To Abram Quary
"To Abram Quary" by Edwina Stanton Babcock is a meditation in verse on the life and death of Abram Quary, identified in the poem's subtitle as the last Indian on Nantucket, a member of the Wampanoag people who inhabited the island before European settlement displaced and ultimately decimated his people. The poem opens by imagining Quary in his final days, sitting at the door of his home near Shimmo, a coastal area of Nantucket, as long shadows fall across the moorland and sheep move through the landscape around him. The speaker wonders what thoughts occupied his mind in those solitary, dream-bound hours, and whether the tides rolling onto the shore reminded him of some distant origin, some source from which his people came. He is described as an outward ripple of a race half spent, a bewildered son of a hidden continent, language that frames him as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and its last visible remnant, cast adrift on an island at the edge of a world that has forgotten what he represents. The poem then probes the nature of Quary's inner life and ancestral memory. The speaker asks whether, in his dying dreaming, Quary could see visions of a vibrant past: coastal lands, young red men launching canoes onto the sea, hunters chasing brilliant-feathered game up great rain-soaked rivers, or communal dances expressing religious and spiritual devotion in harvest seasons. These images are conjured not as certainties but as possibilities, questions the speaker poses across the distance of culture and time, acknowledging that such interior experience is forever inaccessible to the outside observer. From these visions the poem turns to the problem of lost history and vanished record. The speaker laments that there are no trails left, no scrolled birch bark writings to carry the tale from father to son. The meaning of totem carvings, the significance of taboos encoded in crests and trophies, the identities of great chieftains and sachems who once led hunting parties and presided over councils around fire-lit circles, all of this has been lost. The erasure is total. The accumulated knowledge, spiritual life, genealogy, and cultural achievement of Quary's people have left no legible mark that the present can decipher. The poem then shifts toward a kind of consolation, speculating on what guided Quary and his people along what it calls the Outward Trail, meaning the path of life and ultimately of death. Perhaps the stars served as their ancient weather book and guide. Perhaps old campfires marked the scars left in the forest, or some Great Spirit shook a mighty spear across the sky as a signal or a sign. The poem imagines that when Quary finally walked those mysterious trails of death, stern and unafraid in his moccasined feet, his brothers, the generations of the dead who had gone before him, were waiting to welcome him. Time itself, described as aqueous and clear as brook water, veils those trails from the living. The poem is elegiac and reverential in tone throughout, shaped by genuine sorrow at cultural extinction and the irreversible loss of an entire people's inner and outer life. Babcock uses the figure of Quary not merely as an individual but as a symbol of historical tragedy, the end of a lineage stretching back to a forgotten continent and ancient civilization. The poem's questions accumulate a weight of mourning precisely because they cannot be answered. The silence that meets each inquiry about the past is itself the evidence of destruction. Yet the poem refuses to end in pure desolation, offering instead an image of Quary meeting his ancestors in death, restored to community and continuity beyond the reach of the colonial history that isolated and erased him in life.
By Edwina Stanton Babcock · Genre: Poetry, Historical Fiction, Elegy