The Sugar Cane was a pioneering georgic poem adapted to a West Indian theme, first published in 1764. With renewed interest in Caribbean literature, and especially after a new edition was published in 2000, it has attracted critical attention, especially its author's attitude towards slavery.
Background
The Scottish doctor James Grainger settled on the West Indian island of St. Kitts in 1759. Marrying there, his parents-in-law made him manager of the family's sugar estates. At the same time he also set up in medical practice and rode about the island visiting patients. His georgic poem The Sugar Cane was substantially completed by 1762 and represents all he had learned on the subject of planting, about his new home in general, and about the diseases to which the slaves working there were subject. For a few months in 1763-4 he made a brief return visit to Britain and arranged for his poem to be published there. About half the book's text was made up of voluminous explanatory and descriptive notes.
A West-India georgic
The introduction to The Sugar Cane mentions the exoticism and novelty of his new surroundings as Grainger's main reason for writing his “West-India georgic”, coupled with the example of adaptations of the Classical model to domestic subjects such as John Philips’ Cyder (1708) and John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) - which Grainger had been among the few to review favourably on its first appearance. Samuel Johnson also recognised the subject’s novelty in his review in the Critical Quarterly: “A new creation is offered, of which an European has scarce any conception: the hurricane, the burning winds, a ripe cane-piece on fire at midnight; an Indian prospect after a finished crop, and nature in all the extremes of tropic exuberance.”
Grainger defines the scope of his work in the opening verses: What soil the cane affects; what care demands; Beneath what signs to plant; what ills await; How the hot nectar best to christallize; And Afric’s sable progeny to keep: A Muse, that long hath wander’d in the groves Of myrtle-indolence, attempts to sing.
Like Virgil's Georgics, the work is organized in four books, of which the first describes the conditions most favourable for planting and cultivating sugar cane, focusing on the landscape, soil, wildlife and climate in St. Kitts, which at that time was considered one of the most favourable islands for sugar production. The second book is addressed to his fellow poet, the landscape gardener William Shenstone. There Grainger discusses various threats to the growth and health of the sugar-cane, which include natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. The third book deals with the harvest of the cane and the sugar-boiling process, while the fourth book gives an account of slave culture on the plantations.
Although Grainger's The Sugar Cane remains the best known 18th century poem on a West Indian subject, others were written both before and after it. Nathaniel Weekes’ Barbados, a poem (1754) was a forerunner that also included a consideration of sugar cane. Not long after the appearance of Grainger's work, John Singleton published A general description of the West Indian islands (1767) in which he paid tribute to the poem as a successful model. Later there was also a sideways allusion to Grainger in the anonymous Jamaica, a poem in three parts (1777), where the “Argument” to part one declares that “The Muse thinks it disgraceful in a Briton to sing of the Sugar-cane, since it is owing the Slavery of the Negroes”.
Grainger himself, besides placing his poem within the tradition of English adaptations of the georgic in his introduction, also echoed a passage from one of them at a critical point in the body of the text. The description of the harvesters dancing after the apple crop is gathered in John Philips’ Cyder is adapted to a similar scene among the plantation Negroes. Where Philips’ harvesters “frisk and bound”, Grainger's ”gay troop…frisks and capers” while “shaking their sable [or in Philips their brawny] limbs”. In both places the males steal kisses from their female partners, which are received scornfully “with neck reclin’d”. By such deliberate allusions Grainger affirms the place of his “West-India georgic” in the British tradition of such writing, and not simply as an isolated piece of colourful Caribbeana.