to to the left and the two pages which follow. (Just click on the images for larger, more readable versions.)

This scrapbook takes the months of the year as its organizing rubric, perhaps borrowing that structure from the farmer's almanacs that had been a regular part of American life since the 1800s. (Think of the almanac in Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Sestina," for example.) It begins with poems about Valentine's Day, then features a page spread on March which is followed by poems about April and a short illustrated narrative in verse titled "An Easter Eggs-ploit." The section on Thanksgiving consists of seven illustrated poems spread out over the space of the three pages seen here.

Even taken out of context, these pages display many of the hallmarks of poetry scrapbooks more broadly speaking. For starters, the material included here crosses literary "brow" lines, ranging from apparently trite or sentimental popular verse to "A Tribute to the Pilgrims," written by then-Poet Laureate of England, John Masefield. Also, poems that appear to be unpolitical or not at all socially engaged oftentimes acquire a degree of social engagement by virtue of their relation to other poems: the piece by Masefield, for example—in which the settling of New England is described as "the sowing of the seed from which the crop of modern America has grown"—pulls the surrrounding poems about farming and nature (such as "Harvest Time," "Sumac," and "Flight South") into a larger discourse about U.S. history and identity. Lastly, as with many scrapbooks put together during the Depression, certain financially-oriented figures of speech such as

Flowers and sunrises, stars and rainbows,
Health and strength and friendship's ties,
Join in balancing life's budget,
For that Roll Call in the skies.

invite particular speculation about how inspirational or sentimental poetry functioned during times of economic crisis to both help people process the nature of that crisis and identify value systems other than capital by which they could orient their lives.

Scrapbooking is undoubtedly a nineteenth- and twentieth-century version of commonplace book-keeping—a literary activity in which people hand-copied passages from books into their own personal journals or ledgers. Over the years, the word "commonplace" has changed in meaning, going from a term that suggested a particular, even extraordinary value to a term that now usually means "ordinary" or even "trivial." At times, the popular verse in poetry scrapbooks—and especially Depression-era poetry scrapbooks—uncannily performs this etymological history in reverse: seizing on the ordinary and promoting it as extraordinary. The poem "Thankful for What?," for example, is a litany of thanks "just for little things" and concludes:

[Let me be thankful] For little friendly days that slip away,
With only meals and bed and work and play,
A rocking-chair and kindly firelight—
For little things let me be glad tonight.

In a sense, this poem asks for the power to be thankful for the commonplaces in life, not just in literature—for the valuable parts of living that have become, like their literary antecedents, ordinary or trivial over time. That is, in a sense, this poem wishes to extend the literacy practice of commonplacing or scrapbooking into a sort of philosophy of living in which the apparent scraps of life have unanticipated or unrecognized value. That's not a bad thing to think about this November 27 as we teeter on the edge of another depression and wonder where, oh where, the next bailout will come from.