Dave Read

“If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was.”

So begins Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome (1911), which is based on a fatal sledding accident in 1904 at the intersection of Hawthorne St. and Old Stockbridge Rd. in Lenox. By her attempt to discern a lesson, or moral, from an historical event, Wharton keeps good company with fellow Berkshire writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Scarlet Letter also is based on old Salem history.

Born Edith Newbold Jones on Jan. 24, 1862 in New York City, Edith Wharton died on Aug. 11, 1837 in France, where she was buried at Versailles with the honors owed a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s response to her service during the war. She is the first woman awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in 1921, for The Age of innocence.

Like her fellow Berkshire writer Herman Melville, Edith Wharton had an ancestor who was a general in the American Revolution.

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was born in a log cabin near Cummington, where his father built the family homestead two years later and which is open to visitors today.

He was a poetry prodigy; Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl, considered among the first fruits of American poetry, were composed before he was twenty. Some lines of Thanatopsis are inscribed on the memorial to him at Bryant Park outside the New York Public Library.

Gt. Barrington, MA to New York City

Following ten years of law practice in Great Barrington, where he wrote Monument Mountain, the dull routine moved Bryant to answer the call of his muse and move to New York City. There, he began the first great career in American journalism, as publisher and part owner of the New York (Evening) Post, the paper founded by Alexander Hamilton. In 1860, Bryant introduced Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union, thus helped launch his campaign for the presidency.

Poems of William Cullen Bryant

To a Waterfowl

Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sing
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast—
The desert and illimitable air—
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.

Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply has sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

Thanatopsis

To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart-
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To nature’s teachings, while from all around-
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air-
Comes a still voice-yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy images. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrending up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots a broad, and pierce thy mold.

Yet not to thine eternal resting place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world – with kings,
The powerful of the earth – the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulcher. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun – the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods – rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,

Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste –
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings – yet the dead are there;
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep – the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn broad of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man –
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Monument Mountain

Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild
Mingled in harmony on Nature’s face,
Ascend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot
Fail not with weariness, for on their tops
The beauty and the majesty of earth,
Spread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget
The steep and toilsome way. There, as thou stand’st,
The haunts of men below thee, and around
The mountain summits, thy expanding heart
Shall feel a kindred with that loftier world
To which thou art translated, and partake
The enlargement of thy vision. Thou shalt look
Upon the green and rolling forest tops,
And down into the secrets of the glens,
And streams, that with their bordering thickets strive
To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,
Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds,
And swarming roads, and there on solitudes
That only hear the torrent, and the wind,
And eagle’s shriek. There is a precipice
That seems a fragment of some mighty wall,
Built by the hand that fashioned the old world,
To separate its nations, and thrown down
When the flood drowned them. To the north, a path
Conducts you up the narrow battlement.
Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild
With mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint,
And many a hanging crag. But, to the east,
Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs,–
Huge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear
Their weather-beaten capitals, here dark
With the thick moss of centuries, and there
Of chalky whiteness where the thunderbolt
Has splintered them. It is a fearful thing
To stand upon the beetling verge, and see
Where storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall,
Have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base
Dashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear
Over the dizzy depth, and hear the sound
Of winds, that struggle with the woods below,
Come up like ocean murmurs. But the scene
Is lovely round; a beautiful river there
Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads,
The paradise he made unto himself,
Mining the soil for ages. On each side
The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond,
Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven.

There is a tale about these reverend rocks,
A sad tradition of unhappy love,
And sorrows borne and ended, long ago,
When over these fair vales the savage sought
His game in the thick woods. There was a maid,
The fairest of the Indian maids, bright-eyed,
With wealth of raven tresses, a light form,
And a gay heart. About her cabin-door
The wide old woods resounded with her song
And fairy laughter all the summer day.
She loved her cousin; such a love was deemed,
By the morality of those stern tribes,
Incestuous, and she struggled hard and long
Against her love, and reasoned with her heart,
As simple Indian maiden might. In vain.
Then her eye lost its lustre, and her step
Its lightness, and the gray-haired men that passed
Her dwelling, wondered that they heard no more
The accustomed song and laugh of her, whose looks
Were like the cheerful smile of Spring, they said,
Upon the Winter of their age. She went
To weep where no eye saw, and was not found
When all the merry girls were met to dance,
And all the hunters of the tribe were out;
Nor when they gathered from the rustling husk
The shining ear; nor when, by the river’s side,
Thay pulled the grape and startled the wild shades
With sounds of mirth. The keen-eyed Indian dames
Would whisper to each other, as they saw
Her wasting form, and say _the girl will die_.

