Explication of "Indian Death Song"

“Indian Death Song” Explication

A longer title for the poem that Virginia Lucas labeled in her scrapbook “Indian Death Song” appears on sheet music accompanying this poem as “The Death Song of the Cherokee Indian.” This title sheds more light on the contents of the poem with the addition of the word “Cherokee,” which specifies what group of people this poem is about. In her 1802 book entitled Poems, Anne Hunter left a brief note about her motivations behind writing this poem. She explains that “I have endeavoured to give something of the characteristic spirit and sentiment of those brave savages. We look upon the fierce and stubborn courage of the dying indian with a mixture of respect, pity, and horror, and it is to those sensations excited in the mind of the reader that the Death Song must owe its effect” (Hunter 79-80). Hunter’s intentions in writing “Indian Death Song” are clear from her own description of the goals of the poem. However, it is the formal characteristics of the poem that reveal another goal of Hunter’s: to promote empathy for a Native American character in her European audience. 

The plot of “Indian Death Song” involves a Cherokee warrior, “the son of Alknomook,” who recalls his victories while he is being tortured and killed. Although he is in a position of defeat, he maintains his dignity by refusing to complain about the torture, and he welcomes death as a doorway to the land of his ancestors. From her description of Native American people as “brave savages” and her assertation that she views the Cherokee character with “respect, pity, and horror,” it is clear that Anne Hunter considers Native American people very different from herself and her European society (Hunter 79-80). It is surprising, then, that she shies away from any sort of exotic poetic structure in “Indian Death Song.” In fact, the poem seems almost aggressively regulated in its meter and rhyme scheme.

The entirety of the sixteen lines in “Indian Death Song” are written in tetrameter, with four feet to a line. The lack of deviation from this pattern creates a smooth rhythm devoid of variation. In her poem, Hunter does not attempt to mimic the cadence of a Native American language or chant from the perspective of an English speaker, as some poets who use Native American subjects might. Instead, her even rhythm lulls the reader into a familiar pattern that is never unexpectedly upended, which creates a sense of familiarity by the time the reader reaches the end of the poem.  The content of the poem may be foreign to the European audience, but the meter is simple enough to invite a sense of safety in the fact that the form of the poem follows a set rule of tetrameter that it will not vary from.

In a similar way, the rhyme scheme of “Indian Death Song” is fairly uncomplicated, although it does contain slightly more variation than the poem’s rigid tetrameter form. “Indian Death Song” is written entirely in rhyming couplets. Rhyming couplets are a very common and traditional poetic form. The inclusion of rhyming couplets sends the same message to the audience as the even tetrameter form: this poem is safe and familiar. Most of these rhyming couplets are made up of true masculine rhymes. The one exception to this rule is a slant rhyme. The rhyming words in this poem are simple; they are words like “day” and “away.” This follows a trend of simple, easily identifiable words throughout the entire poem. The only word that might offer the general European audience difficulties is the name “Alknomook.” In the sixteen-line poem, three sets of rhyming couplets are “pain” and “complain.” These simple rhymes and recognizable words ensure that the audience does not struggle to comprehend the poem. In order to introduce the topic of a Native American man, which would be foreign to her audience, Hunter strategically guarantees that aspects of the poem such as the rhyming words are familiar to them.

