Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Overview
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780691611396 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
Series: | Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets , #59 |
Pages: | 198 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The New World
An Epic Poem
By Frederick W. Turner
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06641-7
CHAPTER 1
THE HERO
Journey out of Exile
I sing of what it is to be a man and woman in our time.
Wind of the spirit, I should have called upon you long ago
but you would have me gasp, draw dust for breath,
weep without tears, spoil the tale in its telling,
wander an emigrant where no garden grows
before you'd take me back into the bosom of your word.
Sperimenh, master-mistress, heavenly ghost
of humanity, tell to me how heroines and heroes dignify
the windmills that they turn, how invent the truth out of nothing.
Your body, I know it as this sweet English that I learned;
It may be seen in other, finer dressing,
in the feathers of brilliant inflexions, in the scales and spines
of what barbaric or subtle or lucid civilizations,
but where I love your gentle face is in our English:
bright-eyed, furry, swift-footed, suckler of her young.
I have walked the maze of words, preoccupied, and then
burst out suddenly into your astonishing air, knowing
my toil as a tiny threading of your immense mind,
a mind as innocent as meadows, as lovely, as beyond dying.
What that great web is you are weaving, no one of us knows;
lend me your lightning, apocalypse yourself, let me see
one pattern of the whole, and clothe my poem in words.
* * *
Let them have come out of Hattan Riot in late summer,
the boy in his toga and breeches, with the sword Adamant;
his mother in mourning, across the mountains of Vaniah
along the line of ruined Uess Seventy
in the rain, through sodden oak forests, plains, piney woods,
soaked to the skin, up Kittatinny Mountain,
down the Sideling Hill. Whatever they do,
people do what they do because they want to:
to look at her, the mother, you'd think she'd no desire
to take that journey; yet she sets foot before foot,
a flush shows in her cheek; when they reach the crest
of Tuscarora Ridge she gasps, glances about,
peels a strand of blonde hair from her eyes and smiles.
The Tussen, Evitts, Wills are dark with squalls
but it's cleared in the valley, bright green farmsteads,
glassy white domes in a globe of golden light,
windvanes flashing as they turn in the freshening breeze,
rivers that glitter like foil. Being a Kshatriya,
the mother will follow her son, but in the abandon
of service, there's a sensuous impulse and self-will.
What pruning of the heart has pressed forth this fertility
of joy in her, hopeless, self-despairing as she is?
The chill returns; it thunders, and the mist rolls in.
* * *
These are the Mad Comities of Vaniah which have vowed
to carry the Gospel of Christ by the force of their arms
and the fire of their knighthood to all unbelievers and heretics.
But the farms on the road, for the most part, are friendly to travelers,
recognize James George Quincy and Mary
his mother by their garments and speech to be Vates or Kshatriyas,
give them clean beds and fundamentalist food —
unsalted bean soups, braided breads, sausages,
hearty after a day's trudge in the rain.
One surly farmer picked up a stick,
muttered a curse against godless and unclean foreigners,
but fled when the boy put his hand to the hilt of Adamant.
Once on a stovetop in plain view of any
scandalized visiting minister James and his mother
saw lying a brand-new Sears Roebuck catalog,
filled with the art of a gender civilization,
the odes and the tintings that lay on material life
its sweetness, its specious promise, to us who must die.
* * *
More and more as they travel west they hear
the rumor of war. The Mad Counties, for once,
have settled their doctrinal differences, banded together
to carry the Gospel to the infidels of Ahiah.
To appease Allegany, Somerset County has banned
from its borders all Alleganian refugee snake handlers;
Allegany has grudgingly recognized the evangel ministries
of Susquehanna, Monongahela, Shamokin,
and permitted, with licences, revival camps from those ministries.
The moderate counties have vowed noninterference
bullied by Bible-belt truculence, Vanian unity.
Ahian born, the hero James and his mother,
having cast all on the turn of this uncertain voyage
— whether they'll even be welcome when they come home —
must ask if there's a home to come home to.
* * *
In a Somerset inn they lodge for the night, and fall
into conversation with a Sears traveling salesman
whose name, Maury Edsel, befits his Vaisya calling.
It was he, they find, who left the offending catalog;
he insists, to their slight embarrassment, that they call him "Skip";
he's dressed in white shoes and maroon double-knits,
travels, he tells them," over the whole of the East,
even, like here, where powered transport's forbidden;
the pickings are richer, the folk not being exposed
to the video either, which is my chief competition.
