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The west Indian eclogues, edward rushton's first major poem, was published in 1787, one among a spate of other poems designed to rouse moral outrage at the Atlantic slave trade in the English public. Rushton's Eclogues are set in Jamaica and spoken by enslaved Africans taken from their native land. Rushton had personal knowledge of the subject: a former sailor in the slave trade, he "resided several years in the WestIndies," and claimed his poems to be "painted from actual observation."1 After contracting ophthalmia while attending to the enslaved on a ship and becoming blind in the 1770s, Rushton spent the rest of his life as a journalist and writer advocating republican and abolitionist beliefs, and agitating for sailors' rights and Irish autonomy.2 His Eclogues fit into late 1780s political and poetic trends, expressing abolitionist sentiment through the revived ancient form of the eclogue. They also echoed and significantly amplified a theme broached by the young poet: the revenge of the enslaved.
Revenge was an essential theme in early abolitionist poetry, yet it was generally treated indirectly, with varying levels of discomfort. Rushton's poem-in particular the fourth and final eclogue-stands out for its comparatively direct treatment of the topic of slave revenge, but also for the peculiar way in which it ties the theme specifically to the matter of enslaved women's sexual abuse at the hands of slave owners. Rushton would go on to evoke rape in "Briton, and Negro Slave" in his 1806 Poems, also from the point of view of the victims' husbands. On this theme, his poetry is connected to a complex network of racialized representations of rape in English, and more broadly, Western literature. Indeed, the late eighteenth century saw the development of a principally French continental literary trend that invoked droit du seigneur or jus prima noctis-the mythical aristo- cratic privilege by which a lord could lay sexual claim on any new vassal bride on her wedding night-in order to challenge Ancien Régime social and political hierarchies. Rushton's treatment of rape in his poetry reveals that while much like French droit du seigneur literature it is rooted in a long tradition tying the violation of women to collective politics, it also expresses the deep unease with which even the most...