Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

[53]

THE

S U G A R - C A N E.

BOOK II.

  • ENOUGH of culture.—A less pleasing theme,
  • What ills await the ripening Cane, demands
  • My serious numbers: these, the thoughtful Muse
  • Hath oft beheld, deep-pierc’d with generous woe.
  • For she, poor exile! boasts no waving crops;1 [5]
  • For her no circling mules press dulcet streams;2
  • No Negro-band huge foaming coppers skim;
  • Nor fermentation (wine’s dread fire) for her,
  • With Vulcan’s3 aid, from Cane a spirit draws,
  • Potent to quell the madness of despair. [10]
  • Yet, oft, the range she walks, at shut of eve;

  1. The opening lines of Book II parallel Grainger’s experience in the Caribbean. Having married into a planter family, he felt isolated from his London friends, and he hoped one day to have a plantation of his own, though he never did. Writing to his friend Bishop Thomas Percy on 29 February 1766, Grainger lamented that “I am lost, murdered, for want of company” (Nichols 293). ↩︎

  2. Animals like mules, horses, and cattle were used to power sugar mills if wind and water were not readily available. ↩︎

  3. Roman god of fire. Here, Grainger refers to the use of fire in the process of distilling spirits (rum) from fermented molasses. ↩︎