The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 53the American colonies and the ones being made in other parts. And they were also,
and not least, a probable response to their own sense that the blood of others was on
their hands. Anticipating the later Southern argument in defense of slavery, they
turned their slaves, rhetorically, into “children” who positively needed the feudal
institution of an extended family, with a benevolent patriarch at its head, for guid-
ance, support, and protection. Byrd was, of course, exceptional as far as the range of
his interests and his accomplishments as a writer were concerned, but not so excep-
tional that he cannot stand as an example here. As a planter, his life was not so very
different from that of his neighbors: a life combining business activity with at least
some attempt to cultivate manners, knowledge, and the arts. Like others, in fact, he
tried to apply an inherited model of belief and behavior to new historical circum-
stances. That model was, in some ways, inappropriate, and destructively so; but, in
others, it did help at least to ameliorate the harshness of a strange New World. Byrd
expressed an impulse held in common with many of his fellow colonists – an impulse
intended to make life more manageable, more tolerable and livable. And, for good
and ill, that impulse had an enormous impact on how writers write and many others
talk about one vital part of the American nation.
The trend toward the secular in the work of Knight and Byrd is also noticeable in
the poetry of the period. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the work of
Nathaniel Evans (1742–1767) was typical. Evans was an ordained minister. However,
the subjects of his poetry, posthumously published as Poems on Several Occasions
(1772), were rarely religious. He wrote of the changing seasons (“Hymn to May”),
illustrious public figures (“To Benjamin Franklin, Occasioned by Hearing Him Play
on the Harmonica”), and friends closer to home (“Ode to the Memory of
Mr. Thomas Godfrey”). Certainly, he could lament what he saw as the greed and
immorality of the times. As he put it in an “Ode to My Ingenious Friend,” “we are in
a climate cast / ... / Where all the doctrine now that’s told, / Is that a shining heap of
gold / Alone can man embellish.” But, as these lines indicate, the criticism was framed in
terms of an apparently secular morality, and the forms drawn from classical models –
the ode, the elegy, the pastoral. More interesting, perhaps, than writers like Evans were
those women poets of the time who often brought a self-consciously female
perspective to familiar themes, and sometimes wrote about specifically female
subjects, such as childbearing or their difficult role in society. “How wretched is a
woman’s fate, /” complained one anonymous poet of the time in “Verses Written by
a Young Lady, on Women Born to be Controll’d” (1743), “Subject to man in every
state. / How can she then be free from woes?” The solution, as another anonymous
poet, in “The Lady’s Complaint” (1736), put it was for “equal laws” that would “nei-
ther sex oppress:” a change that would “More freedom give to womankind, / Or give
to mankind less.” Not many poems of the time were quite as categorical as this. On
the contrary, there was a tendency to find satisfaction in the admittedly restricted
role reserved for women. “Love, will then recompense my loss of freedom,” the
anonymously written “The Maid’s Soliloquy” (1751) concludes. And this was a con-
solatory note sounded in other poems, both anonymous ones such as “Impromptu,
on Reading an Essay on Education. By a Lady” (1773), and those attributed to aGGray_c01.indd 53ray_c 01 .indd 53 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM