Contributors’ Marginalia: Anna M. Evans considers Dan Ferrara’s “Christmas Day, 1776”

My first thought, on reading “Christmas Day, 1776” in the latest issue of 32 Poems, was that Dan Ferrara must, like me, have some connection to New Jersey, given that our state capital, Trenton, rarely turns up in serious poetry—and a quick look at the contributor’s bios confirmed that he is from Tom’s River. My second thought was to ask myself why more poems like this aren’t being written these days, and by “like this” I don’t mean hauntingly lyrical ballads, although this is a fine example of the form, but poems that emanate either directly or tangentially from famous historical battles.

Washington at the Battle of Trenton

Such poems used to be so common they practically formed a genre. I’m thinking of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” which contributed the phrase “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do & die” to the English language, or of the aurally rich “Lepanto” by G.K. Chesterton— “From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun.” For more contemporary tastes, there is also Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” which begins and ends in the Boston of his day but has plenty to say in between about Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw, who fell at the Battle of Fort Wagner.

Like Lowell’s poem, Ferrara’s is not concerned with the actual Battle of Trenton, which took place on December 26th; it is rather an evocation of love and courage in the face of fear felt by one of the young men who was clearly part of the largely untrained militia that comprised the bulk of George Washington’s forces. Probably a smith by trade, the poem’s narrator has just asked his love to marry him:

there molten brass in cuttle mold
sat cooling on my stove
in the shape of the ring I promised you
that night along the cove

But he knows that the day after Christmas he must face an elite force of Hessians, the German mercenaries employed by the English to supplement the redcoats, and he fears the result:

If a Hessian’s axe should cut me down
like a spruce in the frozen bramble

The poem is wistful and poignant, both specific in its detail, and at the same time universal to how all soldiers surely feel on the eve of a battle, particularly against an enemy perceived to be stronger.

And this is where my interaction with the poem becomes more personal. I live near historic Mount Holly, New Jersey, site of the lesser-known Battle of Iron Works Hill, which took place from December 22 to 23, 1776. My battle is actually the reason why the protagonist of Ferrara’s poem need not, in actual fact, have been so fearful about the result of his battle. What happened in Mount Holly was that a raggle-taggle militia—mostly old men and boys—of 600 put on a display of resistance that lured 2000 Hessians, under the command of Count Carl von Donop, south from their Bordentown garrison.

Hessians

The colonials were eventually routed, and the Hessians settled into Mount Holly for Christmas, rounding up all the alcohol in the town and proceeding to get drunk. They were therefore too far from Trenton, and at any rate, in no fit condition, to be of use in the Battle of Trenton, which Washington duly won with very few American casualties. I hope Ferrara’s young blacksmith wasn’t one of them.

Thus “Christmas Day, 1776” evoked a reaction from me on three levels—it prompted me firstly, at an academic level, to revisit this whole idea of the genre of battle poems; secondly, on an emotional level, to admire the skill with which Ferrara handles the young man’s feelings; and finally, on a personal level, to want to write a ballad in response from the point of view of one of the young Mount Holly boys.

There is no way one can possibly ask more from reading a new poem than all of that!

Anna M. Evans

Anna M. Evans is the editor of Raintown Review and currently teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center. Her chapbooks,  Swimming and Selected Sonnets, are available from Maverick Duck Press.