- With sweet abundance. As on Lincoln-plains, [130]
- (Ye plains of Lincoln sound your Dyer’s praise!)1
- When the lav’d snow-white flocks are numerous penn’d;
- The senior swains, with sharpen’d shears, cut off
- The fleecy vestment; others stir the tar;
- And some impress, upon their captives sides, [135]
- Their master’s cypher;2 while the infant throng
- Strive by the horns to hold the struggling ram,
- Proud of their prowess. Nor meanwhile the jest
- Light-bandied round, but innocent of ill;
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Nor choral song are wanting: eccho rings. [140]
- NOR need the driver, AEthiop authoriz’d,
- Thence more inhuman, crack his horrid whip;
- From such dire sounds the indignant muse averts
- Her virgin-ear,3 where musick loves to dwell:
- ‘Tis malice now, ‘tis wantonness of power [145]
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To lash the laughing, labouring, singing throng.4
- WHAT cannot song? all nature feels its power:
- The hind’s blithe whistle, as thro’ stubborn soils
- He drives the shining share; more than the goad,
- His tardy steers impells.—The muse hath seen, [150]
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The georgic poet John Dyer was living in Lincolnshire at the time of his death. Grainger also refers to the fact that Lincoln was a center of wool production. The Lincoln longwool is a breed of sheep known for its copious and heavy white fleece. ↩︎
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The practice of branding sheep. Although he does not make an explicit comparison between the treatment of animals and human beings, this passage recalls the fact that enslaved persons were branded with the marks of their enslavers. See Gilmore, who credits Tobias Döring with this insight. ↩︎
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This is one of several places in the poem where Grainger shrinks from the violence of plantation slavery. ↩︎
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Grainger refers here to the common practice of enslaved laborers singing while working in the cane fields. The songs were sung in part to help establish a rhythm and pace for the work being performed, and planters also saw them as helping to lighten the burden of the labor being performed. In short, they saw music and singing as making work more pleasant and thereby ensuring compliance with the regime of plantation discipline. At the same time, the songs sung during field work often seem to have contained coded or even overt criticisms of planters and plantation discipline. For example, the Gloucestershire Archives in Britain recently uncovered an eighteenth-century slave song from Barbados that contained the lyrics, “Massa buy me he won’t killa me/Oh_ Massa buy me he won’t killa me/Oh Massa buy me he won’t kill a me/Oh ‘for he kill me he ship me regular” (see “Song of slaves in Barbados”). A recording of the song by the Christ Faith Tabernacle of Gloucester also highlights the song’s minor key, which imbues it with a sorrowful and tragic dimension. ↩︎