Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Wyatt at some time did write such verse, for in the Wyatt Papers of
the Earl of Romney, formerly on deposit in the British Museum, are a
number of manuscript poems by this two-time governor of the Virginia
colony. One is a verse letter written from Francis to his brother Hawte
Wyatt, composed in London before they both went to America. There
is an epitaph "upon my Lady Huntington" and another "Upon the death
of Sir Wm T( evis? ) who died on the eighth of January I629. But more
to our purpose is "Upon the death of King James," in twenty-eight lines,
which may possibly have been written by Sir Francis in the colony, for he
did not return to Britain until May I626. Later, in I637, Sir Francis
wrote a long commendatory poem, "To my honoured Kinsman Mr.
George Sandys, on his admirable Paraphrases" prefixed to Sandys' Paraphrase
upon the Divine Poems (London, I737 ) along with shorter
pieces by Dudley Digges, Henry King, Thomas Carew, Edmund Waller,
Lord Falkland and other poets of the Great Tew circle. In pentameter
couplets, Wyatt's is a competent laudatory piece.46
One other set of occasional lines, so far as is known never printed un­
til I966, is in praise of the colony of Virginia by John Gibbon, ancestor
of the historian, who visited the Lees in I659. In his own handwriting in
his notebook on the colony are lines of doggerel faintly suggestive of
ballad form.
In Virginia I did dwell
Whir;h nourisheth her people well
Of flesh or fish there is no want
All things are there abundant
But mutton is deficient
Yet pork for that gives supplement
Fruits of England planted there
Much bettered and amended are.47
Sandys himself wrote dedicatory verses (and prose) for many of his
poetic volumes, most of them to the King (and earlier Prince ) Charles,
some to the Queen, and at least one "to the Prince," [probably the future
Charles II] as well as additional laid-in lines "To his Grace of Canter­
bury" and to the King's sister the Queen of Bohemia. These appeared
with the paraphrases and other religious poems he composed and pub­
lished after his return from America and during his tenure as a member
of the King's Committee on the Plantations. But Sandys did write some
memorable verse in Virginia which was not at all occasional.
Thus one can see that very little news-ballad and other occasional verse
was written in the southern colonies in the seventeenth century, but that a