B Myers

    How many Hiawancans know the origins of our official state poem? A handful of academics and a few weirdo pedants? Something like that probably. Our condolences to their families.

    “O Hiawanca” was written in the mid-19th century by a poet who wrote in an overwrought style that veered between the slaphappy blathering of Whitman and the godawful sap of Longfellow. This epic (in length) poem was once printed as a discrete work, with a “popular” edition running to 124 pages. It is filled with minute descriptions of natural phenomena and tedious geographical detail paired with great gushings of poetic feeling. If Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin had taken over for Linnaeus midstream, this is what could have happened. There are vast sprinklings of exclamation marks, an annoying overuse of “behold,” and lots and lots of bubbly O’s to froth up line openings. While lyrical sections of trimeter do quicken the pace, the poem regularly debauches into a free-verse word orgy guaranteed to glaze eyes and dampen libidos. Maybe this was why it was once included in so many of Hiawanca’s high school curricula.

The Poet

    C. W. Boakes (henceforth “the poet”) might have been born in Delaware. A single known statue (currently residing in a branch library in the town of Saukinee) shows him gazing into the distance, garb unremarkable, but wearing a typical bohemian hat. There is also a portrait of a figure in an open shirt and jaunty red scarf which is believed to depict the poet during his university days.  

    The poet “came west” and wrote about the area, gaining some local notoriety in the process. Some of his alarming mannerisms included drinking “the wine of the earth” (sources disagree on whether this was simply creek water or a euphemism for urine), picking and smoking flowers from other people’s gardens, adherence to a provocative diet, and sounding off on a pro-labor radical individualism that somehow justified an evasive attitude about his debts.  

    He eventually went back east to teach or lecture or treat his “episodes” or possibly something else altogether. The residual fallout of his existence, writings, and the decision to make “O Hiawanca” the state poem has been that generations of Hiawancan students were forced to memorize sections of it and henceforward avoided poetry for the rest of their lives.  

    The last major writer to even acknowledge the poet in print was John Muir, who described him as “that Job’s turkey” in a single aside. Today, the poet has the prominence of a literary critic’s footnote in Text Fossils Quarterly.

Our State Poem’s Prologue  

    Was this the most convoluted syntax set to print in the 19th century? Probably not, but readers must gird themselves for thickets of dense verbiage. The purpose of the prologue seems to be to express gratitude, but as that sentiment conflicts with the poet’s semi-articulated philosophy of unbridled freedom—it would be servile and debasing to be thankful for what the world offers—everything must be qualified. The poet expresses a qualified gratitude to objects like trees, grasses, waterfalls, lichens, and “curiously besmoothed” river stones. The poet expresses a qualified thanks to footpaths, the crumbling spirit houses of former graveyards, natural log bridges, a 10-foot-high artificial mound (dubbed a “whispery sanctal barrow”), chance-discovered arrowheads, and other artifacts. The poet expresses a qualified thanks to the first robust yokels who came to homestead.  

    The inventorying of things goes on and on. Even contemporaries must have been sapped by this landfill of categorical descriptions. Metrically, there is a tendency toward unrhymed tetrameter (trochaic, no less), with outbreaks of Whitmanesque free verse occurring where the poet abandons any semblance of meter (although more than one critic has suggested that the original printer simply ran lines together for the sake of a tidy folio).

The Poem Itself  

    Let’s call the poem a bucolic traipse through Hiawanca, by way of overview (if only we could stop there). The poet-explorer comes to the territory via a famous frontier trail, recently upgraded to a plank road (“Now did I blaze those dimpled timbers”), and proceeds on foot (proudly on foot—a horse will not do).  

    We are treated to descriptions of local flora that are extensively embellished with complete psychologies. The land’s general demeanor is appraised. Notable trees are appreciated at length; the 48 lines devoted to forest foliage have a particularly stupefying effect. In one section, tree leaves become suddenly warlike: “Incited by the raucous breeze, the ancient doughty oak / in reckless charge brings teeming corseques and halberds / down upon the beech’s spears of serrated golden green.” That’s right: some branches move in the wind.  

    The poem froths up gradually to the general Spirit of the Land. This once-famous section of mystic hyperbole has the slightest traces of meter in the entire poem. There are no overt stanzas, but the tendency here is again toward tetrameter, punctuated by Whitmanesque jailbreaks/printer errors.

    We stay mystic but come down abruptly to the specific when “a heron in the reeds” speaks directly to the poet of its life, discoveries, and events thereof (described so as to be representative of the general spirit of the land and recalling the poet’s own philosophy).  

