-.{.Ii-i_i:!"'t"J "~" ,~l i;J' WESTERING by Thomas Hornsby Ferrill Ahsahta Press Boise State University Boise, Idaho Ahsahta Press edition reprinted by arrangement with Yale University Press Copyright © 1934 by Yale University Press Introduction copyright © 1986 by Ahsahta Press First Ahsahta edition published November 1986 Editor for Ahsahta Press: Orvis Burmaster Third Printing, November 1997 ISBN 0-916272-32-X Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-071597 To Helen Contents Introduction by John Williams iii Time of Mountains 1 Blue-Stemmed Grass 3 Fort Laramie 4 Jim Bridger 7 This Trail 10 Fort Vasquez 11 Morning Star 15 Ghost Town 16 Mountains Themselves 20 Magenta 21 All Years Are Odd as 1849 25 Nocturne at Noon-1605 28 Elegy-New Mexico 31 Screen Doors for Your Tomb 32 Fall Plowing 35 Song for Aaron Burr 36 Waltz Against the Mountains 37 Some Grass 41 Two Rivers 42 High-Line Ditch 43 House in Denver 45 Old Men on the Blue 46 Kenosha Pass 47 This Foreman 48 Dialogue in Kansas-1850 51 Fiftieth Birthday-1859 53 Lincoln Memorial 62 Fire Tree 63 Lodgepole Creek 64 Go, Mountain! 66 Daniel Boone 67 John Colter 68 Sacagawea 69 Something Starting Over 70 Note: A centered asterisk at the foot of a page of poetry indicates that the poem continues without stanza division onto the next page. Introduction The dominant theme of Thomas Hornsby Ferril's Westering is sug­ gested in the first stanza of "Time of Mountains," which is the first poem in the book: I have confused these rocks and waters with My life, but not unclearly, for I know What will be here when I am here no more. Throughout the volume, this theme is developed under the rubrics of a number of oppositions, which are seen by Ferril to be relationships. There is the relationship between the perceiver and the thing perceived, as stated in the lines quoted above; between the scientific and romantic views of man and nature: And you may ask me, when I've finished singing About my Mammy down in Tennessee, If grama grass is grass or whirling orbits Of protons and electrons, or of neither. The vastness of the West is opposed to the minuteness that it contains: And the bodies of the frozen dragonflies Begin to float to the Gulf of California . " , and the opposition is sometimes seen in the juxtaposition of humankind and Nature: Mountain, she is ivory, There's no purple on her thigh, It is the shadow you have pressed On her body, knee to breast. And there is vastness and smallness other than physical. In "All Years Are Odd," Chopin and Hokusai, representative of universal culture, are op­ posed and reconciled to each other, and to the more localized personage of John Sutter; in "Nocturne at Noon," the English Puritan, as well as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Phillip III, and the Spanish Friar encroach upon the Indian, embodied by the Coyote, who lives in a world where "the little mice are dozing," and who is warned: Be still, Coyote in the noon, The practical people come, iii and with them the alien but inescapable trappings of civilization-out of the mud, the city, "The palace of Santa Fe," and all that that implies. But the most pervasive of the oppositions that Ferri! employs are those that have to do with the past and the present, sometimes seen directly and simply, as In Summit County, Colorado, where A Ford transmission rots upon the wall Beside an ox-yoke, sometimes in the irony of history, where Jim Bridger has become only a name, ". ten consonants and vowels You're only the name of a lake in the Yellowstone, And something the postmaster knows in the Clark's Fork Valley." And Ferri! knows ... how hard it would be to make a myth When I hear Wyoming singing to the seven reeds That quiver on a turbo-generator's breast .... In an early essay, Ferri! wondered whether he was a Westerner at all, and refused to define himself as such though the subject matter of his work in both prose and poetry had been, and was to remain, almost exclu­ sively Western; and I am on record somewhere as having wondered if there is or even ever has been a West, at least a White American West, except in the most limited directional and geographical sense of the word. Of course, Ferri! is a Westerner, and there is a West; but it may be useful to raise such contrary questions now and then. For a very large part of that state of mind that we call the West is an Eastern invention, with its historical roots in a Transcendental fantasy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, an invention that has, in our culture, taken on the weight of myth, however