Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

114

  • I spurn indignant; toil a pleasure seems.1 [500]
  • For not Marne’s flowery banks, nor Tille’s green bounds,2
  • Where Ceres with the God of vintage reigns,
  • In happiest union; not Vigornian3 hills,
  • Pomona’s lov’d abode, afford to man
  • Goblets more priz’d, or laudable of taste, [505]

  • To slake parch’d thirst, and mitigate the clime.

  • YET, ‘mid this blest ebriety,4 some tears,
  • For friends I left in Albion’s distant isle,
  • For Johnson, Percy, White, escape mine eyes:5
  • For her, fair Auth’ress!6 whom first Calpe’s7 rocks [510]
  • A sportive infant saw; and whose green years
  • True genius blest with her benignest gifts
  • Of happiest fancy. O, were ye all here,
  • O, were ye here; with him, my Paeon’s son!8
  • Long-known, of worth approv’d, thrice candid soul! [515]
  • How would your converse charm the lonely hour?
  • Your converse, where mild wisdom tempers mirth;
  • And charity, the petulance of wit;

VER. 501. Marne’s flowery banks, nor Tille’s] Two rivers in France, along whose banks the best Burgundy and Champagne-grapes grow.

VER. 510. For her, fair Auth’ress!] Mrs. Lennox.

  1. The theme of pleasurable labor is central to the georgic. Here, Grainger’s narrator experiences labor as pleasurable after he has drunk rum, which is an end product of enslaved labor. ↩︎

  2. The Marne is a French tributary of the Seine that flows through the Champagne region in northeastern France. Wines have been made there since the Roman era, but most champagnes were still wines until the mid-nineteenth century, when sparkling wines became popular. The Tille is a river in Burgundy, a major wine-producing region in France. ↩︎

  3. Vigornian is the Latin name for Worcester, a center of cider production in England. ↩︎

  4. State or habit of being intoxicated, drunk. ↩︎

  5. In this line, Grainger lists literary figures he knew from his time in London. Johnson is Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of the most important English writers of the eighteenth century. His works include a Dictionary (1755) of the English language, Rasselas (1759), A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775), and The Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). Johnson also was a prolific essayist, publishing a series of 208 essays entitled The Rambler (1750-1752). Johnson reviewed The Sugar-Cane in the London Chronicle (Jul 1764) and the Critical Review (Oct 1764). What Johnson actually thought of Grainger’s poem is unclear. While both of his published reviews of the poem are largely positive, the later one in the Critical Review contains a rebuke of Grainger’s depiction of the slave trade. For Johnson’s rebuke, see our note for lines 74-77 in Book IV (the lines that Johnson objected to). Percy is the already mentioned Bishop Thomas Percy, Grainger’s frequent correspondent. The identity of White was confusing to eighteenth-century readers. In a letter dated 9 May 1801, written to Percy by his friend Robert Anderson, the latter states that “[s]everal passages [in Grainger’s poem] want illustration, which probably you can give,” and he then asks, “Who is ‘White’?” In his reply, Percy clarifies, “White, was Mr. James White a native of Edinburgh, who resided in London and taught the learned Languages viz. Latin and Greek to Grown Gentlemen whose Education had been neglected.” Percy adds that White authored a translation of Aristophanes’ The Clouds (1759) and a grammatical text entitled The English Verb (1761). White died circa 1811 (Anderson 9.59, 9.67-68, 9.269). ↩︎

  6. Charlotte Lennox (1730/1731?-1804), British writer best known for the novel The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752). A close friend of Samuel Johnson. ↩︎

  7. Calpe refers to one of the Pillars of Hercules in Greek mythology, now known as the Rock of Gibraltar. ↩︎

  8. Paeon is a Greek god of healing, also known as Paean. By Paeon’s son, Grainger is referring to himself. ↩︎