King Philip’s War was a struggle between the New England Puritan settlers and Native Americans. Fought in 1675-6, it caused the deaths of about 800 colonists and 3,000 Native Americans and a catastrophe for the Native peoples of New England. King Philip (Metacomet, in his own language) was shot to death, his wife and child sold as slaves in Bermuda, his head displayed on a pike for decades.
Traditionally, King Philip’s War was described as a dangerous attack on the colonists, not a genocidal campaign by them against the Wampanoags. Robert Lowell (1917-77) early grasped his region’s original sin. His direct ancestor John Winslow had been a rich Boston merchant during King Philip’s War; another relative had been Josiah Winslow, the governor who led Massachusetts in that war. Out of his struggles with his own ancestry, the Catholic-leaning, pacifist Lowell made poems of permanent value.
In 1946, he published “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” in his collection entitled Lord Weary’s Castle. The setting is King’s Chapel Burying Ground in Boston, where John Winslow was buried with his wife Mary. I recently visited the Burying Ground with a copy of Lowell’s poem in hand and found that he had described the setting precisely and had incorporated relatively obscure historical information. My annotations follow, interspersed with the entire text in italics. The whole poem is reprinted together here.
Title: “At the Indian Killer’s Grave”
The singular noun is interesting, since there are many graves in the Burial Ground that could be connected to King Philip’s War. Perhaps the grave of Joseph Tapping or of John Winslow is the specific reference (see below), or perhaps, as Frank Bidart writes in his notes to the Selected Poems, “The Indian Killer … is essentially generic, a collective figure ….”
Epigraph:
“Here, also, are the veterans of King Philip’s War, who burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer.”
Quoted from Hawthorne’s story “The Gray Champion,” which concerns the colonists’ resistance to James II (the king of King’s Chapel) and mentions their slaughter of Native Americans briefly and ironically. The story concludes: “still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England’s hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry.” (Vindicating his ancestors is pretty much the opposite of what Lowell accomplishes in this poem.)
Behind King’s Chapel what the earth has kept
Whole from the jerking noose of time extends
Its dark enigma to Jehoshaphat;
These are regular iambic pentameter lines, as are most (but not quite all) of the lines of the poem. Most of the poem rhymes, but in a complex and irregular scheme. (Note friends/bends/ends, well/compel, root/foot, etc.) The very first line has no rhyme.
“Behind King’s Chapel”: The small plot of ancient stones is hemmed by some of the city’s tallest and most modern commercial buildings. America’s first subway line runs very close below, the quaint cover of its ventilation shaft interrupting the graves. Crowds of tourists file down the narrow lanes.
The Burying Ground is historically separate from King’s Chapel. The former was a cemetery for Puritans, strenuous critics of the official Anglican Church. Because no settler would sell to King James II land on which to build an Anglican church in New England, James seized some of the Burying Ground to build the chapel, presumably disrupting many Puritan tombs. The present structure of the chapel is a sober neoclassical building, erected in 1754, that overshadows the cemetery. The modern congregation is Unitarian, the Anglicans having been chased away as Tories in the Revolution. Lowell uses the phrase “King’s Chapel” to locate the poem and does not mention the Burying Ground itself. The buried Puritans would be angry that their resting place is so described. Lowell’s own theology would be closer to James’ than to the Puritans’.
“What the earth has kept whole …” Does this refer to bodies in the burial ground, ones that have not been broken up by centuries of building? Maybe not, because the subject of the sentence is singular: it “extends / Its dark enigma to Jehoshaphat.” One possible reading: there is a crime, a mysterious sin, that is hidden from the time when the corpses were buried until the Day of Judgment.
“Jerking noose” alludes to the mass hanging of the Wampanoag Indians in King Philip’s war, part of the crime that is the dark enigma. This also suggests a concrete image: something in the earth is partly broken by a rope which, like time itself, shakes things to pieces.
Jehoshaphat: this could refer to the King of the Israelites. He might be associated with the Puritans because he struggled against idolatry and defeated a large army of Moabites (comparable to Wampanoags) when the Lord made them quarrel amongst themselves. But more likely Lowell means not the king but the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where the Resurrection and Judgment Day is expected: thus, a vast graveyard. Cf. “In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat,” a phrase from Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard of Nantucket.”
Or will King Philip plait
The just man’s scalp in the wailing valley! Friends,
Blacker than these black stones the subway bends
About the dirty elm roots and the well
For the unchristened infants in the waste
Of the great garden rotten to its root;
“Or will King Philip plait …”: The word “or” suggests two possibilities. Either the enigma remains hidden until Judgment Day or King Philip braids the hair on the scalp of the “just man” in the valley of Jehosophat. The phrase “just man” could be ironic and refer to the kind of men whom the real Philip scalped: Puritans. “Plaiting” seems gentle and cosmetic, although perhaps King Philip celebrates the ultimate demise of the men who killed him and his people. Although they won the war, they all died in the end.
“Friends!”: Who could that be? We the readers? Imaginary companions visiting the Burying Ground with Lowell? A congregation addressed by a preacher? King Philip’s friends (for he clearly speaks later in the poem)?
“Blacker than these black stones …” The headstones are gray now, as they must have been when first cut. In Lowell’s time, pollution had blackened them (see the “off-scourings” mentioned in line 2.6). The air was polluted by the heavy industry that his ancestors brought to New England after 1790 and that supported all the office buildings around King’s Chapel.
“… the subway bends …”. It does bend–the Green Line of the Boston “T”–and as it moves it makes extraordinary creaking and whining sounds immediately below the cemetery, as if the dead were rising. The construction of the “T,” like the building of King’s Chapel, disturbed the sober Puritans in their graves and jumbled their bones together promiscuously.
“About the dirty elm roots and the well”: The “well” is actually the cover of the subway airshaft, a remarkable structure that I would call quaint, but I can see how it might look diabolical.
“For the unchristened infants in the waste”: In 1833, a charnel house (a vault for bones) was constructed under the Burying Ground to hold dead orphans. Once again, the dead Puritans must have been shifted. They would not be upset by the idea of unchristened burials. They considered baptism unnecessary for salvation and conducted no baptisms in the New World until about 1628. For the Catholic Lowell, unchristened babies would evoke Limbo.
Of the great garden rotten to its root: The garden may be the cemetery, where the bones are like roots. “Great” is surprising and worth some consideration, because I would have described the Burying Ground as small and quaint. Perhaps the cemetery is metonymy for something truly “great,” such as Boston or America.