Sherry Chandler

Hew Ainslee

HewAinslee was born in Ayrshire in 1792, the year Kentucky joined the union, and he didn’t come to American until he was thirty. He farmed in New York for a while and spent some time in the Utopian community of New Harmony in Indiana. (New Harmony is a neat place, preserved now as an artists’ community. The Ropewalk Writers Retreat is held there. It’s a good place to retreat.)

Ainslee came to Louisville in 1828, when he was about 30, and became a contractor. He didn’t really consider himself an American poet. He wrote in Scots dialect, after Burns, whom he admired greatly, and many of his works are re-creations of old Scots ballads. A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, published in 1822 which would have been the year he immigrated, is described as “songs, ballads, and conversations with friends of Robert Burns.” Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems was published in 1855. The photograph at left is from the frontispiece to that book.

Daniel Hoffman said recently, in an e-mailed “Poetry Month Pick” from Poetry Daily, that the American poets before Whitman were challenged to find a distinctive voice and tended to write fairly generic poems, unmarked by the specifics of the American experience or landscape. This statement is certainly true of Hew Ainslee’s few poems that deal with the New World. In fact, in the introduction to Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems, he apologizes for writing about America at all. The poem below is the best I could find.

He wrote almost entirely in ballad stanza, Emily Dickinson’s hymn stanza: quatrains alternating lines of iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter. These are, after all, songs. He writes a pretty lively ballad but you’re on your own with the dialect. Some of it is glossed but nothing in this particular poem was explained. (I leave you to make your own adolescent puns.)

Come Awa to the West

Come awa to the bonny green West!
   Where the lauld an' the brave hae thriven;
Come, see our braid valleys still drest
   In the crap that was planted by heaven.

Come, leave the dull gear-getting crew,
   Come away frae the lordling an' slave —
It is not a right land for you,
   Wha canna bow down wi' the lave.

Tho' wealth hath not offered yet to deck
   Our valleys wi' taste and wi' art,
Yet the head o' ilk freeman's erect,
   And his language still empties his heart!

Come, come to our bonny green West,
   Whar liberty soughs in the breeze!
O, the flesh, Jamie, never can rest,
   Till the heart an' the spirit's at east!

— from Hew Ainslie Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems (New York, Redfield, 1855)

Possibly related posts:

View from the other side

More of Hew

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

Running across the log pond

The Dailiness of It

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.