Victorian Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

VICTORIAN POETS

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Victorian Poets Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Learning 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Victorian poets / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-276-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3655-4 (e-book) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. I. Bloom, Harold. PR593.V54 2011 821'.809—dc22 2010042081 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: February 2011 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents

Editor’s Note Introduction Harold Bloom

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The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet Dorothy Mermin

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Naming and Doing: Speech Acts in Hopkins’s Poems J. Hillis Miller

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In the Shadow of E. B. B.: Christina Rossetti and Ideological Estrangement 57 Antony H. Harrison Soul and Spirit in In Memoriam Donald S. Hair

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy Gail Marshall Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855) and the Idea of Posterity 129 Francis O’Gorman Rudyard Kipling’s Dress Parade Tim Kendall

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Contents

Tennyson, Browning, Virgil Daniel Karlin Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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193 195

Editor’s Note

My introduction gathers commentary on the leading figures of the period. Dorothy Mermin then suggests that the era’s association of poetry and femininity nonetheless excluded women poets, after which J. Hillis Miller grapples with recovered speech in Hopkins. Antony H. Harrison extends the discussion of Victorian gender roles to include Christina Rossetti’s life and work. Donald S. Hair then delineates some Tennysonian abstractions. Gail Marshall detects the shadow of Shakespeare in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, followed by Francis O’Gorman’s parsing of celebrity and posterity in the work of Barrett Browning’s husband. Tim Kendall explores Kipling and war, and Daniel Karlin concludes the volume with a discussion of Virgil’s influence on the era’s most accomplished poets, Tennyson and Browning.

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Introduction

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad . . . —Shelley

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n the universities, colleges, and schools of the English-speaking world, the canon wars in one sense are pragmatically over, since the academies, joined by the media, have replaced virtually all aesthetic and cognitive standards by considerations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class, and other irreducible resentments. There is, however, no necessary finality in this replacement. A considerable resistance still exists, even in the ruined academies, and an aesthetic underground has formed in many of those who staff the media. Much more important, as I have discovered throughout the last decades, there are hundreds of thousands of common readers, outside the academies and the media, who are not contaminated by what has become fashionable “cultural criticism.” I have given up all guest lecturing at academic institutions and speak only on book tours, which are not intended as aesthetic revival meetings but which hearten me nevertheless. One particularly mindless English Marxist cheerleader, waving his pom poms, nastily compared me to Jimmy Swaggart, but as an aesthetic evangelist I happily acknowledge the influence of the divine Oscar Wilde, who would be rather startled to discover that Elizabeth Barrett Browning has eclipsed her husband, the creator of the strongest dramatic monologues in the English language.

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I who have limped off too many canonical battlefields, acknowledge defeat in the academies and am content to carry on the war elsewhere, and not in this essay. The partisans of Barrett Browning have much to say in her behalf, and many of those reprinted here say it eloquently. I have always loved Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” best among her poems, so I will confine myself to an appreciation of its beauty and a comparison of it to Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” a lyric at least equal in splendor. Homer and Plato say that Pan, god of the woodlands, was the son of Hermes the messenger. As “panic” intimates, Pan has the effect of a sudden fear, like the night terror he caused at Marathon, inducing the Persians to flee, and yet he was named Pan because, at his birth, he delighted all hearts but particularly that of Dionysus, who recognized in the babe a kindred spirit of ecstasy. Attended by nymphs, Pan roams the wild places, and yet the other likely origin of his name means the “feeder” or herdsman, presumably of goats in Arcadia. Though sexually human, Pan has goats’ ears and horns and carries remarkably little mythology with him. His love affairs with Syrinx, Echo, and Pitys (nymph of the fir tree) express his notorious amorousness, as does the music of his reed pipe. Though Pan acquired no transcendental overtones, in the Phaedrus he is among the gods to whom Socrates appeals for an inward beauty. Here is Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument,” one of the best and most vitalizing lyrical poems in the language: What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river; The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a dying-lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. High on the shore sat the great god Pan While turbidly flowed the river; And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

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Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river. He cut it short, did the great god Pan (How tall it stood in the river!) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man. Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sat by the river. ‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan (Laughed while he sat by the river), ‘The only way, since gods began To make a sweet music, they could succeed.’ Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man; The true gods sigh for the cost and pain For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Had she written often thus, she would be beyond praise, and I am puzzled that she did not cultivate her lyric powers. “A Musical Instrument” was published in 1860, a year before her death in Florence, and in it Barrett Browning rejoins the High Romantic vitalism of Shelley, Keats, the young Tennyson, and the young Browning. She knew Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan,” and I suspect she deftly writes an affectionate critique of it in her darker hymn of Pan: I. From the forests and highlands We come, we come;

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From the river-girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb Listening to my sweet pipings. The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings. II. Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings. The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings. III. I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven—and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth— And then I changed my pipings— Singing how down the vale of Maenalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed. Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

I love both hymns and appreciate their differences and originalities. Shelley’s Pan chants in the first person but sings also for the nymphs who

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accompany him and addresses two auditors, Apollo and the reader. Pan’s tone is sublimely exuberant and self-confident, content as he is to have subdued (aesthetically) all nature with his sweet pipings, which are the envy of Apollo, god of poetry. A music of earth challenges and overgoes the Olympian art. There is both a high Shelleyan irony and a universal male lament in the exquisite: I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed. Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

This omits the perspective of the maiden Syrinx, whose metamorphosis saved her from Pan’s lust and thus provided him with a reed he transformed into his musical instrument. Barrett Browning, with her own superb irony, shows us Pan turning a male into a reed pipe, and at the close reveals that her exquisite lyric is a parable of the incarnation of the poetic character itself: Yet half a beast is the great god Pan To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man; The true gods sigh for the cost and pain For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds by the river.

I read this as a profound fable of the denaturalization of the male poet, as opposed to the female, with the “true” or Olympian gods showing a very uncharacteristic sorrow, as if they too had been feminized. That Barrett Browning had the gifts that would have made her into a great lyric poet, I do not doubt. What diverted them, into narrative and sonnet sequence, is a complex matter, not to be discussed in this brief context, but she does seem to me most herself in ballads and dramatic lyrics. Yet the matter of her canonical eminence, or lack of it, remains to be resolved, perhaps when our age of ideology passes into another time. Alfred, Lord Tennyson When I began to write I avowed for my principles those of Arthur Hallam in his essay upon Tennyson. Tennyson, who had written but his early poems when Hallam wrote, was an example of the school of Keats and Shelley, and Keats and Shelley, unlike Wordsworth, intermixed into their poetry no elements from the general thought, but wrote out of the impression made by the world upon their delicate senses. —W.B. Yeats, Art and Ideas

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Harold Bloom So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense. —Hallam on Shelley and Keats, in his review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)

The laureate of “Despair” and “The Ancient Sage” is of course one of the memorable disasters of poetic tradition, surpassing the Wordsworth of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets and even the Arnold of Merope. The whole being of Tennyson was at no single time absorbed into the energy of sense, and for this failure of experience the price was paid, alas even overpaid: And more—think well! Do-well will follow thought, And in the fatal sequence of this world An evil thought may soil thy children’s blood; But curb the beast would cast thee in the mire, And leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness A cloud between the Nameless and thyself, And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel, And climb the Mount of Blessing, whence, if thou Look higher, then—perchance—thou mayest—beyond A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, And past the range of Night and Shadow-see The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day Strike on the Mount of Vision! So, farewell.

There are still Tennyson scholars who can read this, or say they can, but the indefensible badness of it all is plain enough. Sixty years or so before this, as a boy of 14, Tennyson possessed the verbal exuberance of an absolute poetic genius, and manifested it in the splendid speeches of the Devil in The Devil and the Lady and in the remarkable movement of an exercise like the Ode: O Bosky Brook. The extremes of a poet’s values, if they are manifested merely as a chronological continuum, do not much matter. Vision darkens, life triumphs, the poet becomes the man whose pharynx is bad. So went Wordsworth, the founder of modern poetry, and where a Moses was lost, other losses must follow. Yeats and Wallace Stevens appear today to be the first and only poets in the romantic tradition who flowered anew both in middle and in old age, and yet it can be questioned if either will rival Tennyson and Browning after the fogs of fashion have been dispelled. At the center of Tennyson the problem is not whether or why he hardened and kept hardening in poetic character, or just how his vision darkened

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perpetually into the abysses of much of the later verse, but why and how the sensibility of a major romantic poet was subverted even in his earlier years. What the most sympathetic reader can still find wanting in the best of Tennyson is a power of imagination shown forth uncompromisingly in The Fall of Hyperion and “The Triumph of Life,” in “Resolution and Independence” and The Mental Traveller, and on the largest scale in The Prelude and “Jerusalem.” Romance, lyric, epic were raised to greatness again in the two generations just before Tennyson. In a lyrical monologue like “Andrea del Sarto,” a romance like “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and in the curious epic of The Ring and the Book, a poet of Tennyson’s own generation comes close to approximating the romantic achievement. Tennyson was as legitimately the heir of Keats as Browning was of Shelley, and as much a betrayal of Keats’s imaginative honesty and autonomy as Browning was of Shelley’s. To make such a point is to reveal in oneself an unreconstructed romantic bias, like that of Swinburne, or Yeats, or Shaw, or Hardy, to bring in four Shelleyans who were contemporaries of the older Browning and Tennyson. There are achievements in Tennyson that are not romantic, but they are small enough. The Tennyson who counts for most, seen in the longest and clearest perspective we now can begin to recover, is certainly a romantic poet, and not a Victorian antiromantic resembling the Arnold of Merope or the straining Hopkins of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” He is a major romantic poet but not perhaps one of the greatest, though there is an antithetical storm cloud drifting through the center of his work that sometimes shows us what his proper greatness should have been. His affinities in his own time were to no other poet but to Ruskin, a great ruin of a romantic critic, and his value to us now is rather like Ruskin’s, since he shows forth as a most crucial instance of the dilemma of postromantic art. Hallam, who remains Tennyson’s best critic, found “five distinctive excellences” in his friend’s poetic manner: (1) the control of a luxuriant imagination; (2) accuracy of adjustment in “moods of character,” so that narration and feeling naturally corresponded with each other; (3) skill in emotionally fusing a vivid, “picturesque” portrayal of objects (“picturesque” being opposed here to Wordsworthian descriptiveness); (4) modulation of verbal harmony; (5) “mellow soberness of tone,” addressed to the understanding heart rather than the mere understanding. Yeats, in his old age, spoke of “the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam,” but I cannot recognize the poem from that description. What lives in the elegies for Hallam are precisely the excellences that Hallam picked out in his friend’s earlier manner, and the various tracts of discursiveness one learns to step over quickly. Discursiveness became a Tennysonian vice, but it did not in itself inhibit the development of Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson, like Browning, but to a still worse extent, never achieved even a pragmatic faith in the autonomy

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of his own imagination. Such a faith was a ruling passion in Blake, Shelley, and Keats, and such a faith, though held with earnest misgivings, for a while allowed Wordsworth and Coleridge to yield themselves to their greatest achievements. Though the overt Victorian romantics of the Pre-Raphaelite group struggled back to a version of this faith, it was not held again with similar intensity in Tennyson’s age except by Pater, who fostered Yeats even as he gave the more disjunctive and ironical Stevens a fresh point of departure in America. To trace the conflict in Tennyson’s earlier poetry between a romantic imagination and an emergent societal censor is hardly to conduct a fresh investigation, and I will not attempt it here. Such conflicts, whether found in a Spenser or even in a D.H. Lawrence, seem recurrent in the history of poetry and belong more to the study of consciousness than to the study of poetic tradition. The more rewarding problem for pondering is the young Tennyson’s profounder distrust of his own creative powers. A god spoke in him, or a demon, and a revulsion accompanied the maturing of this voice. No really magical poem by Tennyson ever became quite the work he intended it to be, and this gap between his intention and his actual achievement saved him as a poet, though it could not save him altogether. Most considerable poems by Tennyson do not mean what they meant to mean, and while this is true of all poets whatsoever to some degree, Tennyson is the most extreme instance I know of the imagination going one way and the will going quite another. Blake thought that the Milton of Paradise Lost had to be rescued from himself, an opinion that most recent Miltonists find dubious, perhaps without fully understanding it. But Tennyson’s best poems are a much more radical version of Blake’s paradox; they address themselves simultaneously and overtly to both a conventional and a “diabolic” reading. Partly this is due to the prevalence in Tennyson’s poetic mind of the “damned vacillating state” of the early Supposed Confessions. No lyric by Tennyson is more central to his sensibility than “Mariana,” entirely a poem of the autonomous imagination running down into isolated and self-destructive expectation. Wordsworth, in his sublime “The Affliction of Margaret,” wrote the contrary to Tennyson’s poem, for Margaret is destroyed by an imaginative hope that will not take account of the mundane. The hope is all too willing to be fed, and the prevalence of the imagination could hardly be more dangerous. Wordsworth does, here and in Michael, what Tennyson could only approximate in “Dora”; the poet creates a consciousness narrower and purer than his own and measures his own malady of self-concern by its distance from that pure intensity. Mariana, unlike Margaret, is a poetess, and she sings a dejection ode that Tennyson scarcely ventured to write in his own person. Her disease is romantic self-consciousness, and no bridegroom can come to heal her. “She could not look on the sweet heaven,” for much the same cause

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as the singer of Blake’s “Mad Song” turns his back to the east and rejects the comforts of the sun. Wilful and unwilling, she is poised between two states of being, one in which the world has been taken up into the mind (the mind of a picturesque rather than descriptive poet) and the other in which the solipsistic mind rejects the world as an unreal intruder; hence the landscape of her poem, which as a poetic achievement could not be overpraised. The poplar, seen as a phallic symbol by some recent Tennyson critics, is rather an indication of the border realm between the two states in which Mariana lives. She can neither absorb its presence nor utterly reject it, and it serves therefore to show how precarious her mode of existence is. The poem’s strongest impulse is to see the world as phantasmagoria, in which case Mariana’s lament would be transvalued and appear as an ironic cry of triumph for the autonomy of her vision. But there are other impulses in the poem, and “He cometh not” remains a lament. The Shelleyan origins of Tennyson’s female solitary, in “Mariana” and other poems, has been demonstrated ably by Lionel Stevenson, who unfortunately reduces this emblematic figure in both Shelley and Tennyson to Jung’s archetype of the anima. The reduction is unnecessary in any case, since Epipsychidion demonstrates how consciously and deliberately Shelley used his epipsyche figure. Tennyson’s use of his cynosure-female is presumably not as conscious or as deliberate, though no theory of the two Tennysons, and no prosaic psychoanalytic reduction, need be ventured in consequence. Tennyson’s poetry is too many-sided for anyone to suggest plausibly that it was written by uneasy collaboration between a Shelley-Keats and a Victorian Christian humanist, and I intend no such notion in this essay. There is a profound sense of the limitations of poetry in both Keats and Shelley, but each learned how to convert this sense into an overt poetic strength. Tennyson wrote in an age of reform, both voluntary and involuntary, while the younger romantics faced a time of apparent stasis, an exhaustion following an apocalyptic fervor. The temper of poetic imagination is peculiarly and favorably responsive to the thwarting of political hope, and Shelley and Keats and Byron gained immensely by their good fortune of having the era of Metternich and Castlereagh to contend against, little as they would appreciate so cynical a judgment. Like Beddoes and Darley, a half-generation before him, Tennyson found himself with a fiercely autonomous imagination confronting a time that neither challenged nor repelled such an imagination yet also gave it no proper arena in which to function. Keats was of course not a political poet, indeed was far less one than Tennyson, but there still existed provocations for Keats’s humanism and his naturalism to become combative. Browning found provocation enough in the evangelicism of his parents, particularly his mother, but Pauline records too clearly how his Shelleyan

