- OF composts shall the Muse descend to sing,
- Nor soil her heavenly plumes? The sacred Muse
- Nought sordid deems, but what is base; nought fair [220]
- Unless true Virtue stamp it with her seal.
- Then, Planter, wouldst thou double thine estate;
- Never, ah never, be asham’d to tread
- Thy dung-heaps, where the refuse of thy mills,
- With all the ashes, all thy coppers1 yield, [225]
- With weeds, mould, dung, and stale, a compost form,
-
Of force to fertilize the poorest soil.
- BUT, planter, if thy lands lie far remote
- And of access are difficult; on these,
- Leave the Cane’s sapless foliage; and with pens [230]
- Wattled,2 (like those the Muse hath oft-times seen
- When frolic fancy led her youthful steps,
- In green Dorchestria’s3 plains), the whole inclose:
- There well thy stock with provender4 supply;
-
The well-fed stock will soon that food repay. [235]
- SOME of the skilful teach, and some deny,
- That yams5 improve the soil. In meagre lands,
VER. 237. That yams improve the soil.] The botanical name of this plant is Dioscoria. Its leaves, like those of the water-melon,6 or gourd, soon mantle over the ground where it is planted. It takes about eight months to come to perfection, and then is
-
Copper pots used for boiling cane juice. ↩︎
-
Constructed of interlaced branches and stakes. ↩︎
-
According to Gilmore, a Latinized name that refers to the town of Dorchester in the southern English county of Dorset. ↩︎
-
Dried cattle feed (e.g. hay). ↩︎
-
One of the most important food crops for enslaved persons in the Caribbean. There are several reasons yams (genus Dioscorea) became important to Afro-Caribbean diets: yam crop yields are high, yams are easily stored, and they can be prepared in several different ways. Just as crucially, yams formed a part of West African diets long before the commencement of the slave trade. As a result, slave traders often shipped large quantities of yams on trans-Atlantic voyages to feed the people on board, and yams accompanied Africans to the Americas, where they were able to continue cultivating them. Although there is one South American species of yam (Dioscorea trifida) that was transplanted to the Caribbean by Amerindians and consumed by subsequent inhabitants of the region, more widely used species in the colonial period included Dioscorea cayenensis, which is native to West Africa, and Dioscorea alata, which is native to Southeast Asia but had been introduced to the west coast of Africa by the Portuguese and Spanish by the sixteenth century (Higman 72-81). ↩︎
-
Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is native to Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and Sudan. ↩︎