Freneau (dianzi gao)

To the Memory of the Brave Americans
Under General Greene, in South Carolina who Fell in the Action of September 8, 1781
At Eutaw Springs the Valiant died; Their limbs with dust are covered Weep on, ye springs, your tearful tide; How many heroes are no more! • If in this wreck of ruin, they Can yet be thought to claim a tear, O smite your gentle breast, and say The friends of freedom slump here!
Life and Works
Poems (1776) Miscellaneous (1788) The Wild Honey Suckle The Indian Burying Ground
Thematic concerns and features of writing
Freneau is a major transitional poet in American literature. His early poetry shines with a rising positive glory of a new nation. Freneau is a pre-romantic poet. He hails romanticism. His favorite subject matters are nature, Gothic horror, primitive forces and the native Indian civilization. He is very good at creating vivid images in his poems. As a patriot, he often resorts to neoclassical devices of heroic couples, parody, burlesque and mock confession in his satires.
Analysis of The Wild Honey Suckle
The last stanza assumes a different tone. The poet doesn’t let sentiment take over by adopting a quite detached attitude towards life and death. If you begin with nothing, it’s not grievous that you finally end in nothing. So why grieve? Life comes from nature and ends in nature. That’s the universal law. By comparing the life of a flower to that of man, Freneau conveys a note of mild pessimism in the last two concluding lines.
Analysis of the Indian Burying ground
• Stanza 5-8 the observation of the cultural outsider of the Indian Burial and legend as a sign of the culture of the old race. • Stanza 9 the admiration of the poet for the primal and conquering force of the Indian culture.
To the Memory of the Brave Americans
• They saw their injured country’s woe; The flaming town, the wasted field; Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; they took the spear--- but left the shield. • Led by the conquering genius, Greene, The Britons they compelled to fly… None distant viewed the fatal plain, None grieved, in such a cause to die
Analysis of The Indian Burying Ground
• The poem is written in ten iambic tetrameter. • Stanza 1 the old idea of the lying position of the dead • Stanza 2 the sitting position of the dead Indians poses as a contrast. • Stanza 3-4 the symbolic representation of the Indians as the people of eternal energy and spirit.
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To the Memory of the Brave Americans
• Thou, who shalt trace this bloody plain, If goodness rules thy generous breast, Sigh for the wasted rural reign; sigh for the shepherds, sunk to rest! • Stranger, their humble graves adorn; You too may fall, and ask a tear; “Tis not the beauty of the morn, That proves the evening shall be clear---
Analysis of The Wild Honey Suckle
Poem by Freneau, published in his Poem (1786). Short as it is, the six-line tetrameter stanza poem is often considered as the finest and representative work of freneau’s nature poems. Despite its profound beauty, the poem was virtually unread in the poet’s lifetime, yet it is written in true romantic vein and deserves a place among major English and American works of poetry of that time.
Hale Waihona Puke Philip Freneau (1752---1832)
Position
the most significant poet of the 18th century America; a satirist and patriot who enjoyed the reputation as the the poet of the American Revolution.
Analysis
of The Wild
Honey Suckle
The Wild Honey Suckle with the theme of the transient quality of nature, presents the first distinctively romantic note in American literature. Much of the beauty of the poem lies in the sounds of the words, the effects created through changes in rhythm, and the varied pictures of images. In the very first stanza, the poet draws a freshly grown flower in vivid visual and olfactory images. “Fair flower” and “comely grow” best appeal to our vision, creating in our mind a vivid picture of a delicate flower growing silently in a lonely unfrequented retreat, while the “honied blossoms” works on our sense of smell, sending the dreamy fragrance throughout the air. Meanwhile the .
To the Memory of the Brave Americans
• But like the Parthian, famed of old, Who, flying still their arrows threw, These routed Britons, full as bold, Retreated, and retreated slew.
successful use of such internal rhyming devices as alliteration, assonance and consonance as well as the personification of nature invariably add to the color of the picture by varying the rhythm of the lines. The second stanza serves as a transitional part. Grudging no works to convey the beauty, the virginity of as well as his tender affection for the flower, the poet changes the tone of the poem into a pitying and helpless one by showing the quick passing of her prime time. “Thus quietly thy summer goes, Thy days declining to repose.” In the third stanza, the poet muses melancholy over the transience of the flower. However, his keen awareness of the ephemeral quality of life is endowed with a universal meaning. All life will meet its doom. It is the common destiny for all the organic life and human beings. One is helpless but grieve to see his future doom.