Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
in the Temple of Venus," implication of being captured in an embarrassing
personal situation. The author's wit is often in higher forms than this, al­
most always impartial, though occasionally suspended or employed to
admire a brave man's manner of meeting death. The technique of seizing
upon some distinguishing characteristic of a man and playing upon it is em­
ployed to produce humor. Take for example the treatment of Captain
Drew, the miller who was in charge of Bacon's garrison at Green Spring:
"This Whisker of Whorly-Giggs, perceving (now) that there was More
Water coming downe upon his Mill than the Dam would hould, thought
but in time to fortify the same, least all should be bourne downe before
he had taken his toule." Thus Cotton's metaphors spring readily from his
subjects, and at the same time somewhat suggest some of the tropes of the
seventeenth-century pulpit orators. Like Alsop, he is interested in the
sexual practices of his province, in one frequently quoted tongue-in-cheek
passage bemoaning the plight of the wretched prostitutes, who follow the
soldiers in a desperate cause lest they die "for want of exercize."
The best-known and most frequently quoted portion of Cotton's manu­
script is the two poems in memory of Bacon, one allegedly by a personal
follower or servant, the other by one on Berkeley'S side. If "Bacon's Epitaph,
made by his Man" is to be taken as a serious elegy-and there is nothing
within the verses themselves to suggest otherwise-it is perhaps the finest
mourning poem of seventeenth-century America and next only to a few
of Edward Taylor'S as perhaps the finest poem of any kind of that period.
It is difficult to see irony or satire here, and the poem deserves to be dis­
cussed with others in the elegiac tradition in the next section of this chapter.
The second poem, which immediately follows the other in the text, "Upon
the Death of G: B.," might be called an anti-elegy and again may be con­
sidered with serious and mock elegies below. But it is also ironic and
vitriolic in its satire. Replete with elaborate figures and classical allusion,
as in the pro-Bacon piece, it mocks in form and sense the preceding lines
in the supposedly antiquated forms of the baroque or euphuistic, as just
noted for the prose, as does Alsop.
As Hubbell and other analysts of both poems have demonstrated rather
convincingly, it is probable that Cotton himself was the author of the two
and that he was more interested in recording his observations of the human
qualities on both sides of the conflict he had witnessed than in taking a
moral stance on one side or the other. Together, the twin poems are an early
American example of the writer's intellectual delight in, or fascination
with, the same dualism and antithesis as may be seen in the prose portions
of the work. To obtain the quality in verse, he had to create a completely
ironic or satiric poem, to balance the former, possibly sincere, metrical
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