    Descriptions of encounters with several Great Lakes are worthy of the Book of Revelation. We walk under “Noah’s bitter clouds,” trod “soul-parching dunes” and “time-blasted rock,” and hear “reverberatory echoes” of something very momentous and important. One critic has noted that this section also works as a colorful description of a concussion’s lingering effects.

A Small Taste Should Be Enough

    From when the poet sees an old boat and some birds:  

Behold now a tremulous bark, a tempest-seasoned vessel

On the orchestral whirl, froth, foam, and swell

The crescendo frolic of this inland sea.  

Nimble its phantom sails and sleek its otter-brown flanks,

It feints a dance upon the crest and then is lost.  

But again it rises and again it falls, the tremulous bark.  

I follow its course while walking the zephyrous shore

And behold above the speckled flecks of black and white  

Frolicsome gulls in ceaseless, gay, undulating flow.  

    From when the poet smokes some flowers and the heron in the reeds starts talking:  

Behold I shot into the air  

A burst of sheer delight,  

And from my swelling neck I gushed

A song into the sky.

And did behold the firmament  

Its tangent shades and hues  

And newly fledged I did return  

A creature of both worlds.  

    From when nature calls and the poet is distracted by some nearby leaves:  

And did I trace with crude expressive instrument  

Upon the ground a semblance of those verdant lobes  

And mingle Nature’s loam with Humanity and Art

(By the way, this passage apparently enjoyed a stretch of popularity on men’s lavatory walls at schools and colleges across the state in the 1880s.)  

    From a description of the Spirit of the Land (we think):  

I wended weary o’er your shores and lay musing as the autumn Sun

Fed your waters’ western reaches glowing embers of burnished gold  

And did then behold in fascination your splendor, your breaking waves

Your sediments and sands, the forest-tinted airs intoxicant—   

O Hiawanca! Your beauty I do sing.  

Your myst’ry towered trees  

Your fields of dappled green.  

Upon the foggy shores  

And on the windy moors  

Your Spirit freshens me.  

    The final six lines have reverberated down the ages, memorized by defenseless schoolchildren, never to be dislodged from their skulls forevermore. These lines remain lurking in the Hiawanca state anthem, and at one time it was common for state legislators to recite the anthem with children, teachers, and functionaries, during election years. That practice is long gone, but the vapor lingers.

Relics Remain

    Visitors to the grounds of the state capitol will find a plaque set below a statue of two adult-looking frontier children. The plaque’s high-minded message of civic harmony is underlined by a passage wherein the poet looks to the future: “Golden child, cast your gleaming eye / Forward to brightly shining days / And with Nature’s industry instill / Your works with Hope and Love and Charity.”  

    Yes, we should all do that. There are a few other such relics lurking around statues, bridges, and municipal buildings across the state if you’re of a mind to look. We’ll assume you’re not.

Casting Our Gleaming Eye to the Future  

    Many otherwise sensible people would probably argue for keeping the state poem, out of misguided feelings over tradition and continuity. This is silly, of course. But what, the intelligent reader will ask, can we replace it with? That is an important question. In this state at least, our choices of local poetry these days boil down to “cocktail napkin aesthetics,” whatever is in academic vogue, or cabin country doggerel. Would any of those be an improvement?  

    We do not suggest a new and improved state poem or anthem. We suggest phasing them both out altogether. If we are being honest about this subject—things intrinsically Hiawancan and worthy of canonization—then let’s inter the tremulous barks and dimpled timbers and bring bait, tackle, and beer into the conversation.  

    Admit it, Hiawancans: our regional reputation is tied up with fishing and alcohol, and so is our collective psychology. In a Rorschach test where other states see bird nests or hair curlers, we see empty bottles in a tangle of fishing line.  

    Walleye Wally, the original spokes-mascot for Scholl’s Old Ale, was partially based on the legend of the Siqunnock Fish Man—a character who did nothing but fish and drink beer. The character eventually became semiaquatic, emerging from his lake only to raid cabins for more beer, leaving a trail of empties leading back to the water (the reader will pick up on a tidy convenience embedded in the legend). Walleye Wally is also a semiaquatic, beery good-timer whose wants are simple. Here is inspiration for civic harmony. And, we would argue that the Scholl’s label motto, “Catch one if you can!” does vastly more for statewide fellowship and good feeling than anything the fop from Delaware ever penned.   

    For the sake of starting a conversation, let’s consider the old Scholl’s radio jingle:   

Bring your rusty fishing can  

And the extry frying pan  

Six of Scholl’s Old Ale in cans  

And a church key in your hand  

Everybody knows the plan—

Drink and catch one if you can!

    The lines don’t scan and the rhyme is crude, but the sentiment is surely more Hiawancan: drink beer, fish, and have an excuse ready. Would something like this be a more appropriate state anthem?  

    We believe so.