“My mother had five sweet normal wholesome children; then I was born.”
The poet Archibald Rutledge smiled when he said this, but he was indeed a precocious child, and so not really “normal.” When he was only three years old, he told his mother that he had “made a poem.”
I saw a little rattlesnake
too young to make his rattles shake.
He was born in McClellanville, South Carolina, in 1883, and a few years later he and his family moved to their ancestral home, Hampton Plantation, about eight miles away. Rutledge was well educated, and before the age of twenty was already publishing prose and poetry in national magazines. He spent many years as a teacher of English at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. When he retired in 1937 he returned to his beloved Hampton Plantation, where he continued to write and publish. In 1934 he became South Carolina’s first Poet Laureate, and deservedly so. A lover of nature, he was a creator of passionate, lucid literary beauty.
Deep River: The Complete Poems of Archibald Rutledge was first published in 1960, but many more poems were to follow. The inside cover of that book relates that in the Pulitzer Prize contest he was “second to Robert Frost, and once second to Edna Millay.” He lost the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner by only one vote. Read his poetry, and you might conclude he should have won all three prizes. He was a Southern gentleman and treasured his heritage and his ancestors. A number of his poems honor the men who fought in the War for Southern Independence.
Recently a documentary has become available that includes an interview with Archibald Hamilton at Hampton Plantation in 1964. This rare interview has just been added to the YouTube videos available from the Abbeville Institute. In it Rutledge recites one of his later poems, “Hillcrest Pine” (published in The Ballad of the Howling Hound and Other Poems in 1965):
By all comrades long forsaken,
By the storm and thunder shaken,
He a grim deep root has taken.
Him the wintry blasts discover;
But the wild moon is his lover;
Close to him the white stars hover:
Silent, stark, eternal token
Of the anguish kept unspoken,
Of the will that is not broken.
This the stars in heaven divining,
Their tall thrones of light resigning,
For a crown on him are shining.
Archibald Rutledge passed away in 1973 and is buried at Hampton Plantation, which is now open to the public as the Hampton Plantation State Historic Site in Charleston County.
Here is his beautiful ode, “The Confederate Dead.”
Although the Flag they died to save
Floats not o’er any land or sea,
Over eternal years shall wave
The banner of their chivalry.
Lost in the silent Past profound,
Their war-cries to the dead belong,
Yet poets shall their valor sound
In music of immortal song.
Save that for them I nobly live,
Bear life, as death they bravely bore,
They need no glory I can give,
Whose fame abides forevermore;
Whose fame fades not in marble arts,
Nor sleeps within the Past’s dim night;
Heroes who live in loving hearts
Are templed in Eternal Light.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
“Although the Flag they died to save
Floats not o’er any land or sea,
Over eternal years shall wave
The banner of their chivalry.”
Eternal years into eternity
Thank you for sharing this beautiful poem.