The Poets and Poetry of America, ed. Rufus Wilmot Griswold and published in 1855, includes four poems by the Unitarian Ephraim Peabody. While they’re generally forgettable poems, one of them probably arose from Peabody’s travels in the Midwest in the 1820s and 1830s, and so is of some historical interest:
RAFTING. [p.388]
As August night was shutting down,
The first stars faintly glowed,
And deep and wide the river’s tide,
Through the mountain gorges flowed
The woods swelled up from either side,
The clear night-sky bent o’er,
And the gliding waters darkly gleamed,
In the shadows of the shore.
A moving mass swept round the hills,
In the midst a broad, bright flame;
And flitting forms passed to and fro
Around it, as it came.
The raft-fire with its flying light,
Fill’d the thin river haze;
And rock and tree and darkling cliff,
Stooped forward in the blaze.
And while it floated down the stream,
Yet nearer and more near,
A bugle blast on the still night air,
Rose loftily and clear.
From cliff to cliff, from hill to hill,
Through the ancient woods and wide,
The sound swelled on, and far away
In their silent arches died.
And ever and anon they sung,
Yo, heave ho!
And loud and long the echo rung,
Yo, heave ho!
And now the tones burst sharp and fast,
As if the heavens to climb;
Now their soft fall made musical,
The waters ceaseless chime.
Then all was hushed, till might be heard
The plashing of the oar;
Or the speech and laugh, half audible,
Upon the silent shore.
We flung to them some words of cheer,
And loud jests flung they back;
Good night! they cried, and drifted on,
Upon their lonely track.
We watched them till a sudden bend
Received them from our sight;
Yet still we heard the bugle blast
In the stillness of the night.
But soon its loud notes on the ear,
Fell faint and low;
And we ceased to hear the hearty cheer,
Of Yo, heave ho!
Thus quickly did the river pass,
Forth issuing from the dark —
A moment, lighting up the scene
Drifted the phantom ark.
And thus our life. From the unknown,
To the unknown, we sweep;
Like mariners who cross and hail
Each other o’er the deep.
EPHRAIM PEABODY.
Sounds like something out of Mark Twain, until you get to the last stanza. Peabody was the Unitarian minister in Cincinnati from 1831 to 1838. In the introduction to Peabody’s poems, Griswold calls him “a western poet”:
“Mr. PEABODY’S writings, in prose and verse, are marked by a charming freshness, and some of his descriptions have a truthfulness and picturesqueness which can have been derived only from a loving study of nature. Several of his best poems were produced while he was in college, and others, as their subjects indicate, while he was residing or travelling in the valley of the Mississippi. Mr. GALLAGHER, in bis “Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West,” published in Cincinnati in 1841, claims him as a western writer, and quotes him largely. Few western poets have written so frequently or so well of western themes.”
From Cincinnati, Peabody came to the Unitarian church in New Bedford, and from here went to King’s Chapel in Boston — quite a change from his first frontier ministry.