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sensibility failed guiltily before such a stimulus. Tennyson had no combative use to which an assertion of the imagination could be put and no antidote therefore against any aesthetic corrosion that his moral doubts of imagination might bring about. The pride of imagination, and the distrust of it, had nowhere to go but within. Sexual virginity for any poet, even a Jesuit, as Hopkins shows, is a kind of sickness unto action, a time of fear before the potential disorder of the strange. That Tennyson’s Muse was (and always remained) Hallam has given Robert Graves occasion for innocent merriment but need disturb no one any longer. The death of a beautiful young man strikes our social sense as a less appropriate theme for poetry than Poe’s pervasive theme but is of course much more traditional than Poe’s preference in corpses. The sexual longings of a poet qua poet appear to have little relation to mere experience anyway, as for instance in the contrast between the highly sexually active Shelley, with his crucial antithetical theme of the inadequacy of nature to the imagination from Alastor on, and the probably virginal Keats of Endymion, with his profoundly primary sense of satisfaction in natural experience. Still, there is a line of poetry that goes from the complexly sensual aspirations of Spenser through the bitter sexual frustrations of Milton and Blake (particularly relevant to his Notebook poems and Visions of the Daughters of Albion), then to the curious argument between Shelley and Keats in Alastor and Endymion, and on to the astonishingly delayed entries into sexual experience of Tennyson and of Yeats. The analytical sophistication in aesthetic realms that would allow a responsible sexual history of English poetry to be written is not available to us, and yet such a history must and should come. The hidden fulfillment of Wordsworth is the aesthetic puzzle of The Prelude, since the 1805 version is marred by the inclusion of the Julia and Vaudracour episode, and the 1850 version suffers from its exclusion. The malaise of Tennyson’s early poetry is very like that of The Wanderings of Oisin, and the existence of Shelley and Keats as ancestor-poets-in-common is insufficient to explain the likeness. The tragedy of sexual intercourse, according to the older Yeats, was the perpetual virginity of the soul. The comedy of sexual intercourse is presumably the initial virginity of the body, but in poetry poised before experience the comedy tends to be negated, or rather displaced into the phantasmagoria of a Mariana, whose poem would be destroyed by the slightest touch of a comic spirit. I am not, I would hope, alone in my puzzlement as to why Tennyson has not had the prestige of the hieratic in our time, while the more limited but precisely similar Mallarmé has. Tennyson’s poems of the “Mariana” kind, centered on a self-embowered consciousness, are not less artful or persuasive than Mallarmé’s, and are rather more universal in their implications. The English Decadence has, as its true monument, not Swinburne, admirable poet as he

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certainly was, but the more masterful Tennyson, whose “metaphysics of night” go beyond Mallarmé’s in their elaborately indeliberate subtleties. Hallam’s is necessarily a theory of pure poetry (as H.M. McLuhan shows) and while Tennyson could not allow himself to share the theory overtly, he inspired it by his early practice and fell back on it implicitly to save his poetry time and time again. In a way that In Memoriam does not apprehend, the dead Hallam remained Tennyson’s guardian angel. “Mariana” is too pure a poem to test any argument by, so that an overview of its neighbors in early Tennyson seems likely to be helpful. “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” is a clearly Shelleyan poem, more confident indeed in its Shelleyan faith of imagination than anything else of Tennyson’s. It echoes “Kubla Khan” also, but not the third part of that poem in which Coleridge to some degree withdraws from the full implications of his own vision. Like the poet-hero of Alastor, Tennyson voyages through nature in search of a center transcending nature, and he finds it in a pleasure dome like that of “Kubla Khan” or “The Palace of Art” or The Revolt of Islam: The fourscore windows’ all alight As with the quintessence of flame, A million tapers flaring bright From twisted silvers look’d to shame The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream’d Upon the mooned domes aloof In inmost Bagdat, till there seem’d Hundreds of crescents on the roof Of night new-risen . . .

This is the young Tennyson’s Byzantium, and perhaps it lingered in the mind of the old Yeats, though more likely both poets were recalling, however involuntarily, visions seen by Coleridge and by Shelley. Reasonable sophisticates will smile at my connecting Tennyson’s playful “Recollections” to Yeats’s supreme lyric, but there is a great deal legitimately to claim (or reclaim) for “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.” It was Hallam’s favorite among the 1830 Poems, and his choice was a justified one, for the lyric is a complete and perfected miniature of Tennyson’s poetic mind and is even an In Memoriam in miniature. A very great, a consummate poet is at work in the full strength of his sensibility and can be felt with especial power from the fifth line of this stanza on: Far off, and where the lemon grove In closest coverture upsprung,

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The living airs of middle night Died round the bulbul as he sung; Not he: but something which possess’d The darkness of the world, delight, Life, anguish, death, immortal love, Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress’d, Apart from place, withholding time, But flattering the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.

This stanza is at the poem’s center of vision and properly recalls the song of Keats’s nightingale, also sung to a poet in darkness, and like this chant an overcoming of the limitations of space and time. The companion poem to Recollections is the impressive “Ode to Memory,” and it is palpable that both lyrics are love poems addressed to Hallam. Palpable to us and not presumably to Tennyson and Hallam, I suppose I ought to add, but then the “Ode to Memory” ends: My friend, with you to live alone, Were how much better than to own A crown, a sceptre, and a throne! O strengthen me, enlighten me! I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory.

The “Recollections” opens with an inspiriting breeze that takes the poet back to what Hart Crane in Passage beautifully called “an improved infancy.” In that unitary joy, Tennyson emulates the poet-hero of Alastor and sets forth on his quest for the good Haroun Alraschid, who is already the supernatural Hallam of In Memoriam, a poet-king dwelling at the center of vision, a type of god-man still to come. To reach this absolute being, the poet-voyager sails, with “a majesty of slow motion in every cadence,” as Hallam observed, until he enters “another night in night,” an “imbower’d” world of “imprisoning sweets.” The voyage suggests not only the quest of Alastor but also the journey to the Bower of Bliss in book 2 of The Faerie Queene. Tennyson, as many critics by now have noted, is the most discreetly powerful erotic poet in the language, and this early lyric is a masterpiece of subdued erotic suggestiveness. The penultimate stanza, with its confectioner’s delight of a Persian girl, is merely an erotic evasion, but the final stanza, directly celebrating Hallam, is sustained by a lyric rapture remarkable even in the younger Tennyson.

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In section 103 of In Memoriam, Tennyson finds an aftermorn of content because of another voyage-vision in which Hallam is again at the center, the Muse presiding over a realized quest. But the playfulness of “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” is now gone, that poem’s greatest admirer being dead. Perhaps remembering how much Hallam had loved the poem, Tennyson returns to its design at one of the climaxes in his book of elegies, in which his grief is assuaged by the compensatory imagination, and Hallam is resurrected as a Titan capable of reviving Tennyson’s lesser Muses. In itself, section 103 has rightly been judged to be one of Tennyson’s great lyrics, but one can wonder how many of the poet’s readers have seen how very little the poem has to do with the supposed faith of In Memoriam. Bradley, the definitive commentator on the elegies for Hallam, interpreted the dream of section 103 with his usual good sense but declined to see its clearly Promethean pattern of consolation. In Numbers 13:32–33, the spies of Moses report on the Anakim, “which come of the giants,” and the report appals the murmuring Israelites. Like the Titans, the Anakim testify to a time when there were giants in the earth, when men walked with gods as equals. In the titanic section 103 Tennyson dreams “a vision of the sea” during his last sleep in the house of his childhood and in the vision he leaves behind him not only childhood but all that precedes a rising Prometheanism as well. The poet’s lesser Muses, his Daughters of Beulah as Blake patronizingly would have named them, sing “of what is wise and good / And graceful” to a veiled statue of Hallam, the unknown god who must lead them to a greater music. A dove summons Tennyson to an apocalyptic sea, an outward-flowing tide on which he will be reunited with “him I loved, and love / For ever.” The weeping Muses sail with the poet: And still as vaster grew the shore And rolled the floods in grander space, The maidens gather’d strength and grace And presence, lordlier than before; And I myself, who set apart And watch’d them, wax’d in every limb; I felt the thews of Anakim, The pulses of a Titan’s heart.

Watching the ministering spirits of his own creativity, Tennyson suddenly shares their participation in a daemonic possession, an influx of power as the poet rises in the body to be one again with the giants in the earth. With this transformation his Muses sing not of what is but ought to be: the death of war, the great race that is to come, and a new cosmos—the shaping of a

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star. The New Man, the first of the crowning race, Tennyson’s Albion “appearing ere the times were ripe,” and so dying an early and unnatural death, is necessarily Hallam, whose epiphany “thrice as large as man” is the saving culmination of section 103, and indeed of all the elegies. The ship of the reunited lovers, both now Titans and accompanied by the nervous Muses, fearful lest their function be gone, sails at last toward a land of crimson cloud, a realm where vapor, sea, and earth come together, a world out of space and time and free of all merely human moralities. One never ceases to be puzzled that In Memoriam, an outrageously personal poem of romantic apotheosis, a poem indeed of vastly eccentric mythmaking, should have been accepted as a work of consolation and moral resolution in the tradition of Christian humanism. In Memoriam, viewed as one poem, is rather a welter of confusions, but its main movement is clear enough and establishes the work as having considerably less relation to a Christian elegy than even Adonais has. Whatever Tennyson thought he was doing, the daemon of imaginative autonomy got hold of the poem’s continuity and made the poem an argument for a personal love about as restrained and societal as Heathcliff ’s passion, or Blake’s in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, or Shelley’s in Epipsychidion. The vision of Hallam in sections 127 to 130, for instance, is a more extreme version of the transfiguration of Keats in the final stanzas of Adonais and is a victory for everything in Tennyson that could accept neither God nor nature as adequate to the imaginative demands of a permanently bereaved lover who was also a professional poet. No poet in English seems to me as extreme and fortuitous as Tennyson in his sudden moments of recognition of his own powers, bursts of radiance against a commonplace conceptual background that cannot accommodate such radiance. The deeply imaginative reader learns instinctively to listen to the song and not the singer, for Lawrence’s adage is perfectly relevant to Tennyson. More relevant still was the prophetic warning of Hallam, in one sentence of his review that one wishes Tennyson had brooded on daily, and so perhaps saved for poetry more fully than he did one of the major romantic sensibilities: That delicate sense of fitness which grows with the growth of artist feelings, and strengthens with their strength, until it acquires a celerity and weight of decision hardly inferior to the correspondent judgments of conscience, is weakened by every indulgence of heterogeneous aspirations, however pure they may be, however lofty, however suitable to human nature.

Introduction

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Had Tennyson heeded this, he might have ended like the sinful soul of his own “The Palace of Art,” howling aloud “I am on fire within.” One cannot be sure it would not have been the fitting end his imagination required. Robert Browning In proportion to his actual merits of imaginative originality and dramatic power, Robert Browning is probably the most undervalued major poet of the English language, at this time. He is out of fashion, almost totally neglected in our universities, though he still retains favor among common readers who are not swayed by ideologies of gender, race, and cultural politics. Difficult poetry is hardly in demand, and Browning at his subtle best can be quite difficult. The creator of Childe Roland, Andrea del Sarto, and Fra Lippo Lippi was also the re-creator of Shakespeare’s Caliban, far more efficaciously than the critics and directors who give us Caliban as a gallant African-American freedom fighter. Browning’s dramatic monologue is still an extraordinarily fecund form, as can be seen in the work of Richard Howard and the late Edgar Bowers, as in Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound before them. Tennyson was a rival master of the dramatic monologue, in poems as extraordinary as “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” and “Lucretius.” But Browning expanded the range and resources of the monologue to the point that it could take on Shakespearean resonances and depths of nihilistic self-deception. The soliloquies of Hamlet, Iago, and Macbeth find their visionary company in the self-explorations of Childe Roland and Andrea del Sarto. Browning’s monologists tell us more than they mean to divulge and frequently reveal what they themselves do not consciously know. The duke, speaking in “My Last Duchess,” is perfectly candid in observing that he had his “last Duchess” murdered—“I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together”—but presumably is not aware that he conveys clinical madness as well as family and personal pride (to call it that, being indistinguishable from his mania). Childe Roland describes a nightmare landscape, yet we might not see all things deformed and broken had we the misfortune to ride with him. His outrageous question is: “Should I be fit to fail” like his precursors, the band of knights who have preceded him in his quest for the Dark Tower. The quest is for failure, and yet it sublimely succeeds. At the close, Roland stands dauntless, confronting not some nameless ogre but the ring of fire that encircles him, a living flame of all the band of brothers who have been self-betrayed before him. Despair is replayed by the courageous trumpet of a prophecy, as Roland sounds out his fate as his proud motto of self-identification. The

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final confrontation, and the symbolic journey on his “darkening path,” are revealed to be anything but the sickness unto death that Roland believed himself to exemplify. The cost of his confirmation may be his life (we do not know) but his failure is an achieved magnificence, as he sees and knows the poet-questers before him. It is as if Browning, who had worshipped Shelley for a lifetime but felt guilty at having abandoned him at the behest of a fierce evangelical mother, reclaims his Shelleyan, uncompromising heritage in a single epiphany. The two great matched monologues, “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto,” contrast two visions of the artist: hearty naturalist in Lippi and timid self-crippler in Andrea. Browning identifies his own art with Lippi’s and portrays Andrea as the compromiser that the husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning feared to become, had he accepted her influence. And yet both of these grand monologues transcend these implicit self-identifications. Fra Lippo Lippi, though a Carmelite friar, lives what he paints, sensual love: I always see the garden and God there A-making man’s wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards.

Lippi, at one with himself, nevertheless stresses a painterly originality he does not possess. He copies the manner of his teacher Masaccio, the “Hulking Tom” who enters the poem in the verse paragraph commencing at line 270. But, in Lippi’s account, Masaccio is the student, not the teacher, a reversal of fact that portrays Lippi’s anxiety of influence. Doubtless, Browning hints also at his own continued anxiety in regard to Shelley. Browning’s own fear of self-betrayal subtly colors the exquisite monologue by Andrea del Sarto: “A common greyness silvers everything.” A great twilight piece, “Andrea del Sarto” is a depiction of knowing self-degradation: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

The most grotesque of Browning’s masterpieces, “Caliban Upon Setebos,” has the audacity to elaborate on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban, painfully meditating on his mother’s god, Setebos, parodies Browning’s own humanization of the evangelical Jesus who was his mother’s god. But the grim humor of Browning’s parody takes its force from elements

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not wholly ironic, going back as they do to Shakespeare’s representation of Caliban’s pathos. A composite art emerges, very difficult to describe but unmistakable to hear: Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. His dam held different, that after death He both plagued enemies and feasted friends: Idly! He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst,—with which, an end.

Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti is one of a handful of major English devotional poets, together with John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, and her contemporary, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. One might expect the beloved sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to manifest a marked difference from other poets of religious sensibility. Like the PreRaphaelites, her style and procedures stem from Keats and Tennyson, rather than Donne and Herbert, but then Hopkins also is Keatsian in mode. Goblin Market doubtless is Christina Rossetti’s masterpiece and rightly has become a favorite text for feminist literary criticism. It fascinates and disturbs me, and though I have included it complete in two anthologies, I never have commented on the poem, for reasons I can only surmise. In a sense it is poetry for children, though indeed they have to be extremely intelligent children of all ages. Thus they could resist the current academic interpretations: Marxist, feminist, lesbian-incestuous, or imagistic self-gratification, at once erotic, mercantile, and even vampiric. There certainly is a struggle going on in Goblin Market, but it seems to me an agon for poetic incarnation, for the establishment of a strong poetic self. I do not suppose that Christina Rossetti would have accepted John Keats’s Scene of Instruction less ambivalently if he had been a woman, since strong poets are not particularly given to communal quilt making. What troubles Goblin Market is not only Keats’s magnificent oxymoronic rhetoric but also his naturalistic humanism. Keatsian eroticism is totally free of the melancholy sound of church bells. Christina Rossetti’s intense faith was intricately fused with an erotic temperament as exuberant as her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, and her lifelong renunciation (so far as we know) of sexual experience testifies to a rather frightening strength of will, or of faith if you would have it so. The Tempter in Goblin Market is in any case John Keats and not John Keble, or romanticism rather than the Oxford movement of Anglican revivalism.

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I hasten to insist that I find it grotesque to identify the goblins as male precursor poets: Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and D.G. Rossetti and his friends. The nursery rhyme stylistics of Goblin Market are wonderfully effective swerves away from Keatsian celebrations of natural abundance, but they defend against glories of language and not against gendered dangers. That Goblin Market is an open-ended allegory is its finest attribute. Such irony invests deeply in the fantastic, challenging us to behold our own idiosyncratic phantasmagorias. Perhaps Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of irony as the “permanent parabasis of meaning” could not be better exemplified than by Christina Rossetti’s most ambitious poem. Gerard Manley Hopkins Of all Victorian poets, Hopkins has been the most misrepresented by modern critics. He has been discussed as though his closest affinities were with Donne on one side and T.S. Eliot on the other. Yet his poetry stems directly from Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the dominant influences on his literary thought came from Ruskin and Pater. A disciple of Newman, he is as High Romantic as his master, and his best poetry, with all its peculiarities of diction and metric, is perhaps less of a departure from the Victorian norm than Browning’s, or Swinburne’s, or even Patmore’s. His case is analogous to Emily Dickinson’s. Published out of their own century, they became for a time pseudocontemporaries of twentieth-century poets, but perspectives later became corrected, and we learned to read both poets as very much involved in the literature and thought of their own generations. Hopkins was, in many of his attitudes, a representative Victorian gentleman; indeed he was as much a nationalistic jingo as Tennyson or Kipling, and his religious anguish is clearly related to a characteristic sorrow of his age. His more properly poetic anguish is wholly romantic, like Arnold’s, for it derives from an incurably romantic sensibility desperately striving not to be romantic but to make a return to a lost tradition. Hopkins quested for ideas of order that were not available to his poetic mind, and as a poet he ended in bitterness, convinced that he had failed his genius. Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, at Stratford in Essex, the eldest of nine children, into a very religious High Anglican family of comfortable means. He did not enjoy his early school years but flowered at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied classics from 1863 to 1867 and became a student of Walter Pater, who corrected his essays. In the atmosphere of the continuing Oxford Movement, Hopkins underwent a crisis, which came in March 1865 and partly resulted from meeting an enthusiastic, young religious poet, Digby Dolben, who was to drown in June 1867 at the age of 19.

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In 1866, under Newman’s sponsorship, Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Two years later, he began his Jesuit novitiate and continued faithful to the order until he died. Ordained a priest in 1877, he preached in Liverpool, taught at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit seminary, and from 1884 until his death in 1889 served as professor of Greek at the University College in Dublin. Though perfectly free to write poems and paint pictures, so far as his superiors in the Society of Jesus were concerned, Hopkins was a congenital self-torturer, and so much a romantic that he found the professions of priest and poet to be mutually exclusive. Austin Warren, one of Hopkins’s best and most sympathetic critics, justly remarked that in Hopkins’s most ambitious poems there is “a discrepancy between texture and structure: the copious, violent detail is matched by no corresponding intellectual or mythic vigor.” Following Keats’s advice to Shelley, that an artist must serve Mammon by loading every rift of his poem with ore, Hopkins sometimes went too far, and even a sympathetic reader can decide that the poems are overloaded. What then is Hopkins’s achievement as poet? It remains considerable, for the original, almost incredible, accomplishment of Hopkins is to have made Keatsian poetry into a devotional mode, however strained. In the “Subtle Doctor,” on the Scottish Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus (1265– 1308), also an Oxonian, Hopkins found doctrine to reconcile a concern for individual form, for the “thisness” of people and natural things, with the universal truths of the church. Following his own understanding of Scotus, Hopkins coined the word inscape for every natural pattern he apprehended. Instress, another coinage, meant for him the effect of each pattern on his own imagination. Taken together, the terms are an attempt at scholasticizing Keats’s fundamental approach to perception: detachment, the poet’s recourse to nonidentity, negative capability. Hopkins remained unpublished until his friend, the poet Robert Bridges, brought out a first edition of the poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after Hopkins’s death. By chance, this first publication almost coincided with the start of the aggressive literary modernism that dominated British and American poetry until the 1950s, and Hopkins was acclaimed by poets and critics as the true continuator of English poetry in the otherwise benighted nineteenth century and as a precursor who could help justify modern experiments in diction, metrics, and imagistic procedure. Hopkins’s diction adds to its Keatsian and Pre-Raphaelite base a large stock of language derived from his study of Welsh and Old English and from an amorphous group of Victorian philologists who sought a “pure English” less contaminated by the Latin and French elements that are incurably part of the language. Hopkins’s metric was based,

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as he said, on nursery rhymes, the choruses of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and Welsh poetry. Against what he called the “running” or “common” rhythm of nineteenth-century poetry, Hopkins espoused “sprung rhythm,” which he insisted was inherent in the English language, the older, purely accentual meter of Anglo-Saxon verse. Evidently, Hopkins read Keats’s odes as having this rhythm, despite Keats’s Spenserian smoothness. Though Hopkins came to the study of Old English late, his essential metrical achievement was to revive the schemes of Old English poetry. But the main traditions of English poetic rhythm go from Chaucer to Spenser and Milton and on to the major romantics, and Hopkins’s archaizing return to Cynewulf and Langland, though influential for a time, now seems an honorable eccentricity. Nevertheless, its expressive effectiveness is undeniable. The metrical basis of many of Hopkins’s poems is a fixed number of primarystressed syllables, surrounded by a variable number of unstressed ones, or “outrides” as he called them. The alliterations of early Germanic poetry also work powerfully to recast the poetic line into a chain of rhythmic bursts. Thus, in “The Windhover,” the first two lines each have five of Hopkins’s beats (as opposed to five regularized, alternating, accentual-syllabic ones): I caúght this mórning, mórning’s minión, kíngdom of dáylight’s daúphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Fálcon, in his ríding . . .

But the first line has ten syllables, and might be mistaken for an iambic pentameter, while the second has sixteen; and we realize as we read through the poems that what is common to them, their meter rather than their individual rhythms, is the sequence of five major stresses. Moreover, the phrase “dapple-dawn-drawn” is so accented as to preserve the meaning “drawn by dappled dawn” through its interior rhyme and alliterative clusters. Hopkins’s own invented metrical terminology is, like his other philosophical vocabulary, highly figurative: “hangers” or “outrides,” “sprung rhythm,” “counterpointing” (or superposition of rhythmic schemes), even the blended emotive-linguistic meanings of “stress” itself, all invoke the imagery of his poems, and are as subjective as are his metaphysical concepts, but like those concepts constitute an extraordinary approach to a Catholic poetic transcendentalism.

DOROTHY MERMIN

The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet

L

ooking back at her childhood from the vantage point of fourteen years old, Elizabeth Barrett wrote that at four-and-a-half, “my great delight was poring over fairy phenomenons and the actions of necromancers—& the seven champions of Christendom . . . beguiled many a weary hour. At five I supposed myself a heroine and in my day dreams of bliss I constantly imaged to myself a forlorn damsel in distress rescued by some noble knight.”1 Which was she in these daydreams: the forlorn damsel, or the noble knight? “I supposed myself a heroine,” but “I imaged to myself a damsel rescued. . . .” The knight is more distant—“some noble knight”—and the fact that the daydreams arose as an escape from weary hours suggests an unwilling identification with the damsel. But from an early age Elizabeth Barrett despised sentimental young women and wanted to dress as a boy and run away to be, perhaps, “poor Lord Byron’s page”: a daydream that tries to defer gender identification by deferring adult sexuality, but cannot defer it indefinitely.2 In her earliest literary imaginings, then, we find her hovering between two mutually exclusive and equally unsuitable literary roles—one precluded by the need for activity and self-assertion, the other precluded by gender. This is the predicament in which the two best Victorian women poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, found themselves

From Critical Inquiry 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 64–80. Copyright © 1986 by the University of Chicago Press.

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when they looked for a place where a woman could situate herself without self-contradiction and in which she could not just daydream, but speak. A study of their encounters with this problem can help us answer the question that puzzles and teases the feminist critic of Victorian poetry: why were there so few good women poets in nineteenth-century England when there were so many excellent women novelists? Victorian critics thought it was probably because the female imagination cannot go beyond the personal and superficial. Now, of course, we find a different kind of explanation. Most women lacked the classical education that served as the rite of initiation into high culture. Traditional conceptions of the poet’s role—as priest, for instance—were inherently masculine. Publication seemed like unwomanly self-display, or even sexual self-exposure, and could be justified more easily if one wrote novels to make money rather than poems just for glory. With less prestige than poetry, and a less formidably male tradition, novel writing was more accessible, as new occupations often are, to women. It is sometimes said, too, that women could not summon up the sense of self and the self-assertiveness that poetry requires, and that they were too repressed to write strong lyrics.3 Of course, many of the hindrances to women poets also hindered men. Fear of self-exposure and the felt lack of a central, stable self with an existence independent of its relations to others were problems for male Victorian poets too. Sexuality and rage do not seem to be significantly more repressed in Barrett Browning’s or Rossetti’s works than in Matthew Arnold’s or even Tennyson’s. Nor did the men of a self-consciously prosaic and doubting age find bardic or priestly robes more comfortable than women did. But for women, cultural and psychological barriers were reinforced by the difficulty of situating themselves within the inherited structures of English poetry. Barrett Browning records in two narrative poems her early realization that as a woman poet she would have to play two opposing roles at one time— both knight and damsel, both subject and object—and that because she can’t do this she is excluded from the worlds her imagination has discovered. The speaker in “The Deserted Garden” had as a child loved to read and dream in an abandoned garden, a secret and magical place that she entered with “Adventurous joy” and where as she read her “likeness grew” “To ‘gentle hermit of the dale,’ / And Angelina too.”4 But as if in consequence of this impossibly doubled identification with figures of romance, she “shut the book,” she grew up, and the garden was again deserted. A later and longer work, “The Lost Bower,” tells how as a child the speaker once made her way through thickets and brambles to a lovely bower but never could find it again. Discovering the bower is even more of an adventure than penetrating the deserted garden: it is a heroic exploit, an accomplished quest; but the traditional plot that the child is enacting requires the bower to contain a female figure, and

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there is no one to be that figure except herself. So she says: “Henceforth, I will be the fairy / Of this bower . . . the dream-hall I have won” (ll. 241–42, 245). That is, she will be both the quester and the object of the quest. It’s an awkward arrangement, and it doesn’t work. When she looks for the bower again, she can’t find it, because, as she realizes, she is now being the prince in the story of the Sleeping Beauty, and there is no Beauty in the bower to draw the prince on with the light of her dreaming spirit. She can’t be two people at once, both the questing prince and the dreaming princess, both a poet and his fairy inspiration, and so she never arrives. This was the “first of all my losses” (l. 300), the speaker says, and it prefigured many more. It is the loss of a poetic world and a poetic subject, lost because she can’t fill both roles that the story requires. The speaker describes herself at the poem’s end as weary and waiting, just as four-year-old Elizabeth Barrett was when she “beguiled many a weary hour” with daydreams of romance, and as Rossetti’s speakers typically are: this is the state which for both women, apparently, induces poetry. But she has found that there is no place for herself in her daydreams. Barrett Browning said that the incident described in “The Lost Bower” had really happened, and her poems testify that, metaphorically at any rate, it really had.5 The same patterns appear in crucial places in Rossetti’s poetic career. The necessary pairing or doubling of damsel and knight is the subject of the two enigmatic lines of her first recorded verse, composed before she could write: “Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.” And in “The Dead City,” which opened her first collection of poetry, the speaker moves like a questing prince into the heart of imaginative experience and is balked just when it is time to find and rescue the Sleeping Beauty. Like the speakers of “The Deserted Garden” and “The Lost Bower,” she (or perhaps he) wanders boldly through the woods alone “with a careless hardihood”; she eventually finds within an empty city a palace decked for feasting that anticipates in its particular luxuries the world of Pre-Raphaelite sensuousness and art that Rossetti was later to describe in Goblin Market. Everyone at the feast has been turned to stone, but she cannot revive them with a kiss: all the young people are paired off already and their gaze is strange and unwelcoming. She averts her eyes in fear, the palace vanishes, and the poem ends with the assertion that this imaginative quest was not for her: “What was I that I should see / So much hidden mystery?”6 The problem is not only or even primarily one of narrative, although it is articulated most clearly in terms of plot. The Victorian woman poet has to be two things at once, or in two places, whenever she tries to locate herself within the poetic world. Her problem may be said to begin, oddly enough, with the fact that for the Victorians writing poetry seemed like woman’s work, even though only men were supposed to do it. Critics liked simple,

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homely poetic subjects and language and sincere, spontaneous expressions of feeling—the artless spontaneity, in short, which is still assumed by critics who should know better to be characteristic of women. The enormous popularity of Tennyson’s In Memoriam owed a great deal to the scenes of domestic pathos—widows, widowers, grieving mothers, and the like—that belong in women’s sphere. Male Victorian poets worried that they might in effect be feminizing themselves by withdrawing into a private world. Arnold tried to exorcise this fear in Sohrab and Rustum. Bulwer-Lytton enraged Tennyson by jeering at him with the epithet, “School-Miss Alfred.” But Tennyson’s most potent figures for the artist are female; the poor mill girl in Browning’s Pippa Passes is a Shelleyan poet; and Shelley himself in Arnold’s memorable formulation becomes a “beautiful and ineffectual angel”—just like a woman.7 The association of poetry and femininity, however, excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves—Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning’s Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold’s Iseult of Brittany—represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere (although honor and fame might in time return him to it), but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. (When Elizabeth Bishop makes the reversal in “The Gentleman of Shalott” the result is a very un-Victorian sort of comedy.) We can formulate the problem like this: a man’s poem which contains a female self-projection shows two distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman’s poem on the same model, the two would blur into one. Furthermore, it’s not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that the style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and

