Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
How every [wa]y unworthy of thy l[ove] ;
Great God, is erring man? plum'd with vain thought
Of self approving science proud he deems
Himself, poor worm, sufficient; yet how blind,
How lost, how impotent are all thy ways?
There is little else in the way of verse save the later lines of Governor
Thomas Burke, who continued to endite poetry other than satire after he
moved from the Eastern Shore of Virginia to North Carolina, where in
the early I770S he settled in Orange County near Hillsborough. In the
Virginia years he had written "Hymn to Spring By a Physician," lyrics to
ladies, "Benevolence," "Pastoral at Leckleigh," as well as the polemical
poems in the same dispute which occupied his friend Robert Bolling and
others. But in North Carolina he wrote "Colin and Chloe," which appeared
in the Gentleman's Magazine in April and May 1778, he mixed the pas­
toral theme with the contemporary political in many of the remainders
of his extant pieces, and he did a few more purely love lyrics, as "Delia." 262
Although by no means all of South Carolina colonial poetry was printed
in the South-Carolina Gazette, almost no known verse precedes in date
that newspaper's founding in 1732. David Ramsay in his History of South
Carolina from Its First Settlement . . . did print a humorous and burlesque
French poem written about 1706 during Queen Anne's War by one of the
Charleston garrison who was probably a Huguenot refugee, perhaps the
earliest example of French poetry written by an "American" in an Ameri­
can setting on an American subject. And in 1712 a former rector of St.
Philip's, Edward Marston, apparently then back in Britain, addressed a
little volume to the Duke of Beaufort, Palatine of South Carolina, including
a sixteen-line poem on ecclesiastical patronage, probably written in the
province. This concludes the known verse before I732. 263
Like the poems of the Chesapeake colonies, those of the Charleston
area were imitative of British forms but frequently on local subjects. Latin
translations and invitations, lyrics to ladies, the satires and elegies already
noted, a few ballad and narrative pieces, patriotic and eulogistic and com­
mendatory verses, moral and reflective and religious pieces including
hymns, and a few depictions of nature or science or technology including
agriculture are among them.
The classical imitations are at times academic exercises, but more often
serious or playful experiments by mature gentlemen and a few ladies. Fre­
quently they are satiric, in the tradition of Martial or Juvenal, though their
more obvious classical affinity is in the pastoral names bestowed upon
lovers, such as Damon and FIorella, one of whom may be addressing the
other.