- Make direful, loud incursions on the land, [415]
- All-overwhelming: Sudden they retreat,
- With their whole troubled waters; but, anon,
- Sudden return, with louder, mightier force;
- (The black rocks whiten, the vext shores resound;)
- And yet, more rapid, distant they retire. [420]
- Vast coruscations lighten all the sky,
- With volum’d flames; while thunder’s awful voice,
- From forth his shrine, by night and horror girt,
- Astounds the guilty, and appals the good:
- For oft the best, smote by the bolt of heaven, [425]
- Wrapt in ethereal flame, forget to live:
-
Else, fair Theana.—Muse, her fate deplore.1
- SOON as young reason dawn’d in Junio’s breast,
- His father sent him from these genial isles,2
- To where old Thames3 with conscious pride surveys [430]
- Green Eton,4 soft abode of every Muse.
- Each classic beauty soon he made his own;
- And soon fam’d Isis5 saw him woo the Nine,
- On her inspiring banks: Love tun’d his song;
- For fair Theana was his only theme, [435]
- Acasto’s daughter, whom, in early youth,
-
From here to the end of Book II, Grainger tells the fictional love story of Junio and Theana. The story itself is conventional, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as well as the story of Inkle and Yarico, first told by Richard Ligon in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) and retold as a sentimental tale in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (No. 11, 13 March 1711). ↩︎
-
It was common practice for planters to send their children to Britain for education. Many of the children who were sent there, however, never returned to the Caribbean. ↩︎
-
The Thames river. Here, used to mean England. ↩︎
-
Eton, a prestigious English boarding school for boys founded in the fifteenth century. ↩︎
-
Egyptian goddess associated with agriculture and marriage. Isis was eventually apropriated into Greek and Roman mythology, becoming a common figure in eighteenth-century British poetry. In the context of these lines, Isis is used as a name for the Thames as it passes through Oxford. ↩︎