If you\u27re a poet compelled to write a poem for a particular occasion, your muse might well freeze up. Almost a century ago, for example, at Charter Day, 1897, Thomas W. Higginson hailed the College in a poem that included a pleasing tribute (couched in a clever metaphor) from Harvard to William & Mary as  Thou earliest College of our native land/ The first conceived, yet not the earliest born!  But Higginson\u27s poem is flaccid, done in by the bombast characteristic of the genre..

Meyers, Terry L.

English

College of William & Mary: W&M Publish

W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences Winter 1994 Comments on Amy Clampitt’s 'Matoaka' Terry L. Meyers College of William and Mary, tlmeye@wm.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs  Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Meyers, Terry L., Comments on Amy Clampitt’s 'Matoaka' (1994). William and Mary Magazine, 61(5), 60-61. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs/959 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.edu. Comments on Amy Clampitt's "Matoaka'' BYTERRYL. MEYERS I fyou'r.e a poeL co1.11pelled LO wriLe .. a poem for a panicular occasion, your muse mighl well freeze up . Almost a century ago, for example, at Chan er Day, 1897, Thomas W. Higginson hai led the College in a poem that included a pleasing tribute (couched in a clever metaphor) from Harvard to William and Mal)' as "Thou earliest College of our native land / The fir t conceived, yet not the earl iest born! " But Higginson' poem is flaccid, done in by the bombast characteristic of Lhe genre: 0 nursP of presidents and fudges grave.' Thou gavesl them their mrly days of joy Born, bred and rmred this side the All,anlir wave, Marshall, the youth and Jefferson !he boy. In their glad hours began The word American Al last to mean new hopes without alloy. All the tricks of the versifier are here: sentimental apostrophe ("O nurse") , redundancy ('Judges grave"), poetic inversion LO help a rhyme ('Judges grave" again), and so on. But Lhe risk William and Mary's Tercemenary Com-mission LOok when it commissioned a poem to mark the 300th ann iversary of the College's charter has been bril-liantly justified by Amy Clampitt's powerful response LO the challenge. Her "MaLOaka," in quatrains of stately free verse, i strong in all that charges language with poetry's grandeur. Listen to the 1·ichness of sound, for example, as Clampitt evokes the chi ldhood remembered by Pocahontas, the Indian princess whose rescue of Captain John Smith from execution by her father and who e later trip to England (where she died at Gravesend sti ll young) i an exemplary tale that we all learn as chi ldren. As she finds herself in "foul , fashionable London / with its spite-ful / stares and whi per , its catarrh s, / its bruited rifts and ruinings," Pocahonta recalls growing up unLOuched by the complexities of European civilization. She thinks back LO her girlhood's remembered grapevines, stmwberries, sun-60 William and Mary Magazine WI TER 1994 warm mulbenies, leapji"og, cmtwheels, the sound of streams, Of names, of languages: Pamunkey, Chickahominy . .. . One rich way LO approach the poem is to emphasize that it is by a woman about another woman, a Native American of the early seventeenth century, and LO locate the poem as an artifact of the late twemieth century, when the hegemonic institutions of European white pa-triarchy are under critical exploration. The poem's theme of the cultural con (de)sLruction of womanhood slides into focus as Clampitt evokes men who consLruct and deconstruct the myths women are subjected LO, men such as the structuralist anth ropologist and sludent of myth Claude Levi-SLrauss; Lhe ironically named Paul De Man, a recently deconstructed guru of deconstruction ism; and Virginia's own Parson Weems (1759-1825) , who mar-ried inLO Lhe Ewell famil y and, more importan Lly, intro-duced into America the mythologizing biography (he invested George Wa hingLOn wiLh the cherry tree and silver dollar). Clampitt suggests that the archetype of "A king's / daughter as advocate" (e.g. the ship-wrecked Odysseus succored by the princess ausicaa) "was / Lhe sLOry we Lold once, from which / we 've since recoiled" and thal such slippery myths underlie, and undermine, certitude of belief and of identi ty: Who was she? Ask Paul De Man, For instance. Ash Nietzclze, Freud or I ,eui-Strauss. Ash Parson Weems, while you 're about it. Ash any woman What she thinks, or thought she did. The stories we tell ourselves hee/1 changing. Approaching "Matoaka" from Lhis angle quickly broad-ens into examining the vast cultural changes since En-glishmen first u·ied LO settle "Roanoke, on the Outer / Banks, whaL little