River of Earth: Mythic Consciousness in the works of James Still

by Rebecca L. Briley CHAPTER THREE The James Still Heritage: Hounds on the Mountain It is in James Still's Hounds on the Mountain, his first book and his only collection of poetry, that the truest and finest evidence of his mythic consciousness reveals itself. Through the careful and deliberate language of metaphor and imagery, the central theme of the collection emerges: the mythic journey of the narrator beyond his heritage to discover meaning to his life in relation to his natural surroundings. The journey culminates in the inevitable return to the land, first by a spiritual gravitational pull to remain where one's roots are, and eventually, a dissolving in oneness with the earth in death. Again, the language is carefully manipulated, though Still himself objects to that term, but the negative capability of the narrator makes his voice as remote and unsentimental as that of any mountain troubadour, made one with the songs of the mountain itself, and made eternal in the crystallization of publication . Published first in 1937, the collection of thirty-five poems is divided into five un95 equal parts that tell equally of the mythic awareness of the mountain poet. The first section, "Hounds on the Mountain," contains eight poems of lyrical, free verse quality. All are concerned with etching the simple portrait of mountain life, and all emphasize the questing spirit of the mountain poet in the search for knowledge, life, and song that ends where it began: in the roots of the heritage, in the earth. "Child in the Hills," the first poem of the collection, recalls to mind a child whose small foot once tracked the hills, with a thrust of gladness in the soil. Now his "questing words" are "drowned in the waters of Carr," but the poet still hears them, "shrill and imperilous with rain." For though the child "drifted into years of growth, . . . the child did not go." He waits, one with the damp coolness of laurel and rhododendron, lost in mossy coves. His small heart still beats "with low whispering in measured breaths of deep night, ebbing and returning."^ The song of the surrounding mountains and the ways of nature are caught in the fretted maple throat of the instrument of the hills, in "Mountain Dulcimer." Like the poet, it is an instrument made of the hills by skilled, though unpolished, mountains hands, that sings of the hills: "the doe's swift poise, the fox's fleeting step . . . the music of hounds, . . . the creak of saddle-bags, of oxen yoke and thongs," ... of "wild turkey's treble, dark sudden flight of crows, of unshod hoofs. . . And of lambs crying, breath of the lark . . . and the wasp's anger." All are the recorded song of the mountain dulcimer. All are the song of the mountain singer, James Still. "Fox Hunt" carefully enummerates the details of the hunt, from the first "shrill notes of the sheep's horn" calling out the fox through the cries of the catamount in the "chilled and living day." The anxious pace of the hounds after the quarry leads them to where a gum-stump marks "the end of a perilous way." Their quest leads them to the death, to where their blood recourses its way back to the veins of the earth. It is the same anxious, swiftening pace of man on the quest of the unknown in his life that ends in the return of his blood to the land, his quest often unfinished, his voice, like "the mellow banjos of the hounds' throats," stilled. The resignation of the old through experienced mountain life in juxtaposition to the desire for progressing forward is illustrated in "Horse Swapping on Troublesome Creek." Here, careless hands and eyes "peer coldly into the moist, sad eyes" of the aging mare, while her young foals flex clumsy, unbound legs in "short unhindered quests." "An untamed heart is swift upon the earth," the poet notices; young blood surges forward in quest of adventure in this new life. But young blood too soon must quieten to tired resignation, for its quest is as short as it is swift. The marriage of this same juxtaposition comes forth again in "Infare," when...