Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

[3]

THE

S U G A R - C A N E.

BOOK I.

  • WHAT soil the Cane affects; what care demands;
  • Beneath what signs to plant;1 what ills await;
  • How the hot nectar best to christallize;
  • And Afric’s sable progeny to treat:2
  • A Muse, that long hath wander’d in the groves [5]

  • Of myrtle-indolence, attempts to sing.3

  • SPIRIT of Inspiration, that did’st lead
  • Th’ Ascrean Poet to the sacred Mount,4
  • And taught’st him all the precepts of the swain;5
  • Descend from Heaven, and guide my trembling steps [10]
  • To Fame’s eternal Dome, where Maro6 reigns;
  • Where pastoral Dyer, where Pomona’s Bard,
  • And Smart and Sommerville in varying strains,7

  1. Planting by the signs, also known as agricultural astrology, is a cultivation method that advises planting and harvesting crops based on moon phases and the astrological calendar. ↩︎

  2. The first four lines of the poem summarize the topics Grainger addresses in the four books of the poem. Book I introduces the reader to sugar cane and its cultivation; Book II concerns potential problems planters face in cultivating cane; Book III discusses the process of turning sugarcane into the final product of crystallized sugar; and Book IV deals with the management, treatment, and discipline of enslaved laborers. ↩︎

  3. Myrtle (Myrtus communis) is an aromatic shrub native to the Mediterranean region and associated with Venus, the goddess of love. Rather than a traditional invocation of the muse, The Sugar-Cane begins with a muse who has been wandering and in love. Indeed, Grainger married Daniel Matthew Burt, whom he met during his transatlantic voyage to St. Kitts and who was the daughter of one of the most prominent planter families of the island, in 1759. Their daughter Louise was born before he began composing the poem. ↩︎

  4. The Ascrean poet is Hesiod (c. 700 BCE), who was from the Greek village of Ascra in the Valley of the Muses on the eastern slope of Mt. Helicon (the sacred Mount). Contemporary of Homer and known for the Theogony and Works and Days, which is considered to have influenced Virgil’s Georgics. ↩︎

  5. A country or farm laborer, a shepherd. A key figure in georgic poetry. ↩︎

  6. Maro is Virgil or Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), author of the Eclogues, the Aeneid, and the Georgics. A major influence on Grainger and other neo-georgic poets of the eighteenth century. ↩︎

  7. Grainger is listing other eighteenth-century authors of georgic poems. Dyer is John Dyer (1699-1757), a Welsh painter and poet and author of The Fleece (1757), which Grainger reviewed in the Monthly Review (April 1757). Pomona’s bard is John Philips (1676-1709), an English poet and author of the Cyder (1708). Pomona is the Roman goddess of fruit. Smart is Christopher Smart (1722-1771), an English poet and author of The Hop-Garden (1752). Sommerville is William Somerville (1675-1742), an English poet and author of The Chace (1735). ↩︎