specious that myth might be in its popular appli­ cation. In the New England proto-myth of the Emersonian one, the heroic cowboy would have been the Elect of God, the defender of property rights and the status quo, and the mountain man the individual, later to become rugged, in a one-to-one relationship to God (or Nature, in the mythic con­ figuration). That for monetary gain he was also acquisitor and exploiter of that Nature is not part of the myth, but the purple majesty of the moun­ tains he roamed in is, in the philosophical near-Pantheism of the Emersonian tradition. iv Myth measures the losses of a culture, and epic celebrates its victories; and out of the Transcendental myth comes the impulse toward the Western Epic. This is a natural progression; but whereas in earlier cultures (such as the ancient Greek) epic has subsumed myth and given it order, in our culture the two impulses remain oddly antipodal, as we may witness in such a poem as The Bridge by Hart Crane. One of Thomas Hornsby Ferril's tasks as a poet has been to bring these two impulses (or impulses very much like them) into some kind of repose with each other. The most obvious efforts to bring about this repose in Westering are in the longer poems, such as "Jim Bridger," "Fort Vasquez," "Ghost Town," and "Waltz Against the Mountains." Most admirers of Ferril's poetry con­ sider the longer poems to be the least successful, a judgment with which I find myself in qualified agreement. Except for "Waltz Against the Mountains," the best of this group, they tend to wander about too much in their beginings, as if searching for themselves; the predominant tone, casual and often conversational, seems at times somewhat forced and at odds with occasional rhetorical flourishes; and the discursiveness is not ad­ equately supported by structural strategies. But over the years I have come to suspect that this is a poetic method of Ferril's, oddly akin to that of William Butler Yeats in his use of the "numb line"-that is, the line which by its rhetorical and emotive neutrality elevates a succeeding line, or pas­ sage, to an intensity it would not otherwise have had. For such poems as I have mentioned almost invariably build to power and meaning, usually about three-quarters of the way through. And I suspect that the virtue is made possible by the presence of the defect, if it may be called such. It is an old critical problem. It is in the shorter poems-"Time of Mountains," "Blue-Stemmed Grass," "This Trail," "Morning Star," "Mountains Themselves," "Song for Aaron Burr," "Some Grass," "Two Rivers." "House in Denver," "Fire Tree," "Go, Mountain!" and "Daniel Boone"-that Ferril's best work is to be found. There are curious triumphs of rhetoric and perception; in a mountain stream there is . prodigious stillness where the water folds Its terrible muscles over and under each other, There is the sweep of the extended Romantic period: Out of a deep that is, but is not charted, Your dream, uncommon to the meadow crickets, Is Nature moving, and your words are Nature, Uttered of air by flesh resolved of earth, v Each word a member syllable at war With other syllables, to die tonight, Or cry against the luminous distances, Where legendary men grow out of men, Like reefs the polyps build on bones of polyps To hurl the ocean back against itself, and the plain statement, with its blunt evocation of time: The housing of your differential gears Will break the gentians, but the Utes are dead. And there are a few curiosities, such as "This Foreman," Ferril's adapta­ tion of the popular English ballad, set in industrial America, yet with the attendant unstated mystery of many of the original models. Though it is an unlikely success, it is a success nevertheless. And one must call special attention to "Blue-Stemmed Grass," one of Ferril's finest poems. It is a triumph of the language; implicitly and explic­ itly, it gathers all of Ferril's major concerns into a single poem, and dis­ plays his techniques at their best; it is a poem apparently simple and actually profound, dealing as it does with one of the central issues of man's existence in a universe beyond his comprehension. In these re­ spects, it may remind one of what may be William Butler Yeats's finest sin­ gle poem, "The Wild Swans at Coole," a work to which "Blue-Stemmed Grass" is not noticeably inferior. It has often been said that Thomas Hornsby Ferril's relative lack of recognition comes from the fact that he has been too closely identified with a particular region of the West, and to a particular city within that re­ gion.