Saul's Hills

Saul's Hills by Edwina Stanton Babcock

"Saul's Hills" is a long meditative poem by Edwina Stanton Babcock that celebrates the landscape of Nantucket Island and explores the spiritual and psychological renewal that wild, open moorland offers to the human soul. The poem opens in October, after the summer visitors have departed on the white boat that rounds the sandy point, leaving behind a landscape of uncommon beauty and solitude. The speaker surveys the commons, the moor roads, the ponds, the berry-laden hedges, the gulls, the marsh hawks, and the tawny grasses dried to autumn wraith. Specific Nantucket place names recur throughout: Pocomo Head, Polpis, Madaket, Gibbs Pond, Monomoy, Shimmo Shore, and Siasconset. These are not merely picturesque details but anchors that root the poem's spiritual meditation in actual geography. The poem's central argument is that the natural world of the moors has the power to restore what urban and modern life destroys. The rutted sand roads winding through juniper and bayberry, the lichen-crusted turf, the mirroring ponds, and the wide skies act as agents of what the speaker calls shriving, a quasi-religious cleansing of the wounded self. Nature here performs a laying on of hands. The hills reshape the individual into something more complete, rounding the fragmented modern person back toward what the poet calls the whole. Solitude is personified as the one remaining god who still walks the island, passing through goldenrod and brake while all other deities have been displaced. The poem addresses the way human hearts remain strangely dumb to the keynotes that nature sounds all around them, yet suggests that on these particular moors, souls have been freed into liberate ecstasy. The speaker distinguishes between those who are capable of hearing and seeing the island's deeper messages and those who cannot. The latter group, aligned with the forces of modernity, commercialism, and the machine, are seen as breaking a priceless inheritance on the wheel of industry, tarring the wild place with the foul metropolis, caging what should remain free. The heritage of every girl and boy to roam heath and bay is in danger of being taken away by those whose trivial gaze finds the moors barren and sad. Seasonal movement structures the poem's middle sections. Indian summer brings haze, placid tides, a harvest moon, fishing fleets coming silver-laden into harbor, and beach plums glimmering with frost. Winter comes with wild smoking days, black ducks breaking formation, gaunt trees cringing in the wind, and sullen seas hanging foam around the shore. Foggy days bring their own comfort, the trees sailing like ships through pearly seas, voyagers from the vapor laying balm on wounds where the soul has bled. Each season is presented as a different mode of the same underlying spiritual grammar that the island speaks. The poem also honors Nantucket's human history. The old whaling culture is evoked through lantern-lit halls, log books stamped with inked whales, rafters carved in sailor fashion, paintings of canvased ships crossing the bars, and the yarn-winding Swift. Portuguese fishers go down cobbled alleys to their boats at dawn. Quaker ancestors trod the bricked hedged streets. The island's Nantucketer character is praised as resolute, sober-minded, and rooted in great New England roof-trees, producing names that mark what the speaker calls the Great New England Trail. The poem closes with a scene of urban dinner-table conversation among people who have known the island. Though surrounded by damask, silver, candlelight, and city form, they drift inevitably into talk of the Siasconset lighthouse, the cross-rips by the bell buoy, the blue chicory, the bouncing Bet, the smell of marlin and tar, the breakers. The island reasserts itself through memory and longing. The final stanzas make a quiet vow: not a scheduled plan or social rendezvous but a deeper interior promise that the speaking self and the spirit within will together return to the island roads, beyond all outcomes, beyond winning or losing, beyond all other abodes. Throughout, the poem is written in a heightened lyrical register with stanzas of varying length, frequent invocations, rhetorical questions, and passages of prayer-like address to Truth, to Spirit, and to the island itself. The tone is celebratory but also urgent, aware that what the island offers is fragile, threatened, and irreplaceable.

By Edwina Stanton Babcock · First published 1924 · Genre: Poetry, Nature Poetry, Romantic Poetry · 5,116 words

First lines

1. Long after all the talking people go / On the white boat that rounds the sandy point, / The silenced hollows of the Commons show / A deepening curve; and where the grasses blow, / Dried to October wraith, I see annoint / A hundred lanes and valleys splashed with glints / Of silver moss and tawny tapered mints.

2. And where the moor roads plough the tangled sand / The sky's blue river floods these merging hills, / Pocomo Head white morning fire spills; / The deep swung ponds with sapphire sweep expand / Walled with red berries of the alder bough; / Stark monkish trees slant on the windblown space, / And gulls dip to the bay or open meadow place.

Genres

Tags

fiction · historical · literary · drama · character-driven · coming-of-age · americana · rural · early 20th century · family saga · social commentary · landscape

What this Textopian page supports

Saul's Hills is listed on Textopian as a poem by Edwina Stanton Babcock, dated 1924 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Edwina Stanton Babcock