“I saw Columbia’s weeping Genius”

On 5 Oct 1778, Benjamin Edes printed a long poem on the front page of his Boston Gazette newspaper. It started:

“O TEMPORA! O MORES!”

BENEATH the lofty Pine, that shades the plain,
Where the blue Mount o’erlooks the Western Main,
I saw Columbia’s weeping Genius stand,
A black’ned Scroll hung waveing in her Hand,

The pensive Fair in broken Accents said,
Shall Freedom’s Cause, by Vice be thus betray’d;
Behold the Schedule that unfolds the Crimes
And Marks the Manners of their venal Times;
She sigh’d and wept, the Folly of the Age,
The selfish Passions and the mad’ning Rage,
For Pleasure’s soft debilitating Charms,
Running full Riot in cold Av’rice Arms.
Who grasps the Dregs of base oppressive gains,
While Luxury in high Profusion reigns.
Our Country bleeds—and bleeds at every Pore,
Yet Gold’s the Deity whom all adore,
Except a few, whose Probity of Soul
No Bribe could purchase, nor no Fears controul.
A chosen few, who dar’d to stem the Tide
Of British Vengeance in the Pomp of Pride,
When George’s Fleets with every Sail unfurl’d,
And by his Hand the reeking Dagger hurl’d,
The Furies guide, and Albia’s Offspring feel
The wounded Bosom, from the sharp’ned steel,
The purple Tide the Field and Village stain,
And the warm fluid rushes from each Vein,
Yet back recoils the Tyrant’s bloody Hilt,
And slaughter’d Millions mark the Monster’s Guilt,
But midst the Carnage the weak Monarch made,
Stern bending down his awful Grandsire’s shade,
Bespoke the Pupil of the Scottish Thane;
Why sully’d thus the Glories of my Reign?
The Western World oft for my House has bled,
And Brunswick’s Friends lie mingled with the Dead.

Years later, in 1790, Mercy Warren included a revision of that poem in her collection Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, thus claiming it as her work. You can read the book’s text here.

The newspaper didn’t give that poem a title. In the book, it was called “The Genius of America weeping the absurd follies of the Day.” Curiously, it also carried the date of “October 10, 1778,” five days after it first saw print. Perhaps that was when Warren finished her revisions.

This poem is germane to the question of whether Warren also wrote the lines about Plymouth’s “prophetic egg” that Edes published in January 1777, as I discussed yesterday. The two sets of verses share some qualities:

• Debut on the front page of Edes’s Boston Gazette.
• Strongly supportive of the Patriot cause and critical of Loyalists.
• Reference to “the Genius of America,” also known as “Columbia’s weeping Genius.”

Do those similarities that mean they came from the same pen?

In fact, there’s a significant difference in how the two poems discuss that “Genius of America.” The prologue to the egg poem referred to “a Hermit resembling the Genius of America, who had resided in a certain Forest from the first Settlement of the Country.” That hermit was male.

In contrast, Warren’s 1778 lines leave no doubt that the Genius was female, and more a supernatural symbol than an inspired hermit. (The first version also described a female “Albia,” but that became “Albion” later. I don’t know if anyone’s done a close reading of the two publications.)

There are also stylistic differences between the poems, such as tetrameter versus pentameter, and a generally lower tone in the 1777 lines. That’s not to say Warren couldn’t have worked in a different mode in a quick response to the prophetic egg. But with no external evidence that Warren did write the egg verse, those differences make the hypothesis less likely.