Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Other sorts of occasional poems were written by men who had been
in the Chesapeake colonies, though most of the verses were probably
not written in America. Most are commendatory verses, such as those by
Michael Phettiplace, William Phettiplace, and Richard Wiffin, who had
served under Smith in Virginia and wrote of his renown in the prelimi­
nary section to A Description of New England (London, 1616). Recently
discovered and reprinted for the first time since the seventeenth
century are two complimentary poems signed by Smith himself and
supporting the belief that he was probably the author of a better poem
to be discussed below. Both were in honor of well-known writers of
Jacobean England. For An Armado or Navye . .. (1627) by John Taylor
the "Water Poet" Captain Smith composed a generally competent twelve­
line poem sustaining a single figure throughout in an ironic tone. Less
impressive is the sixteen-liner in honor of his friend Robert Norton, The
Gunner (1628), a man who had written earlier similar verses complimenting
Smith.43 And years before he ventured to America William
Strachey wrote the single set of commendatory verses for The View of
Fraunce (London, 1604), and one of several sets of prefatory lines for
Ben Jonson's quarto Sejanus (London, 1605 ), which appeared in good
company with verse by Marston and Chapman. The letter is a conven­
tional sonnet revealing nothing of the writer's personal relation to the
dramatist. Strachey was also probably the "W. Stra." who signed prefatory
verses "To the Cleane Contrary Wife" for a new edition in 1616
of Sir Thomas Overbury's The Wife. One of perhaps his best two surviv­
ing poems appears before the "Premonition" in his Historie. It was writ­
ten as a plea to Christianize the Indians, beginning "Wild as they are,
accept them, so were we / To make them civill, will our honor bee."
These lines indeed may have been composed in America. So may the dedicatory
verses to "the Lords of the Councell of Virginia" prefacing For the
Colony of Virginea Britannia: Lawes Divine Morall and Martiall, etc.44
Other occasional poems refer directly to Virginia, as those by John
Ferrar in the 1655 Reformed Virginia Silkworm, but they were not written
by men who had even visited the colony. This is true, even though
Ferrar's are dedicated "To the most Noble deserving Esquire Diggs; upon
the arrival of his two Armenians out of Turkey into Virginia."45
The group at Jamestown in the 1620S, including Christopher Davison
and perhaps his brother Francis, Sir Francis Wyatt, and George Sandys,
have left known poems, and it is probable that as a Jacobean man of
letters John Pory, gifted epistolarian and political writer, tried his hand
at verse. Of these, no one is known to have written occasional verse while
in the colony, though it is possible that Sir Francis Wyatt and his wife's
uncle George Sandys did.
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