SOURCE: Rubin, Jr., Louis D. “The Serpent in the Mulberry Bush.” In Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs, pp. 352-67. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1953.

In the following essay, Rubin discusses how Tate's background as a Southerner and Agrarian poet informed the imagery and subject matter of “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

“That poem is ‘about’ solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.”

That poem, as Tate goes on to say about the “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” is also about “a man stopping at the gate of a Confederate graveyard on a late autumn afternoon.” Thus the man at the cemetery and the...