Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
passing, and to his participation in a campaign "To vindicate the British
int'r[estJ wrong'd." It is an early example of the southern martial elegy
raised to greater dignity and grace and perceptivity by Henry Timrod and
Allen Tate.
Localized also is "An Elegy On the much Lamented Loss of Col. HYRNE'S
Lady," published anonymously in the issue of December 16, 1756. "Fair
Carolina" has lost one of her jewels. Two years later the anonymous "On
the Death of a Young Child" is 110 lines of mixed Christian sentiment
and classical allusion, with much more orthodox religious terminology than
any previous poem so far observed. It is interesting that the poet rather
adroitly, as Wages has observed, skirts the question of infant damnation.124
Though southern poets such as Samuel Davies voice their obligations
to the form and the classic poet, the so-called Pindaric ode, which was
enormously popular in Britain in mid- and later-eighteenth-century writing,
was rare in colonial America. But on August 9, 176o, the Gazette carried
" A PINDARIC ODE on the Death of Captain Manly Williams," by Anglicanus.
It is in reality a pseudo-Pindaric which English and colonials alike
employed. This example is perhaps the only one to appear in the southern
gazettes, despite Davies' advocacy and exemplification of use of the form
elsewhere. The subject of this poem had been killed in a skirmish with the
Cherokees on June 27, 1760. The poem is introduced by a quotation from
Virgil's JEneid. The invocation to "Goddess of numbers, and of thought
supreme!" is followed by strictly secular allusions to frontier warfare and
to Britain's glory in her martial sons. Though all the figures are conventional,
this dignified poem should be remembered as another early example
of southern pride in military prowess, or in militancy itself.
Even more conventional is the military elegy published on November
I, 1760, "To the Memory of Capt. John Seabury Commander of a Troop
of Rangers in the Service of the Province who died at Amelia Township,
October 24, 1760," signed "N.A." The brave and virtuous youth had been
"Untimely crop'd on Carolina's shores / By fell disease, and autumns
tainted breath . ... " It was reprinted in the New York Gazette of December
4, where the subject is identified as "late of New-London, in Connecticut;"
but the poem is datelined "Charles-Town, (in South Carolina ) Nov. 1."
The thirty-one lines primarily of couplets form one of the better and most
dignified of secular elegies.125
Then there is Edward Kimber's (1719-1769 ) "On the Death of Mrs.
Alice who did in childbed, October 24, 1742," published in the
London Magazine for January 1744. Kimber, son of the magazine'S editor,
had made an extended stay and tour in the colonies, particularly from
Virginia to Georgia, sending home from each port verse or prose inspired
by what he saw. His accounts of Georgia and a British expedition to St.
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