Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
Occasions was reprinted from George Washington's copy in 1930, though
several more years passed before the work was identified as Dawson's.
Dawson's little volume contains quite conventional pieces, in both subject
and form. They are indeed occasional poems, including "Hymn to the
Morning," to a friend in London, "An Anacreontique" (2), "Fable" (2),
epigrams, "An Epistle, To-Esq.," and "On the Corruptions of the Stage."
Besides these, there are lyrics "To Sylvia" (4), a "Song" (or toast ) to
Cloe and Sylvia. The poems to ladies are in the favorite decasyllabic couplet
form in most instances, though one is made up of four six-line stanzas, the
first four lines of which are in octosyllabics. "To Sylvia, On Approach of
Winter" has the familiar carpe diem motif:
Come, my Silvia, come away;
Youth and Beauty will not stay;
Let's enjoy the present now.
Most are in the neoclassical pastoral form or framework, and in many
there are references to life at Oxford. The poems were probably largely
products of Dawson's university years in England, because of both the
references to "our Oxford" in several places and the failure to cite persons
or fauna or flora or topography of America. Also in the preface the author
refers to them as the "casual Productions of Youth." Philomela, Jove,
"Progne," and other references to classical myth, along with direct references
to Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Rowe, and other writers, are characteristics
of the little volume. The Bodleian Library, Locke, Aristotle, the
Oxford Colleges are principal subjects, not the glories of a Virginia spring
or autumn.
The "Dawson Papers" in the Library of Congress are a miscellaneous
collection of letters and sermons of William and his brother Thomas, the
latter also affiliated with the Virginia college. The so-called "William and
Mary Miscellany," also in the Library of Congress, contains both Latin and
English verse probably composed as exercises under William Dawson's
direction or some perhaps even his own early experimental pieces. Lemay
believes that several poems of the years between the volume and Dawson's
death, printed in the Virginia Gazette and reprinted elsewhere (as were
individual poems from the little volume), may also be Dawson's. These
include the elegies on Sir John Randolph and other lyrics. Graceful and
competent, all the verses assigned to Dawson suggest a metrist of some
ability who had more important things than verse-making to occupy most
of his time.236 They are literally transplanted English verse, but they have
significance as indicative of colonial taste and colonial abilities.
From the first extant issues of I736, at least, the Virginia Gazette through
1475