Indian Woman's Death Song

by Felicia Hemans

An Indian woman, driven to despair by her husband's desertion of her for another wife, entered a canoe with her children, and rowed it down the Mississippi towards a cataract. Her voice was heard from the shore singing a mournful death-song, until overpowered by the sound of the waters in which she perished. The tale is related in Long's Expedition to the source of St. Peter's River.1

Non! je ne puis vivre avec un coeur brisé. Il faut que je retrouve la joie, et que je m'unisse aux esprits libres de l'air.

--Bride of Messina, Translated by Madame de Staël2

Let not my child be a girl, for very sad is the life of a woman.

--The Prairie3
 
 
Down a broad river of the western wilds, 
Piercing thick forest glooms, a light canoe 
Swept with the current: fearful was the speed 
Of the frail bark, as by a tempest's wing 
Borne leaf-like on to where the mist of spray 		 5 
Rose with the cataract's thunder. Yet within, 
Proudly, and dauntlessly, and all alone, 
Save that a babe lay sleeping at her breast, 
A woman stood. Upon her Indian brow 
Sat a strange gladness, and her dark hair waved 		 10 
As if triumphantly. She pressed her child, 
In its bright slumber, to her beating heart, 
And lifted her sweet voice that rose awhile 
Above the sound of waters, high and clear, 
Wafting a wild proud strain, her song of death. 		 15 

Roll swiftly to the spirit's land, thou mighty stream and free! 
Father of ancient waters, roll, and bear our lives with thee! 
The weary bird that storms have tossed would seek the sunshine's calm, 
And the deer that hath the arrow's hurt flies to the woods of balm. 

Roll on! My warrior's eye hath looked upon another's face, 

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And mine hath faded from his soul, as fades a moonbeam's trace; 
My shadow comes not o'er his path, my whisper to his dream, 
He flings away the broken reed -- roll swifter yet, thou stream! 

The voice that spoke of other days is hushed within his breast, 
But mine its lonely music haunts, and will not let me rest; 

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It sings a low and mournful song of gladness that is gone; 
I cannot live without that light -- Father of waves, roll on! 

Will he not miss the bounding step that met him from the chase? 
The heart of love that made his home an ever-sunny place? 
The hand that spread the hunter's board, and decked his couch of yore? 

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He will not! -- roll, dark foaming stream, on to the better shore! 

Some blessed fount amidst the woods of that bright land must flow, 
Whose waters from my soul may lave the memory of this woe; 
Some gentle wind must whisper there, whose breath may waft away 
The burden of the heavy night, the sadness of the day. 

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And thou, my babe! though born, like me, for woman's weary lot, 
Smile! -- to that wasting of the heart, my own! I leave thee not; 
Too bright a thing art thou to pine in aching love away, 
Thy mother bears thee far, young fawn, from sorrow and decay. 

She bears thee to the glorious bowers where none are heard to weep, 

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And where th' unkind one hath no power again to trouble sleep; 
And where the soul shall find its youth, as wakening from a dream -- 
One moment, and that realm is ours: on, on, dark rolling stream! 
 

1 William Hypolitus Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the source of St Peter's River, a play performed in 1823 (published 1824). Back
2  Translation: "No, I cannot live with a broken heart.  I must recover joy and unite myself with the free sprits of the air."  From German dramatist Friedrich Schiller's tragedy Braut von Messina, Die, oder, Die Feindlichen Bruder, performed in 1803 (published 1803).  Germaine de Staël was a French writer whose works, including Corinne (1807) immensely influenced the writing of English women. Back
3 Based on a passage in American novelist James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie (1827). Back