Capering & Kickery

Reading onward in Thomas Fessenden’s Original Poems (1806), what should turn up but another poem about dance, even lengthier and more detailed than “Horace Surpassed”!  “The Rustick Revel” is less impressive as a poem, being made up entirely of rhyming couplets of utterly regular rhythm, but it’s even thicker with dance references.  As Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his biographical sketch of Fessenden:

He had caught the rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor.

Hawthorne was referring to a different poem, but it could easily serve for this one as well.  Among the highlights are the very calculated invitation list, the squire calling a dance, people messing up the figures, and trying to get out of paying the bill.

Once again, I’ll give the entire poem in bold with my own commentary interspersed in italics.  Fessenden’s own footnotes have been moved to the end.

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“Horace Surpassed” (lengthily subtitled “or, a beautiful description of a New England Country-Dance”) was published by the American author Thomas Green Fessenden (left) in his 1806 collection, Original Poems.  Fessenden (1771-1837) was, according to the biographical notes here, a lawyer, poet, farmer, journalist, newspaper editor, and member of the Massachusetts legislature.  He was born in Massachusetts, educated at Dartmouth, and spent most of his life in New England.  His original fame as a poet grew from the 1803 work “Terrible Tractoration”, a satire about physicians who refused to adopt a quack medical device.  (Yes, really!)

In his spare time, Fessenden evidently liked country (contra) dancing, and his poem is a cheerful look at the characters of rural New England society: agile Willy Wagnimble, clumsy Charles Clumfoot, graceful Angelina, etc.  The “New England Country-Dance” in the subtitle should be understood as referring to a social evening, not to an actual country-dance.

A rather catty review quoted the poem at length

not because it is superiour to the rest, but as a fair specimen of the work, and it describes an amusement which is “all the rage.”
 — The Monthly anthology, and Boston review. (July, 1806)                     

Fessenden topped his poem with a quote from Horace’s Odes.  “Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae” (“Enough of snow and hail at last”) is the opening line of “To Augustus, The Deliverer and Hope of the State” (1.2).  This particular Ode concerns the disastrous overflowing of the Tiber, possibly as a punishment of the gods for the ill deeds of Rome (notably, the assassination of Julius Caesar), with Augustus as its hoped-for saviour. An 1882 translation of the Ode may be found here.  I must confess that I cannot detect any thematic connection between it and Fessenden’s poem, so I’ll chalk it up to Fessenden’s ego and desire to be recognized as a poet.

The full original text with my best approximation of the formatting is in bold below, with a few comments of my own interspersed in italics.  In the absence of page breaks, the footnotes have been moved to the end.

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