Henry Washington Bellamy: Poetry and the Poet in 19th Century Appalachia

I 1ItIM Hj111I[I ||?|?· 1""IMI1I | I I JIIL ? ?'??.1 ·µ? i G' 1H1I' ' "' ··> I11I1UIHI 1-J 'VBI <_ .. .L,U.Tt.»? -I. -J- .......Ul A,.i.iA..ljl .?.?.,?????,,?????.,.,.??,???,?.?, ,iL,!. t..,,.,.. .. .1,.' .?'_ 1J Henry Washington Bellamy: Poetry and the Poet in 19th Century Appalachia by S. Paul Rice Several years ago a box of old manuscripts , many of them tattered and badly in need of conservation, was found in the attic of a Victorian house in Lynchburg, Virginia. There were a few letters and other papers, but mostly there were poems, about a hundred of them, which comprise in all likelihood, the complete poetical works of the Rev. Henry Washington Bellamy of Tennessee. Bellamy, a frail youth who set himself apart from the agrarian rigors of a pre-Civil War South, educated himself in the genteel tradition, left the farm for college, was graduated and ordained, and spent his life preaching and writing in Appala44 chian Tennessee and Virginia. Dying, he left an important part of his life in his poems. Bellamy's oeuvre contains two titled collections of verse, the first called Bellamy's Miscellaneous Poems and containing 66 poems, the earliest of which was written in 1873. This collection is written in Bellamy's own hand in an accounting ledger. There is a second collection called Moments of Rest, which was probably begun shortly after the completion of Miscellaneous Poems. There are twenty poems here, also in a ledger. There are also some uncollected poems which seem to have been written over Bellamy's lifetime, as some are in the firm hand of youth and some in the quavering hand of obvious old age. Furthermore, there are a number of miscellaneous prose documents relating to Bellamy's life. Most interesting and most beneficial to research is the 450word biography intended, it seems, to introduce Bellamy's Miscellaneous Poems. There is no evidence that any of these poems made it to press either individually or in collections. From the autobiographical sketch we learn that Henry Bellamy was born December 26, 1848, in Sullivan County, Tennessee. His father was a poor farmer, the owner of a small amount of land which was sold when Henry was about one, because it did not contain a sufficient acreage to support the large family of which Henry was the eleventh child. At this time, the family moved to Claiborne County, Tennessee, where they remained until he was five. Again his father sold his land holdings, and the family moved to Monroe County, Tennessee , where they bought a 120-acre farm a couple of miles south of the "thriving little town of Sweetwater, Tennessee." In April of 1861 when the South Carolina Confederates fired on Ft. Sumter, Henry Bellamy was twelve, and in the fall of that year his father bought a lot, house, and coopering shop in Sweetwater where the youth went to work, and where he "quickly learned to make vessels ." He declares, however, that he never cared much for the work, especially detesting the confinement of the shop. He became sick because, as he states in the autobiography, the work did not suit either his "turn of mind nor delicate constitution." In 1865 after Lee's surrender, Bellamy Sr. sold the town property and moved to Illinois. Again Mr. Bellamy was not satisfied with his land and returned to his farm property in Monroe County in the spring of 1866. Young Henry went to work on the farm for the next three years, working the fields and dreaming of a literary career, a matter which occupied his mind more and more. Near the end of the 1860s Henry fell seriously ill, and his recovery took three years. He returned to farm work for a while, and then, in the fall of 1874, he enrolled at Hiwassee College. Hiwassee College had made it through the war, but barely. There was little money, and the physical facilities consisted of a single intact building (Hilten 43). The Methodists of Tennessee, the school's sponsor, were bitterly divided at the end of the war, and indeed, many members had maintained "northern ' sympathies throughout. Things were better, but not much better, when Bellamy arrived there. Farm work was not a pursuit that the entering freshman left behind, for, as a part of his contribution to the community, each student was expected to participate in the general care and feeding of those at the college. There was water to be carried, wood to be chopped, and repairs to be made. A student was expected to participate in the spring planting and the fall harvesting , and with the care and slaughter of animals. In 1874 there were fewer