Line 58: “pelt” – The hide or skin of an animal with the wool, hair, etc., still on it. (OED)
Line 59: “Medicine-man” – also called medicine person or healer, member of an indigenous society who is knowledgeable about the magical and chemical potencies of various substances and skilled in the rituals through which they are administered. The term has been used most widely in the context of American Indian cultures but is applicable to many others as well. Despite the term’s nomenclature, women perform this function in many societies. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Medicine man of the Blackfoot tribe. Courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery.
Line 60: “Dance us back to the tribal man”– reference back to the spiritual ghost dance surrounding the Sacrifice of Maquokeeta.
Line 63: “pulsant”- Chiefly literary; pulsating; From 1870, Overland Monthly Mar. 215/1 A world of life, pulsant, vivid, real: the great, eloquent life, that ever is beating so close to ours. (OED)
Line 65: “buzzard-circleted”- Possible reference to buzzards, also known as vultures, or the birds of prey; a) One of a number of large birds of prey of the order Raptores which feed almost entirely upon carrion and have the head and neck altogether or almost featherless; b) Something which preys upon a person, the mind, etc., after the manner of a vulture; esp. a consuming or torturing passion. (OED)
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Buzzards, a.k.a. vultures circling around their prey
Line 70: “raven”- Possible cross-reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven
Line 71: “cataracts”- 1) The ‘flood-gates’ of heaven, viewed as keeping back the rain; 2) A waterfall; properly one of considerable size, and falling headlong over a precipice; thus distinguished from a cascade; 3) A portcullis; also the grating of a window; 4) An opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye, or of the capsule of the lens, or of both, ‘producing more or less impairment of sight, but never complete blindness’; 5) A brake for flax; 6) A form of governor for single-acting steam-engines, in which the stroke is regulated by the flow of water through an opening. (OED)
Line 78: “sacrosanct” – Of persons and things, esp. obligations, laws, etc.: Secured by a religious sanction from violation, infringement, or encroachment; inviolable, sacred. (OED)
Line 78: “blent”- adj: mingled; v: To mix (components) intimately or harmoniously so that their individuality is obscured in the product; esp. of qualities, properties, effects, etc. (OED)
Line 80: “There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.”- Possible reference to Mount Olympus, the home (or, “tent”) to the Grecian gods and goddesses. Also, a possible reference to the tradition of building a keeping a hearth as the first part of any house that was built in ancient Greece. The tradition of keeping a fire follows a bridegroom from her mother’s home with a torch to her new home with her husband where she ceremoniously lights the first fire in the hearth with the one from her mother’s torch, symbolically joining together the two homes (Littleton).
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Mount Olympus