BooksFilmandMusic

Allen Tate’s Failed Poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Introduction by Daniel Mallock

“The Horror, the Horror” - Joseph Conrad

So much of modern American poetry is self-indulgent; semi-obscure, purposely confused, overly complicated, essentially tonal, and mood pieces rather than art involving substance and depth. Perhaps this is why there is an ever-shrinking audience for it and why the only lively and enthusiastic discussions on such matters take place in staid and boring academic literary journals and poetry magazines that nobody reads, or in back rooms and dark corners of downtown book stores.

This approach to poetry by poets is often a hidden disdain for the readership, and their more common place yet elegant self-referential excess of construction, imagery, metaphor and message perhaps make poetry now the art form of the elite “artistes” of academia and folks amongst the great hoi polloi who - so wanting to like poetry so wanting to see it revived and reinvigorated wait patiently for another Whitman or Poe or the like - to the poets themselves, just don’t “get it” and never can or will.

Say that you like poetry, and the response will invariably be “but, why?”

Poems that tend to drive wedges between the reader and the form itself and that are so confused in their approach that loyal fans think it means one thing while the auteur believes it means quite something else in the opposite direction - is the mark of an art form in decline. There continues a small coterie of poetry fans who still buy poetry books and talk about poets and keep the flame alive like the readers in Fahrenheit 451 who hid their books at risk of imprisonment and worse. So we wait for a Poe, another John Ashberry, and others of superb quality, but we get Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” instead with its pompous odius misdirection disguised as tribute.

Tate’s “Ode” is really neither about Confederates nor really about the dead. Additionally, it is also not “original” in the literal sense. Henry Timrod, sometimes described as the “Confederate Poet laureate” wrote an “ode” poem that actually was a tribute to the Confederate dead unlike Tate’s which was not, whether by accident, malfeasance, or design we’ll never know. Titled “Ode: Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1867″ Timrod’s poem is short, emotional, sad, honest, and most likely deeply meaningful to any audience hearing it read (or for those reading it themselves). It is not at all obscurantism like Tate’s homage to Timrod written much later, and foisted upon us as a tribute to the Confederate dead rather than simply a appalling failed poem by a famous poet.

Tate’s Ode is not a tribute, it is simply a failure. Oft-read by caring folks as a tribute to Confederates long gone, it is a mistake. According to one Williamson County, TN website, “It remains, the works of Robert Hicks and Madison Smartt Bell notwithstanding, the most important piece of literature to come out of Williamson County.” This is utterly absurd. Randall Jarrell, and David Donaldson, both Vanderbilt colleagues of Tate’s are superior poets. As a partisan for southern remembrance, having written several biographies of Confederate heroes (Jackson and Davis) Tate seems to have the requisite qualifications to have penned a great tribute poem for the Confederate dead, appropriate for graveside readings. But if he did, this is not the poem. Great artists can create bad art, happens all the time.

According to the Williamson County website mentioned above, Tate was inspired to write the Ode after a 1926 visit to the McGavock Confederate Cemetery at the Carnton Mansion which played itself an important role during the Battle of Franklin. There are almost 1500 Confederate dead in that cemetery many in mass graves that are marked only with a state designation as “125 Texas soldiers buried here” etched into a granite column. It is no insult to Tate personally to say that this is a bad poem. Contrast it with “Lee in the Mountains” or Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and you will see why. Or read Timrod’s original “Ode “. Timrod’s rings and sings true, Tate’s Ode does neither basking in its own glow and of little moment outside of its own internal context.

Tate’s poem is overdone and internally confused so that his use of powerful words that ring to everyone with any sense of respect and affection for Confederate heros would think that they are reading or hearing a tribute - but it just isn’t so. Even great poets from Vanderbilt’s famous “Fugitives” can misfire now and then. Tate’s Ode is a clear miss, much more than a misfired poem.

Mention of battle names and “Stonewall” in several lines does not a Civil War poem make. Tate clearly took this poem exceedingly seriously and that adds to the shame of it as it is simply exceedingly bad. Folks hungry for meaningful poetry about the Civil War have long heaped praise upon this conglomeration of unfortunate metaphors and falling leaves outside graveyard crypts. It’s the use of the Civil War “code words” that have made this poem so famous, and so mistakenly lauded as brilliant.

I am not the only one who feels this way. Certainly in the minority on this issue, it is good to know that I am in good company. Donald Davidson, a colleague of Tate’s at Vanderbilt and the author of the beautiful and authoritative “Lee in the Mountains” used harsh words to describe Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”. In a letter to Tate, Davidson didn’t mince any words when he said, “Your poetry, like your criticism, is so astringent that it bites and dissolves what it touches.” But this is just the beginning. Great poets can be savage critics, and when they criticize each other - yipes, watch out!

