- Deep, moral truths convey;1 while every beam [570]
- Flings on them transient tints, which vary when
- They wave their purple plumes; yet musical
- The love-lorn cooing of the mountain-dove,
- That woos to pleasing thoughtfulness the soul;
- But chief the breeze, that murmurs through yon canes, [575]
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Enchants the ear with tunable delight.
- WHILE such fair scenes adorn these blissful isles;
- Why will their sons, ungrateful, roam abroad?2
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Why spend their opulence in other climes?
- SAY, is pre-eminence your partial aim?—— [580]
- Distinction courts you here; the senate calls.
- Here, crouching slaves, attendant wait your nod:
- While there, unnoted, but for folly’s garb,
- For folly’s jargon; your dull hours ye pass,
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Eclips’d by titles,3 and superior wealth. [585]
- DOES martial ardour fire your generous veins?
- Fly to your native isles: Bellona,4 there,
- Hath long time rear’d her bloody flag; these isles
- Your strenuous arms demand; for ye are brave!
- Nor longer to the lute and taber’s5 sound [590]
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By the time Grainger wrote The Sugar-Cane, there was a long-standing tradition in European literature of using insects to represent moral, religious, and philosophical ideas. ↩︎
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Grainger refers here either to the common practice of absentee plantership, in which plantation owners lived in Britain and managed their plantations from afar, or to the equally common practice of sending children of planters to Britain for education. ↩︎
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Metropolitan British attitudes toward creoles were inevitably condescending, regardless of how wealthy planters were. Grainger himself looked down upon creoles when he lived in St. Kitts. Writing to his friend Bishop Thomas Percy on 5 June 1762, Grainger noted that “reading, I assure you, is the least part of a Creole’s consideration. It is even happy if they can read at all; Spell few of them can; and when they take up a book, modern romance, magazines or newspapers are the extent of their lucubrations” (Nichols 278). ↩︎
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Bellona, the Roman goddess of war. Once again, Grainger is referencing the Seven Years’ War. ↩︎
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A one-handed snare drum often played as a military instrument. ↩︎