REVIVAL OF AN OLD POET

When we moved to Sewanee with the intention of staying at least six months of the year, I had to cull my library here in New Iberia for favorites to take with me to The Mountain. Most of my books of poetry found a new home in Tennessee, but I left hundreds of other beloved volumes, some of which were passed on to me by my godparents who lived in Virginia most of their lives. Markham, my godfather, was Head of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, so I inherited anthologies of literature and books by the Elizabethan and Romantic poets. Dora, my second cousin and godmother, passed on several volumes of poetry written by friends of the family, among which were two volumes by Mary Leslie Newton.

In another life when I took Communion to Sarah Helm of New Iberia (now deceased), I found we shared a mutual interest in the work of poet Mary Leslie Newton who had been Sarah’s headmistress at All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi and who had been Dean of the school when my godmother served as Assistant Dean. Sarah had never seen one of the small volumes I inherited from godmother, a green leather book measuring 3 ½” x 5 ½” entitled THE WINGS OF LONELINESS. The volume, with its parchment frontispiece (still in good condition), was written in 1925 and contained twelve poems to coincide with the months of the year, each reflecting the theme of loneliness.

On a flap torn from another of Newton’s books of poetry entitled A CROOKED STAFF, I learned that the poet had graduated from the University of Tennessee, and following her retirement from All Saints, she had moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, a forty minute drive from my second home at Sewanee. She'd probably be judged as a “minor poet” in contemporary literary circles, but some of her work had appeared in the “New York Times,” the famed “Poetry” magazine, “The Lyric,” “Singing Mississippi,” and other publications.

During WWII, Mary Newton was in great demand as a lecturer and conducted a class on current events during the war years. In addition to her work at All Saints, she taught at Noble Institute in Anniston, Alabama, Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah, and at St. Mary’s Hall in Dallas, Texas. When she attended the University of Tennessee, she produced so many publishable poems that she had to use several noms de plume for the school paper in which they appeared so the readers wouldn’t accuse of her monopolizing space.

Mary Newton’s friends referred to her as Emily Dickinson, and she was capable of writing what I call “pithy snippets;” e.g., “A memory is a sudden coin you touch/Deep in an empty pocket…”

From THE WINGS OF LONELINESS, a few lines from the poem depicting August:

“Night is a pool of silence, on whose brink
Hover the stars, and winds stoop down to drink.”

‘Seems she was a minimalist in 1925 before the minimalist movement had gained momentum in the literary world. It’s nice to find such small treasures on my own bookshelves.

A TECHE COUNTRY POET RE-DISCOVERED

After leaving Sewanee, Tennessee on Sunday, I returned to New Iberia, Louisiana Monday evening, expecting a Louisiana monsoon, and I was relieved to find sunshine and roads devoid of mud. Two days later, I am looking out my window at the sunny patio and hoping the weather will hold. October is usually a halcyon month in Louisiana, and I like Teche country in the late Fall when some of the sulk has gone out of the air and I wake up to crisp, clear mornings.

After cleaning and tending yard for two days, I began “reading the shelves,” particularly the ones containing my Louisiana collection, and I dusted off several good titles about hurricanes before I unearthed a thin chapbook entitled SHORT MEET, the poetry of a younger friend of mine, Jeanne Bernard, who often shared dinner and literary conversation at my home on Front Street back in the 80's before she moved away – far away – to Paris, France where she met and married a Frenchman. Jeanne is the youngest of eight children born to Lewis and Catherine Bernard of New Iberia and has the distinction of carrying her grandmother’s unusual name as a middle name: Alaska. I’m not privy to the story about how Jeanne’s grandmother acquired such a distinctive name, but Jeanne often used the middle name because most people mispronounced her first name, she said , at the time of the publication of SHORT MEET. Today, I’m sure Parisians don’t have any difficulty giving it a proper French inflection.

Jeanne wrote the slim volume of poems when she was working on her B.A. at Stephens College in Missouri. The booklet is No 227 of 300 copies and No. 4 in the Harbinger Chap Book Series published by Stephens College. It contains several poems that should resonate with native New Iberians, poems rich with imagery of south Louisiana. I always thought Jeanne would be the Poet Laureate of Louisiana one day. Actually, our wonderful Poet Laureate, Darrell Bourque, read at a poetry event at the Iberia Parish Library the same night Jeanne read from SHORT MEET, and I had the privilege of introducing both of them.

One of the poems that I think is rich in Teche country imagery is entitled “At the Cemetery,” and I’m sharing it with readers because I want Jeanne to read it in a blog and remember that she’s a talented writer who needs to pick up her pen again!

