[As spring gets
ready to spring, a series on the season in American culture. Add your vernal
associations and responses for a blooming weekend post!]
On two
contrasting images and narratives of spring for America’s earliest English
arrivals.
Sylvia Plath’s sonnet
”Mayflower,”
another Plath
poem that should be more widely known than it is, captures quite
eloquently, through an extended metaphor connecting the ship to an actual
flowering plant, the quality I most admire in the Pilgrims: their perseverance,
in the face of some of the most daunting circumstances (including but in no way
limited to Cape Cod in December!) to have faced any fledgling American
community. As Plath indicates, their faith (particularly in the
concept of Providence) provided one critical element to that perseverance;
as I’ve written
elsewhere in this space, Tisquantum (or Squanto) provided another. But in
any case, I agree wholeheartedly with Plath that, like the may flower after
which they named their ship, the Pilgrims embodied “how best beauty’s born of
hardihood.”
That flower, as
Plath envisions it at least, was the bud of the hawthorn plant—and, not quite
coincidentally, it is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (who was throughout
his life and career hugely interested
in his Puritan ancestors) which provides our clearest illustration of a
very different side to May for that fledgling New England community. As
fictionalized in Hawthorne’s “The
May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836)—and as documented
in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth
Plantation—one of the earliest splinter groups from the Puritan communities
was that led by Thomas
Morton, the man who came to be known as “the pagan Pilgrim” for his embrace
of a far livelier and more celebratory set of practices. Those celebrations
were exemplified by the May-Pole that Morton and his followers erected in their
town of Merry-Mount (Mt. Wollaston), and it was perhaps the appropriation of this be-flowered “pagan”
symbol that led to the full condemnations of Morton and his community by
Bradford and his fellow orthodox Puritans.
So two images of
spring: as a beautiful, hard-earned reward for enduring the winter; or as a
time of excess and luxury, of plenty and its resulting vices. And two
corresponding images of the Puritans: as a persistent and hardy community,
blossoming into American fullness after making it through their first and
hardest winter; or as an overly dour and intolerant bunch, suspicious of any
deviation from their norms and most especially of anyone, anywhere, having a good time.
The truth? As so often on this blog, all of the above, or more exactly a
combination of them all that hopefully leads us toward something more and
different and stronger. Spring, like any season and experience, can indeed
bring out the worst in us (whether we see that worst as carnival or
condemnation); but it can also allow us to wonder at the best, of who we are
and of the world we live in. There’s value, I believe, in engaging with each
and all of those sides.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So how would
you engage with the season? Thoughts on this or any of the week’s posts? Other
takes on spring in America?
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