The Iroquois went to war to "
requicken" their dead.
Interestingly, the theme of invasion that was established in a revision for stanza II is reiterated here in the speaker's query: "Is it rapture or terror that circles me round, invades / Each vein of my life with hope--if it be not fear?" Again a sexual motif is evident in the mingled pleasure-pain sensations that seem to elevate in the rhetoric of "pulse that awakens my blood," "rapture," and the "dread of a strange thing near," though that same pulsing "
Requickens with sense of a terror less dread than dear." In contrast, the speaker continues to question: "Is peace not one with light in the deep green glades / Where summer at noonday slumbers?
In other words, it resuscitales or requickens a persona that had lapsed into dormancy (Richter, Ordeal 32).
All hope of the family is placed in this captive who becomes the mistress of this family and the branches dependent on it" Similarly, when a man "requickens [ressuscite] an Ancient, a man of consequence run Considerable], he becomes important himself, and has authority in the village if he can sustain by his own merit the name he takes" (Lafitau, Customs 171-72).
Through prescribed acts and set forms of words, the dead chief is
requickened and in a way reincarnated in the person of a legally chosen clansman.