Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
edition of 1636, was among the most popular. But it seems more than
likely that the idea was suggested to him by his Jamestown fellow-official
Christopher Davison. For during the years just before arriving in Virginia
in 1621, and probably during his visit back to England in 1622
and probably also during his stay in Virginia (where he died ), Davison
and his two brothers Francis and Walter were translating or paraphrasing
the Psalms into English verse. Their work was not published until Sir
Egerton Brydges edited it in 1814 under the title of Davison's Poetical
Rhapsody (Kent, privately printed). The British Museum Harleian Manuscript
6930 indicates that Christopher was responsible, perhaps among
others unsigned, for Psalms XV and CXXV.52 A comparison of Sandys'
and Davison's versions indicates that the former was not at all indebted
literarily to the latter, but there can be little doubt that the two poets discussed
their craft as Sandys labored on his classical translation and Davison
on his scriptural. Davison died in Virginia about December 1623, and
Sandys returned to Great Britain in 1625. With Wyatt and Thorpe and
Pory they formed a remarkable intellectual group.
In the second half of the seventeenth century there were a few more
religious or meditative poems actually written in the Chesapeake area.
Sent back to London and printed there in 1662 was Quaker Robert Grave's
("whose outward Habitation is in Virginia" ) long poem A Song of Sian.
Though about half of it is written in pentameter couplets, the inner address
to the sinner is in the popular four-three ballad measure in verses in form
and figures strongly suggestive of Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, the
Puritan best-seller of the same period. Grave's piece is better as an example
of early Quaker devotion, in that sect's militant period, than as verse. It
depicts a God who punishes, and urges that the "Pure Lambs of Christ,
that do in pureness dwell" remind others of their sins:
Now let this be imprinted in your mind,
In time repent, whilst you a time yet :find
Fear the Lord God, cease from iniquity,
And love Christ's Light, else in your sins you die.
The everlasting Gospel, Saints declare,
o all mankind to hear it now prepare.
Some lines are a little better than these, but not much.
More sophisticated than Grave and possessed of a quite different philosophy
of life is the whilom indentured servant and royalist George Alsop,
whose A Character of the Province of Mary-land (London, 1666) is baroque
or euphuistic in both its poetry and prose and often ribald and satiric
in tone. The book will be considered more generally a little later, as it
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