Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature} Principally Belletristic .
When soft and Iow a voice was heard,
Saying, Mary, weep no more for me.245
A poem to his beloved left at home was written five years after he had ar­
rived in Virginia. Meanwhile he had conducted an academy at Fredericksburg
and then taken holy orders. He forgot the Scottish lass and fell in
love with a beautiful Virginia lady who refused him, though eventually
he married her sister .. His wife proved intemperate and unfaithful, and he
himself died an alcoholic at forty-eight. He was buried in the churchyard
near Fredericksburg "under the shade of two palm trees," his biographer
in Cromek's book alleges! His "Morning Poems" and "Lowe's Lines" were
probably written in Britain but were read and remembered also in America.
He is one of the symbols of the trend away from the neoclassical toward
the sentimental and pathetic.
Lowe was a Scottish Anglican in Virginia, Samuel Davies a Welshdescended
Presbyterian there. Something of Davies as satirist, critic, elegist,
and hymn writer have been discussed, but little or nothing of his few love
poems, his meditative and devotional and nature pieces. It is to be noted
that this devout man is also the southern colonial poet who wrote with the
greatest intensity about the conjugal bond, expressing in several poems the
warm sexuality of his relationship to his beloved wife. In one poem, "Whom
have I in Heaven but Thee?"' a meditative piece on the glory of God's
universe, he pauses to pay tribute to Jean Holt Davies :
When Chara, the Companion of my Life,
The chastest, mildest, tenderest, kindest Wife;
The Honour and the Beauty of her Sex;
Whom every Grace and every Virtue decks:
When she blooms on my Sight in all her Charms,
And Every correspondent Passion warms;
I· farther look; and thro' this radiant Glass
Gaze on the brighter Beauties of thy Face.246
"Conjugal Love and Happiness" admits the "active Fires" of his love and
the consequent bliss, and then he adds : "But hence! far hence ! ye wild
lascivious Fires: / To Purer Themes the modest Muse aspires:' But more
than a hundred lines later he adds:
Chard, beneath thy Influence I felt
The charming Flame; my Soul was taught to melt
In Extasies unknown, and soon began
To put the Stoic off, and soften into Man.
Thy yielding Bosom soon began to glow
With the same Flame thy Charms taught me to know.247