National Poetry Month-Brother Jonathan’s Lament for Sister Caroline by Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mighty big doings today. It’s the 150th anniversary of the firing on Federal Ft. Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina by the swaggering firebrands of the Palmetto state thus officially opening the American Civil War. The Civil War was the central event of American history. The first half of the 19th Century was a long prelude, the war itself four years of hemorrhaging horror, and the long glide to our own day the fallout. “Celebrations” of the War will abound even as posturing about secession has become fashionable again in some deluded quarters and the country is so deeply and so irreconcilably polarized that another Civil War does not seem impossible.
When South Carolina declared its secession Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes took up his pen. New England itself had toyed with secession in Holmes’s father’s generation during the War of 1812. The War with Mexico, demands for the extension of slavery in the Western territories, and above all the Fugitive Slave Act had kept the idea alive among radical intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson. But Holmes was an unabashed Union man and old fashion patriot. His poem, Brother Jonathan’s Lament for Sister Caroline, like so many other of his efforts, was printed in the popular press. Brother Jonathan was the shrewd Yankee peddler figure who stood as a national symbol before Uncle Sam took his place. Sister Caroline, of course, was South Carolina cast as a tempestuous, headstrong belle.
Holmes would soon have skin in the game of the Civil War in the form of his tall, lanky son, Olive Wendell, Jr. Late in the war he would actually tackle a foolish President Abraham Lincoln as he silhouetted himself on the parapets of the fortifications of at Petersburg drawing enemy fire. “Get down, you fool!” the young captain told the Commander-in-Chief with the contempt of a war weary soldier. They younger Holmes would go on to a career as a distinguished Supreme Court Justice and eclipse his father’s fading fame.
Brother Jonathan’s Lament for Sister Caroline
She has gone,-she has left us in passion and pride
Our stormy-browed sister, so long at our side!
She has torn her own star from our firmament's glow,
And turned on her brother the face of a foe!
0 Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
We can never forget that our hearts have been one,
Our foreheads both sprinkled in Liberty's name,
From the fountain of blood with the finger of flame!
You were always too ready to fire at a touch;
But we said: "She is hasty,-she does not mean much."
We have scowled when you uttered some turbulent threat;
But Friendship still whispered: "Forgive and forget!"
Has our love all died out? Have its altars grown cold?
Has the curse come at last which the fathers foretold?
Then Nature must teach us the strength of the chain
That her petulant children would sever in vain.
They may fight till the buzzards are gorged with their spoil,
Till the harvest grows black as it rots in the soil,
Till the wolves and the catamounts troop from their caves,
And the shark tracks the pirate, the lord of the waves:
In vain is the strife! When its fury is past,
Their fortunes must flow in one channel at last,
As the torrents that rush from the mountains of snow
Roll mingled in peace through the valleys below.
Our Union is river, lake, ocean, and sky;
Man breaks not the medal when God cuts the die!
Though darkened with sulphur, though cloven with steel,
The blue arch will brighten, the waters will heal!
O Caroline, Caroline, child of the sun,
There are battles with Fate that can never be won!
The star-flowering banner must never be furled,
For its blossoms of light are the hope of the world!
Go, then, our rash sister! afar and aloof,
Run wild in the sunshine away from our roof,
But when your heart aches and your feet have grown sore,
Remember the pathway that leads to our door!