Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Up River

Gouverneur Morris casts again for trout
As he and I did yesterday.  He'll fish
And fish and fish and fish until he's out
Of flies, and then comes politics:  he'll dish
Out some mess of line behind bait you'll wish
You'd never bit.  He'll ask:  "How are your slaves?"
You'll say, "They're fine."  Then, vulturish,
He'll stand there, silent, waiting on the laves:
The truth he hopes will burst the staves of guilt's conclaves.

Last night, again, he set his hook on me.
Better me than Rutledge . . . there'd be the fight!
Me, he asked, "Could it be hypocrisy
To own a man, yet claim men free by right?"
He's got me . . . But Rutledge would say:  "What right
Has any such as never came from Adam?"
Well, you know how far they'd go in their spite.
May their rage crash upon this stone I am
Lest federalism's promise fall to Bedlam.

Today, here in the hills far above the creek
Where Mister Morris fishes, I ride upon
The old Cantonment of the army, seek- 
In ruins of our works, in an echelon
Of huts Tom Paine saw built-the pantheon
Of men, women, whose souls, together, weigh,
Inform and strengthen me, and urge me on.
Their spirit made us one.  If we belay
Our lives-our hopes-to theirs, then discord falls away.

The Constitutional Convention has,
For two months, groped about that fact.
I've held back . . . not said much.  I know, whereas
Speech has its place, my speaking would have lacked
The grace that floods my soul on this still tract

Of land these twenty miles northwest of where
The People and their government contract,
But may my silent presence carry there
A nation's heart forged here of suffering, work, prayer.
 
 
 
 

Note: Washington, who was chairing the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, traveled to Valley Forge at the invitation of Gouverneur Morris, who, on August 8, would deliver his address against slavery, the Southern states' response to which would nearly wreck the Convention.

The Transcendentalists

The transcendentalists, despite their love
Of poetry, wrote few poems worthy of
Their aspirations for the art.  Thoreau
And Emerson and Channing each would row
Where Keats sailed-bent poesy's bow till "twang"
Went string; "thud" went pointy head.  Muses sang
"You hit our horse and missed the leaping hart- 
Poor Pegasus, stuck drafting truth's slow cart."

For naught they loved the wild ought; for naught, sought
To clothe, in beauty's threads, their lives' best thought.
They launched each hard?won word into a sea
That mirrored light but hid duality:
Kant's ordering of mind they understood,
And how it freed art's falcon from faith's hood,
But Boston's finest failed to grasp how Kant
Had placed art's heroes by a Hellespont
With God and science at opposing poles
And set in circulation battling souls
Who sought for adversaries farther out
Than where Kant sailed, to sink them in their doubt.

To transcend!  Oh, they wished it so!  And who
Am I, and what am I trying to do,
When I, who say I love the truth, deride,
Throughout a clever monument to pride,
Their sincere strivings and my own,
And maybe everyone's?  This poem . . . this tone
Has got to change.  Our hearts have got to change . . .
Oh, raise their ships and set us in the prow
Who would attain the life that they avow,
And wonder at that ash?encrusted spark
Michael lights before we disembark
At this dark age from our Goethean ark.
 

George Reitnour was born in 1957. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania where his family first settled generations ago. Reitnour attended Allegheny College and Duquesne University School of Law. After 17 years in private practice, he closed his law office in 2000 and became Vice President of Private Wealth Management at Investors Trust Company.