Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Neihardt, John G.
can Indian wars. It consists of five songs composed over
twenty-nine years and totaling more than sixteen thousand
lines. The five songs merge in a unified work
around a central theme: the conflict over the Missouri
River Valley from 1822 to the 1890 Battle of Wounded
Knee, which marks the end of Sioux resistance.
Neihardt chose the heroic couplet to help underscore
his topic’s universal significance. He also modeled his
poetry after other heroic epics, noting in The River and I
that the story of the American fur traders had such literary
potential, it made the Trojan War look like a Punch
and Judy show.
The Song of Three Friends, though composed second,
begins the cycle with Will Carpenter, Mike Fink,
and Frank Talbeau starting up the Missouri River in
1822 with a beaver-trapping expedition. These comrades
end up destroying one another’s potential over what
starts as a rivalry for a chief’s half-breed daughter. The
descriptive passages are powerful because, as Neihardt
notes in his 1948 introduction, “If I write of hot-winds
and grasshoppers, of prairie fires and blizzards, ...of
brooding heat and thunderstorms in vast lands, I knew
them early.”
The second book of the cycle is The Song of Hugh
Glass, based on the historical trek of an old trapper who
survives because he knows the ways of the wilderness.
Left to die by the others after being mauled by a grizzly,
Glass is filled with a desire for revenge. He crawls for
miles, endures starvation, thirst, near drowning, and
freezing to track his betrayers. However, instead of a
brutal revenge, he chooses to nobly forgive. Much like
the Ancient Mariner, Glass is brought back to his better
self by the vision of a ghostly brother:
Stripped of his clothes, Hugh let his body drink
At every thirsting pore. Through trunk and limb
The elemental blessing solaced him;
The Song of Jed Smith, though last to be completed,
presents the third song of the cycle. This story is told by
three first-person narrators, all trapper friends of Smith.
Also, while the first two songs center on the larger-thanlife,
but brutish, figures of Mike Fink and Hugh Glass,
Jed Smith represents a more perfect flowering of the frontiersman.
He is an awe-inspiring hero, a frontier saint,
finding water in the desert, trail-blazing the unknown.
The Song of the Indian Wars begins in 1865 with the
period of migration; it focuses on the last great contest
for the bison lands between the Plains Indians and the
superior technology of the invading white race. The
Sioux cannot understand the white people’s lust for land
and gold, for their faith assumes a sacred unity with the
earth and its resources.
Since Neihardt intended his cycle to show a progress
in spirit, in this song he turns from the mere indomitable
physical prowess celebrated in the earlier songs to the
spiritual triumph of the Sioux, even in the midst of their
defeat. After his victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn,
Crazy Horse is hounded into starvation and surrender.
The last section of this song, “The Death of Crazy
Horse,” was Neihardt’s most popular work and was
most often requested at his recitations. Here the landscape
and animals reflect the agony of the tragic hero as
Crazy Horse surrenders for the sake of his people. He
loosed the bonnet from his head
And cast it down. “I come for peace,” he said;
“Now let my people eat.” And that was all.
The last moments of the brave young man are dignified
and noble, his language simple and straightforward.
The Song of the Messiah, the fifth and last song of
the cycle, records the conquered people, whose time for
heroic deeds is over. The beavers, the buffalo, and the
mighty hunters are gone; all that remains of these native
people is their spirit. Although the whites appear to have
mastered the continent, the poet indicates that he still
needs to attend to his spiritual self if he is to be whole.
The reduced Sioux people turn to the Ghost Dance
religion, which offers nonviolence and a mystical link to
ancestors, but this desire for rebirth is doomed; the song
ends with the massacre at Wounded Knee. As the leader
Sitanka dies, he has a vision of the soldier who smashes
his skull:
. . . And he knew
The shining face, unutterably dear!
All tenderness, it hovered, bending near,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
...Hestrove to rise in vain,
To cry “My brother!”
And the shattered brain
Went out.
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