Digital Grainger

An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764)

126

  • Thine arms, and ankles: O attend my song.
  • A muse that pities thy distressful state;1
  • Who sees, with grief, thy sons in fetters bound; [15]
  • Who wishes freedom to the race of man;2

  • Thy nod assenting craves: dread Genius, come!

  • YET vain thy presence, vain thy favouring nod;
  • Unless once more the muses, that erewhile
  • Upheld me fainting in my past career, [20]
  • Through Caribbe’s3 cane-isles; kind condescend
  • To guide my footsteps, through parch’d Libya’s wilds;4
  • And bind my sun-burnt brow with other bays,5

  • Than ever deck’d the Sylvan bard6 before.

  • SAY, will my Melvil,7 from the public care, [25]
  • Withdraw one moment, to the muses shrine?
  • Who smit with thy fair fame, industrious cull
  • An Indian wreath8 to mingle with thy bays,
  • And deck the hero, and the scholar’s brow!
  • Wilt thou, whose mildness smooths the face of war, [30]
  • Who round the victor-blade the myrtle twin’st,
  • And mak’st subjection loyal and sincere;
  • O wilt thou gracious hear the unartful strain,
  • Whose mild instructions teach, no trivial theme,

  1. Despite the fact that The Sugar-Cane is unequivocally pro-slavery, Grainger affects a tone of regret and sympathy for the enslaved in these opening lines of Book IV. ↩︎

  2. By invoking a singular “race of man,” Grainger seems to promote the theory of monogenesis. Supporters of monogenesis believed, in keeping with the creation story of Genesis, that all human beings had descended from a common ancestor. According to the alternate theory of polygenesis, different races represented different species, each descended from different ancestors. In the eighteenth century, the concept of polygenesis was often used to argue for the relative superiority and inferiority of races and to support slavery. ↩︎

  3. Caribbe’s. The Caribbean’s. ↩︎

  4. Not the modern nation of Libya but the Libyan desert in the eastern Sahara. Grainger uses “Lybia” and “Lybians” several times in Book IV of The Sugar-Cane to signify Africa and Africans. ↩︎

  5. Laurel (bay leaf) crown, often associated with poetic achievement. ↩︎

  6. By Sylvan bard, Grainger literally means poet from the wilderness. Grainger seems to be referring to himself insofar as he was writing from the Caribbean rather than from metropolitan London. ↩︎

  7. Robert Melville (1723-1809), Scottish army officer and colonial governor. Like Grainger, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh before joining the British army and fighting in the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748). During the Seven Years’ War, he fought in the Caribbean, becoming temporary governor of Guadeloupe after defeating the French and then governor of Grenada, Tobago, Dominica, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines in 1764. He was also the founder of the St. Vincent botanic garden, which became a major scientific research station later in the eighteenth century. ↩︎

  8. Grainger’s invocation of an Indian wreath further makes the point that the poem is a product of the Caribbean. ↩︎