Harbor Lights

engraving by unknown artist

Harbor Lights

“There is nothing either good or bad,

that thinking makes it so.”

--Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

During the autumn of 1863

when Edwin Booth played Hamlet

at the Charleston Dock Street Theatre,

during his preview tour of the play,

he stood midday on the shores

of the Battery, near where residents

once sat comfortably on their balconies

in the early spring of 1861, applauding

and drinking, saluting the Confederate’s

34 hour bombardment of Fort Sumter,

their bourgeois cheers flattened by 

bellicose cannon that assaulted their ears;

the actor staring at the majesty of buried pride,

Sumter, the masonry sea fortification

standing quiet guard out in the harbor,

its fifty foot stone walls and three tiers

of gun emplacements strongly reminiscent 

of Kronsborg castle near Elsinore, tying 

history, legend and Shakespeare

to the dreary dead hours that lay

like spectral warlike forms, oppressive,

malevolent, blanching the former beauty

of that Southern gem on the coast of Carolina,

hearing the husky voices of a hundred slaves,

their raucous singing pounding out the beats,

one after another, their promised freedom

being raised to the skies as they labored

to rebuild the fort,

thinking “tis strange” how that sea castle

seemed to resonate luck and rebellion

in equal measure, marveling at how earlier

that year Lincoln had sent Admiral Du Pont

with an impressive Union armada

of ironclads, frigates, and monitors,

that sailed in strongly and fired 154 rapid rounds

at the battlements, 

answered by an angry parle

of Confederate powder, a serious smote

of over 2,000 rounds illuming that part

of rebel heaven, quickly forcing the Union Navy

to entreat the Southern forces to allow them

to paddle wounded and burning back out to sea.

Without being a Civil War scholar, Booth

was keenly aware of the September 1863

Union Naval assault on Fort Sumter,

that unfolded itself into a complete fiasco,

where 400 sailors in 35 boats were

easily repulsed by fewer Southern liegemen,

high above them, killing sailors at will,

while not suffering any casualties themselves,

making him stand in awe of this military fort

named after a Revolutionary War general,

now in the shadow of the Citadel, shining,

rebellious, a clenched fist thrust effectively

into the underbelly of every Union force 

sent against it.

His large British pocket watch struck twelve,

breaking the military magic of the moment,

and as he strode tall toward Dock Street

and an afternoon repast, Hamlet’s speeches

were beginning to resurface, readying him 

for the play’s matinee that day.

Years later, in 1865, while Booth played Hamlet

to great success at the Winter Garden Theatre

in New York City, he found out that Fort Sumter

had never surrendered, that only after

General Sherman had conquered Charleston

did the defenders depart their Jutland keep. 

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on Shawna's flipside records

Posted as well over on dVerse Poets, OLN

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