I

White was the world as a winding-sheet
The day we buried Parson Treat.

Sunday it was as the new days go,
That there fell the first of The Great March Snow.
We marvelled that God chose His holy morn
To empty the grains from His hunting-horn,
Powdering all the soft Cape air.
Deep was the horn He emptied there.
A day and a night came down the snow
Light and idle as feathers blow.
A night and a day it fleeted and flew
Like a swarm of white bees escaped from the blue,
Globing the cabins and furring the trees.
Then the spray on the cliffs set in to freeze,
And keen as arrows the angry flakes
Whirled wild as the foam when a spring-tide breaks.
Few, thereafter, had craft to tell
When the morning rose and the even fell,
For the skies gloomed mightily; surges tore
Ancient rocks from the shrieking shore;
Tall red cedars were snapt in the gripe
Of the wind, as a foeman snaps the pipe
That shall puff no longer the smoke of peace.
Men had forgotten that storm could cease,
When the sun looked out through diamond sleet
On a world as white as a winding sheet.

II

That bitter gale from out of the East
Bore our father's soul to the White God's feast.

As far as the reach of an Indian's gaze
Shrouded were all the familiar ways;
New were the hillocks, the hollows were new;
Nor fox nor squirrel had ventured through;
Never a track nor a trace was there
Of the little feet that our wood-paths share;
But steadily on through that printless snow
We dug a road for our friend to go;
Through the deepest drifts we cut an arch
Six feet high for the burial march;
The up-flung snow, as our rude spades ploughed,
Fanned out above us a shimmering cloud.
Whenever a gust would the pine groves thrash
Till the icicles, thick on their boughs, would clash,
Or a snow-laden fir give a sudden crack,
We started as if his laugh came back;
For a merry heart had old Parson Treat,
Though his voice was rough as the blasts that meet
On the plains of Nauset; he laughed as he died,
As his soul went out on the ebb of the tide.
But now by that crisped and sparkling road,
Slowly we carried a silent load;
Through those white arched tunnels, with moccasined feet
We walked our last by Parson Treat.
Crystal-floored was the pond we crossed;
Muffled with snow and sealed with frost
The fields he loved; and the grave below
Was draped in white by the drifted snow.
It glistened and gleamed in the tingling air;
When we shut our eyes for the white man's prayer
Our friend had taught us, we saw it yet.
It stung our eyes till our eyes were wet.

III

It was love of him that held us tame
When every leaf whispered King Philip's name.

Long ago, when the heads now hoar
Slept in their mother's necks, our shore
Was sold to the palefaces; long ago
Were set the bounds where our fires might glow.
They came from Plymouth, the stern chiefs seven,
Friends of the terrible God of Heaven,
Came for the woods where we loved to rove,
For our eight fresh ponds and our shellfish cove.
They bought Namskaket of Mettaquason;
From our sachem of Nauset his all they won
Save the width of a cornfield out on the Neck
That the great waves beat and the soft foams fleck.
But we longed for the hunt as we plied the tillage;
Caged wolves were we in our Indian village.
Ever the spring wind called to our blood,
And our longings surged like the tide in flood;
But level or upland, sunny or dim,
The paleface deemed it was made for him.
Wheresoever he found a hill,
He set the sea-wind tending his mill.
If we cut the pine-knots to make us tar,
Or dug us clams where the beach stretched far,
It was trespass against the settlement law.
We were as the mouse in the white owl's claw.
They felled our reaches of oak and pine —
Fools! for the storm-wind, bitter with brine,
Buffets the soil from coast to coast,
Wreaking its wrath like a foeman's ghost.
Wherever we went, whatever we did,
Still was the Indian checked and chid.
Closer and closer they marked our bounds,
Driving us back from the hunting grounds
Where our fathers had wandered beneath the sun
Since first the ways of the world begun.
They gave us a portion of cod and wheat,
But the scorn of their eyes was sharp as sleet.
They burdened our hearts with strange, new shame;
Red faces were fair till the paleface came;
And our hate grew rank as the river-flag grows,
Till when thirty winters were nigh their close,
They thought they had store for a minister's meat,
And they called our Eliot, Parson Treat.

Little by little they eked it out,
What might suffice for a soul devout,
— Fifty pounds with upland and mead,
A share in whatever the sea should breed,
A parcel of marsh, a strip of the shore,
And firewood piled at his cabin door.
The wood was for us to gather and stack,
And winter by winter he knew no lack,
For he gave good words and wise was he
In the fashions of forest courtesy;
But when he prayed his Great Spirit to pour
Grace on the heathen, it puzzled us sore.
Weary to us were the white men's prayers;
Unfit we were for that heaven of theirs;
The redman's tongue it is hard to trim
Out of the warwhoop into the hymn;
The redman's muscles were made of steel
To chase the game and not to kneel;
Better the war plumes in our hair
Than the trickle of holy water there:
Yet we hearkened the words our father spoke
And bowed our necks to the White God's yoke.

