Monument Mountain is now an open-space reservation in Great
Barrington, Mass. But it looms large not only in the topography of the
Berkshire Mountains, but also in the art and literature of this region in
Western Massachusetts.
In late August, while on vacation in the Berkshires,
I took this photo of the mountain from a distance—to be exact, from the back
porch Chesterwood, the summer home of Daniel Chester French, the renowned sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, in the town
of Stockbridge. It surely inspired French to behold this site every day while
he was here.
Well before French lived in this region, though,
this mountain had fired the imagination of writers. In the early 19th
century, for instance, the American Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant wrote “Monument Mountain,” which told the sad tale of a young Native American woman who, because
of tribal disapproval of the man she loved, threw herself from what is now
called Squaw’s Peak. This portion of the Bryant poem gives a sense of what this sublime landscape was like in its wilder years:
“…Thou
shalt look
Upon
the green and rolling forest tops,
And
down into the secrets of the glens,
And
streams, that with their bordering thickets strive
To
hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,
Here
on white villages, and tilth, and herds,
And
swarming roads, and there on solitudes
That
only hear the torrent, and the wind,
And
eagle's shriek.”
More famously, Herman Melville developed a friendship with older writer Nathaniel Hawthorne as a result of a picnic with mutual friends on
the mountain in 1850. The relationship between the two authors fired the imagination of Melville, who plunged more intensely into the manuscript that became Moby Dick.
