Intention
Indeed, words can be slippery. They almost always exist in context and context is often subjective and thus forever evolving. The form of a poem requires a reader to not assume author and speaker are the same persona: words in a poem have more individual possibility (it comes in reduction). The appearance of a word does not exactly clarify intention: presence is not necessarily endorsement. Suffice it to say, the reader here should take great care and time to peruse Emerson’s poem in full. By the end of those 427 lines, however, one gets quite the picture of a colonial-settler presence in what was named New England that does, uncomfortably, feel part of the poem’s final destiny: “thy Founder’s truth.”
Song Language Music Naming Subjectivity Translation Emerson History Erasure[violence] 427 Child of the Bear Indian Words Intention Rivers Preservation Body[music] Thresholds Dialogues Water Return