Songs of the Affections, with Other Poems/The Indian with his Dead Child
THE INDIAN WITH HIS DEAD CHILD.[1]
In the silence of the midnight
I journey with my dead;
In the darkness of the forest-boughs,
A lonely path I tread.
But my heart is high and fearless,
As by mighty wings upborne;
The mountain eagle hath not plumes
So strong as Love and Scorn.
I have raised thee from the grave-sod,
By the white man's path defiled;
On to th' ancestral wilderness,
I bear thy dust, my child!
I have ask'd the ancient deserts
To give my dead a place,
Where the stately footsteps of the free
Alone should leave a trace.
And the tossing pines made answer—
"Go, bring us back thine own!"
And the streams from all the hunters' hills,
Rush'd with an echoing tone.
Thou shalt rest by sounding waters
That yet untamed may roll;
The voices of that chainless host
With joy shall fill thy soul.
In the silence of the midnight
I journey with the dead,
Where the arrows of my father's bow
Their falcon flight have sped.
I have left the spoiler's dwellings,
For evermore, behind;
Unmingled with their household sounds,
For me shall sweep the wind.
Alone, amidst their hearth-fires,
I watch'd my child's decay,
Uncheer'd, I saw the spirit-light
From his young eyes fade away.
When his head sank on my bosom,
When the death-sleep o'er him fell,
Was there one to say, "A friend is near?"
There was none!—pale race, farewell!
To the forests, to the cedars,
To the warrior and his bow,
Back, back!—I bore thee laughing thence,
I bear thee slumbering now!
I bear thee unto burial
With the mighty hunters gone;
I shall hear thee in the forest-breeze,
Thou wilt speak of joy, my son!
In the silence of the midnight
I journey with the dead;
But my heart is strong, my step is fleet,
My father's path I tread.
- ↑ An Indian, who had established himself in a township of Maine, feeling indignantly the want of sympathy evinced towards him by the white inhabitants, particularly on the death of his only child, gave up his farm soon afterwards, dug up the body of his child, and carried it with him two hundred miles through the forests to join the Canadian Indians,— See Tudor's Letters on the Eastern States of America.