Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· LiteratMe,
Principally Belletristic •
noticed, is presumably serious, an elaborate baroque and classical tribute
to the departed hero. The second, clearly satirical and taking a hostile
attitude towards its subject, here the antihero, is also replete with classical
allusions and figures of speech from legal phraseology. Neither poem has
a single reference to Christianity or hope of afterlife in a Christian heaven.
But the poet in the first has produced moving verse in stately couplets :
In a word
Mars and Minerva hath in him Concurd
For arts, for arms, whose pen and sword alike,
As Cato's did, may admiration strike
In to his foes; while they confess with all
It was there guilt stil'd him a Criminall.
On ely this differance doth from truth proceed:
They in the guilt, he in the name must bleed,
While none shall dare his Obsequies to sing
In disarv'd measures, untill time shall bring
Truth Crown'd with freedom, and from danger free
To sound his praises to posterity.los
By the beginning of the eighteenth century in Britain, and developing
into broader or more general forms or applications as the century pro­
gressed, was the graveyard elegy, often with mortuary detail, occasionally
with satiric lines, and by Robert Blair and Edward Young, among other
poets, broadened into various sorts of lamentations on mankind in gen­
eral or on some selected segment of human kind rather than on the individ­
ual. Though the elegy with general application does develop, these latter
meditative "graveyard-school" verses appear seldom in the southern colonies.
Not until the national period does the sentimental tribute become
frequent.
Though the New England funeral elegy was not highly regarded anywhere
until well into the twentieth century, several recent critics have
given itspecially that of the seventeenth century-high place in the colonial
writing of the Northeast. This growing esteem for the examples of
the form reached some sort of climax in Kenneth Silverman's critical study
and representation of such verses, a whole section of his colonial verse
anthology. He and Robert Henson have seen in it a definite tradition from
the earlier seventeenth century to at least 1720, when the communal elegy
representing a whole township'S or province's grief was replaced by a less
reverent satiric lamentation on men or things. Probably the best of the
orthodox Puritan mourning verse is Urian Oakes' An Elegie upon the
Death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard (Cambridge, Mass., 1677 ).
High-flown rhetoric, mortuary detail, biblical references, a listing of the
virtues of the deceased, even Harvard College's groans, are incorporated