The poem below goes the rounds of the press every year signed with the name of Gen. Albert Pike. In fact, such is the general belief, and all the books in which I have seen this poem printed fall into this error. |The Old Canoe.| But though General Pike wrote some very beautiful poems, he did not write this one. We have his own admission made to Senator Carmack, the distinguished senior Senator from Tennessee. Like many other good poems, it was, perhaps, the only one some poet wrote, and, never thinking it would be immortal, or that it had any special merit, failed to sign his name to it.
It is a little curious how this poem became identified with General Pike. But we learn how it was from an old citizen of Columbia, Tenn., who knew General Pike when he was a young man and lived here. Pike practiced law there when he first started out in life, but met with poor success. Becoming despondent, he one night paid his hotel bill, went to the river’s edge, got into an old canoe, and drifted down to Williamsport, where he took the stage for Nashville. From there he went West, where he became a successful lawyer and politician, and afterwards wrote a volume of poetry. Those poems in which he allowed himself to be natural, such as “Every Year” and others, are very beautiful. But in his most pretentious poem he seems to imitate Keats and Shelley, and so lost his own individuality.
After many years Pike came back to Columbia, a celebrated man. He was an ardent Whig, and made a big speech in support of his principles. To offset his influence some ardent Democrat composed a doggerel called “The Old Canoe,” in which it was plainly intimated that Pike had left here years before between two suns, and had not been too particular about taking some one else’s canoe to get away in. This doggerel was sung around the streets until General Pike and his friends were exasperated beyond measure, ending in the sensitive poet’s leaving the town. Of course, it was all a lie, and the old canoe was probably the property of no man, but it seems that then, as now, nothing was too mean for one political party to say of another. This beautiful poem, “The Old Canoe,” coming out about that time, was attributed to General Pike, and its authorship has never before, perhaps, been publicly corrected. It is found in the schoolbooks, and in books on elocution, as being by General Pike, but Senator Carmack is our authority that General Pike himself told him he did not write it.
Where the rocks are gray and the shore is steep,
And the waters below look dark and deep,
Where the rugged pine, in its lonely pride,
Leans gloomily over the murky tide,
Where the reeds and rushes are long and rank,
And the moss grows thick on the winding bank,
Where the shadow is heavy the whole day through,