Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
the dazling Dye / Of flaming Yelloe, wounds the tender Eye," all of them
alongside the enclosures of "the grassy wheat" of cultivation. This is fol·
lowed by scenes of rural life, the farmer and his orchards, and thereafter
images of hummingbirds in brilliant colors and the fascinating mockingbirds.
After taking refuge from a storm, the traveler continues his ride
through the Maryland spring woods of dogwood, maple, redbud, and more
flowers and birds. All this brings him to meditation which includes a
vision of the course of man's life, and thoughts on the comforts of eighteenth-century
existence, comforts such as reading at leisure or wandering
with a congenial friend. Such musings bring him to his climax, awestruck
admiration of the "Tremendous God!" who has created all this and this
persona's concomitant fear of his own mortality and some speculation
whether he possesses a "never-dying Soul."
The organization is in terms of the journey and of the time-scheme of
one day from earliest dawn to twilight. There are obviously several levels
of meaning, and his imagery and deftly varying feet result in interesting and
even beautiful metrical effects. As Beverley and Byrd present the hummingbird
in prose, Lewis brings him into the more glorious world of poetry,
where he continues, along with the mockingbird, as America's major contribution
to bird lore in verse. Lewis could not rhapsodize either bird into
a Keatsian nightingale or a Shelleyan skylark, but his American successor
Emily Dickinson could bring "the living rainbow" as both thing of beauty
and imaginative symbol into the major poetry in our language.222 Lewis
shows that he owes something to Addison, Gay, Pope, Milton, perhaps
Chaucer, and certainly James Thomson's Seasons, and one must agree with
Lemay that he probably knew Beverley's History. But the poem has remarkable
life in its own right.
Probably by Lewis is the poem "Food for Criticks," which may have
appeared first in the Maryland Gazette but survives in one version in the
New England Weekly Journal of June 28, 1731, and in another varying
form in the Pennsylvania Gazette of July 17, 1732. In each of these two
instances, this nature and descriptive piece seems to have been altered or
adapted to make it appear the work of a local poet. Lemay argues well that
the awkwardnesses in these two versions are the result of the substitution
of local names, and that in imagery, classical references, meter, seasonal
distinction, and other aspects of nature poetry it is clear! y Lewis'. There
are echoes of Denham's Cooper's Hill and Addison's Campaign, as well as
of Virgil, but the author asserts the superiority of American nature over
European as the matter of poetry.
Hither ye bards for inspiration come,
Let ev'ry other fount but this be dumb.