Friends,
Columbia is a city of rivers, having grown up at the convergence of the Congaree, Saluda, and Broad Rivers in the midlands of South Carolina. When the weather suits, I like to take campus visitors for a walk down along the Congaree for some nice views of the rapids and the wildlife the river supports.
You approach the riverwalk through a park, and just before the footbridge leading to it you pass a granite stone monument. I had never paid much attention to the verses engraved on it--until last weekend, when taking that walk with Doug Knox of Washington University. Doug, a reader of plaques and historical markers, asked me if those were Spenserian stanzas engraved on the stone.
Indeed they are. You may see a photo at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19812754. The poem, a four-stanza ode entitled "Congaree" that hails the river as "O tawny flood!", is composed in metrically competent Faerie Queene stanzas. The diction is stilted and the imagination melodramatic, but the author, one Max Revelise (1907-1962), does seem to have known that an ode to a river should be written in stanzas named after the great river poet in English.
The poem was posthumously published in a slim volume, I Died, and Other Poems (Valkyrie Press, 1977), that bears the traces of its author's romantic regionalist sensibility. Revelise was a forerunner of the modern unemployed English major who knocked around during the Depression, working as a WPA writer before going back to school (at the University of South Carolina) to earn an MA degree; his thesis (1942) defended the merits of the novels of James Branch Cabell. Eventually he went to work for his nephew, Max Gergel, at the Pierce Chemical Company. In a memoir entitled Excuse Me, Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?, Gergel refers to Revelise as "my genius Uncle Max."
Doug Knox ran an Ngram which shows that the Revelise life span captures both the high tide and the ebb of the phrase "tawny flood" (http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tawny+flood&year_start=1850&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3). According to Gergel, his uncle Max was himself rather tawny of complexion, a circumstance that led to some ambiguity in perceptions of his racial status in the deep south of the mid-twentieth century.
Come visit Columbia sometime, and I'll show you the engraved monument down by the river.
--
David Lee Miller
Carolina Distinguished Professor of English
and Comparative Literature
Director, Center for Digital Humanities
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-4256
FAX 777-9064
[log in to unmask]
Center for Digital Humanities
Faculty Web Page
Dreams of the Burning Child
A Touch More Rare
