Tuesday
Our mad king’s obsession with Greenland has led me to a fascinating 18th century poem by William Cowper. “Greenland under the Influence of the Moravians” caught my eye in part because my wife grew up Moravian and in fact has stories of her ancestors carrying the faith into arctic lands.
In the case of her great-great-great-great grandfather Michael Miksch, however, the locale was northern Russia rather than Greenland. The egalitarian and communitarian faith of the Moravians appealed to many small communities, but Miksch was arrested as a suspected Swedish spy. He was released when he and his fellow Moravians saved their captors after they fell through the ice.
Michael would later turn his attention westward and ended up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His descendants would move on to Gnadenhutten, Ohio (where a few years before a white militia group had massacred two Moravian missionaries and 125 Native American converts) and then to Grace Hill, Iowa, where Julia grew up.
Cowper, who became an evangelical Christian and an ardent opponent of slavery, appears to see the faith of the Moravians as purer and truer than that which flourishes in more temperate climes. (Cowper describes such “false religion” as accompanied by “the pride of lettered ignorance” that “binds in chains of error our accomplished minds.”) By contrast, the simple Moravian beliefs—which included genuine interest in the Inuits—are brighter beams that “shoot into your darkest caves the day/ From which our nicer [more delicate] optics turn away.”
Moravian missions flourished in Greenland until late in the 18th century, when the monopolistic practices of the Danish General Trade Company made imports prohibitively expensive.
In his poem Cowper focuses on Greenland’s harsh climate: “But Winter, armed with terrors here unknown,/ Sits absolute on his unshaken throne.” So American can’t be satisfied with its “soft airs and genial moisture [that] feed and cheer/ Field, fruit, and flower, and every creature here”? It must have frozen wastes as well?
It doesn’t take Moravians to shine the light of truth on Trump’s nakedly imperialistic designs.
Greenland under the Influence of the Moravians
By William Cowper
Fired with a zeal peculiar, they defy
The rage and rigor of a polar sky,
And plant successfully sweet Sharon’s rose
On icy plains and in eternal snows.
Oh, blest within the enclosure of your rocks,
Nor herds have ye to boast, nor bleating flocks;
No fertilizing streams your fields divide,
That show reversed the villas on their side;
No groves have ye; no cheerful sound of bird,
Or voice of turtle, in your land is heard;
Nor grateful eglantine regales the smell
Of those that walk at evening where ye dwell;
But Winter, armed with terrors here unknown,
Sits absolute on his unshaken throne;
Piles up his stores amidst the frozen waste,
And bids the mountains he has built stand fast;
Beckons the legions of his storms away
From happier scenes, to make your land a prey,
Proclaims the soil a conquest he has won,
And scorns to share it with the distant sun.
Yet Truth is yours, remote, unenvied isle!
And Peace, the genuine offspring of her smile;
The pride of lettered ignorance, that binds
In chains of error our accomplished minds,
That decks with all the splendor of the true
A false religion, is unknown to you.
Nature, indeed, vouchsafes for our delight
The sweet vicissitudes of day and night;
Soft airs and genial moisture feed and cheer
Field, fruit, and flower, and every creature here:
But brighter beams than his who fires the skies
Have risen at length on your admiring eyes,
That shoot into your darkest caves the day
From which our nicer optics turn away.
