Thursday, October 14, 2010

What Did Pocahontas Have to Regret?

In Carl Sandburg's poem, "Cool Tombs", he compares Pocahontas' life to those of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.  He writes, 


     "When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs he forgot
the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs?"
 I see this as Sandburg talking about what regrets and worries that Lincoln and Grant had when they died, and how they got to leave these things behind.  The issue with Pocahontas though, is that we do not know what she worried about, or what she regretted from her life when she died.   The part "...did she wonder? does she remember?"  makes the reader wonder what Pocahontas regretted in her life.  Did she want to go back to life as a Native American once she was settled in the European way of life?  Is that really what she wanted?  I think that this is a big mystery that many people seem to overlook when they think of Pocahontas. Since she gave no real written account of her life, historians and other people are not able to figure out if Pocahontas was happy.  We do not know what she regretted in her life, if anything. 

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