Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

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  • First pallid, sickly, dry, and withered show; [210]
  • Unseemly stains succeed; which, nearer viewed
  • By microscopic arts, small eggs appear,
  • Dire fraught with reptile-life; alas, too soon
  • They burst their filmy jail, and crawl abroad,
  • Bugs of uncommon shape; thrice hideous show! [215]
  • Innumerous as the painted shells, that load
  • The wave-worn margin of the Virgin-isles!
  • Innumerous as the leaves the plumb-tree1 sheds,
  • When, proud of her faecundity, she shows,
  • Naked, her gold fruit to the God of noon. [220]
  • Remorseless to its youth; what pity, say,
  • Can the Cane’s age expect? In vain, its pith
  • With juice nectarious flows; to pungent sour,
  • Foe to the bowels, soon its nectar turns:
  • Vain every joint a gemmy embryo bears, [225]
  • Alternate rang’d; from these no filial young
  • Shall grateful spring, to bless the planter’s eye.—
  • With bugs confederate, in destructive league,
  • The ants’ republic2 joins; a villain crew,

VER. 218. the plumb-tree sheds,] This is the Jamaica plumb-tree. When covered with fruit, it has no leaves upon it. The fruit is wholesome. In like manner, the panspan3 is destitute of foliage when covered with flowers. The latter is a species of jessamine, and grows as large as an apple-tree.

  1. According to Gilmore, Spondias purpurea. Its native range is Mexico to northern Colombia. ↩︎

  2. Ant colonies were often represented as model republics in early modern and eighteenth-century accounts because of their ability to work together for the collective good. For example, in his True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), Richard Ligon observed that he once put a pot filled with sugar in the middle of a larger dish of water to see whether the ants would be able to find and retrieve the sugar. As he reported, the ants began venturing into the water even though they could not swim, so that their dead bodies could form a bridge for the others to use to access the sugar. The ants thereby “neglect[ed] their lives for the good of the publique” (64). ↩︎

  3. According to Gilmore, the panspan or hog plum is Spondias mombin. Its native range is Mexico to the tropical Americas. ↩︎