there ever was / to remember long overgrown." If the very name of the Indian maiden shifts ("MaLOaka. A woman's name, though / not the one we know her by"; "noL as Matoaka or, any longer, / Pocahuntus buL, renamed in Christ, / Rebecca"; "as Mis-tress / Rolfe, she crossed / that threshold") , so too have Photo by C. James Gleason larger terms and beliefs shifted and faded. History itself has become a "long quasi- / anonymity," a "shadowy predatory tentshow" with once-certain pieties and pious certainties everywhere called to account. The Brafferton, for example, was founded (but failed) as a school to convert and educate Indians to Christianily and was sup-ported by revenues from the estate of the great British man of science Robert Boyle; now it is "a monument / to words we, or some of us, / once listened to / in fear and trembling," "monument at last / to policy, tergiversation and / neglect." The corrosion of time, the complexity of motives, the conflict of cultures, the loss of certainty: "Who's the more lost?" Clampitt asks--Pocahontas mar-ried for reasons of policy ( "the mere sullied pawn / of statecraft and testosterone") to John Rolfe, Pocahontas sent to London ("chief showpiece / of colonial bra-vado ")--or us, "given our own / tergiversations, the worn-down / pieties we stumble over, / that trip us up--gnarled rootstocks / of the once counted on." We are, by comparison to the faith of an earlier age, "Less cer-tain, / ourselves, of anything / except the omniprevalence of error." So where is William and Mary in this poem commis-sioned for its Tercentenary? Evoked through its campus and its historic associations, William and Mary, "a college given royal grant / and charter to propagate a faith," is at the center of the poem. Take the title. Even to a Virgin-ian, the name may not at first recall the woman we choose to remember as Pocahontas. And to those who know William and Mary, the title recalls most immedi-ately the picturesque campus lake-itself, not just inci-dentally, a construct of colonial times and the bearer of several names over the centuries (i.e., Raccoon Chase, Archer's Hope Swamp, the Mill Pond,Jones's Millpond) . The title of the poem, then, moves us obliquely towards a woman whose being and import are subject to slippery cultural determinations, moves us by way of a body of water associated with a college (and indeed a town) that has itself at several times and in several ways been con-Amy Clampitt read her Tercentenary poem "Matoaka" in the special setting of the Botetourt Gallery in Swem Library as one of the events =ciated with Charter Day. struc ted , d es troye d , recons tru cte d , deconstructed , and redeconstructed . Lake Matoaka, "mere water, rippling, preserves / the name of one- / her true, her secret name perhaps, / but that's surmise." (Pon-der, by the way, the epitaph of Keats: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"). The poem approaches Matoaka (lake and woman) in an intimated journey by way of Virginia's rivers and peoples and then a walk through the campus, a walk that explores names and signification, names representing the College's founders, faculty, ad-ministrators, and benefactors: "beyond / the sunken gar-den, the crape- / myrtle symmetries, / past the founda-tion-stone surnames / (Blair, Wythe, Ewell, Brafferton, / Crim Dell)." Recognizing that the College was chartered for prag-matic aims, for ideological, colonialist as well as for ideal-istic purposes, we can see it as an institution at the center of determining, defining, defending, and criticizing our culture 's most important myths, those constructions and beliefs that define how people relate one to another-as men and as women, as classes and interests within a culture, and as cultures in touch with others. In the closing lines of the poem, Clampitt locates the College somewhere close to the center of the human endeavor: to stroll thus is to move nearer, in imagination, lo the nub, the pulse, the ember of what she was-no stranger, finally, to the mystery of what we are. For all the uncertainties of what we know and of how we express what we know ( even words, Clampitt says, tum to "bric-a-brac," "whatever they / once stood for gone"), "Matoaka" hints still at a divine presence, past change: the awesome news of Love personified, Who, having undergone the worst, might still prove to outlast undoing. (An associate professor of English at William and Mary, Terry L. Meyers conceived the idea of commissioning a Tercente-nary poem for the Colkge.) William and Mary Magazine WINTER 1994 61 

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Comments on Amy Clampitt’s \u27Matoaka\u27

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