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Sullivan’s Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn’t write poems because she is a poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning’s works that “a woman and her book are identical.” In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity—was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, “ . . . and I love you too.” When Aurora Leigh crowns herself with an ivy wreath in secret anticipation of poetic fame, she looks to the admiring Romney like a work of art, not the artist she means to become (see Aurora Leigh, 2, ll. 59–64). Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes a woman and a sonnet as interchangeably self-enclosed and self-admiring: the woman is “subtly of herself contemplative”; the sonnet is “of its own arduous fulness reverent.”8 How does one tell them apart? Christina Rossetti was an artist’s model as well as an artist, and she says in a sad little poem called “A Wish”: “I wish I were a song once heard / But often pondered o’er” (ll. 3–4). As we can see in Tennyson’s The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to the Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional—and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity—narcissism, passivity, submission, silence—most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write? Where male writers have two figures in poems, for women it often happens either that one of the two disappears and ruins the economy of the poem, like the Sleeping Beauty in “The Lost Bower” and “The Dead City,” or else that the two collapse into one. A simple example of the collapsing of subject and object is women’s use of flowers, which traditionally represent female objects of male desire. Women poets tend to identify with the flower. Barrett Browning flatly equates a fading rose with a failed poet in “A Lay of the Early Rose” and sympathizes equally with both. Rossetti’s “The Solitary Rose” congratulates a flower that is fortunate enough to be unseen and therefore unplucked; the rose is like Wordsworth’s violet by a mossy stone considered from the violet’s point of view, and the poem is a literal presentation of what Rossetti’s great carpe diem poem, The Prince’s Progress, later presents figuratively—a “gather ye rosebuds” from the point of view of an ungathered

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rose. On a larger scale, however, as Margaret Homans has shown, nineteenthcentury women writers fear and resist identification with nature: nature for women is not the maternal other, in relation to whom the Romantic poet defined his poetic identity, but—as the mother—always a possible self.10 But nature doesn’t write, just as mothers don’t write (in the world as Rossetti and the young Elizabeth Barrett experienced it), and poems don’t write, and the forlorn damsel can’t rescue herself. In “Winter: My Secret” Rossetti identifies with the teasing incommunicativeness of the season: like winter, her speaker won’t speak. When the woman poet looks for something that can stand in the same relation of significant difference to her within a poem that a female figure stands in to a man, the equation often reads: a male poet is to a woman as a female poet is to a child or an animal. Tennyson in In Memoriam compares his loss to that of a girl whose lover has died, and calls the girl a “meek, unconscious dove.”11 Barrett Browning, in contrast, writes about real doves (“My Doves”), which like Tennyson’s young woman are less intellectual and closer to God and nature than the poet is. When her cocker spaniel, Flush, appears in her poems he behaves like a woman, spending long days indoors, filled with love and sympathy, watching tenderly and patiently by a bedside, a “low” creature who “leads to heights of love” (“Flush or Faunus”). Rossetti’s animals are generally male, like Flush, but like the women portrayed by PreRaphaelite men they are compellingly attractive and yet somewhat repulsive, mysterious, and inhuman: the lover whom Rossetti affectionately compares to a blind buzzard and a mole in “A Sketch,” the sexy, self-satisfied crocodile in “My Dream,” and the goblins in Goblin Market. Animal poems have helped to confine Barrett Browning and Rossetti to the women’s and children’s section of the literary world. But the animals don’t come just from emotional hunger, or sexual repression, or cultural pressure toward certain acceptable female subjects: they are generated by the need in certain kinds of poems for someone or something to take the woman’s role in relation to the speaker. Barrett Browning and Rossetti both wrote long poems in which they make the poet a questing male figure and then take the side of the passive female object against the ostensible protagonist. In Barrett Browning’s The Poet’s Vow, a woman deserted by a male poet posthumously denounces him, and in Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress our sympathies are directed toward the waiting princess who dies before the dilatory, self-indulgent prince arrives. But such a strongly gendered identification with imagination’s object, in direct antagonism to the questing figure or the poet who imagines, takes it for granted that poets and questers are male. Recent women poets have taken a more radically revisionist approach to traditional stories of this sort, making poems precisely out of the act of revising—from a woman’s point of

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view—the male versions of the stories;12 but Barrett Browning and Rossetti don’t do this. In their revisionary stories the crucial shift in point of view is incomplete and usually concealed, and Victorian readers apparently never saw it. In Lady Geraldine’s Courtship Barrett Browning makes an interesting attempt to split her identification between a male poet and a female object, but as a result the poem loses the articulation and psychological tension that is generated by difference. She tries to equalize the two figures and participate equally in both. The poet is poor and lowly born, but male and a poet, and he is the speaker. Lady Geraldine is rich and noble and the active agent of the plot, but she is the object of desire and represents the subjects (nature, beauty, and the like) about which poems are written. She owns a garden of art. In the center of that garden, moreover, there is a statue of a sleeping woman, representing Silence, but Lady Geraldine argues that the statue represents the power of meaning to “ ‘exceed the special symbol’ ” (l. 121) embodying it: that is, a silent work of art in female form says more than speech does. Lady Geraldine herself is both a singer and a song: “Oh, to see or hear her singing,” says the enamored poet-narrator, “For her looks sing too” (ll. 173–174). This is the only one of Barrett Browning’s ballad-narratives with a happy ending: the lady takes the initiative, the lovers marry, the two roles merge. This may be the ultimate narcissistic fantasy of the nineteenth-century woman poet, in which she imagines herself enacting both roles perfectly at the same time rather than, as in “The Lost Bower,” failing in both. That the poem represents a fantasy of wish fulfillment is suggested by the fact that it was written very easily, much of it in a last-minute rush to meet a printer’s deadline, and perhaps too by its enormous popularity.13 It is in Barrett Browning’s and Rossetti’s amatory sonnet sequences, however, that we find speakers who most clearly locate themselves in two opposite parts of the poems at once. Here the woman poet-speaker plays both roles whose opposition had traditionally generated such sonnets: the self-asserting speaker and the silent object of his desire. The speaker in Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese speaks and desires like a male sonneteer, but she is also responding as a woman to male voices—not just her lover’s but those of a long poetic tradition. This relation to tradition is even clearer in Rossetti’s Monna Innominata, since each poem is preceded by a quotation from the sonnets of Dante and Petrarch. In both sequences the roles often jarringly conflict: as object of love, the woman should be beautiful, distant, and unquestionably desirable, and she disturbs and embarrasses the reader when she presents herself as subject as well as object of desire and when her sense of her inadequacy as an object of love is expressed in the selfdenigrating humility that traditionally belongs to the male lover-speaker.14

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Elsewhere, Rossetti suggests that it is a transgression for a woman to speak her love. “But this once hear me speak,” a woman says to her lover, although she knows that “a woman’s words are weak; / You should speak, not I” (“Twice,” ll. 7–8). Instead of listening, however, the lover looks—he looks at her heart and breaks it. A similar but usually less problematic merging of roles appears when the speaker’s voice comes from in or beyond the grave to which men’s poetry so often relegates women. The poet is necessarily doubling roles whenever she speaks from the place where only silence should be—the place of poetry’s object, not that of the speaking subject—but these poems, unlike the amatory sonnet sequences, are constructed more fully in response to male poems than in imitation of them. Barrett Browning gives a narrative context to such a situation in The Poet’s Vow, where the woman whom a male poet abandoned because he loved nature more writes out an accusation and has it sent to him with her corpse. “I left thee last, a child at heart, A woman scarce in years. I come to thee, a solemn corpse Which neither feels nor fears. I have no breath to use in sighs; They laid the dead-weights on mine eyes To seal them safe from tears.” [ll. 416–22]

She is responding, of course, to Wordsworth: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.15

She appropriates Wordsworth’s speaker’s power of language and applies to herself his descriptions both of the woman (she does not feel or see or move) and of himself (she does not fear, her eyes are sealed as his spirit was). But she is dead.

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Like the woman in The Poet’s Vow, Rossetti’s speakers are often situated at or beyond the border between waking and sleeping, life and death: a place where the female object of desire can become, for a long transitional moment, subject and speaker. A paradigm of this appears in the first issue of the PreRaphaelite magazine, The Germ, which contains two poems on facing pages: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “My Sister’s Sleep,” which tells how the speaker’s sister died in her sleep, and his own sister’s “Dream Land”—about a woman who has traveled to a deathlike land of dreams in a progression like that which is described with unctuous delectation in “My Sister’s Sleep.”16 And in what may be Rossetti’s most famous lyric, “Song: When I Am Dead, My Dearest,” the speaker thinks about what would happen if she were to die and becomes a legitimate object of song: When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree. [ll. 1–4]

She won’t hear the songs or see the flowers; and she won’t care. The strangeness of the poem comes from the fact that it centers not on the mourning lover’s consciousness but on that of the dead beloved, in which the memory of the lover will have ceased to matter and might even disappear. And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. [ll. 13–16]

We miss the full resonance of this lyric unless we recognize it not just as self-pity or self-abnegation, but as a response to the long tradition of songs in celebration of women who are dead and silent. Rossetti in tacit reciprocity writes about the indifference of corpses, the grievances of ghosts, and women whose sleep of death will end in a happy resurrection beyond all earthly loves. The speaker in “Remember” will not mind—“if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once I had” (ll. 11–12)—that her lover forgets her; “At Home” is the lament of a ghost shut out from the home that has forgotten her; in “After Death” the speaker recalls with pleasure that a man who had not loved her during her life pitied her when she died; the eponymous ghost in “The Poor Ghost” is drawn

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back by her lover’s tears only to discover that his grief has abated and he would prefer her to stay in her grave; and “Sleeping at Last” finds solace in the thought of being “out of sight of friend and of lover” in the grave. Many of Rossetti’s most interesting and successful poems merge the traditionally opposite roles of the poetic speaker and the silent object in this way, and they may seem self-enclosed and solipsistic—as if the speaker were speaking only to herself, as in a sense she is—unless we reinstate the silent other who is present only by implication: the male poet who spoke first. One might expect women to be more comfortable in devotional poetry, where gender would seem not to matter and where male speakers often take an essentially feminine role. But the difficulty arises here in a different form: religious poetry reinforced the impulses toward self-effacement and self-suppression that threatened women’s very existence as writers. For Barrett Browning and Rossetti, Christ can be a maternal as well as a masculine figure, and their submission to God the Father places them in the childish position from which Victorian women artists had to struggle to escape if they were to write at all. This throws their poems badly off balance, in comparison to poetry by men. For George Herbert, for instance, to recognize that he is God’s child does not make him childlike in other ways—that he is normally adult and self-dependent is in fact what gives meaning and dramatic force to the recognition. But for Victorian women there is no such clear disjunction between their religious and their social roles. In the writings of both Rossetti and Barrett Browning, religion sanctions the life-weariness, the acceptance of inactivity, and the willing subsidence toward death which often appears in poems by male Victorian poets too, but which the men present with a countering element of resistance that is expressed either tonally or through a dramatic frame—in “Tithonus” and “Tears, Idle Tears,” for instance, “Andrea del Sarto,” or Empedocles on Etna. Here again, where men’s poetry has two aspects, women’s has only one. (It’s no accident that Rossetti’s most successful religious poem is “Up-Hill,” which is composed entirely of a dialogue between speakers of no apparent gender.) Oppositions are more drastic in the women’s religious poetry, choices more absolute. When they conceive of the world that stands in opposition to God as female, it appeals to them not as a sexual opposite, a possible object of desire, but as an unacceptable potential self; Rossetti describes the world as a beautiful woman who is revealed at night to be a hideous fiend and wants to make the speaker equally hideous: “Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell” (“The World,” l. 14). Like the male Victorian poets, speakers in Rossetti’s religious poems lament their emotional aridity; unlike their male contemporaries, however, they lament their speechlessness too: “I have no wit, no words, no tears” (“A Better Resurrection,” l. 1); “What would I give for words, if only words would come!” (“What Would I Give!” l. 4). If she could, she would speak her

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own sinfulness, but “if I should begin / To tell it all, the day would be too small / To tell it in” (“Ash Wednesday [‘My God, my God, have mercy on my sin’],” ll. 2–4)—and so she does not tell it. It is perhaps surprising that neither of these women poets made much radical use of the dramatic monologue, the primary generic innovation of the Victorian period, which exploits the problematic nature of the speaking subject and would therefore seem to offer an opportunity either to escape or to explore problems of gender. But the women’s dramatic monologues are different from the men’s. The women seem usually to sympathize with their protagonists, and neither frame them with irony as Browning does nor distance and at least partly objectify them like Tennyson by using characters with an independent literary existence. The women did not find figures in literature or mythology or history through whom they could express in an apparently dramatic and impersonal manner feelings that they did not wish directly to avow. Nor do they show off their own virtuosity the way Browning does in “My Last Duchess,” for instance: we are not made aware of the poet signaling to us from behind the speaker’s back. Once again, that is, we find that where men’s poems have two sharply differentiated figures—in dramatic monologues, the poet and the dramatized speaker—in women’s poems the two blur together. Browning’s dramatic monologues usually create a collusion between poet and reader that presupposes shared values and responses which enable the reader to spy out the poet signaling from behind the mask; women could not expect to evoke such collusion and seldom tried. In fact, unless a woman poet’s mask was male, or exceedingly bizarre (Barrett Browning’s infanticidal black American slave, for instance, in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”), she might not be perceived as wearing a mask at all. How could she be, if women are poems, not poets, and speak spontaneously and sincerely? When Rossetti assumed a dramatic mask of her own invention to complain about woman’s lot in “The Lowest Room” and “A Royal Princess,” her brother Dante Gabriel objected because the voice in the poems was not the voice that he was accustomed to think of as her own, and he didn’t like it—“falsetto muscularity,” he called it, and said that it derived from Mrs. Browning;17 and yet he didn’t think of the poems as dramatic either. He didn’t want his sister to speak in any voice except the one he chose to consider her own. Like their other works, the women’s dramatic monologues were expected to be, and were almost always perceived as being, univocal. * * * Emily Brontë, whose poetry was almost unknown in the nineteenth century and seems in most respects totally detached from the Victorian context in