than 200 students from 13 southern states (Hilten 54). Bellamy's dated works indicate that about three years before his arrival at Hiwassee he had begun to write verse, a Eractice which gave him a large part of is identity at the college and in the sur45 rounding community. From the dedications appended to many of his poems, we may assume that he soon became a local poet of note and was asked upon numerous occasions to write verse as the de facto poet laureate of the college community. One young friend of Bellamy lost his arm in an accident and engaged Bellamy to write a poem to the beau s fiancee explaining his wish to break off the engagement for fear that a one-armed man might be incapable of supporting a family. On another occasion he was asked by a young lady to write a poem for a childhood boyfriend of hers whom she still loved, even in adulthood. He wrote a poem to a woman who had spurned one of his friends, asking that she reconsider her decision. He also wrote several poems about Craighead Cave, where the Methodists held worship services and singings , with as many as a hundred people and the light of "a hundred blazing torches" (Hilten 51). Miscellaneous Poems contains the verse written during his Hiwassee years, and there is, throughout the work, in the introductions, epigraphs, and explanations , and in the poems themselves, a Victorian quality of gentility and refinement in this island of learning in a rough and tumble 19th-century Appalachia . From his poems we can gather that the people in Bellamy's world talked much of religion, but also led something of the parlor life, giving each other flowers and boughs of cedar, making line drawings of each other, and exchanging polite chat about literature. Bellamy was right at home in this environment and must have been accorded, by right of his position as poet-inresidence , a special and inside place in the local society. His friends were the outstanding young people of the area. One of his friends, LW. Cooper, mentioned several times in the manuscript, went on to become a well-known educator in Mississippi (Hilten 51). Another, perhaps his best friend in his college years, was the man to whom he wrote a poem on the subject of friendship, the Rev. Snow Hamilton, who, three years after he and Bellamy graduated from Hiwassee, became president of that college (Hilten 61). Based on the number and intensity of the poems written during his time at Hiwassee , Bellamy must have spent hours with these people talking of life and love and death. The memories of drowsy afternoons in summer when the planting was over fill his works. He was accustomed to carrying a small volume in his back pocket, often until he had worn off the boards. He always carried a small copy of the New Testament which a relative had given him. From a note attached to one of his poems we learn that during the period of his sickness in the first three years of the seventies, Bellamy read a great deal and borrowed books from several of his friends, and this stood him in great stead at Hiwassee where the curriculum was a strenuous one (Hilten, 180) drawn from the English idea of a university, with heavy emphasis on grammar, rhetoric , and the classical languages. Bellamy studied grammar, and natural philosophy , and probably read Horace, Caesar, Virgil, Ovid, Homer, and others, and studied Greek and Latin. In addition, he had lessons in composition, science, and mathematics. He was a member of the Methodist church, but this was not a requirement of those attending Hiwassee. Bellamy enjoyed the Greek writers, especially Plato, and in a note to one of the poems he mentions that he was especially fond of Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake." His poems are full of allusions to classical sources. But his work was resolutely Christian, and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was favorite reading. This was more in keeping with the theological stance he assumed in his poetry, as was another of his favorite bits of reading, A Call to the Unconverted, by Richard Baxter, the fiery Presbyterian divine who was a contemporary of John Milton. 