Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
who composed some of his poems in the colony and died there. He has
been remembered by a sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography
and by an interesting publication at the College of William and Mary
on the two hundredth anniversary of his death, the latter really a lecture
by an eminent Welsh scholar on Owens' significance as a literary figure.
One could hardly suggest that Owen's poems had the least influence in
Virginia or that anyone ever read them, though there were Welshmen in
the colony who could have done so, as his letters tell us. It is worth noting
that one of the most influential of all Welsh poets (on the literature in
his native tongue ) lived for a time and composed in a southern province
and that he frequently wrote on religious subjects. His best-known poem,
for example, is on the Last Judgment, a paraphrase of Scripture imitative
of both ear lier Welsh and earlier English verse. According to John Gwilym
Jones, who has written on Owen, the colonial had some of the same sources
as Davies, notably Pope's Messiah. Some of his commemorative or elegiac
poems written in Virginia, as he learned in his rural parish a couple of
years before his death, were being printed in Wales or in London.250
Blacksmith Charles Hansford, personal friend of Benjamin Waller, assumed
the role of the simple and uneducated rhymster, though in reality
he was a very learned man. His reading was wide, his poetic subjects frequently
religious and patriotic, almost always the meditations of a man
who must have lived, at least in mind, much to himself. His manuscript
poems, discovered a short time before they were first published in 1961,
begin with "Of Body and Soul," in decasyllabic couplets in which he muses
on the duality of man, the physical and the spiritual, for 195 lines of not
very profound but commonsense rational philosophy. "Some Reflections
on My Past Life and the Numberless Mercies Receiv'd from My Maker"
is clearly autobiographical, beginning with his mother's devout advice in
his early youth and continuing in its 415 lines of couplets to meditate upon
God's providence, on his uneventful life, the meaning of the death of his
children, and his hope in a gracious God. ttBarzillai," based on 2 Samuel
19:32, is some 582 lines of paraphrase, reminiscences, historical allusions,
and rumination on the parallel between his own situation and that of the
Gileadite. Two digressions are perhaps clues to his previous life, one an
account of the northern whale fishery and its antithesis, the hard life of
sailors in the tropics. As his editors admit, he may have been a sailor,
though there seem to be possible literary sources for these sections.
More valuable historically is Hansford's fourth poem, "My Country's
Worth," a patriotic, even chauvinistic, piece, which indicates how well he
knew the society, topography, geography, and individuals of his native
province. Virginia rivers, the great bay of Chesapeake, Williamsburg, Virginia's
leading families, Governor Dinwiddie (complimented), merchan-