What swelling columns, form’d by Jones or Wren,69
Wren was obsessed with reducing congestion, abstractly and concretely. His models for rebuilding London (after fire of 1666) tried to remap the city around a steady flow of commerce in and around the grand exchange. Similar to Haussmann’s Paris. It was a city plan that disregarded the presence of labor.
The muse, soft daughter of humanity! Will ever entertain.—The Ethiop knows, The Ethiop feels, when treated like a man;
This moment reminds me of Markman Ellis’s argument
reclin’st
Here comes the Locke, ugh.
Negroes should always be treated with humanity. Praise of freedom.
…The move here relates to the same logic Kant sadly deploys in his argument against harming livestock. The emphasis lies on the character of the harmer, not in the harmed. Which is to say, Grainger is not concerned with the humanity of these subjugated persons, but with the so-called “humanity” of white slave-owners. The logic would later be applied in the American South to justify slavery as some kind of paternity.
but addicted
I can’t even begin.
Papaw-negroes, make the best field-negroes: but even these, if
This whole set of lines shows the taxonomic violence that occurs when agricultural classification turned backwards
More firmly daring, in the face of Heaven, And win, by regular approach, the Cane.
It’s lines like these that approach epic parody
Enormous vices taint the noblest souls!)
And how these interaction of plants becomes the vehicle for moralizing
SHALL the muse deign to sing of humble weeds, That check the progress of the imperial cane?
Keeping with the metaphor of imperial agriculture, I want to sit longer with this resistant weed.
Nor quits the Muse her walk, immers’d in thought, How she the planter, haply, may advise; Till tardy morn unbar the gates of light, [20]
The lines suggests that the “planting of thought” as over an above the actual planting of the cane. It leads to making slavery into an intellectual exercise. cringe
cultur’d land
Again, this combination of culture and agriculture. It’s ideological effects become more and more apparent—we see the poetic violence/role of making agri(culture)
To drive invasion
Analogy victimizes the slaver, turning commerce into a noble reaction to the “state” of things.
willing soil;
plants are given more agency to resist than humans
but one of his undaunted and philosophical turn of mind.
The guy who thought manatees were mermaids—to say the least
A selfish, sullen, dilatory court;
This is making more sense for me now—early parts of the poem suggest a different courtliness in Sugar production.
The Indian name of St. Christopher is Liamuiga, or the Fertile Island.
Notably appears at the end.
so pleased with its appearance,
Appearance again.
little labour grows;
Ambiguity in the ‘little’ labor— the growth itself or the growing of the fruit. Either way it obscures what we know to be the obvious…
An of course. The [large] growth of the colonial economy/institution of slavery
Supreme of plants,
Chain[s]of being—Hierarchy determined by economy.
ARGUMENT
Reminds me of Milton
unavoidable
The placement of the word here suggests the assumptions on part of a particular readership
SOON
I find Gainger’s immediacy important to work out…the need to make a poem SOON.