The poem is structured around a simple AABB rhyme scheme, but CC and DD rhymes interrupt that pattern in two places.The exceptions to the AABB rhyme scheme and true masculine rhymes designate important plot points in the poem. The CC rhyme scheme occurs in the lines, “Remember the arrows he shot from his bow; / Remember your chiefs by his hatchet laid low!” This is the first line in which the main character, the son of Alknomook, is conquering his enemies. The lines before this speak of general “glory” and the threats made to the son of Alknomook, but this line shows him as an active, victorious warrior in the poem. The other rhyme scheme exception, the DD rhyming couplet, appears in the lines: “I go to the land where my father is gone; / His ghost shall rejoice at the fame of his son.” In a similar way to the lines of the CC rhyme scheme, these lines show the son of Alknomook triumphing in a dramatic way. He will join his father in the afterlife after his death, and his name will enjoy fame that brings joy to his father’s ghost. These lines also contain the sole slant rhyme in the poem on the words “gone” and “son.”  The combination of a unique rhyme scheme and a slant rhyme makes these two lines stand out from the rest in a significant way that hints that this point is the beginning of the climax of the poem. Another reason that this slant rhyme occurs is because it sends a message to the audience to pay extra attention to the content of these lines. In these two lines, Hunter is explaining the son of Alknomook’s belief in an afterlife where he will be able to join his father’s ghost. This concept will be familiar to her mainly Christian audience who views the afterlife in a very similar way. The reference to the son of Alknomook’s beliefs about souls in the afterlife is a tactic to show the audience that the character is not so different from them, and the single slant rhyme of the poem forces special attention to this message.

These exceptions to the rule of the rhyme scheme and true rhyme pattern of “Indian Death Song” function to distinguish important plot points in the story of the son of Alknomook. However, aside from these few exceptions, the poem remains fairly regular in its rhymes and rhyme scheme. The subtleties in the variation of these elements of rhyme in “Indian Death Song” serve the same purpose as the even tetrameter of the poem: they create a pattern that allows the reader to become familiar with the elements of the poem and they offer few surprising or novel twists in the form of the poem. 

Another aspect of “Indian Death Song” that shares this trend of simple patterns is the pattern of metrical feet in the poem. In this poem, lines are presented with either one iamb followed by three anapests or a pure meter of four anapests. The last line in every stanza is always pure anapestic tetrameter. There is an exception to these two metrical patterns in the same way that there are exceptions to the true rhyme pattern and the AABB rhyme scheme. This exception occurs in the second-to-last line of the poem: “Death comes like a friend to release me from pain.” In this line, “death comes” functions as a spondee, which disrupts the otherwise simple repetition of either one iamb and three anapests or four anapests. Just as the disruptions of the rhyming patterns point toward the most important plot points of the poem, this disruption reveals the fate of Alknomook in his death. However, the use of the word “friend’ in this line reveals that death is not a punishment for the son of Alknomook. He has been the victim of torture, and he is confident that his death will bring his soul to a better afterlife. In Christianity, this better spiritual place would be heaven. If the audience assumes that death is a “friend” to Alknomook and will lead his soul to heaven, they will also assume that he has done enough good in his life to be worthy of a peaceful death.

In all, “Indian Death Song” is a highly formulaic poem. As Anne Hunter mentioned in her note on the poem, the poem leans heavily on the content of the story for its intended dramatic effect. For a poem including references to torture, battles, scalping, and death, this regulated format seems to tone down the content of “Indian Death Song” instead of complimenting the story in the way that a more complex form would. However, the formal elements of the poem in combination with Hunter’s explanation of her own motivations for writing it are evidence of the fact that watering down the content of “Indian Death Song” while preserving the story was her exact intention. 

In Anne Hunter’s note on “Indian Death Song,” she points out the bravery and “fierce and stubborn courage” of the son of Alknomook and the Cherokee people. She states that she pities and respects this character, although her outdated ideas about Native American people lead her to refer to them as “savages.” The European society around Anne Hunter might have agreed with her label of “savages” for the Native American people, but they may not have seen or admired the actions of Alknomook’s son in “Indian Death Song” in the same way that she did. To circumvent the idea that everything regarding Native American people is foreign and strange, Hunter relied on an unremarkable poetic form which was so even that it could, and would, be put to music in the form of a hymn. By creating a poem with an innocuous form, Hunter was able to spread a story framing the Cherokee people in a favorable light that may have otherwise been ignored because of its content. In this way, Anne Hunter opened a window for empathy for Native American people in a society in which this understanding may not have otherwise been accessible. 

Works Cited

Hunter, John. Poems. United Kingdom, T. Payne, 1802.