Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Now rumbling in the dark aerial Hall,
Till scattering far away
The horrid Murmurings decay,
And die away and fall.
These lines are from a 1751 "A Description of a Storm" published in the
Virginia Gazette (July 4, 1751) as well as in Miscellaneous Poems. His
later lines on "The War of the Elements" jotted in his diary depict an even
more stupendous Nature of lightning flashes and thick gloom and horrors
of the dark, "the Wreck of Worlds . .. / the blended Roar of Thunder,
Winds and Waves / In ,Tumult," with a new image as each tremendous
wave struck his ship.249
His hymns were usually composed, like so many of Edward Taylor's
poems, to accompany sermons, especially those homilies preparing Davies'
flock for the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. That they were effective is
borne out by the fact that they were printed by several religious denominations
as "Communion Hymns" down to the end of the last century. These
and his other meditative verse were written in a southern colony touched
by the Great Awakening by a deeply devout and artistically gifted man
who was also learned. His one volume of verse, his pamphlet sermons
with hymns attached, were bought, and read, by stout Anglicans as well as
Presbyterians, as the Virginia Gazette bookstore account books and the
copies in many libraries testify, and the poems were copied in newspapers
and early magazines from South Carolina to New Hampshire. Several
were printed in British magazines, some with versions of his individual
sermons. The controversy as to the artistic merits of the completed poems
carried on in the Virginia Gazette indicates the local interest in the man
and his work.
One may never call his verse great poetry and by no means all of it good
poetry, but it was the rhymed representation of a significant American
movement, the Great Awakening. And with all due allowance for the Bay
Psalm Book and Michael Wigglesworth and a number of New England
fugitive religious poets, it was Samuel Davies who brought the muse of
sacred poetry before the American public.
One might say John Wesley's 1737 Charleston volume was Davies'
precursor and some scattered individual religious verses his southern colonial
successors. The blacksmith-lay reader Anglican poet Charles Hansford
(1685-1761), the Anglican schoolmaster-parson Goronwy Owen
(1723-1769) who wrote largely in his native Welsh even in Virginia,
and the Scottish (possibly Presbyterian) James Reid (fl. 1768-1769) all
composed verses which might be designated as religious in theme.
Owen, who held the mastership of the grammar school at William and
Mary and a parish in rural Virginia, was a most significant Welsh bard