R.D. READING GUIDE #7
TOPSFIELD (p.9)
This poem clearly a rejoinder to the conflicted cul-de-sac of previous poem (“Black Peak”). The aim seems to be clarification, but the murk only grows darker.
“Topsfield” : suburb of Boston, next door to Salem, Massachusetts
“Shaker plate / of light” : simplicity, clarity. Memory of lakeside Shaker settlement near Lewiston, Maine
“one steady statute / of a dauntless ghost” : refers to “our W”, one of the poem’s heroes, Roger Williams (R.W.)
“O say // can you see / By the Topsfield / town line / Where Endicott / ripped / the King’s cross out / barehanded...” : national anthem transposed onto colonial Bay Colony. The future Governor Endicott of Massachusetts was (at that time, anyway) an enthusiastic disciple of Roger Williams. One day (in the 1630s) the excitable Endicott, inspired by Williams’ objections to King Charles I’s reinforcement of the Tudor “establishment” of a state-sponsored church, tore the cross out of his own militia’s Union Jack. This was an early (and emotional) expression of Roger Williams’ influential theory of the separation of church and state. Very remotely echoed by Dante in his De Monarchia – the medieval version of a doctrine stipulating the separation of Pope and Emperor. (Endicott, a resident of Topsfield, was next-door neighbor to Zaccheus Gould, the poet’s great++grandfather).
“Friend” : Quaker, Shaker
Twain’ll meet / Nought, around the bend” : some kind of prophetic cancelling of violent rivalries and conflicts (with a prefiguration of Mark Twain and the river)
“Wauontam. Let’s eat.” : a Narragansett welcome, to feasting (experienced by exiled Roger Williams)
“Tempestuous word... stirs up... chartered Concorde” : a lot packed into this stanza. Let’s say the tempestuous and threatening prophetic word of someone like Roger Williams, in the 17th century, eventually grew and flourished into the “self-evident endowments” of the 18th century – the U.S. Bill of Rights – in some kind of constitutional alliance with France (“chartered Concorde”).
“Hip-hop’s // Charlie horse” : ambiguous image of a limping monarch (Charlie horse”)
“rocking, racking... icing on a cake of Peking / take-out orders” : the political concept of human liberty, originating in America with Williams, results in a challenge to the autocratic, lawless brutality of “Putin’s generic icing” and “Peking’s take-out orders”
“Aerial checkmate thing” : poetry’s inherent opposition to soul-tyranny. Echoes of Biblical Ariel (the Psalmist’s hope); and Nabokov, Montale (“checkmate thing”)
