View of 19th-century East Rock by George Drurie.
Who says New Haven isn’t a great town for cogitating writers and poets looking for new inspirations for pastorals?
You don’t need to go to the countryside or to East Rock for the quiet that promotes inspiration.
Our peripatetic poet Sam Woodworth found his in the deep quiet of … New Haven mud.
Join us at the Local History Room of the New Haven Free Public LIbrary for the next episode of This Day In New Haven History, where we continue to read Samuel Woodworth’s poem “New-Haven,” a bit of a travelogue of our fair burg in 1808. It turns out to be a paean to the muses and to the pains of daily life in our unpaved town.
Today Sam walks toward Long Wharf and encounters a few failures of the yet unknown department of public works:
No slippery flags[read flagstones] the careless step betray,
And crack the skull on every rainy day;
Here, should you fall, you lose no drop of blood,
But safe and soft recline on yielding mud!
You can listen to my dramatic reading and incisive deconstruction of Woodworth’s poem by clicking on the audio above.
Sam also mentions East and West Rock, but didn’t go there for his muses. Sam’s a city guy.
New Haven Museum 19th-century painting of East Rock.
You have to love him for having a positive, if satirical, attitude toward the conditions for writing, and lodging as well:
Here thoughtful Silence holds her chosen seat,
For here no deafening pavements spoil the street;’
A chaise or chariot here are hear no more
Than feathers falling on the felted floor;
Here I can write, three stories only high,
In such dead silence I could hear a sigh.
Join me for the broadcast, which also includes an eye-witness account of Woodworth’s trip down to Long Wharf in the midst of its initial construction by remarkable African-American engineer William Lanson; the poet helps us understand “the fragrant odours arising from the docks.”