I put this poem on one of my old blogs, but it’s been about ten years, so I think I’m allowed to re-upload it. Most of the poems in Virginian Writers of Fugitive Verse aren’t very good, but this one is nice, and it has a good story, a sort of memento mori as he contemplates an Indian mound. The author was the grand-nephew of Thomas Jefferson—Dabney Carr being the name of his brother-in-law. He killed a fellow student in a duel at Dickinson College in 1816, an act that would have been scandalous in Pennsylvania—and it was, the school closed shortly after—but utterly normal for a high-spirited youth of Virginia. It took a toll on him, and there is a certain heaviness to his writing that others noticed at the time and attributed to the duel.
Facing a rap for first-degree murder from a Pennsylvania jury, he went to Europe, where he met Byron—by one account Byron was fascinated by his habit of chewing tobacco, though he didn’t care for it himself. He studied in Geneva while being looked after by Albert Gallatin, who would have been minister to France at the time. Back in the United States, he accompanied General Lafayette on his steamboat journey on the Ohio River in 1824, which included the wreck of the steamship Mechanic. He died at 26 or 27 in New Orleans of yellow fever.
On an Indian Mound
By Dabney Carr Terrell
Can’st say what tenant fills yon grave?
Oppressor stem, or crouching slave?
Or gallant chieftain, vainly brave,
Who for the land he could not save
Was well content to die?
Or beauteous maiden in her bloom,
Who rashly sought an early doom,
Because unable to resume
Her lover’s heart? or, in the tomb
Do both united lie?Or it may be some bard divine,
Whose lofty lay and polished line,
By age unthreaten’d with decline,
A thousand years had seen to shine,
With still increasing ray;
When from the north the savage horde
Of hostile tribes, like torrents poured;
Sweeping the peasant, throne and lord,
The shiver’d shield and broken sword,
Like wither’d leaves away.Or it may be some victor proud
Came o’er our world like tempest cloud,
With blaze as bright and noise as loud,
Trampling on earth the servile crowd,
Their wonder and their fear.
Or itmay be some patriot chief,
Camillus-like, that brought relief,
Whose clos’d career, Alas! too brief,
Awake a nation’s bursting grief
To millions justly dear;Or it may be—but whither springs
Bold Fancy on her airy wings?
Unmeasured Time deep darkness flings
O’er what our fond imaginings
Try vainly to explore.
Yet this past race has left behind
A lesson dear to Wisdom’s mind;
In that lone mound, summ’d up, we find
The story of our wretched kind,
To be—and be no more.