Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
It must be so-- Milton, thou reas' nst well.
Else why this pleasing Hope, this fond Desire,
This longing after something unpossess'd?
Or whence this secret, Dread and inward Horror
Of dying unespous'd? ...
"A.B.," who wrote "To Miss M-C--" in the May 6, I75I, number,
was probably of local origin. His thirty-two lines are conventional over­
tures in praise of the fair one. The "Humourist" on December 24, 1753,
was more cynical when he began his "Song" with "A woman means Yes
whenever she says NO," in the depiction of Damon and his fair one. HOn
Miss Dolly S-," twenty-eight lines of March I I, 1756, is a typical
love lyric in seven four-line stanzas, as is "Verses to a Lady" by "W.B.," in
six-line stanzas :
Accept, my Dear
Advice sincere
Nor let these lines offend;
For what doth move
Me here, is Love
And such to you I send.
Probably the most ambitious or pretentious South Carolina love poetry
was The Nonpareil: Humbly Inscribed to the Honourable Miss Townsend,
published with a separate title page but bound with The Sea-Piece (to be
noted later ) in London in I750. The I68 lines of The Nonpareil were
written by Dr. James Kirkpatrick (earlier Kilpatrick, c. I700-I770),
who had contributed several poems on Pope and perhaps on other subjects
to the South-Carolina Gazette before he returned to Britain and continued
as a prolific writer on medicine, especially the smallpox. In the present
poem his subject is ostensibly the Painted Warbler, a gorgeously colored
bird of Carolina and Florida, which he compares to "Townshend," presenting
in decasyllabic couplets a detailed comparison of the bird with
other birds and flowers. Kirkpatrick almost surely knew the great natural­
ist he refers to in one couplet: "Catesby the Term of painted Finch conferr'd,
/ And Carolinians call'd him Rainbow-bird." He goes on to say
that the fair lady owns a living bird which is fed by her and remains "A
chearful Captive," with the obvious implications. His final address is to
the lady:
Then, while th' officious Warbler You regard,
Pardon, accomplish'd Nymph, a ruder Bard;
Whose rustic Lays, that wrong his glitt'ring Theme,
Rush worthless to thy Sight, and snatch thy Name.265
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