(By treaty the multinational corporations
may operate here if they pay a good tithe to the church.)
There isn't much east of Cargo I don't know about."
So they seize the prerogative granted to travelers,
ease the constraints on talk between caste and caste,
for Skip is a goldmine of news. The Mad Counties,
it seems, have given up hope of converting the Riots,
have ceased their raids on the Burbs that in terror pay tribute
to Delphia Riot and Pitsburg; have turned their attention
to the High Counties that lie to the west. They have launched
a two-pronged attack, one south of Pitsburg,
and one to the north, skirting the Kelan Riot.
They hope to take Tuscarawas County by winter,
reclaim the Amish lands, launch a full-scale attack
on Sandusky and Mohican Counties the following spring.
* * *
Mohican County! will your domes and amphitheatres
fall to the torch of barbarians? Where scholarship flourishes,
strangers who come from the stars are made welcome to learn
from our craftsmen, our libraries, houses of science and music?
where, by our disciplines, the person is finer than otherwhere,
for the art of life is hammered here to perfection?
Mohican, mother of your poet, so powerful-seeming,
when all two hundred thousand citizens gather
yearly at the festival in Mount Verdant, when we see the cupolas
of your cathedral, after many days' travel, blaze in the sun,
you're no more than the breath of a flower in a fine globe of glass.
And all those planters, year after year, who poured
into this ground the overflowing of their spirit —
Johnny Appleseed whom we remember in our little shrines,
John Crowe Ransom, Griselda the gardener,
Bender the Shaman, Elizabeth our first praetor —
who would not eat the fruits that others offered
but chose Ahian earth, where the Mohican river
glitters, to bury wit, goodness, passion
as the poor fool buried the talent in the parable
where there was no assurance they might grow —
all of the planters, seeing their garden devoured,
must they then mourn their city without recompense?
* * *
"Heck," says Skip, "you look like you've just seen a ghost."
"Mohican's our home. After nine years we're returning."
"No shit. You're in a whole heap of trouble.
Take my advice and go back. They won't mess with you here,
but out further west it's a sick elephant's toilet."
"This is a lady, Skip, so please watch your language.
We give you our thanks for the warning but we have no choice
but to continue. Some iron for your good intentions."
The boy gives him one of the last of their coins,
the resin varnish worn almost down to the iron.
Skip wraps it up gravely, records the event on his 'purer.
"That's a High Countian gift, even I can see that,"
says he. "I don't mean to be nosey, sir,
But aren't you — no offense — young to be traveling so far
in charge of the lady?" "No business of yours,
but I am seventeen and able to look after myself —"
he touches the scabbard of Adamant. "— And my mother,"
he adds, rather angrily, seeing her hide a sad smile.
"Hey, hey, no offense!" says Skip, alarmed and amused.
"I was going to ask, if you're bound and set to go west,
and I'm going that way, couldn't I come with you,
I mean, under your protection." "Maury Edsel,
take care. Those I protect must have no reservations
nor falseness of heart, for I will brook no betrayal.
How may I know that you are no spy or traitor?
And what do you have to offer my mother in service?"
"There isn't no way that I can prove myself honest.
Take me or leave me. But perhaps you could use some advice
on the way. Like, you know, fellow-travelers."
The young man relents. "Agreed, and please pass the pie."
* * *
Of all measures of value, numerical quantity,
marked in human affairs by money currency,
most common, is also most shared. Truth, goodness,
beauty, are the flowers of refinement; in them the fire
of reality burns more fiercely, but only the few
whose hearts, like crucible ceramic, have been tested in the flame,
may know those radiances. Bless number then,
the speech the crassest nuclear iota speaks,
and money, which is the numbering of human deeds,
the telling in the common tongue, the ligaments of love.
* * *
On Skip's advice they go at once into disguise.
In a shop smelling of fabric, ivory buttons,
heavy-cut cotton and dye, they purchase new clothes.
The boy puts off the cloak, tunic, and breeches
of the hero, wraps up the sword in silk, and stows it
in his pack; puts on the black suit, the vest, and tall hat
of the fundamentalist farmer. His mother, in apron and bonnet
might be come fresh from a farm prayer breakfast.
