Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
into six-line stanzas of considerable dignity. There is one reference to Apollo,
none to the pastoral figures or themes, and much to the Old Testament
and "Israel's Singers." Oakes spoke for the whole New England world, or
so he felt.109 And his lengthy poem is really, as are other Puritan laments,
a versified sermon.
As the New England elegy gradually disappeared as a popular form
of expression, the southern elegy got well under way. One repeats that in
form it frequently followed the contemporary English neoclassical lament,
and yet it continued to exemplify qualities to be seen in one or both of
the Bacon epitaphs. The heroic couplet continued to be used in the eighteenth
century, of course, becoming more and more popular. The southern
elegiac expression also was at times in blank verse, in octosyllabic couplets,
or the ode form (supposedly that of Pindar). Like Cotton's two poems
most southern elegies eschew the mortuary details prevalent in Puritan
poems in England and America. The southern colonials used biblical
allusions at times as did the New Englanders, but these are far outnumbered
and outweighed by the classical, usually pastoral. The Cotton
poems and later southern laments show variety and internal shift in tone:
the New England elegies vary little within. Perhaps a most significant
difference between examples of this genre in the two regions is the much
greater number of ironic or satiric elegies in the southern provinces.
The South's earliest newspaper, in eighteenth-century Maryland, contained
some of the earliest elegies of the second colonial era, though such
poems were written in this province before I727, and others were contemporaneous
with the gazettes but not printed in them. The first to appear
in Parks' Maryland Gazette, December 24, I728, is Ebenezer Cook's curiously
ironic and brief "An Elegy [on} the Death of the Honourable Nicholas
Lowe, Esq." 110 It begins by addresses to the ladies, one of whom, some
critics believe the poet was saying, Lowe had wronged by not marrying
(that this is fact, they point out, is obvious in the final lines of the main
body of the poem ). He begins
What means this Mourning, Ladies, has death led.
Your Brother Captive to his Earthly Bed?
Is Love to Nature's chilly Womb returned,
[Who ca}utiously the fatal Summons shun'd?
The lines continue with some mortuary detail, with no reference to God
or Christ but to "Victorious Death" and some legal phraseology (Cook
may have studied or worked in law with Lowe ) and conclude with "[It
ca}n be said, his Character to blast, / [He livJ'd and dy'd a Batchelor at
last." The afterpiece, an "Epitaph," does mention Jehovah and heaven and
continues the legal imagery, here with Habeas Corpus.