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which Barrett Browning’s and Rossetti’s is so thoroughly embedded, nonetheless presents the woman poet’s situation in similar ways. The speaker in “I saw thee, child, one summer’s day,” for instance, is a vision-bestowing spirit; and while many of Brontë’s poems appear to be dramatic lyrics spoken by characters in the Gondal saga, that context is available to us, if at all, only through scholarly reconstruction, and the poems generally offer even fewer indications of authorial distance than Barrett Browning’s or Rossetti’s. The story of the damsel and the knight, Sleeping Beauty and the questing Prince, provides much of the basic structure of the Gondal world of Byronic exile, wandering, captivity, and ambiguous rescue. And although the same roles can be taken by both men and women and the gender of speakers is often unclear, two of the latest, longest, and best poems describe the rescue or awakening of a woman as an imposition of male imaginative dominance. In “Ah! why, because the dazzling sun,” the speaker’s visionary experience is dispelled when the stars that have looked into her eyes in a happy mutuality are driven away by the sun’s violent intrusion into her bedroom: “Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight / His fierce beams struck my brow.”18 She hides her closed eyes in the pillow, but It would not do—the pillow glowed And glowed both roof and floor, And birds sang loudly in the wood, And fresh winds shook the door. [ll. 33–36]

She is forced to become the center of Nature’s awakening by the “hostile” and “blinding” light of an alien imagination which destroys her own. Essentially the same story is told and retold six months later as a Gondal episode in “Silent is the House—all are laid asleep,” which begins with a brief, mysterious struggle for the position of central consciousness. The first stanza introduces in the third person the speaker of the second and third stanzas: a woman, apparently, who waits at her window every night for “the Wanderer” (l. 8) and speaks defiance of those who may scorn and spy but will never know about the “angel” (l. 12) who nightly visits her. Her defiance appears to be vain, however, since she is immediately displaced as speaker by a man named Julian who tells how he found in his dungeons a beautiful prisoner, A. G. Rochelle, whom at first he cruelly scorned. Julian reports Rochelle’s account of the “ ‘messenger of Hope’ ” (l. 67) who has come to her every night, like the Wanderer-angel to the speaker of the opening stanzas, bringing visions of “ ‘the Invisible, the Unseen’ ” (l. 81); but then he takes over as narrator again to tell how he “watched her” (l. 93) like the spies defiantly imagined by the

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earlier speaker, fell in love, overcame the temptation to keep her imprisoned, and finally freed her and won her love—and (although he doesn’t mention this) ended her visions. As in “Ah! why, because the dazzling sun,” the woman’s visionary power disappears under the gaze of an intruder-rescuer—is it rescue or rape?—that objectifies and transforms her. For Brontë, the story of the damsel and the knight is the story of the female subject’s displacement into the position of the erotic object of male imagination, and she makes poems out of the struggle between them. In America the same situation produced different results. The contradiction in the double role of the woman poet appears in Emily Dickinson’s work less as a difficulty to be evaded or overcome than as an essential organizing principle; Dickinson read Barrett Browning’s work with great attention, and perhaps it taught her how to go beyond itself. Even more than Rossetti, Dickinson likes to situate her speakers in or beyond the grave, and they characteristically identify with flowers, children, smallness, powerlessness, and silence; but at the same time they implicitly or ironically assert their power in revolt against the patriarchal universe, and the tension between these opposing attitudes is essential both to the poems’ meaning and to their form—the smallness and apparent childishness of the verses (and the fact that Dickinson did not publish them) in conjunction with their explosive force. Furthermore, Dickinson went far beyond her British counterparts in exploring the possibility of an absolute equality, or even identity, between subject and object; her explorations suggest that the result would be a horrifying stalemate and may help us to understand why Barrett Browning and Rossetti (who psychologically and poetically were much more conventional than Dickinson) and even Brontë never dropped the essential point of difference that is created in poetry by gender. Like Eyes that looked on Wastes— Incredulous of Ought But Blank—and steady Wilderness— Diversified by Night— Just Infinities of Nought— As far as it could see— So looked the face I looked upon— So looked itself—on Me— I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine— The Misery a Compact

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As hopeless—as divine— Neither—would be absolved— Neither would be a Queen Without the Other—Therefore We perish—tho’ We reign—19

Since both are the damsel waiting for rescue as well as potential knights, neither can rescue the other and they remain frozen in an intensified and more terrible version of the changeless, eventless condition in which Barrett Browning daydreamed and Rossetti’s speakers wait for God. In “I would not paint—a picture” Dickinson considers the problematic position of the woman poet in her own art: is she artist, or audience, or instrument, or the work itself? She would like to be everything at once—the situation that Barrett Browning and Rossetti found both inevitable and impossible for most kinds of lyric poetry. Dickinson imagines this situation as highly precarious, offering the possibility of an exhilarating self-sufficiency that ends in self-destruction. Nor would I be a Poet— It’s finer—own the Ear— Enamored—impotent—content— The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!20

Being both poet and audience, both subject and object, would mean turning eroticism and aggression inward: both to marry (“dower”) and to “stun” oneself, to be “impotent” and yet to wield the tools (“bolts”) of violence—and to wield them against oneself. Recent American women poets have found other ways both to use and to evade the problematic situation of the woman poet as the Victorians experienced it. Subjects and emotions new to serious poetry and new ways of experiencing such familiar ones as love, exclusion, enclosure, and longing provide escape from patterns of relationship embedded in the structure of traditional English poetry. Sylvia Plath expresses rebellion and rage of a kind that Barrett Browning and Rossetti either turn inward against themselves, producing depression that sometimes comes close to despair, or else express indirectly in narrative and political poetry. Anne Sexton and others have done explicitly, aggressively, and forthrightly what Rossetti and Barrett Browning

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more timidly and unobtrusively tried to do, reinterpreting old stories from a woman’s point of view. Elizabeth Bishop transforms the passivity and the sense of enclosure, exclusion, frustration, and impotence that debilitated so much of the work of nineteenth-century women poets into images of exile and travel in which the poet becomes an endlessly questing spirit; and exotic animals and peasants serve the function in Bishop’s poetry that animals and children do in Barrett Browning’s and Rossetti’s, standing in the relation to the woman poet that women have stood in to men. And in writing about love between women it may be possible to escape the shadow cast by the traditional relations between subject and object in amatory poetry. Rossetti and Barrett Browning, however, were hindered and often debilitated by a situation which Dickinson and later poets were able to exploit or transcend. They sometimes tried to use the problematic nature of woman as speaking subject in an attempt to explore and to protest against women’s roles both in poems and in society, but since the surface of their poetry—diction, subject matter, and (at least apparently) tone—did not contradict what Victorian women were expected to say, their shifts in point of view and revisions of old stories generally went unobserved and unencouraged. Rossetti stopped trying to rebel: in her devotional writings she finds an appropriate place for a conventional Victorian woman’s voice. Barrett Browning, on the other hand, turned after Sonnets from the Portuguese away from the old poetic situations—that is, from the lyric tradition—to narrative form and highly topical contemporary subjects and made her revisionary view of the world defiantly, if incompletely and intermittently, explicit. In Aurora Leigh she works the problem through in terms of plot. At the beginning of the poem Aurora is the forlorn damsel, a dispossessed orphan in a rigidly patriarchal world, but by the end she has become a poet and a knight. First she rescues Marian Erle, a damsel in distress, and then she rescues—by marriage, as knights and princes used to do—Romney Leigh, the man who had tried at various times to rescue both Marian Erle and Aurora herself, and had been rebuffed by both of them. But the humiliation, blinding, and subjugation of Romney that makes the happy ending possible is not a solution to the woman poet’s difficulties; it is her fantasy of revenge. It suggests that for women to speak, men must be forcibly silenced; for women to be heard rather than looked at—to be artists rather than works of art—men must be blinded. Similarly, in Rossetti’s Goblin Market a girl ventures forth and rescues her sister from the thralldom of goblin sexuality, and later the two sisters with their daughters set up a society that apparently excludes men. Neither of the two major Victorian women poets developed any better solution than this punitive reversal of roles or rejection of men on the one hand, enacted in narrative rather than lyric, or the retreat into feminine submissiveness and self-suppression represented by Rossetti’s

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devotional poetry on the other. They could imagine an androgynous ideal— Barrett Browning celebrated George Sand in two bold sonnets as a mixture of male and female qualities, and Rossetti wrote movingly of the one escape from the restrictions of gender ordained by Christianity: “in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one”21—and they sometimes blurred the gender of their poetic speakers. In narrative and political poetry they could thematize and redefine the terms in which the speaking subject located herself within a poem. But despite the substantial although flawed success of Sonnets from the Portuguese and Monna Innominata, and the many excellent lyrics in which Rossetti implicitly responds to the male tradition, neither Barrett Browning nor Rossetti fully solved within their lyric poetry the problem of the damsel and the knight.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character” (1820), in “Two Autobiographical Essays by Elizabeth Barrett,” ed. William S. Peterson, Browning Institute Studies 2 (1974): 123. 2. Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 22 July 1842, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, 3 vols. (n.p., 1983), 2:7. 3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar offer most of these suggestions in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 545–49. The distinguished Victorian critic R. H. Hutton answers the question with the assertion that women’s imaginations cannot abstract themselves as men’s can from “the visible surface and form of human existence” (“Novels by the Authoress of ‘John Halifax,’ ” North British Review 29 [1858]: 467). 4. Barrett Browning, “The Deserted Garden,” The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (New York, 1900), ll. 17, 69–72; all further references to poems in this edition, identified by line number, will be included in the text. The ballad of Edwin and Angelina appears in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, chap. 8. 5. Barrett Browning to H. S. Boyd, 4 October 1844, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1898), 1:201. 6. Christina Rossetti, “The Dead City,” The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1911), ll. 2, 273–74; all further references to poems in this edition, identified by line number, will be included in the text. The verse about Cecilia is given in William’s introductory memoir, p. xlix. “The Dead City” first appeared in Verses, printed by Rossetti’s grandfather, G. Polidori (London, 1847). 7. Donald S. Hair notes the critical enthusiasm for In Memoriam’s domestic themes and images in Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson’s Poetry (Toronto, 1981), pp. 7–10. Bulwer-Lytton jeered at Tennyson in “The New Timon,” and Tennyson responded with similar insults in “The New Timon, and the Poets.” Matthew Arnold’s phrase about the angel first appeared in his essay “Byron”; see The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich.,

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1960–77), 9:237. As Ellen Moers points out, “The spontaneous, the instinctive, the natural, the informal, the anticlassical, and the artless: all these terms of art have been associated with the woman’s voice in literature from the beginning of time. They are also applied to the start of modern literature that we call Romanticism, and that cannot be separated from the raising of the woman’s voice in letters” (Literary Women [Garden City, N.Y., 1976], p. 163). 8. See W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Iolanthe: or, The Peer and the Peri, arranged by Berthold Tours (London, n.d.), pp. 19–20; see George Eliot, Middlemarch (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 166; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York, 1902), 12:1; Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 10 January 1845, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 1:3; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty,” “Introduction” (in “The House of Life”), The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti, rev. ed. (London, 1911). There are many similar examples. Eric S. Robertson coveted a fine copy of Katherine Philips’ poems: “I indulged myself with another peep at the ‘matcheless Orinda,’ still longing to possess and love what so many reverent hands had fondled” (English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies, with Illustrative Extracts [London, 1883], p. 2). An unidentified earlier critic wrote: “Beauty is to a woman what poetry is to a language, and their similarity accounts for their conjunction; for there never yet existed a female possessed of personal loveliness who was not only poetical in herself but the cause of poetry in others” (“The Female Character,” Fraser’s Magazine 7 [1833]: 601); that the latter part of this sentence says the opposite of what it apparently intends reflects the silliness of the thought. Gubar discusses the conception of women as works of art in “ ‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 243–63. 9. John Woolford points this out in “EBB: Woman and Poet,” Browning Society Notes 9 (Dec. 1979): 4. 10. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J., 1980). For brief discussions of women poets’ use of flowers, see Cora Kaplan, Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets (New York, 1975), pp. 20–24, and Alicia Ostriker, “Body Language: Imagery of the Body in Women’s Poetry,” in The State of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 256–57. 11. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam 6, l. 25, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks (London, 1969). 12. Ostriker discusses the remaking of old myths by twentieth-century women poets in “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” Signs 8 (Autumn 1982): 68–90. She notes that “feminist revisionism differs from Romantic revisionism” in that “it accentuates its argument, in order to make clear that there is an argument” (p. 87)—which is just what Barrett Browning and Rossetti do not do. 13. To make the two volumes of Poems (1844) of equal length, “there was nothing for it but to finish a ballad poem called ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ which was lying by me, and I did so by writing, i.e. composing, one hundred and forty lines last Saturday! I seemed to be in a dream all day! Long lines too—with fifteen syllables in each!” (Barrett Browning to H. S. Boyd, 1 August 1844, The Letters of

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:177). On the poem’s popularity, see Alethea Hayter, Mrs. Browning: A Poet’s Work and Its Setting (London, 1962), pp. 85–86. 14. See my “The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese,” ELH 48 (Summer 1981): 351–67; Homans, “ ‘Syllables of Velvet’: Dickinson, Rossetti, and the Rhetorics of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 11 (Fall 1985): 569–93; and Moers’ discussion of nineteenthcentury women’s love poetry in Literary Women, pp. 162–72. 15. William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2d ed., 5 vols. (Oxford, 1952), 2:216. 16. See The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art, no. 1 (Jan. 1850; Portland, Maine, 1898), pp. 20, 21. Jerome J. McGann attributes Rossetti’s idea of the sleep that follows death to the millenarian doctrine of “Soul Sleep” in “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti,” Critical Inquiry 10 (Sept. 1983): 133–41. 17. Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Christina Georgina Rossetti, 3 December 1875, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1967), 3:1380. 18. Emily Brontë, “Ah! why, because the dazzling sun,” The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York, 1941), ll. 21–22; all further references to poems in this work will be included in the text. Homans gives a somewhat different analysis of Brontë’s poems about visionary visitants in Women Writers and Poetic Identity, pp. 110–22. 19. Emily Dickinson, “Like Eyes that looked on Wastes” (458), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1955). 20. Dickinson, “I would not paint—a picture” (505), The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 21. Christina Rossetti, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (New York, [1879]), p. 32.

J. HILLIS MILLER

Naming and Doing: Speech Acts in Hopkins’s Poems

I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God . . . (P 52)

I

pose a cascade of questions to initiate this essay. Are these lines just quoted from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” a speech act? Do they do rather than merely say? Or are they no more at most than the report or “mention” of a past speech act, the naming of it, the naming, moreover, of a speech act that was not spoken, but uttered inwardly by a silent speech that was “truer than tongue”? Is saying yes in this way a performative act of language in the strict sense? If not, what is it? More generally, is there a performative dimension to Hopkins’s poems, for example in the late sonnets? Did Hopkins have a theory of speech acts, explicit or implicit? Finally, is my posing of these questions itself a speech act? Can I speak of speech acts without performing a speech act myself? This present essay is a return to Hopkins that echoes previous returns going back to almost the first paper I published, thirty-four years ago, in ELH: “The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins.” To turn again to Hopkins is to remember and perhaps to renew the sense I had then of an identification of myself, by way of the words Hopkins wrote, with the inner

From Religion and Literature 22, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1990): 173–91. Copyright © 1990 by the Department of English, University of Notre Dame.

