While Dickinson makes plain her poetic debt to Emerson, Cowper, Thomson, and perhaps Allen, she also reaches back to Greek literary associations of winter and war. The variant for “Artisans” is “Myrmidons,” the warlike people that Achilles led to battle against Troy. This single word summons the story of the Trojan War, as depicted in Homer’s Iliad, in the language of Alexander Pope’s translation (that translation was in her family library, as were volumes by Thomson and Cowper).30 An extended passage in the Iliad compares in detail a warlike snowstorm with the Greeks’ blizzard-like bombardment of Troy with stones:
And now the Stones descend in heavier Show’rs.
As when high Jove his sharp Artill’ry forms,
And opes his cloudy Magazine of Storms.31
This excerpt suggests that Dickinson’s poem is infused with the metaphoric logic of the Iliad: the heaviness and minerality, for lack of a better word, of her snow metaphors—lead, alabaster—summon the storm of rocks in the epic. Her sifting and powdering “It” suggests Jove’s godly impersonality; both deliver lethal, aerial messages to humans without concern for the consequences, but Dickinson’s “It” is so far removed that it doesn’t have a name or a place in a belief system as Jove does. Even so, in one way “It” is more intimate, for it is engaged in domestic activities that are suitable for a war at home. The poems also share “fleeces” as an evocation of snow:
The circling seas, alone absorbing all,
Drink the dissolving fleeces as they fall:
So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o’er the plain.
Dickinson’s synonym for fleeces, “alabaster wool,” further underscores the connection: Alabaster is a word derived from Greek for a fine white stone from which ornamental vessels and sculptures were carved.32 Dickinson inverts the earlier metaphoric valence: if in the Iliad, battle is described as a snowstorm, in Dickinson’s poem, a snowstorm is described as a battle … or is it? By the end of the poem, “It” is also “lost in fleeces,” and it is unclear which is the tenor and which is the vehicle. Dickinson underscores the remoteness of present violence by referring to even more elusive and remote past violence, historical, but also mythical and beautiful, inspiration for an enduring poetic tradition that, she suggests, must both resonate and be renovated in order to make sense of the present violence.
Though many critics and historians have found nature poetry of the period to work in the service of naturalizing and rationalizing state-sanctioned violence, both Dickinson and Allen offer a thoughtful meditation on mass violence via the language of natural phenomena. They forge connections between remote scenes of suffering, largely in the South, and the Union home front.33 The weather is not only a metaphor for war; it is also a metaphor for news. The “simple news that nature told,” as Faith Barrett has suggested, is not that simple once the war begins, and not just for Dickinson.34
“The Snow of Southern Summers”
Though Confederate and Union poetry are usually characterized as discrete, opposed wartime forms of expression that do not enter into communication with one another, Confederate Henry Timrod’s poems are clearly engaged with a tradition of English and New England snow poems as a way of infusing climactic differences between North and South with contrasting symbolic valences. “Ethnogenesis” inaugurated the birth of a new nation on the occasion of “the meeting of the Southern Congress, at Montgomery, February, 1861,” as the extended title tells us.35 Published in the Charleston Daily Courier on February 23, 1861, it was reprinted not only in Southern papers, but also in Littell’s Living Age, a weekly Boston publication.36 Timrod’s nature poetry had been popular enough in the North before the war that he published a volume of poems in the prestigious Ticknor and Fields series in 1860.37 Northern readers of “Ethnogenesis,” curious how secession changed the poet’s outlook, would see that Timrod is quite familiar with poetic traditions that associate winter with war even if, as a lifelong resident of South Carolina, he did not have the substantial experience with blizzards that residents of Massachusetts could claim. Working both within and against that tradition, Timrod broadcasts a new kind of snow that he promotes as superior to the northern sort. This kinder, gentler snow, along with the rest of a more amenable, milder climate, will help the South win the war:
Beneath so kind a sky—the very sun
Takes part with us; and on our errands run
All breezes of the ocean; dew and rain
Do noiseless battle for us; and the Year,
And all the gentle daughters in her train,
March in our ranks, and in our service wield
Long spears of golden grain!
A yellow blossom as her fairy shield,
June flings her azure banner to the wind,
While in the order of their birth
Her sisters pass, and many an ample field
Grows white beneath their steps, till now, behold,
Its endless sheets unfold
THE SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS! Let the earth
Rejoice! beneath those fleeces soft and warm
Our happy land shall sleep
In a repose as deep
As if we lay intrenched behind
Whole leagues of Russian ice and Arctic storm!38
Rather than, like the winter snow, competing against those living in its atmosphere—alienating, isolating, and confusing the human population—Timrod’s summer weather “takes part with us.” Personification is far less ambiguous and more persistent in “Ethnogenesis” than in the poems of Emerson, Allen, and Dickinson: the sky, the sun, the breezes, the year, the months (“all the gentle daughters”), all take human shapes so they can take up arms—fanciful arms—a “fairy shield,” a “spear” of grain—in the name of cotton.39 Cotton, the thing not named, and one of the few things not personified in the passage, behaves atmospherically, like southern snow, rather than like a plant. It blankets the earth in “fleeces,” like Dickinson’s and the Iliad’s snow, only hospitably, nurturing the earth and keeping it warm. Its whiteness becomes the very atmosphere of moral purity that Timrod hopes will inspire the new Southern nation. At the same time, he associates the color of cotton with racial superiority. Timrod thus posits an alternative to northern snow that appeals to the slaveholding South; this snow is far more ideologically saturated, and unlike the Northern poems, it is directly tied to nation building.
There is one strange ambivalence about the Confederate project worth noting, however. The cotton stretches out in “sheets” like clouds, or like Allen’s “winding sheets,” but rather than wrapping the dead, it cultivates an opiate “sleep” that Timrod casts positively. He suggests that cotton inures white Southern