“You have decided that the opposite sort of poetry (say, an expansive poetry) can no longer be written in an age where everything is in a terrible condition. But this attitude does not merely lie behind the poetry; it gets into it, not in the form of poetry but of aesthetics, so that poem after poem of yours becomes aesthetic dissertation as much as poetry. … [W]hen you deal with things themselves, the things become a ruin and crackle like broken shards under your feet. The Confederate dead become a peg on which you hang an argument whose lines, however sonorous and beautiful in a strict proud way, leave me wondering why you wrote a poem on the subject at all, since in effect you say (and I suspect you are speaking partly to me) that no poem can be written on such a subject…

The poem is beautifully written. … But its beauty is a cold beauty. And where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them completely out of sight – with them yourself and me. God help us, I must say. You keep on whittling your art to a finer point, but you are not whittling yourself. What is going to happen if the only poetry you can allow your conscience to approve is a poetry of argument and despair. Fine as such a poetry may be, is it not a Pyrrhic victory?”

I’ve often found myself asking the same question that Davidson did so many years previously, why did Tate write this poem nominally about the Confederate dead when they are so glossed over? Why choose the Confederate dead as the title? It’s a bait-and-switch, typical of bad art.

There are so many failures in this poem that discussing them all could fill a book, which is not my desire. As a poem it’s a mish-mash confabulation of unfortunate images and metaphors utterly out of sync and described confusedly, without context and with little respect of history or reality. This poem doesn’t sing, it scrapes itself across the blackboard of the mind making that abysmal irritating screeching sound so familiar to every school child all the while!

Observe the poem as a Civil War historian, as someone who appreciates the sacrifices of American soldiers in past wars; think about how this poem would sound read over the graves of heroes - and be appalled…

“Unfortunate” is merely the most kind word to use here, but not at all the most accurate. Read the following section from Tate’s Ode, and ask yourself if the imagery is all wrong, confused, negative, insulting, grotesque.

“What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;”

The above bizarre cacophony of images of the rotting dead, and gray spiders (Confederate spiders… huh?) and unclean bones is but only part of the many assaults upon the reader by Tate. How can Confederate bones in a poem supposed by so many to be a tribute be unclean? The bones of our American war dead, Confederate and Union, cannot be unclean! Tate’s imagery is vile.

These are not the words of commemoration of loss or sadness or of appreciation. This is no veneration appreciation of the sacrifices of the Confederate dead! These are words that reduce the dead to their very bones and shiver their accomplishments out of context from their lives so that the only thing remaining in the poem to mark their lives are the Confederate gray spiders to be trodden under foot and screamed at by little girls and old women.

Observe the Civil War code words in the following lines in this also muddled and bizarre section, these are the source of this poem’s longevity and also the source of so much misunderstanding:

“Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.”

There is false mystery here, and fake sentiment. Confederate infantry is not “inscrutable”. The dead at Franklin are there because of a specific historic event, the battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864. Confederate infantry are not demons. “Demons”? Did Tate actually suggest here that Confederate infantrymen are “demons”?? This is misery and absurdity rolled all together into an abysmal ball thrown at people on dark and sad occasions thinking that they are giving tribute/paying tribute to lost heroes but are instead indulging a poet his awful and unfortunate mistake of a poem. Why on earth would “I/you” curse the setting sun? Should I curse the setting sun for all the horrible Confederate losses during the war or do I curse the setting sun because I am sad at the deaths of brave men resting in the cemetery? No, in Tate’s twisted-up version the men are not resting at all in the cemetery, they are “rising” - oh, you know, like gray spiders.

“Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.”

Can anyone listening to a recitation of this abysmal monstrosity of a poem truly believe that it is a tribute to dead Confederate soldiers when they are described as “gray spiders”, and “demons”? No!

Never has a more unfortunate mess been foisted upon a caring public so desperate for ways to honor the bravery of their forebears. Tate’s poem “ode to the Confederate Dead” is not the way. This poem should be rendered asunder and banished into the black holes of obscurity where it belongs. Mind you, this is not a condemnation of all of Tate’s work merely this one poem so wrongly portrayed as an appropriate commemoration of Confederate dead (even read at Confederate cemeteries!) while it is not all such a thing.

A poem can fail for so many reasons. Davidson was so right when he wrote, “The poem is beautifully written. … But its beauty is a cold beauty. And where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them completely out of sight – with them yourself and me.” The poem reads “well” as do most poems written by an accomplished poet such as Tate. But it is cold, and heartless.

There is no care for the Confederate dead here, in fact they don’t even appear in the poem but as demons and spiders. The heroes are converted to the ugliest of images, and the sacrifices and losses ignored, while the poet plays his literary games with metre and rhythm and names of battles - clearly meaningless to him, but hooks for the audience like a bad ABBA tune’s irresistible hook.

But I do not care a whit about Tate’s internal poetics or his “music”, I want a Civil War poem that is an Ode to the Confederate Dead, a tribute and appreciation. This is the manner that this poem has always been sold to me through my life, having been read at Civil War events with the direst and humblest of tones. But I’ve been sold a bill of goods and been cheated throughout my life and now the truth needs to be told so that future generations are not so abused as I have been by this wretched poem.

Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!–
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know–the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision–
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl’s tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush–
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

Tate poem courtesy of Poets.org