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life of Hopkins, back in those days when I was a “critic of consciousness.” To turn again to Hopkins is like coming home, since I feel so much at home in his work, can move around almost as easily within it as I do in my own house. Or, rather, I turn to Hopkins with a mixture of homecoming and nostalgia, in the root sense of “home pain,” Heimweh, Sehnsucht, melancholy, homesickness for a lost innocence when I thought of reading literature as the happy merger of two minds by way of words that provide transparent cognitive and affective access to the mind of another. My words in that old essay reported my experience of insight into the life of another, long dead. Those words claimed a successful introspection d’autrui [“introspection of another”], in Charles du Bos’s phrase for it. Were those words merely descriptive, constative, or cognitive, or were they in some way constitutive, “the creation of the self in Gerard Manley Hopkins” in a different sense, that is, as a performative making by way of the trope of prosopopoeia of what they seemed merely to report? This is the question that lies at the heart of this present essay, as it has, in one way or another, in all my study of literature since then. I turn, then, back to Hopkins. A frequent temporal structure of Hopkins’s poems, it is easy to see, is that of the repetition of a past locution, apparently a speech act, that is remembered and renewed, perhaps performed again, in the present. In “The Wreck of the Deutschland” this structure is triple: the tall nun’s saying yes to the appearance of Christ at the moment of her death in the wreck repeats the poet’s own past saying yes “O to lightning and lashed rod.” That is then repeated again in the writing of the poem and in the moment when Christ appears to the poet’s “fancy”: . . . Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she . . . There then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head . . . (P 60)

What then do I mean by a speech act? I mean a form of words that does not name something but makes something happen. Speech acts, or, as the region of them of most importance here are called, “performatives,” include promises, engagements, bets, excuses, oaths, orders, and so on, each with its own special problematic and way of functioning. As J. L. Austin, the founding father of the science of speech acts, has observed, the usual grammatical form of a performative is a sentence in the first person present indicative: “I promise”; “I bet”; “I do”; “I order”; “I apologize”; “I accept”; “I shall.” On the other hand, it is possible that a piece of language lacking these distinguishing marks of the performative might nevertheless function as a performative. If so, it might take a sharp eye to spot a performative.

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Moreover, though the neat distinctions theorists of speech acts make have their heuristic value and their apparent conceptual necessity, they always break down when a rigorous inspection of examples is made. “Mention” of a word or phrase may always be slightly contaminated by some dimension of “use.” A constative, referential, or descriptive phrase may always have an obscure performative side, and vice versa. To say “I did say yes” not only describes a past speech act. It is also implicitly a new saying yes in the present. This is accomplished by the emphatic “did.” To say “did say yes,” is a way of saying, “Yes, I said yes.”1 But it is not only necessary to discriminate carefully among various kinds of performatives, to show that a promise does not work in quite the same way as an excuse, nor an oath as a bet. It is also necessary to distinguish performatives from closely adjacent forms of language that may or may not involve what is necessary for an efficacious performative, namely actually doing something with words. Such forms of language would include apostrophes, imperatives, injunctions, questions, commands, invocations, prayers, blessings, interjections like the “O” in Hopkins’s “I did say yes / O at lightning and lashed rod,” optatives, like the exceedingly strange past optative at the opening of “Henry Purcell,” in which another ejaculatory “O” also appears: “Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear / To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell” (P 80). This means “Let Purcell have fared well after his death.” In a letter to Bridges Hopkins explained that “Have is the sing. imperative (or optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actual both in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one,” and he paraphrased the line to mean, “I hope Purcell is not damned for being a Protestant, because I love his genius” (L 174, 170). It is difficult to be certain that such speech acts have nothing of the performative about them, though they appear different. To Glendower’s boast, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” Hotspur responds: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?” (Henry IV, Part One, 3.1, 52–54), whereas the bride’s and bridegroom’s iterated “I do,” spoken in appropriate circumstances, does really always work to get the couple married. A prayer simply asks the deity to do something. It by no means ensures that God will do what he is prayed to do. An apostrophe merely addresses someone or something, with an explicit or implicit personification, as does in a slightly different way an invocation. Questions hardly seem to be performative. They simply interrogate. Nevertheless, each of these forms of language may have a performative aspect. The spirits may actually come from the vasty deep. Who knows beforehand? Is such a question “simply interrogative”? To ask a question demands an answer. Even the refusal to answer is an answer. A question establishes a field of discourse that defines the status of what is said or written thereafter.

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In that sense a question is a form of words that makes something happen. And a prayer or other form of direct address to God might be seen as in some way constraining God, at least in the minimal sense of putting him in the position of having to say yes or no to the prayer. Hopkins shows he well knew this in the slight tinge of cheeky insolence of the “sir” in the second line of “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend”: “But, sir, so what I plead is just.” To address God as “sir” is to speak to him as a schoolboy speaks to a teacher or as a man on trial and serving as his own lawyer speaks to a judge. The prosopopoeia that is an inextricable part of an apostrophe may be seen as a way of using words to make something happen, namely to give a face, a voice, and a name to entities that do not have these: the absent, the inanimate, or the dead.2 Even to address God as “Thou,” as in the first two lines of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “THOU mastering me / God! giver of breath and bread” (P 51), is to assume that God might answer back and to invite or even demand an answer. The “THOU” mingles apostrophe with prosopopoeia, the trope of address. All of these forms of speech act are clearly distinct from one another and from true performatives. At the same time there are tantalizing crossovers and overlappings that make it impossible to hold rigidly to the distinctions in any given case. Even so, one thing is sure: none of these forms of language simply names something, even though each may have a constative function along with its speech act function. My hypothetical starting place has been the assumption that Hopkins’s poems might well have a performative dimension, but before trying to see in detail if that is really the case, two further problems must be identified. It should be remembered, first, that Austin explicitly excludes poetry from the realm of efficacious speech acts. Poetry, for him, like some other frivolous uses of language, cannot ever be a “serious” way of doing things with words. “[A] performative utterance,” says Austin, “will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (22). It may have been some fear that, compared for example with the priest’s transubstantiation of bread and wine in the Mass, or the priest’s work for the salvation of others and himself, poetry could not be other than frivolous that made Hopkins so anxious about his poetic vocation and its possible conflict with his vocation as a priest. If “to admire the stars is in itself indifferent” (S 166) then a poetry that does no more than describe beautiful things in nature, however powerfully, is also indifferent, “etiolated,” as Austin would say. So Hopkins feared, as he said in a letter to Bridges, that the writing of poetry would “interfere with [his] state and vocation” (L 24), and in a letter to Dixon he expresses unequivocally his conviction that the writing of poetry is a waste of time: “The question for me is not whether I am willing . . . to make a sacrifice of hopes of fame . . . , but whether I am not to

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undergo a severe judgment from God for the lothness I have shewn in making it, for the reserves I may have in my heart made, for the backward glances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of time the very compositions you admire may have caused and their preoccupation of the mind which belonged to more sacred or more binding duties, for the disquiet and the thoughts of vainglory they have given rise to” (C 88). On the other hand, Hopkins may have been anxious about his great gifts and clear calling as a poet for just the opposite reason, namely a fear that his poetry might really be performatively efficacious. Far from being trivially descriptive, his poetry might work, might make something happen. It might be a way of doing something with words. If that were the case, his poetry might be a species of dangerous and secular magic. It might be irregular, inassimilable to the performative rituals authorized for him as a priest. His poetry might perhaps even be sacrilegious or blasphemous. In a letter to Bridges of 1879 Hopkins said: “Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the only person that I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my heart sensibly and when he does I cannot always ‘make capital’ of it, it would be a sacrilege to do so” (L 66). Christ, it is safe to assume, is the only person Hopkins is in love with. “Sacrilege” is defined in The American Heritage Dictionary as “the misuse, theft, desecration, or profanation of anything consecrated to a deity or regarded as a sacred.” The word, says the dictionary, combines the roots sacer, “sacred,” with legere, to gather, pluck, steal. But legere in Latin also means “to read,” and the Indo-European root, leg- means “to collect, with derivatives meaning ‘to speak.’ ” The Greek word for word, logos, has the same root. An unattested Germanic word lekjaz would have meant “enchanter, one who speaks magic words.” The particular sacrilege involved in using religious feelings, the movement of the heart in response to Christ’s love, or God’s love as mediated by Christ, the Word, him whom “Heaven and earth are word of, worded by” (P 61), as material for poetry is not just any stealing of sacred things. It is a misreading or misspeaking, a misappropriation of the Word for profane uses, as an enchanter or magician misappropriates spiritual powers, constraining them to his own performative ends. Another way to identify this counter-fear on Hopkins’s part, not that poetry may be a trivial and inefficacious speech act, but the fear that it may be only too efficacious, is to remember that for Hopkins in the end each of us can do little toward his own salvation. Only God’s grace freely given can save fallen man with his inherent, inveterate turn or twist away from God and toward damnation. Hopkins’s theory of grace is complex and subtle. It is expressed in a series of not quite analogous analogies or vigorous figures. But all these metaphors are ways of defining grace as that action by God that “shifts” a person from one “pitch” or arbitrium (in the sense of radical

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disposition of the will) to another more in “correspondence” to God (S 148, 151). This “shift” changes one’s very selfhood and lifts it “through the gulf and void between pitch and pitch of being” (S 156). “Pitch” means here at least three things at once: “musical pitch,” “thrown,” as in “pitched past pitch of grief,” and “angle of the self away from or toward the absolute vertical of his possibility of being Christlike,” as in “pitch of a roof.” The work on man’s side in making grace efficacious is so slight, so small, so nearly equivalent to passive acquiescence, as scarcely to seem able to be defined as “performative” in the strict sense. Man’s acceptance of God’s grace would seem to be quite unlike a poetry seen as vigorously performative. Hopkins’s figure for the acceptance of grace is “saying yes,” which returns me to the question with which I began. Is “saying yes” a true performative? It would seem not. When I say, “yes, the sun is shining,” my statement seems purely descriptive, constative. It affirms that I name the way things are. To say that does not change things one whit. Almost all of the work of grace, changing man from less to more Christlike, comes from God’s side. Hopkins’s images for this stress the violence of what God does to man through grace. It is like being twisted or wrung, or like being beaten into a new shape on an anvil, or like being defeated in a wrestling match, or like being threshed, the grain violently separated from the chaff, or like being eaten or becoming what one eats, or, most violent and even shocking image of all, though still a perfectly traditional one, like a sexual act in which the soul, self, or “brain” “conceives” Christ, is filled with Christ, and so becomes Christlike: For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright. (P 65) . . . it is Christ in his member on the one side, his member in Christ on the other. It is as if a man said: That is Christ playing at me and me playing at Christ, only that it is no play but truth; That is Christ being me and me being Christ. (S 154)

Hopkins so stresses the quasi-physical violence involved in God’s action of grace that it would seem wholly inappropriate to think of it as in any way a performative speech act, that is, a way of doing things with words. In this God’s action of grace is like the original creative Fiat in his “Let there be light.” As Hopkins says, God’s grace completes the original work of creation. Grace, in Hopkins’s definition, is “any action, activity, on God’s part by which, in creating or after creating, he carries the creature to or towards the end of its being, which is its self-sacrifice to God and its salvation” (S 154).

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God’s Fiat lux might seem to be the very type or archtype of a proper performative, a way of doing things with words: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light” (Gen. 1.4). But it is easy to see that this by no means fits the definition of an efficacious performative as defined by Austin and other speech act theorists. For one thing, it is the report of a putative speech act, not the speech act itself: “And God said: Let there be light.” The Bible tells us what Moses says God said. Though all performatives, it can be argued, are citations, for example when the words of the marriage ceremony are repeated in each new marriage, nevertheless no one in his right mind would claim that Moses’ repetition of God’s words repeats the act of creation and makes light anew. The problem of translation or what might be called “babelization” also arises here. In what language did God say, “Let there be light”? In Hebrew, Latin, English, or what? Even Moses’ “original” Hebrew may be the displaced report and translation of a Fiat spoken in an unknown and forever unknowable tongue. Moreover, as Augustine long ago recognized in Book Eleven of The Confessions, there is great difficulty in thinking how God’s speech, that must have the all-at-once quality of eternity, a time out of time to which all times are copresent, can get translated or transposed into human time where words must follow one another in temporal sequence and where meaning depends on rhythmic phonemic differentiations within time. Augustine’s example is not only the Fiat lux, but also God’s “This is my beloved son,” in the New Testament.3 Of both examples of God’s speech, Augustine affirms that “it is not a case of first one thing being said and finished, then another thing so that all can be said: no, all things are said together and eternally” (262). The first creative act of all, moreover, is not said in the Bible to require words at all: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1.1). Most of all, however, God’s Fiat lux does not fit the definition of a performative because: 1) In it knowledge and power, the power of the word, are in perfect congruence, whereas a performative as defined by Austin, Derrida,4 de Man, and others is a form of language in which knowledge and act are asymmetrical, never in perfect harmony. God is omniscient and omnipotent. In him knowledge and power go hand in hand. God’s perfect foreknowledge, combined with his limitless power, meant that he knew exactly what was going to happen when he said, “Let there be light.” A true performative, on the other hand, is a contingent act in the human and social world that makes something happen all right, though it can never be known for sure beforehand exactly what that something will be. There is always an element of contingency in a true performative. 2) God’s Fiat lux is entirely autonomous and solitary. It does not depend on anything or anyone else for its efficacy, whereas the efficacy of a performative speech act in the Austinian sense depends on

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the presence of a whole set of social conventions, agreements, contracts, laws, constitutions. It depends on the ratification and approval of other people in the right circumstances. A true performative, in addition, is always an iteration, even though the act it performs is unique, for this time only. The efficacy of a marriage depends on the fact that the participants repeat just the right words in just the right circumstances, words that have been used innumerable times before. Moreover, a true performative, somewhat paradoxically, always in one way or another demands outward material embodiment for its efficacy, even though it is a way of doing things with words rather than with tools or with weapons. Nevertheless, a performative uttered silently to myself, a promise or an oath, would not be efficacious. I cannot commit myself to a mortgage by silently promising myself to make the payments. I must take pen in hand and write my signature on a document, or I must utter aloud the right words before appropriate witnesses, modulating air so as to leave a trace or mark on the material world. A true performative is always an intersubjective, social, and material phenomenon, whereas God can create light before creating man, nor is there mention of any other creature, earthly or divine, as necessary to the ratification of his act. God himself approves of his own act of creation: “And God saw the light that it was good” (Gen. 1.4). Nor is God’s Fiat lux the iteration of a form of words ratified by convention and used many times before. It is radically inaugural, said for the first and only time, once and for all. It is not without significance that God’s Fiat produces light, since light is the precondition for human knowing and seeing, therefore the precondition for those human performatives in which knowledge and power are asymmetrical. Nor can it be said that since God creates the world by means of Christ the Word, this means that the intersubjective and material conditions for an efficacious performative are present. Hopkins’s doctrine of the Trinity is a complex matter, as Hopkins specialists know. It involves the notion of a going forth of Christ from God in aeonian or angelic time as well as the actual Incarnation when Christ was conceived and then born into the created world. But for Hopkins there is never any doubt that God is three in one and that Christ has been part of God’s triune being from all time. From all time he was, and Christ with him, just as the whole creation could be destroyed and the Trinity would still be, three in one. The Incarnation, as a moment of the materialization of God, is a historical event occurring long after the creation and is not presupposed by the latter. To say (as of course Genesis does not), that God created the world by means of Christ the Word by no means makes the Fiat lux into a performative. To say that would be like accepting as a successful performative a marriage in which one person were bride or bridegroom, officiating priest or other authority, and witnesses, all three at

