Swamp Angel

Swamp Angel was a 1994 Caldecott Honor book by Anne Isaacs and Paul O. Zelinsky. It’s a delightful tall tale about a giantess from the Great Smoky Mountains. As a newborn, she was “scarcely taller than her mother and couldn’t climb a tree without help.” Swamp Angel is also a poem by Herman Melville. I stumbled upon it in my high school library and thought it described some evil spirit. “He dwells (like the hunted and harried) in a swamp where the green frogs dip. But his face is against a city which is over a bay of the sea. And he breathes with a breath that is blastment, and dooms by a far decree.” It was years before I discovered the poem was about a cannon that shelled Charleston at the end of the Civil War. This block pattern is also from the Civil War era, so it’s more likely to be named for the cannon than the heroine. What a pity.