Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

69

  • SAY, can the Muse, the pencil in her hand, [270]
  • The all-wasting hurricane observant ride?1
  • Can she, undazzled, view the lightning’s glare,
  • That fires the welkin?2 Can she, unappall’d,
  • When all the flood-gates of the sky are ope,
  • The shoreless deluge stem? The Muse hath seen [275]
  • The pillar’d flame, whose top hath reach’d the stars;
  • Seen rocky, molten fragments, flung in air
  • From AEtna’s3 vext abyss; seen burning streams
  • Pour down its channel’d sides; tremendous scenes!——
  • Yet not vext AEtna’s pillar’d flames, that strike [280]
  • The stars; nor molten mountains hurl’d on high;
  • Nor ponderous rapid deluges, that burn
  • Its deeply-channel’d sides: cause such dismay,
  • Such desolation, Hurricane! as thou;
  • When the Almighty gives thy rage to blow, [285]

  • And all the battles of thy winds engage.

  • SOON as the Virgin’s charms ingross the Sun;
  • And till his weaker flame the Scorpion feels;
  • But, chief, while Libra weighs the unsteddy year:4
  • Planter, with mighty props thy dome5 support; [290]
  • Each flaw repair; and well, with massy bars,

  1. In a 5 June 1762 letter to his friend Bishop Thomas Percy, Grainger notes that he had almost finished writing The Sugar-Cane and that this set-piece on the hurricane was one of the last sections that needed to be completed: “You may remember I some time ago mentioned my being engaged in a work of some length and difficulty. Lately I completed it, at least for the present, though no less than a Georgic, and in four books too. It is called the ‘Cane Piece,’ and was composed mostly in my rides to the different parts of the island to visit my patients. I now send you the whole; only as I have seen no hurricane, and have not yet had time to arrange my remarks on a fire by night in a cane field, those parts in the second book are incomplete” (Nichols 278). ↩︎

  2. welkin. Sky, firmament. ↩︎

  3. Etna, Europe’s highest active volcano, located in Sicily. ↩︎

  4. Grainger is using astrological signs to designate peak hurricane season. The Virgin names Virgo, the sixth sign of the zodiac; the sun enters it in mid-August and exits it in mid-September. Libra is the seventh sign of the zodiac; the sun enters it in mid-September and exits it in mid-October. Scorpio is the eight sign of the zodiac; the sun enters it in mid-October and exits it in mid-November. ↩︎

  5. House. ↩︎