“AT THE CEMETERY (for my brother, Buddy)

We walked to Papou’s grave
with the two camellias, Purple Dawn,
we had cut, and imagined
we would find something more
than a slab of granite in the cold grass.
But it was noisy out.
There were firecrackers popping,
children shouting, radios
blaring in the next lot.
We were cold,
and the city sewage stank.

I had few recollections:
how Big Mary Marionneaux
placed her hands on my shoulders
when they lowered his coffin,
Mama saying it was
“pitiful to watch
your poor ol’ grandfather
buy these plots”
just before our grandmother died.

Her headstone said
Happiest When Doing For Others,
and we brought no camellia for her.
When you placed your camellia in his vase,
I decided to put mine in hers,
remembering how the other Mary,
Mary Fontenette,
came to our house in a cab
the morning Granou died,
saying “She told me to come take care of her children.”

And you remembered that Granou
used to sing as she and Papou
tended their wild irises and roses,
their tulips and pansies, easter
lilies, morning glories, camellias.

When we got home I told Mama
what I’d done with my flower.
“You should have picked Pink Perfection,” she said.
“Your grandfather loved her in pink.”

THE FOREST PRIMEVAL

When Lori, my brother Paul’s wife, sent me another e-mail image of one of Paul’s recent paintings, still drying on the easel in his yard, I recognized the title of the painting, “The Forest Primeval,” as the first line of Longfellow’s famous poem “Evangeline” – a tale of “love in Acadie, home of the happy” (otherwise known as Nova Scotia). I love the light and the mystical scenery in Paul’s painting and feel that it must have been inspired by Paul’s knowledge of our Vincent ancestors who were expelled from “Acadie” during the Grand Derangement from Nova Scotia to Louisiana.

According to noted Louisiana author Harnett Kane, the authentic story about Evangeline was passed along by the Mouton and Voorhies families in Acadiana and began with the grandmother of Judge Felix Voorhies. The grandmother had raised an orphan girl, Emmeline Labiche, in the Canadian home of the Acadians before the Grand Derangement. At sixteen, Emmeline was betrothed to Louis Arceaneux, and the marriage banns had already been published. The day before the marriage, Louis was injured and carried away; Emmeline collapsed, screaming for her lover. During the Grand Derangement, she and her guardian were taken aboard a ship and transported to Maryland. Emmeline thought that Louis would be there when she landed, but he couldn’t be found among the crowd of people who had been expelled from their homeland. After several years, the Acadians in Maryland heard about Louisiana, and Emmeline was among those who made a perilous voyage to St. Martinville in Teche country. When Emmeline stepped off the boat, she glimpsed Louis Arceneaux standing underneath a large, moss-laden live oak. However, when she reached out her arms to him, he turned away and said in a muffled voice that he had pledged himself to someone else. He had waited, but too much time had passed and he had asked another woman to marry him.

From that day on, Emmeline’s manner became, in Kane’s words, “strange… alternating between melancholy and tremulous excitement.” She wandered along the banks of Bayou Teche, picking moss and flowers, weeping and talking about Acadie and of her marriage to be consummated the next week. She would talk about Louis being killed by soldiers and often asked people what would become of her. Her health deteriorated and she died, still believing that she would reunite with Louis.

Longfellow heard about this romantic story that took place in Teche country and was intrigued with it. Actually, he had heard the tale from Nathaniel Hawthorne when they shared breakfast together one morning. Longfellow told Hawthorne he wanted to write about this “idyll in hexameter,” and Hawthorne agreed that the poet could use the story. Longfellow had never been in Louisiana, but he read histories, studied pictures, and corresponded with people who knew about St. Martinville. Longfellow was then teaching at Harvard, and a student of his who was a St. Martinville native, corroborated the story told by the Voorhies family. Longfellow began to create his epic poem and was surprised when it was published and circulated widely throughout the U.S.

The Longfellow story differs from the Voorhies account in that Louis (who is Gabriel in the poem) didn’t forget his Emmeline (Evangeline). In the poem, Evangeline arrived in Louisiana, as did the real-life Emmeline, but she wandered throughout the countryside, searching for Gabriel and found him, dying in a hospital far from Teche country. The story about this romantic pair became so popular that a statue of Emmeline was placed on her tombstone near St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church in St. Martinville, and the huge oak beside the bayou in that town has been commemorated as the place where Evangeline found Gabriel. This story has gained much prominence in the U.S., and people in Louisiana often refer to St. Martinville and environs as “Evangeline Country,” scene of “the forest primeval” depicted in Paul’s beautiful painting.