Pocahontas & What's More Important: To Appreciate Rightly or Be Praised?

Pocahontas, "So Distinct and Yet So Unknown"

I was very affected to read in a lecture Eli Siegel gave on the poetry of Carl Sandburg sentences about Sandburg's poem "Cool Tombs," which has the line:

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw
    in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder?
    does she remember?...in the dust...in the cool tombs?

Said Mr. Siegel, "Pocahontas is so distinct, and yet so unknown. Her life is very tragic." This is true. Because the Virginia Company was on the verge of bankruptcy, they brought Pocahontas to England, presented her to "the King and Court" in hopes that she and "her troop of redskins would stimulate investment to keep the colony alive."

While in England Pocahontas was much esteemed, including by the poet Ben Jonson who said of her, "I have known a princess, and a great one." Yet knowing, as she must have, the ugly purpose of the Virginia Company--using her as a novelty to stimulate investors so they could make more profit, to assure further exploitation of her people and land must have made her heart sick. "Sometime after that gala season ended," Mossiker writes, "Pocahontas's health and high spirits visibly deteriorated." She became ill with a respiratory illness and while on a ship returning to America, Pocahontas died in her husband's arms. Till her last day she showed a dignity and courage, and she is buried at Gravesend, England.

I was moved to read in an issue of The Right Of that Mr. Siegel saw Pocahontas as standing for something large and just in America when he wrote: "We have been asked to evoke good will from the American press by Pocahontas, Spinoza, Albert Einstein, and Rain-in-the-Face." I am so happy that Pocahontas is getting what Mr. Siegel said she was asking for as Aesthetic Realism is becoming known across America.

Through Aesthetic Realism every person can have the proud, thrilling good time of knowing what the world is and appreciating it truly. That is what I am so grateful to say happened to me.

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