Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ·
Mary faculty, though at least a dozen men in and around Williamsburg
might have written it. Not one reference to Christian myth or doctrine
occurs in the poem, which in phrase is classical and pastoral. Randolph's
public and private career and interests are referred to, as well as "His
mournful consort." His work for the college and for the city as well as his
principal political office is mentioned:
Our wretched Seminary wails to find
A Loss so great, as its departed Friend
The Orphan City for its Parent grieves;
His Death the Public of its Weal bereaves.
The speechless Chair does fitly bemoan
Th' August ASSEMBLY ' S Speaker, and its own.
In the Williamsburg newspaper of December 9, 1737, appeared "An
Acrostick upon Miss Evelyn Byrd, lately deceased," usually attributed to
the subject'S father, William Byrd II, whose other known verse suggests
that he was capable of composing these lines. This is a restrained and graceful
tribute to a young woman who died aged twenty-eight. Two years later,
on September 21, 1739, "An Epitaph" on another young woman, Miss
Molly Thacker, was published in the Gazette. Angels and "the Heavenly
Choir" are referred to, with the suggestion also found in other southern
elegies that the reader should emulate the subject'S character. A week later,
September 28, 1739, an eighty-two line elegy on the same young lady was
printed. It is an extended lament listing Molly'S virtues, with the specific
exhortation to readers to emulate these qualities of her character. Though
there are references to her "strugling Coughs" and patient endurance of
pain, most of the poem is devoted to the neoclassical cliches characteristic
of the eighteenth-century funeral elegy. It is vaguely pastoral, and contains
one reference to her "Christian" traits. Both these Thacker poems
were published anonymously.
Several other Virginia-authored elegies on Virginia subjects were
printed in places other than the Gazette in this period. The Philadelphia
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle in May 1741 published a
twenty-line anonymous occasional poem "to Benjamin Needler, Esq." It
is unusual in that it is written in ballad measure of five quatrains. Again
anonymous, it contains no Christian references but employs conventional
and general terms in lamenting this former secretary of the Virginia Gen­
eral Assembly. Other prominent persons were mourned in verse in the
London Magazine, the verses by the Edward Kimber who had spent some
time in the colony or by some colonial he had known in America. The first,
in the issue of May 1750 is UA Monody, as a Tribute to the Memory of a
most tender Mother, the Han. Mrs. Hannah Lee, late excellent Wife of