Figure 7. Thomas Shaw, “A Mournful Song on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. Nathaniel Knights” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The year 1807 seems to have been a bad one for travel over water and, consequently, a good year for Shaw’s poetry; his poem “Melancholy Shipwreck,” written after the schooner Charles ran aground at the mouth of Portland harbor (killing sixteen people), proved as popular as his poem on the Knight family tragedy.
[As] I was riding to Portland, I heard the Melencoly news of Capten Adams Shiprack on Richmend Iland, and began a Moun-full song on the accashen. I wrote 9 verces on the rode, and finisht the same in Portland…. I comited my song to the press, and have reached home the third day. The next Saturday I rode to Portland saw to the fixing of the tipe for printing the Shipwreck song, and staid to quarterly meeting on the Saboth & herd Elder Breal, and Brother Wintch preach, and attended the Sacrement there, on monday I took out my Songs and spread them about, which met with great approbation, and returned home at night.76
Figure 8. Thomas Shaw, “Melancholy Shipwreck” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
This broadside was dated July 14, 1807, two days after the accident. This timeliness outcompeted the newspapers, and one of the poem’s primary functions was to convey information about the disaster; a postscript appended to the bottom of the sheet (probably of a later impression) included the names of the drowned, as well as information about the rescue of six surviving passengers. The poem itself works as a news report of the event, a providential interpretation of it, and also a meditation on the social work of poems in communicating information and forming communities. It begins by invoking a collective audience in the service of collective mourning:
Come let us weep with those that weep,
For their lost friends, plung’d in the deep;
And let us all now take some part
In grief which breaks the tender heart.77
Reading the poem (or attending a recitation of it) establishes the medium of a social emotion, communal grief. The news of the accident therefore works within a moral paradigm:
O God! who know’st the wants of men,
Direct my mind, and guide my pen,
That I may bring the truth to light,
On this dread scene, and awful night.78
Elaborating the news of the accident serves as a means to reveal God’s power (“my dear friends pray eye the rod, / And know’tis from a holy God”) while also calling for consolation (“Good Lord send cheering comfort down / To those who mourn in Portland town”), but these revelations and consolations come specifically through the dissemination of the poem. In other words, events do not interpret or reveal themselves but must be revealed through the inspiration, production, circulation, and consumption of poems.
Thus I have some few truths here told
The whole I cannot now unfold;
But if occasion e’er doth call,
The world at large shall have it all.
And now good people I must close
This solemn scene that since arose.
Then take the truth in this my song,
And overlook where I am wrong.79
The concluding disclaimer shifts responsibility to the reader, who ultimately must filter the poem’s truths from its errors (a standard trope in disaster poems like this). In the context of the poem’s exchanges through recitation and the dissemination of printed or handwritten copies, this conclusion also links poet and reader in a community grounded in the work of poetry. The broadside thereby offers an occasion for audiences to reflect on the occasion that brings them together, which is not the sinking of the Charles but the recount of that tragedy in the distribution of the poem, its sale in song and sheet by a balladmonger.
Here, too, Shaw has left a very specific record of his travels and travails hawking this poem. His peddling circuits wound through a large piece of southern Maine. After printing the song in Portland, he peddled it around town before following a sales route that went from Portland to Saco on the south and west and then to Buxton, Windham, and Gorham on the north and west, an itinerary of roughly 80 miles. According to Shaw’s record, the trip took a week, during which “I had four thousand & and five hundred copies printed of, and disposd of nigh three thousand.”80 The next week, he rode a circuit northeast from Portland to Bath and New Gloucester, traveling around 90 miles. In August, Shaw followed a trade route west, to Limington, Maine, and Effingham, New Hampshire, southwest to Wolfeboro, and then back through Buxton to Standish, a journey of more than 100 miles. Along the way, he stayed with Methodist friends and elders, attended meetings, and listened to much “lively exortation.”81 While his diary emphasizes his successes, he also mentions setbacks on the road, such as one near Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where “the colledge Boys beset me devil like, and I told them that they were burning to preach the gospel, & I told them that if they did not mend there ways, the devil would have them.”82 The community imagined in the poem did not necessarily materialize in the way that the poem envisioned, for the crowds gathering to listen and buy were not always docile. The abuse also indicates the widely different responses that the itinerant poet could anticipate. When distributed in the Methodist meeting, poems like the “Mournful Song” on the Knight family tragedy elicited communal grief, godly exhortation, and the desire to recirculate the poem in other contexts. The “colledge boys,” however, beset Shaw when they met him in the street. The derisive abuse he suffered shows how fragile the poet’s right to perform in public could be, especially when presented in the guise of the balladmonger peddling his wares. Publication and publicity did not necessarily meliorate Shaw’s marginal relation to public culture, for while so much of his work expresses his inability to be recognized as a poet, even when such recognition came, it could easily be used against him.
The incident rankled and perhaps happened on other occasions as well, for Shaw complained about this sort of harassment in a poem, “To Those that Cry Me Poet,” which he recorded in another of his daybooks sometime around 1837.
To all of you, that ofton due
At me both laugh and hout
For all you say, this is my way
My Rhyems for to throw out
I make a Rhyem, in little time
As fast as I can say
A song by heart, and never start
On jot out of my way—
You that hant wit, do say poet
And at me you do hollow
With your mouth wide so one can slide
Clear down into your swollow
Is not it shame, that some by name
Beset me in the street
And at me yell, which is not well
Such languge to repeate—
As true as I, cant pass you by
Without that word you Poet
You cry aloude, like man thats proude
And thus I think you shoe it—
What