Oft have we stood at the meeting-house door
When the Parson's voice would the seas out-roar,
While the Cape children, lulled by stormy sounds,
Would sleep till the tithing-man went his rounds.
'Twas a wonder to hear our father shout
As he hammered the White God's anger out.
Yet in every wigwam his voice was sweet;
The pappooses nestled between his feet;
And ever he soothed the sullen brave,
And the railing squaw with a smile forgave;
As soon as he saw her black eyes flash,
He would tease for a taste of her succotash.
The villages blithened when he came;
We hung the kettle and fanned the flame.
Ten mile afoot through the deepening sand
Makes a hungry guest; then the hearty hand
He would strike in ours, while from chest so stout
Ever the big laugh rumbled out.
Reading and writing he taught our young,
While he learned of our elders the Nauset tongue.
In the meeting-house that was twenty feet square,
Thatched and loop-holed, he taught us prayer.
He would bring the wild grapes of Monomoyick
All the way to Truro's sick;
In Sawkatucket he used to praise
First their faith and then their maize.
From Pochet down to Provincetown tip,
Where first was seen the great winged ship,
He would trudge to strengthen a soul for flight;
He loved the red as he loved the white.

But oft in our villages while we heard
Our father thunder the awful word,
Our hearts were stirred by a longing dim
That the fierce White God were like to him.
Vessels of wrath we were, boomed he;
God would torment our souls with glee;
Laugh at the helpless that cried for aid;
Mock the coward that cringed afraid;
Much as our sires, I ween, would make
Their mirth of a captive burned at the stake.
So sinners, he said, God like briers would cast
Into a fire that ever should last;
He would make them the butt of his arrows; the weight
Would be heavy on them of his endless hate;
His heart to their groans would be harder than flint;
His fury would never know pause nor stint;
Not as a man would he meet his foe,
But deal him an omnipotent blow.
At times he would preach of a land of love,
But left us in scanty hope thereof,
For from Roger Williams the word had crossed
That probably Indians all were lost.

As the White God would, it hath come to pass.
Our spears are blunted; our minds — alas! —
Are all confused between wrong and right.
We loved our father; we would not fight
Against his people, not we, his band
Of Praying Indians, though the sand
Was hot with messengers, though there came
On a stormy wind King Philip's name.

IV

Sons and daughters had wept and gone.
On a rough new mound the sunset shone.

Our sorrow was full of undercries.
We lifted our looks to the glowing skies,
To the beautiful sun that gleamed so red,
The sun our fathers worshiped;
For the sun rose to us and to us set
Ere ever the paleface came to fret
Our woods with his axe and our hearts with his law;
Good was the world that our fathers saw.
For them their God made the starlights burn,
Sowed for their covert the wild sweet-fern;
When in heavy sands tired feet would sink,
He breathed upon them from Mayflowers pink.
But the white man's God was a foe to ours
Who grieved as the rain for the broken flowers,
But trembled like rain in the blow of the wind.
Were our fathers granted their God to find
In the Happy Hunting Grounds green and free
Where they wander safe by a wider sea,
Too wide for the white-winged ships to cross?
Do they lie in the moonlight on red-cupped moss
And husk the corn with laughter and tale,
Or still doth the strong White God prevail?
There, as here, doth his haughty frown
Look strange on the Red God and face him down?

We were of the best in bookman's wit,
And read the sermons the Parson writ
In a hamlet here or a hamlet there,
To the white man's God prayed the white man's prayer;
But our people wilted like corn in drought;
They perished like fish when the tide is out.
Our store of simples availed no whit,
Nor the white man's leech could benefit
The redman's ill; and our father sighed
By the deerskin beds where his converts died.
And still, bewildered and strangely sick,
We die in Meesham and Monomoyick.
We die as the autumn leaves are shed
From the oaken boughs, poor tribes of red.
The long sky-river our last look views
Is crowded bright with our star-canoes.
We know no more than the mown beach-grass
Or the broken sprays of the sassafras
Why we are cut from the white man's path,
How we have vexed his God of Wrath.
Our father told of one far away
In some unseen land, on some bygone day,
Who cured the sick; it may be thus;
No hands of healing are laid on us.

Strong is the race of the great White God,
But ours has come to its period.
Our wigwams shall vanish from these our lands;
Our paths be lost in the blowing sands;
Our tragedy hidden in time's dim blur,
And only a name be remembrancer
That the Red God once had a people here.

Will they not miss us, the fox and deer?
Will not cedar and juniper.
Murmur together of days that were?
Will the paleface care, as we, for these
Soft whirrs of wings, and fragrances,
Wraiths of cloud that go drifting by
In the pearly-misted undersky,
Blush of the brier-rose when it peeps
From tangle of green where a nestling cheeps,
Golden stems through the April land,
And tawny Autumn's enkindling brand?
We have heaped the earth in the Parson's grave;
We have given him love for the love he gave;
We have prayed the prayers that he bade us pray;
Now we reach our arms to the God of Day.
Our hearts are bitter and clamorous.
Red Sun, Red God, O comfort us!