Back in the 1990s, I worked closely with Dr. Paula Bennett at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and during my two research assistantships with her, I typescripted the poems that eventually appeared in her Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Rutgers UP, 1998) and transcribed manuscripts of fellow Kentuckian Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt for Bennett’s Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (University of Illinois Press, 2001). As a full-time professor since 1998, I have taught many courses in American literature, and my syllabi include Piatt’s work as much as I can. For my fall 2026 offering of Survey of American Literature I, I looked for “The Grave at Frankfort” and didn’t find it in any of the usual spots; to remedy this gap, I am including the poem on my own blog.
Bennett’s introduction to Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt summarizes Piatt’s life and her major poems and devotes attention to Piatt’s coverage of her ancestor by marriage, Kentucky celebrity Daniel Boone. Bennett sums up Piatt’s poetic treatment of Boone: “In poems such as ‘Giving Back the Flower,’ ‘The Grave at Frankfort,’ and ‘Another War,’ Piatt treats the past as if it were always with her, writing in multiple time frames at once. In the complicated perspective enjoined on her by this three-dimensional view of time, not just her home state of Kentucky but all of America was a ‘Dark and Bloody ground’; and at its center stood Piatt’s enigmatic kinsman, Daniel Boone, pioneer, Indian-killer, slaveholder, the quintessential American, the man with a gun. She could not escape this relationship; it was written into the past and into her living blood and into the blood of her sons and daughter as well” (Bennett xlii-xliii). Born a century before Piatt, Boone died in Missouri in 1820, and in 1845 through the efforts of Thomas Crittenden and William Boone, the remains of Daniel and Rebecca Bryan Boone were reinterred in a spot that overlooked Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort. At the time of the burials, nine-year-old Piatt was living with relatives in New Castle, Kentucky, nearly thirty miles away from Frankfort.
In 1862, the state commissioned four marble panels to be placed in the Boone memorial, and they were vandalized during the Civil War. Sometime in the 1960s, one of the original marble panels from Boone’s memorial monument made its way to Waveland State Historic Site, the former plantation of Boone’s nephew Daniel Bryan, and the marble panel stands in the brick-walled herb garden behind the mansion and slave quarters.
The Grave at Frankfort
I turned and threw my rose upon the mound
Beneath whose grass my old, rude kinsman lies,
And thought had from his Dark and Bloody Ground
The blood secured in the shape of flowers to rise.
I left his dust to dew and dimness then,
Who did not need the glitter of mock stars
To show his homely generalship to men
And light his shoulders through his troubled wars.
I passed his rustling wild-cane, reached the gate,
And heard the city’s noisy murmurings;
Forgot the simple hero of my State,
Looked in the gaslight, thought of other things.
Ah, that was many withered springs ago;
Yet once, last winter, in the whirl of snows,
A vague half-fever, or, for aught I know,
A wish to touch the hand that gave my rose,
Showed me a hunter of the wooded West,
With dog and gun, beside his cabin door;
And, in the strong fringed garments on his breast,
I recognized at once the rose he wore!
Works Cited
Bennett, Paula Bernat. Introduction. Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, edited by Bennett, University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. xxiii-lviii.
Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan. “The Grave at Frankfort.” Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, edited by Paula Bernat Bennett, University of Illinois Press, 2001, p. 27.
An American Feminist Teacher 