Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
length classical and pastoral elegies in the tradition going back to Theocritus
but modeled immediately on contemporary English neoclassical
poems of the genre. This tradition began with or before the Renaissance in
Great Britain. And there are the opposite, a number of mock-elegies be­
longing in one sense to the satiric tradition but taking their form from the
traditional Anglican, not Puritan, form of mourning poem. A large volume
containing them has been ready for publication for some time, but new
and interesting examples have continued to turn up so regularly that it has
been delayed.
As already noted, the southern colonies were on the whole peopled by
religious or moderately pious individuals, believers in an orthodox form
of Christianity which they never allowed to tyrannize, though it might
regulate, their lives. Curiously, of all the forms of literary expression
employed by southern writers, the elegiac shows perhaps least the influence
of their religion in their conceptions of grief and death. Many of the more
elaborate and ambitious poems published by colonial elegists in the Mary­
land, Virginia, and South-Carolina Gazettes, or in British magazines, were
strictly pastoral, some not containing one word indicating the relation of
death to Christian eschatology or to the Trinity. There is nothing strange
about this, for funeral elegies similarly devoid of biblical sentiment or ref­
erence were being composed in Britain at the same time. But perhaps more
than in the mother country, the southern colonist looked at death with
Stoic resignation or Socratic philosophic acceptance (as exemplified in a
verse-drama among Cradock's manuscripts ) or simply with classic dig­
nity. In his will a dying man might declare his personal creed, but his
friends who composed mourning lines for him ignored his Christian faith
and posed him among the ancient pagan heroes who died with composure
and made only vague allusions to their deities.
Examples of the elegiac form in the seventeenth century really should
begin with two poems composed by men associated with early Virginia,
though neither was written in the colony. "Mr Strachie's Harke," composed
by the Virginia historian about 1620 when he was back in England,
is a moving and orthodox Christian plea for God's mercy, a sort of selfelegy.l04
More genuinely elegiac is the "Epitaph" on George Thorpe incorporated
into Christopher Brooke's A Poem on the Late Massacre in
Virginia (London, 1622), a brief piece which sets at least the tone, an­
tithesis, and couplet form employed in southern colonial elegies over a
considerable period. Thorpe, director-custodian of the Henrico College
enterprise, is mentioned elsewhere for his Christian piety. Here the em­
phasis is on other things :
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