Today is the anniversary of the birth of Philip Freneau (1752-1832), "the poet of the American Revolution" and one of the first great figures in American literature. I like his tribute to a group of soldiers who fell in action against the British in South Carolina in 1781, which closes softly



Now rest in peace, our patriot band,

Though far from nature's limits thrown,

We trust they find a happier land,

A brighter sunshine of their own.



Freneau would almost certainly have produced more and better work had he been less involved in political controversy and he might have felt, as did Hilaire Belloc, that he had been called out of his proper medium into prose, "because one fights with prose." Here is the text of one of Freneau's finest poems.



The Wild Honey Suckle



FAIR flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear.



By Nature's self in white arrayed,

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

And planted here the guardian shade,

And sent soft waters murmuring by;

Thus quietly thy summer goes,

Thy days declining to repose,



Smit with those charms, that must decay,

I grieve to see your future doom;

They died--nor were those flowers more gay,

The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power

Shall leave no vestige of this flower.



From morning suns and evening dews

At first thy little being came:

If nothing once, you nothing lose,

For when you die you are the same;

The space between, is but an hour,

The frail duration of a flower.