In the "Jamaica Funeral" the poet outlined his early philosophy of life. He was fast breaking from the influence of Gray, his early master. It is a Gallic philosophy that he outlines; he is becoming infected with Deism; he is a true bacchanalian. Is there not a ring of the "Rubaiyat" in a stanza like this: "Count all the trees that crown Jamaica's hills, Count all the stars that through the heavens you see, Count every drop that the wide ocean fills, Then count the pleasures Bacchus yields to me?" Freneau's early dream of a purely poetic career was rudely broken by the sudden clash of war and by the sternly practical nature of the American people. Circumstances decided for him his career. There was needed a poetic voice to arouse the common people to action. There was no demand for an imaginative creator, for a sensuous singer of love and wine,--America needed a popular voice, one that could be understood by the unlettered, one that with satire and patriotic appeal could arouse and fire the land. Freneau laid aside for a time the harp and the lyre and took up the trumpet and the bagpipes, and of his influence on the stormy period of the Revolution there can be no two opinions. His ballads and satires were scattered far and wide; they were sold in broadsides in every port and city and camp. Even in the war of 1812 his poems flew like leaves everywhere that men were gathered together. To be the lyrist of a righteous revolution, and above all to be the people's poet, is in itself no small distinction. His poems of the war are in themselves a running history of the struggle, especially of its last years. His heart was in his work; the prison ship had blotted for a time all memories of the old criticisms of his early work, all his early dreams, everything save "the insulting foe" who was making desolate his dear mother land. He lampooned without mercy Clinton, Cornwallis, Carleton, and the royalist printers, Rivington and Gaine. He sang tender lyrics of the patriot dead at Eutaw Springs, who "Saw their injured Country's woe; The flaming town, the wasted field; Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; They took the spear,--but left the shield." He sang peans of victory over the downfall at Yorktown; he exalted the fame of Washington; he called down maledictions on the ship that bore the "worthless Arnold" from American shores. These are more than the fleeting voices of a newspaper muse; they are true poems, and they are American to the core. Scott declared that "Eutaw Springs [was] as fine a thing as there is of the kind in the language."