The Legend of Hartford
by Eleanor O’Rourke Koenig
With overtones to what he said,
This man may he believed:
Go into the Cities and Towns, and there you
shall find many compassed about with the chains
of captivity, and every man bemoaning himself.
Thomas Hooker.
THE LEGEND OF HARTFORD
Their legend of the Seed, a glistening thing,
They planted, even if under a king.
LISTEN, and hear their Legend rise in song;
In homespun, silver now, they flow along
These streets; we see and hear and feel
Them pass, their skirts, their steps, we feel them as one of three
in the light leaves’ quiver;
So do we hear turning still
The wheel of Matthew Allyn’s mill,
As we stand on the bridge over the Little River.
Or, in a rich amazement of the mind,
No wilderness, but a choosing place we find;
As esculent country, waiting to give of its all;
Prolific thrice over the earth; running riot from spring until fall
The medicinal herb, bittersweet, ginseng, angelica, bloodroot;
The large trees loaded with fruit;
Opulent nuts, wild vegetables, artichokes, wild onions, plantain,
wild pease;
These, and more wild berries than these:
The black, the blue, the bil-, the mul-, the elder-, the strawberry;
In the groves ran the furry
Round fat red bear, the moose like its speaking name, the deer;
And here
Long ago through the trees might be seen great turkeys strutting
sideways;
The squirrel abounded, the raccoon–the wildcat, the wolf, the
fox, black, blue and grey:
The otter fished in the stream, the beaver built his dam:
There were quails, ducks, geese, partridges, and plenteous other
wild game;
Pigeons so numerous they would obscure the light;
Of which it has been written: “It passeth credit, but the truth
were written right. . .”
In the Great River lamprey eels, salmon, sturgeon, in the
Great River shoals of fish of silver gleam. . .
Say this in a dream,
Then stitch it straightly and precisely in a sampler’s seam. . .
The blur of the sky-bloom trees, the wild vegetation, the pleasant
banks of the river, the paint of the crimson bush. .
Silence is over this country, hush. .
Then, as through a parting in the trees, into this charming country,
strange with his spell unwild,
Comes the white man,
The Puritan,
His spouse, the staid and Biblical child. . .
Faded the colors and stitches, yet fresh as a flower with the rain
on. . .
Children of Israel into the Land of Canaan.
So it would seem, they wish to leave their story,
Rested and wise, too inherent for glory;
Leaving sparse books to tell of their bodies’ and souls’ consecration;
As if to say one and all fervidly entered into this town’s creation;
They come back now wistful, as on tiptoe,
To see again the places they used to love and know;
Finding them whatever change, speaking with the self-same gesture:
Here is Soldiers’ Field, Sentinel Hill, the Middle Ox Pasture. . .
Yet here at first they nearly broke their hearts –
Winter comes down fierce in these Western parts;
Think how it must have been with them here, with winter over all.
It was in the fall
When they first came here – those men of 1635;
Somehow we know they stayed, somehow they kept alive
Through that winter. Even with time so short,
They built dugouts, cattle shelter, a rude palisade, their fort.
With minds scantily given to ponder,
They prayed all would be well –
On November fifteenth the Great River was frozen under –
And winter fell.
The winter fell and the Indians in the swamp,
Paled in their wigwam snow or moved to a further camp;
Corn in their barns of earth to weave through the winter gold,
Cured meat from the hunting – or they could starve in the cold
Like an Indian –
Not so with the white man.
Inside his smoke-filled hut he heard loud the wind, and the
wind’s recoil,
He looked at the pot swinging over the blaze
With nothing under it to boil. . .
It snowed days on days;
The woman’s face blanched, the little children cried;
The wind blew
And he knew
As he listened stricken dumb,
Winter come,
Loud with the wind it had quaffed –
The white man plunged into the forest to find game, but the forest
laughed,
As he ludicrously stumbled and bled;
The forest laughed, the boughs laughed, the beasts laughed – or
were dead;
His children cried,
His cattle knelt down and died;
Then he chopped down through the snow and ice and ate of the
acrid acorn
And found it fit to eat;
Then the Indians came and dealt him out corn
And he ate it without any meat;
And he trembled to hear the wind, rousing the forest apart;
In this winter he had come to know,
Spring must have been many times in his heart,
Then there must have seemed never a spring. . . but the
ever falling snow. . .
He has left us no written word of that winter when the wind surged
Night and day,
But has left us his image, after the winter, too pallid, coming out of
a door as if to say: “Just say
We emerged.”
Oh this beautiful extreme country in Spring, over-coloured,
over-heaped,
How his sallow face must have shone, how his slow gone blood
must have leaped
In this primeval spring, as he stood at his door, or in the wood
to see. . .
He had heard the black ice crack and split on the Great River and
make it free. . .
Nathaniel Ely, Nicholas Clarke, William Butler,
Richard Webb, William Pantry, Stephen Hart, . . .
They seem to step as from a waiting roll call,
And answer in silver: “Here we are . . .”
Sheep’s Ridge,
Gully Brook, Haynes’ Swamp . . .
Near the river. . .
On the bridge, not strange, . . .
Venturers’ Field – where was the first highway from the Little
River to the North Meadow . . .
Look and see, it is in silver now, and will not change. . .
Those who look will know.
John Talcott’s house?
John Talcott’s house. . .
Westwood and Steele, Elder Goodwin and the others
Who, after winter, met on warm spring ground,
What thought was one’s was prudently another’s,
To search for any clearing to be found;
So, these men, who had been nearly broken-hearted,
Were planting now the seed, a glistening thing,
And when this wondrous soil was firstly parted,
In the spring,
The seed they dropped glistened
All for itself, and yours, and for my sake,
Bright rain pattered on it as they listened. . .
Think of the Puritan’s heart when he first buried
The first of homely seed in Hartford soil;
The winter in his mind, he must have hurried,
Not having spared himself the least in other toil
Of body or intellect – already were order, law, a presiding
Commission;
The shadow of the seed had been before;
Worn missionary, he performed his mission,
Dropped a seed in the earth, then dropped one more. . .
Then he must have stood a little, with the winter still,
Mingled with how he had felt the winter go,
And, covered always under ice and snow,
His need
The Seed
That winter could not kill –
Oh never think of him as poor and forlorn,
Planting in spring a seed for its own sake –
It had survived the sword, the lurid stake;
Soaked salt in sea,
Had been torn
From dead men’s hearts alive.
He
Must have given thought to this,
Cowed, humble and half-grieving
For men who had died and never would come back,
Then he was visionary and believing,
That their hand was his
Delving him seed from a silver hempen sack. . .
Cumbered by myriads of silvery men
Free –
Those who had been and those who would be –
And he cried as these men cried
Then
Planted Liberty!
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