Skip stays as he is: no one will stoop
to bother a Vaisya. Thus clothed like its enemies
they strike for the embattled borders of their native land.
The Storytelling Game
The road now passes through gentler landscapes.
On Laurel Hill the sun comes out again,
waterdrops flash in a rayed point of scarlet
or blue; heavenly shafts through the clusters of leaves;
the wood smells of leather and skylight and soil.
On Chestnut Ridge their first signs of war overtake them:
troops heavily armed, choking the way,
methahol trucks (permitted for war, not for peace),
wains drawn by greathorses, loaded with rocketry,
food wagons, mobile microprocessor shops,
two or three highly expensive tanks
clad in their jet-black resinite armor.
Overhead can be heard the drone of sunplanes in echelon
and sometimes a hillside is darkened, a dirigible's shadow.
To ease their minds, the companions fall into talk,
and thence into stories, which always shorten the journey.
"When I was just an apprentice salesman," says Skip,
"one of the master travelers made me a wager.
He showed me a boxful of widgets he had, and bet me
a Sears traveling dealership I couldn't sell four of them. Sears is the ace. I was only a kid. It was easy.
'You're on. What's the catch?' I asked him, street-wise.
The catch: you must sell one to a Free Countian,
one to a Mad, one to a Rioter, and one
to a Burbian. And no lies.' He'd caught many young salesmen
that way; he had theories of human psychology, thought
he might make me a fool. But I had some theories too.
First I sought out a Free Countian, told her
in frankness all that had happened. She, being a lady,
was pleased with the game. The widget's expensive,' she said,
'but it's cheap if you promise to tell me the story of how
you have fared, when it's over.' I agreed. Next I approached
a Mad Countain farmer I knew, picked
for a public morality that masked a fevered desire
to know what Free Countian women do
with their men. (The preacher in Puritan districts loves
to inveigh in language so vague that nobody knows
what he means, against 'practices,' 'pleasures,' 'abominations,'
inflaming the boys' curiosity in the back row of pews.)
So I told him in private I had a device that I'd sold
only last week to a Free County woman, that she
had assured me would give her the most refined pleasure, though I
hadn't the faintest idea what she would do with it.
'But,' I said, 'I'll bet she's doing it now.'
The fellow paid me twice what I'd got from the lady.
Two widgets to go. The problem with Rioters,
when you have something to sell, is not selling
but finding something of value they haven't spent yet.
No Rioter works, as you know; work
infringes their freedom; the world owes them a living.
But Burbians work, to pay the Rioters' levies,
and sometimes keep something by between burnings and taxes.
Burbians (pardon me, Ma'am) have no balls to speak of
and Rioters scare them shidess. The Burbian Government
(which used to be called the Uess Federal Government)
is controlled by the Riots. So. I found a Burbian,
gave him a widget, and asked him to keep it safe
from the Rioters down the street; then approached a huge Rioter,
showed him a widget, told how eagerly Countians
paid for them — even that wretched Burbian had one.
Rioters know what to want by wanting what other folk
show that they want by possessing. My Rioter cornered
the Burbian, made him give over the widget I gave him.
Shocked, I called to my aid a yet uglier Rioter
and told him the story. His eyes gleamed with cunning.
? want a widget,' he said. That Burbian pays.'
So the Burbian paid for the widget he wanted. But I,
ready to sting, asked the Rioters why they would want
and be willing to buy (at the Burbian's expense) a thing
that the Burbian got without paying. Struck by injustice,
the Rioters huddled, agreed that the Burbian must buy
his own widget, else it wasn't worth stealing.
So the first Rioter gave me my widget back
and taxed its replacement out of my scared Burbian.
When I told the tale to the Countian lady she laughed.
'So all six of us win at the wager: I,
with a story worth seventeen widgets; the farmer, with hours
of pleasure (though I fear you have used me most shamefully);
the Rioters too, who have got what other folk want,
even the Burbian, who has escaped with his life;
and you, who have got your Sears concession, though why
you should want such a thing is surely a mystery to me.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New World by Frederick W. Turner. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- I. THE HERO, pg. 1
- II. THE HEROINE, pg. 25
- III. THE THREE SUITORS, pg. 57
- IV. THE GRIEF OF LOVE AND WAR, pg. 91
- V. HEALING, pg. 127
- VI. THE SHADOW OF DEATH, pg. 157