46 The most important influence in Bellamy's work is the poetry of the Victorian Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose complete poetic works were available in this country in the 1850s. Bellamy states in a note that he borrowed a copy of Tupper's work from a Mrs. Dorcas Gaines to read while he was ill. Much of what he thought a poem was, and was supposed to do, came from Tupper. It might do well here to consider that when Bellamy entered Hiwassee in 1874 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold were English poets of note, and Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson were American ones. It is unfortunate for Bellamy's poetic career that he chose Martin Tupper as a mentor. It has been said of Tupper that "as a poet," [he] does not possess sufficient merits to make up for his many defects .... Still he wrote verse abundantly, he believed himself to be a prophet, and to thousands of Victorians , he appeared the man to carry on Wordsworth's duties as Poet Laureate (Buchmann 6). Perhaps Bellamy embraced Tupper because the Englishman was seen as "the poet of a religious and moral class" (Buchmann 6). Hence, if there was an atmosphere of the cosmopolitan salon at times in Hiwassee with gentlefolk discussing polite things, there was also the cold reality of life in Appalachian Tennessee in a tough young country which, at the demotic level, had little use for the frail groping of Tennyson's poetic faith or the outright impiety of Browning and Arnold. And, of course, Emerson was a Transcendentalist who did not even believe in the unique deity of Jesus Christ, and Whitman was a national scandal with his open and diverse sexuality . The men of Hiwassee were, for the most part, studying to be ministers. There would have been little reason to emulate those poets not interested in the values which the Hiwassee preachers were about to embrace for life. Tupper was one of England's most popular poets, though few outside the British Studies classroom have ever heard of him. He was never a critical success, and indeed, was often the subject of parody. His poetry was characterized by its rather narrow-minded, black-or-white approach to most of life's important auestions. And it was unremittingly diactic . In one of his sonnets he says that the purpose of poetry is: To touch the heart, and make its pulses thrill To raise and purify the grovelling soul, To warm with generous heart the selfish will, To conquer passion with a mild control, And the whole man with nobler thoughts fill... (193). Someone attempting to infer Bellamy 's poetic manifesto from the sum of his work could hardly formulate a more complete one than this. Poetry was meant to uplift, to ennoble, to structure the passions, to civilize. Bellamy's poetry is all of a piece and suffers considerably from his refusal, over the entire body of his work, to vary the prosodie structure of his verse. There is no "growth of a poet's mind" evident in the work. With very few exceptions the poems are all in four-line stanzas, most of which are rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets, and some of which are in the common-measure quatrains of the protestant hymnals. What Buchmann says of Tupper, that he spent his entire life "writing poetry without any sense of the artistry of words or the beautiful movement of rhythm in absolute unity with subject" could be said equally of Bellamy . Readers can only wish, too, that Bellamy had given more of the details of his day-to-day contact with the mountain culture of eastern Tennessee as it was in the last half of the nineteenth century. It would be interesting to hear of his relationship to the soil and sweat of this era, but nonesuch is forthcoming; the purpose of poetry is civility. Most or the poems are far from the land and far from the farming life Bellamy had rejected in 47 his pursuit of the ministry. His Nature is the stylized and conventional kind characterized by "crystal streams" and "golden beams." His images are as remarkably unvaried as his prosody. Bellamy methodically shuns the sublimity of the mountain landscape with its laurel thicket, steep paths, and fanged predators. Over Bellamy's artificial Nature hangs inevitable death, a subject thematic in his poetry and only natural in a time when death was much closer to everyone than it is now. There are a number of poems lamenting the deaths of infants and one written for the passing of a beautiful young woman. All bemoan the dying but use the occasion to expound upon the certainty of a Christian resurrection . (To Mrs. Dorcas Gaines) March 25th, 1873 When earth is perched 'neath burning skies, And seems to live with tearful eyes, Her plaintive voice from hill and plain, How nature hails with the joy of the rain! And human hearts when pierced with grief, Yearn on the one who gives relief, And feel how sweet it is indeed, To have a friend who aids in need. My warmest thanks I send to thee, For favors shown me recently— Those books* I will return to you, When I have read their pages through. Since