Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
The poem continues more than another hundred lines and includes a
somewhat morbid meditation on what "Chara" will do when he predeceases
her-if he does. In his diary during the voyage to England he includes
fourteen lines coming "spontaneously" to him as he thought of his
wife and home.248
All his adult life at least this evangelical dissenting clergyman who
died at thirty-eight wrote poems, most of them religious and many to
match particular sermons, but others meditations, appreciations of nature
and human knowledge (science ), and patriotic. Educated at one of the log
colleges, he was exceptionally well read, and because of his references to
Socrates, Plutarch, Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, and a dozen other ancients, he
has been called the "Classical Champion of Religious Freedom." To the
Greeks and Romans he added the Church Fathers. Among later seventeenth-
and contemporary eighteenth-century authors he refers to voyagers,
essayists, preachers, poets, historians, and philosophers, most notably Milton,
Baxter, Pope, Young, Addison, and his own friend Jonathan Edwards.
In Charity and Truth United . . . Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. William Stith,
A.M., Davies gives his own poetic translations from J uvenal, Horace, and
Cleanthes, but more often, in his verse as well as his prose, he restrains himself
at the moment he seems about to plunge into a series of learned allusions
and is content with plain para phrase or turns aside from the erudite
to the hortatory and sublime. It is in the Calvinist sublimity, a fusion of his
Christian doctrine and belief with the means of expressing it employed by
such divines as Edwards and himself, that Davies is most effective.
In the age of Burke, Alison, Blair, and other forerunners of the fullblown
Romantics, this American colonial Calvinist wrote and spoke in
terms of the sublime, giving it a special place and definition or interpretation.
He saw God's wrath as power, infinity in time and space, magnificence
in the Almighty, awe in the rugged majesty of the Christian concept, as the
qualities he must stress. Stylistic felicity was important to him but never as
much as clarity calculated to reach deep into the hearts of humanity. He
scorned what he called Enthusiasm, and returned to the Renaissance idea
of the language of divine inspiration in sacred poetry. The rhetorical cadences
of the King James Bible or the Song of Solomon as paraphrased
by George Sandys, and an older concept of the function or duty of religious
verse, are closer to his practice than are the neoclassical rationalists or the
sort of liberalism of some contemporaries. In common with certain other
writers of his own age and earlier and later, this Calvinist believed that awe
could produce sublime emotion, a kind of tranquillity tinged with terror,
which might reach the souls of men.
Thus Davies' poetry is sublime in aim and imagery and theme. Much of
its form is derived from the hymns of Watts and Doddridge, from Milton,
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