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once. Nor does God’s creating word need to be inscribed, materialized, and made public in the way a true human performative must. God so to speak speaks to himself, since there is no one else to hear him. Augustine speaks of “Your eternal word which is in silence” (262) and denies that God’s Fiat lux was sounded at all. God’s creating words do not need materialization in the way human performatives do to be efficacious, since they do not need to be witnessed, as for example a signature on a promissory note must be. It is a sign of the difficulty of understanding just what is at stake in Austin’s theory of performatives that God’s “Let there be light” is so often mistakenly cited as an example of a performative. The essential conditions of what Austin calls a “happy performative” are not at all fulfilled by God’s Fiat lux. If God’s acts of creation and grace are not performatives, neither, it would seem, to return to man, is man’s tiny action of accepting, saying yes, to what has been done to him. Hopkins agrees that, yes, “there must be something which shall be truly the creature’s in the work of corresponding with grace: this is the arbitrium, the verdict on God’s side, the saying Yes, the ‘doingagree’ . . .” (S 154). He stresses, however, the minimal strength, autonomy, or originating power involved in this saying yes. It is a response to a demand, a “correspondence,” a verdict in the sense of a speech making a choice between alternatives (e.g. between “guilty” and “innocent”), an aspiration in answer to an inspiration, a tiny sigh of breathing out in response to God’s all powerful creative breath. Though only “the aspiration in answer to his inspiration” (S 158) can complete the work of sacrifice and change the “Jackself ” into Christ, this is described as the “least sigh of desire” (S 155), as a “bare acknowledgment,” a “counterstress which God alone can feel” (S 158), for “even the sigh or aspiration itself is in answer to an inspiration of God’s spirit” (S 156). This least sigh is man’s “correspondence with grace and seconding of God’s designs” (S 197), but it is practically nothing in itself. It is like one of those fictitious entities in infinitesimal calculus: “And by this infinitesimal act the creature does what in it lies to bridge the gulf fixed between its present actual and worser pitch of will and its future better one” (S 155). If God’s acts in creating and in proffering grace are not performatives, neither, then, are man’s “least sighs” of correspondence to God’s grace. They do not independently make anything happen. Man’s saying yeses are heard only by God. They do not have the public quality requisite for a true performative. They may be spoken inwardly and so lack that additional essential requisite: embodiment, materialization, registration as a permanent mark in the world. Hopkins’s saying yes to God’s lightning and lashed rod was spoken “truer than tongue,” that is, unvoiced, silent, spoken inwardly. Hopkins’s poems, on the other hand, do contain a genuine performative component, as Hopkins, I am hypothesizing, feared they might and as he

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had reason to fear, given his anxious and exclusive focus on his own salvation and that of those in his care. How may that performative component be characterized? Here two further discriminations are necessary. First, it must be said that all Hopkins’s poems contain a strong constative, naming, descriptive component. The nature poems describe nature, though “describe” or “name” is a weak word, as any reader of Hopkins knows, for the dynamic mimesis of the inscapes of nature as they are inhabited and vitalized by Christ. But even late nature poems like “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” and “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” are, it could be argued, primarily descriptive, referential, mimetic. They tell the reader the way things are. In the so-called “terrible sonnets” Hopkins names his desperate inner state. These too are constative poems. Whatever there may be of the speech event or speech act in Hopkins’s poems, more particularly speech acts truly performative, will be intertwined with a strong constative component, sometimes naming of an imagined present (“Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- / built thoroughfare . . .” [P 105]), sometimes a past scene (“I caught this morning morning’s minion . . .” [P 69]). Second additional requisite discrimination: In searching Hopkins’s poems for their possible performative dimensions, it is necessary to identify carefully their addressees. There is a surprisingly wide variety here, and in many poems the addressee shifts, sometimes repeatedly, during the poem. Some of Hopkins’s poems are addressed boldly and directly to God: “Thou mastering me / God!” (P 51); “Thou art indeed just, Lord . . .” (P 106). Some are addressed to fictive, capitalized, personified entities, “Earth,” “Peace” or “Despair”: “Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape . . .” (P 90); “When will you ever, Peace, wild wood-dove, shy wings shut, / Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?” (P 85); “No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee” (P 99). Sometimes Hopkins addresses a particular person, Margaret in “Spring and Fall”: “Márgarét, are you grieving . . .” (P 88), or Robert Bridges in “To R. B.” Sometimes Hopkins appears to be speaking primarily to himself, so that the reader overhears the poet’s secret meditations, as in the “terrible sonnets”: “O what black hours we have spent / This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!” (P 101). Many of the poems, finally, seem to be addressed primarily to the reader, as though they were speeches or sermons delivered in public. Such poems would include many of the nature poems, for example “As kingfishers catch fire” (P 90), as well as more explicitly religious poems like “To what serves Mortal Beauty” (P 98). But of course all of the poems are in a sense addressed to the general reader, once they are written down and made public, which may explain why Hopkins was so loath

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to let his poems be published. To publish a poem addressed to God or to his own secret interior self, his “heart,” would be like publishing his private correspondence, even if that correspondence were, as Hopkins says in one of the more moving phrases in the sonnets of desolation, “cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away” (P 101). What forms of language pervasive in the poems are candidates for the identification of a performative dimension there, remembering that a performative by no means needs to take the form of a first person present indicative locution? Candidates would include imperatives, pleadings, interjections, prosopoetic apostrophes, and, most of all perhaps, all those poetic devices of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, those cunning sequences of words Hopkins called “vowelling on and vowelling off,” strongly marked and echoing sprung rhythm, and so on, that go in Hopkins’s poetry to make words into things and things that have power to do other things in their turn by a performative transformation that makes them embodied or materialized breathings, sighs, cries, saying yeses. Hopkins’s poems are punctuated by a multitude of “O’s,” “Oh’s,” and “Ah’s.” These are sometimes just ejaculatory interjections, the inarticulate cry that precedes, it may be, and is presupposed by, all articulate language: “I did say yes / O at lightning and lashed rod” (P 52); “Oh, / We lash with the best or worst / Word last!” (P 54); “Ah, touched in your bower of bone, / Are you!” (P 57); “O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth” (P 57); “Ah! there was a heart right!” (P 61); “Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy” (P 61); “Our King back, Oh, upon English souls!” (P 63). All those are in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” alone, but there are dozens more in the later poems. Here are a few: “Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—” (P 66); “O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!” (P 66); “Complete thy creature dear O where it fails” (P 68); “O half hurls earth for him” (P 70); “O if we but knew what we do” (P 78); “O fair, fair have fallen”; “Let him oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me!” (P 80); “Yet ah! Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu / Some good!” (P 85); “O is he dead then?” (P 86); “Ah well, God rest him . . .” (P 86); “O let them be left, wildness and wet” (P 89); “Ah, the heir / To his own selfbent so bound” (P 91); “But ah, but O thou terrible” (P 99: there are two more “O’s” in this poem alone); “O the mind, mind has mountains” (P 100); “Oh what black hours we have spent” (P 101); “O pity and indignation” (P 105); “Oh, the sots and thralls of lust / Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, / Sir, life upon thy cause” (P 107). Often the sentences containing “O” or “Ah” end with an apostrophe, that unvoiced mark of punctuation that indicates an exclamation or ejaculation. Sometimes, however, the “O” is the signal of the prosopopoeia of apostrophic address, often also marked by the mark of punctuation called an

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apostrophe. The distinction, in some cases, between interjection and apostrophe proper is not easy to maintain, for example in “O Deutschland, double a desperate Name! / O world wide of its good!” (P 58), where the “O” may be read as simply exclamatory or as an apostrophic address to the ship and the country. The apostrophic “O” is often associated with that crucial moment so characteristic of Hopkins’s poems when description gives way to an imperative, an optative, a prayer or blessing, in any case to a form of locution that is in one way or another no longer constative but has turned the poem into a speech event. First a few apostrophic “O’s,” all addressed to Christ or God, then some examples of direct address without the “O,” moments that are in one way or another a calling of spirits from the vasty deep, and finally some examples of the ubiquitous imperative or optative moment in Hopkins’s poetry: “O Christ, O God” (P 52); “O Father” (P 55); “O Christ, Christ, come quickly” (P 59); “O maid’s child” (P 67); “O my chevalier!” (P 69); “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain” (P 107). Now some apostrophes without the “O”: “Thou mastering me / God!” (P 51); “thou Orion of light” (P 58); “Jesu, heart’s light” (P 61); “When will you ever, Peace . . .” (P 85); “Márgarét, Are you grieving . . . ?” (P 88); “Earth, sweet Earth . . .” (P 90); “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee” (P 99); “That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God” (P 100, where the second “my God” is simply constative, while the first is a violent apostrophe); “Thou art indeed just, Lord” (P 106). As for imperative or optative moments in Hopkins, they are ubiquitous: “Let him easter in us” (P 63); “Look at the stars!” (P 66); “Have, get, before it cloy / Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning / Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy” (P 67); “here / Buckle!” (P 69); “Have fair fallen” (P 80); “Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet” (P 89); “Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind” (P 98); “Here! creep, / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind” (P 100); “My own heart let me more have pity on” (P 102); “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain” (P 107). All of these speech act features of Hopkins’s poetry are present in this last example, the apostrophic “O,” the prosopoetic direct address, the constative assertion that turns into an imperative with a performative tinge, as “mine” is read first as an adverbial adjective modifying “roots” (“Whose roots?” “Mine!”) and then as an imperative meaning “please dig down to my roots so the lifegiving rain can reach them.” The samples I have given of bits and pieces of Hopkins’s verse also give sufficient examples of those devices of alliteration, assonance, vowel sequences, and strongly marked rhythm I have identified as giving substance to his poetry, but the best example of “vowelling on and vowelling off ” I know in Hopkins’s poetry will make it more manifest. In the first two lines of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” the initial “û” of “earnest” is turned by degrees, as word

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follows word, into the “oo” of “stupendous” and then back finally to the “û” again of “hearse,” followed by the final “i” of “night,” in which all these distinctions among sound vanish, just as the play of “t’s,” “v’s,” and “w’s” vanishes too. The lines mime what they describe or do what they say: Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. (P 97)

Finally there is “yes.” If Hopkins’s verse from one end to the other is a massive “doing agree” or saying yes, then a “yes, I affirm this, I do say it” is implicit everywhere, unvoiced except in the inarticulate cry or sigh that everything Hopkins says rises from but never wholly frees itself from, present still in all those “O’s” and “Ah’s” I have cited. “But indeed,” says Hopkins, “I have often felt when I have been in this mood and felt the depth of an instress or how fast the inscape holds a thing that nothing is so pregnant and straightforward to the truth as simple yes and is” (J 127; See also 129). It is by no means necessary actually to say “yes” in order to say yes. But the actual word “yes” or “yea” appears at several crucial places in Hopkins’s poetry, as the surfacing of an implicit “yea-saying” present everywhere. I began by citing “I did say yes / O at lightning and lashed rod” from “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” That “yes” is echoed in “Yes I cán tell such a key, I dó know such a place” in “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” (P 92). The “yes” is iterated as “yea” in the last line of “To what serves Mortal Beauty”: “Yea, wish that though, wish all, God’s better beauty, grace” (P 98). “Yes” appears once more by itself as the emphatic first word of “(The Soldier),” initiating the poem and underlining the whole poem with an implicit, “I do say this”: “Yes. Why do we all, seeing of a soldier, bless him?” (P 99). If Jacques Derrida is right to say that “yes” is the transcendental condition of all performative language (Ulysse 126), Hopkins’s poetry, as a massive and continuous materialized saying yes, has a pervasive performative dimension that goes counter to his desire to submit his poetry to a religious world in which man’s proper speech, his least sigh of aspiration, the infinitesimal mite of breathing “yes,” should be as disembodied, as little public and dependent on social conventions, as little truly performative, as God’s inspiration through grace or his initial Fiat lux, to which man’s saying yes is a response. “Yes” is always double, paradoxical, self-contradictory, for example in that “Yes” at the very beginning of “(The Soldier).” “Yes” is always a response, an answer presupposing previous language or other signs. You always say yes to something that someone or something, some “other,” has previously said. At the same time “yes” is radically inaugural, initiatory. It is presupposed in all

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performatives, perhaps necessarily leads to a performative dimension in the language that follows, for example in the poems Hopkins wrote that came after his saying “yes” to God. That saying yes is always anterior but at the same time continuous. It is murmured as an implicit undertone or “underthought” in all Hopkins’s poems. If all language, whether constative or performative, presupposes an initial “yes,” that yes in turn always presupposes some preexisting language, word, Word, or marks, some “other,” to which the “yes” says yes, but the yes always goes beyond acquiescence to become a performative act of its own. “Doing agree” is not the same thing as simply agreeing, just as saying “I did say yes” is not the same thing as saying “I said yes.” Yes as “doing agreeing” turns the yes of passive acquiescence into the yes that is a speech act. Hopkins’s poems are that “doing agree.” “Yes” is, in Hopkins’s phrase from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” for the words and the tears that “break” from him in recreating in imagination the death of the nuns, “a madrigal start,” both a rhythm in response to a previous rhythm, as in a madrigal, canon, or round, and at the same time a “start,” an abrupt beginning. Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” is double in just the same way. On the one hand, it is a radical innovation in English metrical practice, but on the other hand it is, as Hopkins argued, an appropriation of rhythmic features already present in common language and in popular verse forms like nursery rhymes. Moreover, that “new rhythm” whose “echo” had long haunted Hopkins’s ear and which he first “realised on paper” in “The Wreck” (C 14) was a response to the deep rhythm of the creation, a kind of breathing in and out present for example in the “sway of the sea” (P 51). Hopkins’s sprung rhythm is a “madrigal start” in the sense of being an aspiration in response and correspondence to that inspiration, but it goes beyond its inspiration to initiate performatively something new of its own. The performative dimension of Hopkins’s poems, now that they are published and available where all who wish may read them, goes beyond and exceeds any inward, private, and disembodied saying yes into a public realm where they are indeed a way of doing things with words, as they materialize the “O” or “Ah” or “Yes” that permeates them and makes them the emergence of articulate meaning out of inarticulate cry that still remains in one of its dimensions pre-performative inarticulate cry, as in that line from “(Carrion Comfort)”: “But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me / Thy wring-world right foot rock” (P 99), where the “ah” and “O,” the “ow” and “ou” in “thou,” “thou,” and “rude,” the obtrusive “w’s” and “r’s,” and all the other devices of materializing non-semantic echo, as well as the performative prosopopoeia in the address to God as a triumphant wrestler, work against constative meaning to keep the words at the level of sound, sigh, cry, and thereby to make them words that do, that work.

