Begun in the mid-1920s and completed in 1936, Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” his most anthologized work, questions whether his contemporaries are capable of true honor to the past. The poem, a free-flowing, private meditation, opens on irony by employing the Pindaric ode, a lyric, metrically precise form intended for public reading to honor a single hero. Instead of narrowing his focus on one person, the poet broadens his scope to the unified body of war dead and to the spiritually dead community that suffers eroded ties with history. The unidentified cemetery visitor envies military casualties for their sense of purpose at “Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run,” in part because he lacks their understanding of myth. His dislocation stems from a modern narcissism, expressed by the headlong self-destructive leap of the jaguar toward “his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.” The physical separation symbolized by the cemetery gate shuts the timeless dead away from “The gentle serpent,” an Edenic metaphor for time, which interlaces past and present, the dead and the living who are marked for the grave.
The text blends Greek form with Southern themes as the modern viewer attempts to empathize with the Civil War dead. Crucial to loose iambic lines are frequent interweavings of one-syllable rhyme (there/stare, plot/rot), slant rhyme (there/year), harsh sounds (hound bitch), repetition (Stonewall, Stonewall), alliteration (sagging gate), and assonance, as with the various oh and oo sounds of “you know the rage, / The cold pool left by the mounting flood, / Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.” The flow of dense rhetoric reaches dramatic stopping points with the plunge of leaves in lines 25 and 26 and again in lines 41and 42.
Anchored to a passage of autumns, the poem focuses on physical decay, both in buried corpses and the chipped slabs that mark each plot. At the emotional height, the poet asks, “What shall we say of the bones, unclean, / Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?” The question makes its demand on the South as a whole, which must choose whether to carry its history in the heart or bury it along with the era’s diminished sensibilities.
