Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
past singers to understand and recreate or repeat what they heard, may be
better indications of early entry into the colonies. In the eighteenth century
southern poets publishing in newspaper or book a kind of literary ballad,
or story in verse, would indicate that it was to be sung to the tune of "Chevy
Chase" (perhaps the favorite) or "Barbara Allen" or "Sweet William,"
and the colonial satirist was often burlesquing the ballad style and idiom
at the same time that he indicated his composition was to be sung to a
particular ballad tune. The news ballad, of which some colonial examples
will be discussed in a moment, was of course the conscious and relatively
sophisticated offshoot of the folk ballad. One of these from Virginia was
printed in London as early as 1610. To this writer, an investigation of
traditional ballads in the South as to date of appearance and alteration induced
by New World environment (the latter of course evident in the
now-printed texts) would seem a profitable undertaking. For the traditional
ballad from Britain or a ballad composed as early as the colonial
period in America is an art form, even a literary form, in itself and, more
significantly, has been imitated or employed with some subtlety in southern
verse down to our own time.34
The ballad surviving in print from seventeenth-century southern colonial
America is the news ballad, carrying a tale of tragic or happy events
to Britain and usually printed there, normally but not always as propaganda
or promotional literature. Of the three best-known early verses
describing events in the Virginia colony, two were written by colonists
and the third by a prominent member of the Virginia Company. All three
turn or attempt to turn tragic events into happy surprises for the future.
Two are in genuine ballad meter and rhyme, the third in pentameter
couplets.
The earliest of these, published in London by its author, Richard Rich,
in 1610, bearing the title Newes from Virginia} The Lost Plocke Triumphant,
in long ballad measure and eight-line stanzas, was perhaps written
at the request of Virginia Company officials to offset rumors of the death
of Gates and Newport in storms at sea or in the Bermudas. The poem is
discussed as propaganda in Chapter I above. It is wretched verse, but it
gives an accurate account of events in 16°9-1610. Two stanzas contain
the well-known lines frequently quoted : "Wee hope to plant a nation,
where none before hath stood / . .. To glorifie the Lord tis done, and to no
other end." This versifier is otherwise generally unknown, although there
are surmises as to his background.3s
Christopher Brooke, university and Inns-of-Court educated lawyer and
poet, M.P. for the City of York 1604-1626, was concerned enough for
the Virginia enterprise and his personal friends and acquaintances involved
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