Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
already has been from a different point of view, but here one must look at
the usually brief poems embedded in the text or rounding off or conclud
ing chapters and appended letters, which are in some instances interesting
little meditations, sometimes half-mocking in tone, but not bitterly satiric
or ironic as some other verses in the same work are. One is a homely bit
of advice to plantation masters of bond servants:
Be just (Domestick Monarchs ) untO them
That dwell as Household Subjects in each Realm;
Let not your Power make you be too severe,
Where there's small faults reign in your sharp Career:
So that the Worlds base yelping Crew
May'st bark what I have wrote is writ untrue,
So use your Servants, if there come no more,
They may serve Eight, instead of serving Four.
In a letter to his father, Alsop's "melancholly Muse" forced him into more
sententious phrases upon hearing of the death of the usurper Cromwell:
Poor vaunting Earth, glow'd with uncertain Pride,
That liv'd in Pomp, yet worse than others dy'd:
Who shall blow forth a Trumpet to thy praise?
Or call thy sable actions shining Rayes?
Even Alsop's longest sustained bit of poetic irony, written upon the oc­
casion of receiving a purple cap from his brother, is in part a remarkable
sardonic meditation. In all the poems the moral fiber is strong. One is fre­
quently reminded of John Donne, whom Alsop mentions in a letter of
December 1 3, 1662.53
THE BEGINNINGS OF CLASSICAL PARAPHRASE AND TRANSLATION
Thus in the seventeenth century there were poets writing in English on
the colonial South, usually while they were back in Great Britain, and a
very few who wrote occasional and meditative-moral poems in the New
Wodd. As noted already, there was no Edward Taylor or Anne Bradstreet
or even Michael Wigglesworth, at least so far as is now known. But
there was a strong classical tradition from the first Jamestown period
which continued throughout the colonial era. Its manifestations in educa­
tion, libraries, and the fine arts have already been touched upon. Several
authors represent the tradition in one way or another, but one well-known
English poet renowned throughout Europe composed most of his remark
ably able rendering of a major Latin poet into his own language at
Jamestown. This was the George Sandys already mentioned.
Classical background is to be noticed in Smith's GeneraU Historie, into
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