I've been sick+, truly I find That woman's heart, so soft and kind, Is ever ready to give aid To one on whom affliction's laid! Cold as an iceberg in the sea, And void of human sympathy, Is that man's heart who would defame The precious honor of her name! *Tupper's Works and Scott's "Lady of the Lake." +At the time of writing I had been sick three years. In fact, most poems touch upon religion, sometimes in passing and sometimes by way of direct treatment. For instance, Bellamy's versification of the 23rd Psalm is one of the most interesting pieces in the manuscript and is unarguably superior to the version in the Bay Psalm Book. Psalm xxxiii Dedicated to the Rev. James A. Wallace My shepherd is the Lord on high, Who maketh me at ease to lie, In pasture green, where crystal streams Reflect the noonday's golden beams! He doth my wandering soul restore And safely lead me evermore, In shining paths of righteousness, His great and glorious name to bless! Yea, though Death's dark wings shade my head As through his gloomy vales I tread No evil shall I fear, Oh God, Cheered by thy presence, staff and rod! My table, Lord, thy hand doth spread, And I before my foes are fed; While on my head thine oil doth pour, Which makes my cup with joy run o'er! Surely, oh Lord, thy righteous will, Thy goodness and thy mercy still Will grant until life's days are o'er, And then thy house forever more! In 1879 Bellamy was graduated from Hiwassee having served his last year there as the resident "preacher." He left Tennessee to take up residence in the Holston Methodist Conference area of southwest Virginia. From a poem we learn that in 1880 he married "Eliza." At some point he switched his allegiance from the Methodist to the Baptist church, which occasion must have caused him considerable emotional turmoil though he remains silent about it in his manuscript. The poems of his Virginia years are almost identical in form 48 and convention to those he wrote in Tennessee . This collection of documents doesn't contain many clues about his long life in Virginia. The poems he wrote there are devoid of the sort of personal references from which a reader can gather details of his life. A Baptist minister, the Rev. James F. Aker of Radford, Virginia, who lived to 115 years old, claimed to have known Bellamy, whom he called "Dr. Bellamy," and to have seen him last in 1912 in Marion, Virginia. Courthouse records reveal that Bellamy died of a stroke in Abdingdon, Virginia, on November 19, 1934, a few weeks before his 86th birthday, a considerable age for a man who since childhood had complained of illness and frailty. Despite Bellamy's shortcomings as an artist, his legacy is an interesting one, both as history and as literature. It is a comment on the power of art upon the minds of some inhabitants of Southern Appalachia, and it is a window opening upon the history of culture in this area. Also, despite the fact that Bellamy's poetics run afoul of the critical dicta of the Victorian and modern eras, his work is, for millions of Americans, what poetry is supposed to be. Many would derive great solace from his hopeful message, and many would identify with the values he espouses. Just Throw Off the Blues Just throw off the blues, for like your old shoes They let in the cold and the damp, Rub the hide off your toes and turn up your nose With the pains of the corns and the cramp. If the heart is sad, 'twill never be glad While you sit with the cat in the ashes, If you want to feel stout, you'd better get out, And rub the dirt from your lashes. You may mourn and grieve with a ragged sleeve And lament that you're not wealthy, But to mend your state, don't quarrel at fate, Work, work, 'twill make you healthy. And if trouble should come, don't grow so glum, For a sulky dog's disdainful. Not a man as yet, though he foam and fret Hath thus made his ills less painful. If the world goes wrong, the tide is strong And to stop it you can never Then look to your boat and keep it afloat For your frowns can't change the weather. Works Cited Akers, W. F. Interview conducted at Pole Creek Baptist Church, Asheville, NC June 7, 1981. Buckmann, Ralf. Martin F. Tupper and the Victorian Middle Class Mind. Bern: Verlag A. Franke Ag., 1941. Hüten, Robert L. The Hiwassee Story. Selfpublished , 1970. Miller, Perry, Ed. The American Puritans. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Tiede, Tom. "Reverend Aker, 115, Is Old Time Preacher." The Brunswick (Georgia) News 85.185 (April 7, 1986): HA. Tupper, Martin Farquhar. A Selection from the Works of Martin F. Tupper. London: Moxon, 1865. 49 ...