One day into the bosom of a friend,
A playmate of her young and innocent years,
She poured her griefs. “Thou know’st, and thou alone,”
She said, “for I have told thee, all my love,
And guilt, and sorrow. I am sick of life.
All night I weep in darkness, and the morn
Glares on me, as upon a thing accursed,
That has no business on the earth. I hate
The pastimes and the pleasant toils that once
I loved; the cheerful voices of my friends
Have an unnatural horror in mine ear.
In dreams my mother, from the land of souls,
Calls me and chides me. All that look on me
Do seem to know my shame; I cannot bear
Their eyes; I cannot from my heart root out
The love that wrings it so, and I must die.”

It was a summer morning, and they went
To this old precipice. About the cliffs
Lay garlands, ears of maize, and shaggy skins
Of wolf and bear, the offerings of the tribe
Here made to the Great Spirit, for they deemed,
Like worshippers of the elder time, that God
Doth walk on the high places and affect
The earth-o’erlooking mountains. She had on
The ornaments with which her father loved
To deck the beauty of his bright-eyed girl,
And bade her wear when stranger warriors came
To be his guests. Here the friends sat them down,
And sang, all day, old songs of love and death,
And decked the poor wan victim’s hair with flowers,
And prayed that safe and swift might be her way
To the calm world of sunshine, where no grief
Makes the heart heavy and the eyelids red.
Beautiful lay the region of her tribe
Below her–waters resting in the embrace
Of the wide forest, and maize-planted glades
Opening amid the leafy wilderness.
She gazed upon it long, and at the sight
Of her own village peeping through the trees,
And her own dwelling, and the cabin roof
Of him she loved with an unlawful love,
And came to die for, a warm gush of tears
Ran from her eyes. But when the sun grew low
And the hill shadows long, she threw herself
From the steep rock and perished. There was scooped
Upon the mountain’s southern slope, a grave;
And there they laid her, in the very garb
With which the maiden decked herself for death,
With the same withering wild flowers in her hair.
And o’er the mould that covered her, the tribe
Built up a simple monument, a cone
Of small loose stones. Thenceforward all who passed,
Hunter, and dame, and virgin, laid a stone
In silence on the pile. It stands there yet.
And Indians from the distant West, who come
To visit where their fathers’ bones are laid,
Yet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day
The mountain where the hapless maiden died
Is called the Mountain of the Monument.

American literature may not be tied to any single place, but the Berkshires had as profound an influence on its evolution as anywhere else. Here are four primary examples, in the order of their arrival in the Berkshires.

William Cullen Bryant – Monument Mountain

Rising a hundred miles inland, away from the storms and tides of the sea, are the Berkshires, among America’s eldest mountains, including Monument Mountain, a peak known around the globe because it caught the fancy of a homegrown poet -> William Cullen Bryant.

Nathaniel Hawthorne – Tanglewood

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brief Berkshires residency, 1850-51, was as fruitful and important as any artists sojourn anywhere. Since it’s the poet’s job to name things, he named an area at southwest edge of Lenox Tanglewood! -> Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Herman Melville – The view from his Piazza

Images of once grand mansion/cottages, now tourist attractions, are seen everywhere, but the most famous element of architectural design in the Berkshires is the humble, north-facing porch that was tacked onto the farmhouse where Moby-Dick was written by -> Herman Melville.

Edith Wharton – Ethan Frome

“If you know Starkfield (Lenox), Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it … and you must have asked who he was.” During the decade or so Edith Wharton lived in Lenox, she built The Mount and she turned a local tragedy into Ethan Frome. -> Edith Wharton.

Photo credits:

• Bryant – photo credit: By José María Mora – cabinetcardgallery.wordpress.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9722907
• Hawthorne – By Mathew Benjamin Brady – Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11558996
• Melville – By Joseph Oriel Eaton – Houghton Library – Harvard University – Modern Books and Manuscripts, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75721837
• Wharton – By E. F. Cooper, Newport, Rhode Island – Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110844478