Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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• 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.
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . Which way so'er your airy genius leads, Receive your model from these vocal shades. Wou'd you in homely pastoral excel, Take patterns from the merry piping quail, Observe the bluebird for a roundelay, The chatt'ring pie, or ever babling jay. Pindar, satyr, Phoebus, nor the water nymphs can rival these things, the versifier avers. It has been argued that this is the earliest as well as the best nature poem of colonial America. Certainly there are some fine lines, poetically much superior to those just quoted.223 A Rhapsody (Annapolis, 1732) was printed as a folio sheet on March I, 1732, and subsequently in the Maryland Gazette of February 9, 1732/33, and the Gentleman's Magazine of July 1734 (IV, 385 ). This is a serious pastoral, with the meditative shepherd walking through the forest toward the Chesapeake. The soliloquy with which he begins proclaims the hope for an American literature inspired by and equal to the magnificent scenery, the " topographical fallacy" to be proclaimed by many later poets. Extended similes here are sometimes powerful. Several suggest that the poet had recently been reading Shakespeare's The Tempest. Though Lewis' name is not attached to these verses, internal evidence has convinced Wegelin, Sherburn, and Lemay that they are his work.224 One manuscript occasional poem and another printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette of August 21, 1732, may be Lewis', and the manuscript elegy on Benedict Leonard Calvert falls in this period. But among Lewis' most notable verse is his signed Carmen Seculare, for the Year M, DCC, XXXI . ... To the Right Honourable Charles . .. Lord Baron of Baltimore (Annapolis, 1732 ), originally a folio pamphlet but reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine (III [April-May, 1733], 2°9-210, 264) as the work of the author of ' 'a Journey from Patapsko to Annapolis." Carmen Seculare was written for the festivities on Lord Baltimore's arrival in 1732 to celebrate the colony's first century. Welcome to the Proprietor, long passages of praise of Maryland's fruit, corn, flowers, and animals, even planters' hospitality (which Edward Kimber may have echoed in his Itinerant Observations) are elements of the poem. There are lines of praise for Calvert's religious position and the resultant liberty to be en joyed in Maryland. There are a chronological survey of Maryland history, strikingly accurate, and a number of suggestions for solving the colony's economic problems, especially regarding tobacco. In conclusion, Lewis prophesies more glorious times when some "nobler Bard must sing those golden Days," anticipating the long line of less modest would-be composers of the American epic. Well organized, the poem is perhaps most effective in its
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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