Ina Coolbrith
Photo from Sausalito Historical Society
Ina Coolbrith was a colleague of Bret Harte and Mark Twain in San Francisco in the 1860s. The well-regarded poet was known as the "Sweet Singer of California.”
Coolbrith’s literary inspiration began at the age of 10, when she first read the poetry of British Romanticist George Gordon, Lord Byron, on a wagon train from S. Louis to San Francisco in 1851.
As a young woman in the heady world of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, Coolbrith became a regular contributor to the literary and cultural magazine Overland Monthly, which was edited for a while by Harte.
During her time in the city, Coolbrith’s fascination with Byron led to a caper that would range from San Francisco to Sausalito and on to Byron’s burial site in England.
Byron had died in Greece while assisting in the Greek revolution. His body was returned to England but refused internment in Westminster Abbey due to his profligate lifestyle — he was considered the equivalent of a modern rock star who craved publicity and took part in numerous affairs and scandals. Instead, his remains (minus his heart, which was allegedly left in Greece) were entombed at his old family church in Hucknall, Nottingham.
Feeling her hero deserved some funereal honors, Coolbrith decided to adorn his tomb with a laurel wreath – symbolizing triumph or achievement. To this end she enlisted an accomplice: poet, author, and frontiersman Joaquin Miller. When Miller told Coolbrith that he was planning to visit Byron’s grave in England, it gave her an idea: Why not make a gesture to show Europe that some American writers still loved the author of Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage? What if Miller carried a wreath of laurel from California to crown the poet’s grave?
Here's how the U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine tells the story:
“One late July day in 1870, two poets boarded a side-wheel ferry at Meiggs Wharf in San Francisco. The Princess plowed six miles across the mouth of the bay to what was then the village of ‘Saucelito,’ at that time just a few piers and a building or two at water’s edge. The ferry usually carried prospective buyers for the residential lots that had recently been carved out on paper, but the poets hadn’t come to look at real estate. They were on a mission to defend the memory of Lord Byron.
“When the ferryboat arrived, Ina Coolbrith and Cincinnatus Hiner Miller [as he was known before he became Joaquin] walked ashore and climbed the steep chaparral hillside. He was tall, blonde, and blue-eyed and had arrived in San Francisco from Oregon earlier that month wearing beaded moccasins, a sombrero, and a white, ankle-length duster. The flamboyant outfit had been noted with appreciation by Charles Warren Stoddard, a San Francisco poet who had agreed to show Miller around town. As it happened, Stoddard was scheduled to leave for Tahiti the day after Miller’s arrival and so asked fellow poet Ina Coolbrith to step in as literary host. When Miller met his appointed guide, he was inspired by her beauty to quote Lord Tennyson: ‘A daughter of the gods! Divinely tall and most divinely fair.’”
Miller was able to place the wreath, but not without conflict. “… the vicar protested against it,” The San Francisco Examiner later reported, “and a bitter Clerical battle was fought in the old Norman church that had stood there for nearly 500 years. And the matter was finally appealed to the Bishop of Norwich. The Bishop of Norwich sent to the King of Greece for another laurel wreath, and so had the two hung side by side above the bust of Byron.”
Later, Ina Coolbrith wrote a poem about the Byron episode: “With A Wreath of Laurel.” Today, that wreath is long gone, but Ida’s poem is immortal. It can be enjoyed at voetica.com.
Bay laurels can still be found in a few groves up in the hills of Sausalito, notably around an obscure playground known as Langendorf Park, with an unmarked entrance off Easterby below Woodward.
Thanks to Jonathan Westerling of Radio Sausalito for unearthing this story, and to Juan Ochoa of Bartlett Tree Service for pinpointing bay laurels in the Sausalito landscape.
By Larry Clinton
Sausalito Historical Society