Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
The ceaseless Verdure o'er Britannia's Plains;
That props her Mountains, rincing thro' their Ores,
And spouts each Stream that curls within her Shores;
That warms the cold Degrees in which she lies,
Clasps her whole Form, and every Foe defies,
That boundless Realm I seize, to Verse unknown,
And each Imperial Billow's all my own.
See the round Waters, wide from ev'ry Land,
How vastly uniform! how simply grand!
Thus he puts out to sea, referring to Descartes for an explanation of the
relation of the sea and the Earth itself. Newton is invoked in another
speculation, and the poet begins to employ a varied group of nautical terms
as he describes sail and storm. By the end of the canto the ship has passed
the Azores and is approaching tropic seas.
Canto III begins with a hackneyed figure of Life as a voyage, followed
by thoughts of the great voyagers including Columbus, Drake, and Raleigh,
and by accounts of sharks and whales and flying fish, all mixed with allu­
sions to Mars and Minerva and the Muses. Canto IV continues description
and digresses into speculations on zoology and meteorology and other sciences.
A white tropical bird with yellow beak elicits a description marred
by trite imagery. The narrator dreams of the New World he is about to
reach :
.. , the vast Continent COLUMBUS found;
Where Wonder-loving Fancy hears and sees
Fair flow'ring Birds, and sweetly vocal Trees;
Pearls, that depend from clear, transparent Vines,
And Amber Rocks, that spout delicious Wines.
Canto V opens with reflections on the enjoyments of life ashore after a
lengthy voyage, with apostrophes to Poetry, allusions to Addision's Cato,
and a tale of his ship's capture by pirates, who would not harm the young
poet. The Gulf Stream, the arrival at the port of Charleston and the rivers
Ashley and Cooper, are noted in lines which bring the reader to the last
pious and didactic verses in overworn figures: "Thus when the final Voyage,
Life, is o'er / And the last '" to"m reveals the dreary Shore." The immediate
goal, Charleston and South Carolina, has been reached.
Kirkpatrick's topographical poem, weighted with cliches and digressions
and overdone religious adoration, is actually not as good verse as the
Nonpareil bound with it or the Epistle to Alexander Pope of many years
before. One would like to have seen the Carolina version, almost surely
composed during his early days in the colony from notes made at sea. In
his preface he readily admits that the "digressions"-and they are not
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