FanPost

Poem of the Week: On the Death of J.R. Drake

Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) was for a brief time the shining star of the Gotham gliterati and a man dubbed "the most eligible bachelor in New York". A young doctor who dabbled in poetry, Drake became the dear friend of Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), a fellow poet who adored him with the deepest of loves. When Drake died of tuberculosis in 1820, he was only twenty-five, leading to an over-abundance of Keats linkages in the 1820s and 1830s (Drake's poetry is not bad, but the comparison is painfully embarrassing.) Shortly thereafter, Halleck published his elegy to Drake, which became one of the most well-loved poems of the nineteenth century, and whose opening lines were once a part of our idiom.

Fitz-Greene Halleck

"On the Death of J.R. Drake"

GREEN be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

Tears fell, when thou wert dying,
From eyes unused to weep,
And long, where thou art lying,
Will tears the cold turf steep.

When hearts, whose truth was proven,
Like thine, are laid in earth,
There should a wreath be woven
To tell the world their worth,

And I, who woke each morrow
To clasp thy hand in mine,
Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
Whose weal and woe were thine;

It should be mine to braid it
Around thy faded brow,
But I've in vain essayed it,
And feel I cannot now.

While memory bids me weep thee,
Nor thoughts nor words are free,
The grief is fixed too deeply
That mourns a man like thee.

-----

Halleck's career is an interesting one, as he was one of the first American writers to be blacklisted because of his sexuality. For most of his life Halleck was held up as a great example of American literature and his few decent poems -- mostly humorous newspaper verse, a long poem called Fanny about the rise and fall of a nouveau riche NY girl, and the patriotic poem "Marco Bozzaris" -- were treated as great works of art. Over time, Halleck's homosexuality went from unmentioned subject to an indictment of his character and art. The turning point seems to have been the decade immediately after his death, and when a statue of Halleck was revealed in Central Park in 1877, the response was almost complete horror at the effeminate and scandalous rendering of ole Fitz-Greene.

You be the judge:

Gay or just relaxed? In 1877, they were pretty sure what cross legged meant.

From there Halleck pretty quickly disappeared, and in short time fell off the anthologies lists and slid easily into oblivion. To be sure, sexual politics played a role, but in a larger sense it was all inevitable: nearly all the poetry of the 1820s-30s is forgotten today. Moreover, the poems Drake and Halleck wrote in old New York were hilarious and controversial and all the rest, specifically because they were peppered with references to the society scene. Obviously, we don't get the jokes and allusions anymore.      
 

Still, his poem on Drake deserves to live on.

The best book on Halleck is John W.M. Hallock's The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck (Wisconsin, 2000).

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.