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The word “sigh” not only names a certain kind of aspiration or suspiration. To utter the word is to do what it names. One of the ways to sigh is to say “Sigh” or “Sss-iii-gh,” drawing out the initial sibilant, prolonging the “i” and then cutting off the expiration of breath with the “gh” at the end, before all breath has been expelled. Hopkins’s poems throughout turn names into acts by stressing in manifold ways the pure sounds of speech as opposed to their meaning and the way words do what they say, according to one of Hopkins’s definitions of poetry. “Poetry,” said Hopkins, is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. . . . Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake—and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. ( J 289)

The inscape of speech is a pattern of echoing sounds, and therefore “verse is . . . inscape of spoken sound, not spoken words, or speech employed to carry the inscape of spoken sound . . .” ( J 289). I affirm that, yes, speech employed in this way is necessarily and radically performative.5 Far from being that almost disembodied infinitesimal sigh Hopkins wanted man’s work toward his salvation to be, Hopkins’s poems are initiatory, autonomous, even anomalous. They bring something new into the world, something that does, that is a way of doing things with words, but in a peculiar way that is not wholly controlled beforehand by social conventions nor by the expectations and assumptions of its auditors. In that sense Hopkins’s poems are not lawful. They make their own laws. What a poem by Hopkins does was not predictable, just as Hopkins’s formal innovations, for example his use of the curtal sonnet and what might be called the exploded sonnet, builds on the conventional rules of poetry but goes beyond them in unexpected ways. Coda I have been asked to comment on the development of the discipline of religion and literature since I wrote my first essay on Hopkins (in 1955) and since I published (in 1967) an essay on “Literature and Religion” in an MLA volume on Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions. My position on this topic has not changed a great deal since I published “Literature and Religion.” I still think that reading a work of literature with strong presuppositions of any kind, including religious ones,

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may get in the way of a confrontation of the complexity, heterogeneity, and strangeness of the work. On the other hand, I recognize perhaps more clearly now than I did then that there is no reading without “theoretical” presuppositions of some kind. My anxiety about religious theoretical presuppositions would apply just as strongly to other presuppositions. But I still see reading as asymmetrical to theory, the disconfirmation or severe modification of theoretical presuppositions. If these theoretical presuppositions are religious, that means reading will or even ought to change the religious position of the reader. That has certainly been the case for me with my reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I have returned to write essays on his work four times now, each time to find something that not only changed my ideas about Hopkins (for example I think I did not at first understand what he means by “inscape”), but also changed me. Insofar as I have been changed by reading, that means that whatever I do, for example teaching or writing, is changed too. I see reading, real reading, therefore, as radically inaugural. It brings something new into the world. Reading thereby has performative effects in the personal, social, and political realms. This present essay might be taken as an example of that. Though I had my presuppositions all right when I began the essay, they were more in the form of questions than in the form of answers. I did not quite know where the essay was going to lead me. In fact it led me to conclusions I did not anticipate. The thinking through started by my initial questions has changed once more my understanding of Hopkins’s work. I add to this only the observation that the field of religious studies, including the study of religion and literature, has in recent years been marked by the work of Jacques Derrida and his colleagues and associates, that is, by so-called “deconstruction.” Paul de Man, rather surprisingly, once said to me with great conviction, “Religious questions are the most important ones.” That could even more obviously be said for the work of Derrida. Derrida’s most recent seminars at the University of California at Irvine, in the spring term of 1990, focused on a reading of Augustine’s Confessions and on the section in the Logique du Port Royal on the Eucharist. This is an example of what I mean, as is another book by the great twentieth-century American critic, Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, also a book primarily on Augustine’s Confessions. So-called “deconstruction” sometimes has given offense to some just because of its willingness to take metaphysical or religious questions seriously. One of the fields that has appropriated and transformed what it might be better to call “deconstructionisms” is the discipline of religion and literature. My asking whether there is a performative as opposed to a constative dimension in Hopkins’s language and then following where those questions lead might be taken as a very small example of that.

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Notes 1. Jacques Derrida gives another example of this contamination of constative by performative language: “ ‘Il promet’ n’est pas un performatif explicit et ne peut l’être sauf si un ‘je’ sous-entend par example: je vous jure qu’il promet, etc.’ ” (Ulysse 129). . . . 2. See Culler’s admirable essay, “Apostrophe.” 3. “But how did you speak? Was it in the same way as when the voice came from the cloud, saying, This is my beloved son? That voice came and passed, had a beginning and an end. The syllables were heard and then ceased to be heard, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so on in order until the last came after all the others, and after the last there was silence. From this it is plain and evident that the voice was uttered through the motion of something created, something itself temporal, though serving your eternal will. And these words of yours, created in time, were reported by the outer ear to the intelligent soul, whose inner ear listened to your eternal word. But the soul compared those words which were pronounced in time with your eternal word which is in silence, and said: “It is different, utterly different. These words are far beneath me, indeed they are not at all, because they pass away and disappear; but the word of my God is above me and abides forever” (Confessions 262 [11.6]). See Ricoeur’s discussion of Augustine’s analysis of time and language in Time and Narrative, 1.5–30. 4. See the new, augmented edition of Jacques Derrida’s major work on performatives: Limited Inc. 5. Derrida, Ulysse 126: Or je crois, oui, que, pour le dire dans un code philosophique classique, oui est la condition transcendentale de toute dimension performative. My “yes,” like Derrida’s oui, is the indication of an affirmative answer to one of the questions I posed at the beginning: Is there a performative dimension to my own discourse or that of others about performatives? Yes, I affirm, there is.

Wor k s Ci t e d American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Ed. William Morris. New York: American Heritage, 1969. Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: NAL, 1963. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics 7.4 (Winter 1977), 59–69. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. . Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon. London: Oxford UP, 1955. Cited in text as C. . Journals and Papers. London: Oxford UP, 1959. Cited in text as J. . Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. London: Oxford UP, 1955. Cited in text as L. . Poems. 4th ed. Ed. W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie. London: Oxford UP, 1967. Cited in text as P. . Sermons and Devotional Writings. London: Oxford UP, 1959. Cited in text as S. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

ANTONY H. HARRISON

In the Shadow of E. B. B.: Christina Rossetti and Ideological Estrangement

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he year after Christina Rossetti’s death Andrew Lang contrasted her poetic accomplishments with those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, adding his views to what in late Victorian England was already something of a critical tradition. Ironically for feminist admirers of Rossetti today, Lang begins his eulogy with a statement that demonstrates his captivity to patriarchal domestic and amatory ideologies that both Rossetti and Browning—in very different ways—had interrogated in their poetry. “We are now deprived of the greatest English poet of the sex which is made to inspire poetry, rather than to create it,” Lang lamented. “Except Mrs. Browning, we have no one to be named with Miss Rossetti in all the roll-call of our literary history. . . . [Yet] for the quality of conscious art, and for music and colour of words in regular composition, Miss Rossetti seems . . . unmatched. The faults of Mrs. Browning she did not follow.”1 By 1895 such comparisons between the two Victorian “poetesses” were commonplace because, at least in the eyes of male reviewers and critics, only these two among a score of serious female poets had achieved genuine artistic stature. In these straw contests for recognition Rossetti was often declared the victor. 2 Rossetti’s brother Dante Gabriel, who was her mentor and regularly provided critiques of her poetry before publication, would have approved Lang’s decision. When reading poems intended for his sister’s second volume he

From Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intextuality and Ideology, pp. 108–43, 219–22. Copyright © 1990 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

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had complained of the “falsetto muscularity” of some pieces in “the BarrettBrowning style.”3 Often reluctantly, Rossetti usually took her brother’s advice in these matters and, to his satisfaction, succeeded in effacing all evidence of “falsetto muscularity” in her work. The result was that, though brief arguments about the relative stature of Rossetti and Browning often appear in the pages of Victorian periodicals, their poems and the authorial self-images their poetry projects are usually acknowledged to be worlds apart. Browning was notorious for engaging social and political topics considered unsuitable to women poets, while Rossetti was canonized long before her death as a kind of poet and saint substantially different from the figure of “woman and poet” Browning sets up as a model in Aurora Leigh. These writers appeared to Victorian audiences so very different from one another largely because of the hundreds of devotional poems Rossetti published. These, along with her six volumes of devotional prose, caused her more secular poetry to be read (often correctly) in terms of her religious values. Rossetti’s first biographer, Mackenzie Bell, who knew her work as well as anyone at the turn of the century, is representative in his view that “hardly any, if any, trace of the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is discernible in Christina Rossetti’s work.”4 Rossetti herself might well have disagreed with Bell and certainly would have contested Lang’s assertion of her artistic superiority over Browning. During her lifetime Rossetti had, in fact, already done as much privately. In a characteristically modest letter reacting to Patchett Martin’s published opinion that she was the “greater literary artist,” Rossetti concluded definitively: “Yet all said, I doubt whether the woman is born, or for many a long day, if ever, will be born, who will balance not to say outweigh Mrs. Browning.”5 As this comment and others in her letters make clear, Rossetti profoundly admired Browning, as both woman and artist. That admiration was in part evoked by Browning’s sallies into traditionally masculine fields of interest and by the impressive quantity of her work. She had attained a level of productivity that Rossetti usually associated with male poets. In a letter to Gabriel she laments her own restricted poetic scope and energies, which contrast with those of Browning: “It is impossible [for me] to go on singing out-loud to [my] onestringed lyre. It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and, having said my say, may well sit silent. . . . at the worst I suppose a few posthumous groans may be found amongst my remains. Here is a great discovery, ‘Women are not Men.’ ”6 These remarks are fascinating for several reasons, not the least of which is Rossetti’s apparent masculinist perceptions of Browning, who struggled so visibly throughout her career to be received as a serious female poet. Despite her strong admiration, Rossetti views Browning as a kind of artistic cross-dresser. Further, Rossetti’s apparent

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resignation to the customary feminine role of silent passivity—often echoed in her poems—positions her, by contrast with the outspoken Browning it would seem, as an ideological conformist to prescribed gender roles. Perplexingly, however, such acquiescence is called into question everywhere in her work (prose, as well as poetry). Even in this letter her ostensibly trite observation that “women are not men” resists her brother’s attempts to influence her and appears self-subverting. The stubborn assertiveness of the rhetoric in this passage, like so many in Rossetti’s correspondence, suggests that she has, at least internally, transformed what is normally accepted as a position of powerlessness into a repository of power. Reading it, we feel close to the source of Rossetti’s strength as a woman and poet, and that strength, in opposition to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, lies, not in assertive outspokenness, but rather in a baffling and defiant, sometimes ostensibly self-contradictory, sometimes masochistic, and sometimes riddling, silence. Such is the case, for example, in the concluding poem of her great sonnet of sonnets, the Monna Innominata (1881), a work prefaced by an odd and elusive dedication of sorts to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the outspoken “happy” lover of the Sonnets from the Portuguese. After thirteen initially playful but increasingly anguished sonnets spoken by an unknown female troubadour (with highVictorian values and discursive practices), the speaker repudiates her earthly beloved in favor of God and hopes for an ultimate reunion with him in the “flowering land / Of love” where they shall stand as “happy equals.” For now, she concludes with a lament: Youth and beauty gone, what doth remain? The longing of a heart pent up forlorn, A silent heart whose silence loves and longs; The silence of a heart which sang its songs While youth and beauty made a summer morn, Silence of love that cannot sing again.7

This speaker defiantly renounces in this world what is an unquestionably powerful erotic love, in favor of an idealized spiritual passion in the afterlife. Her adoption of the traditional role of silence, after speaking with impassioned (and artful) eloquence, generates within the reader a sense of frustration, perhaps even anger. Her choice simply makes no sense in terms of the erotic compulsions that drive most of us. Even more baffling is the extent to which the movement of this sequence deliberately resists, and indeed sets out to subvert, the domestic and amatory ideology, as well as the gender roles, ostensibly propounded in the parallel sequence of sonnets by Browning admiringly invoked in Rossetti’s headnote.8 The obvious explanation of the

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speaker’s choice and of Rossetti’s rhetorical strategy in the Monna Innominata, it would appear, derives from her pervasive religious values, which shun all affairs of this world as vanity. Rossetti’s best poems, for the most part, usually enter that world discursively and reject it. Her force as a poet, according to any simple analysis of her work, derives from her traditionary Christian stance of vanitas mundi. But this explanation, as I shall later argue, is incomplete. After all, Browning—not to mention other eminent Victorian “poetesses,” from Adelaide Proctor to Dora Greenwell and Jean Ingelow—were considered by their contemporaries as appropriately theistic and devout, and the gestures of their poems repeatedly invite this perspective. The ostensible difference between the religiosity of these women poets and that of Rossetti is one of degree. Browning in fact published a good deal of religious poetry, including such works as “The Seraphim,” A Drama of Exile, and a number of hymns. The year after designating Browning the “Great Poetess of our . . . day and nation” in her epigraph to the Monna Innominata (Poems, 2:86), Rossetti was asked to write a life of Browning for John Ingram’s Eminent Women series. In the event she did not write the book, because Robert Browning apparently refused to endorse the project, but her response to Ingram tells us yet more about her perspective on the single female precursor whose stature and work proved enabling for her own career: “I should write with enthusiasm of that great poetess and (I believe) lovable woman, whom I was never, however, so fortunate as to meet.9 Such comments as these, along with echoes and implicit ideological challenges to Browning that inform Rossetti’s poetry, suggest that she had Browning in mind even at the very beginning of her public career, when she submitted six poems to William Edmondstoune Aytoun at Blackwood’s on August 1, 1854. In her letter to Aytoun she anticipates Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), who insists, “I too have my vocation,—work to do.”10 Rossetti tries to anticipate any misapprehension that her aspirations to be received as a serious woman poet are radical or arrogant. She explains, “I hope that I shall not be misunderstood as guilty of egotism or foolish vanity when I say that my love for what is good in the works of others teaches me that there is something above the despicable in mine; that poetry is with me, not a mechanism but an impulse and a reality, and that I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.”11 In 1854 no other woman poet was taken as seriously, by men and women alike, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had, in fact, been a contender for the post of poet laureate only four years earlier. Rossetti, at twenty-three, with only a handful of published poems, was implicitly making the comparisons that commentators decades later would hit upon. Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had lamented, “I look everywhere for grandmothers and see

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none,”12 Rossetti could look to at least one conspicuous figure of the generation preceding her own as a literary mother. For the most part, Rossetti did not write “political and philanthropic” poems, as Browning did. But she did appropriate a number of Browning’s thematic concerns and poetic strategies. Like Browning, Rossetti often transposes the traditional forms, as well as the courtly, medievalist, and amatory subject matter, of the ballad and sonnet to serve uniquely Victorian ideological ends. Most often, however, these radically diverge from the purposes served by such transpositions in the work of Browning. For instance, in a number of poems—including “The Iniquity of the Fathers,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and even “Goblin Market”—Rossetti explores the issues surrounding “fallen” women, issues that culminated in Browning’s poetry with the depiction of Marian Erle in Aurora Leigh. Like Browning, Rossetti refused to condemn the victims of men’s sexual energies, but unlike her precursor, she denied the value of their reentry into the world of social relations. In “The Lowest Room” Rossetti appears also to challenge the conclusions about professional aspirations and possibilities for women presented by Browning in early poems about Queen Victoria and Felicia Hemans, as well as the later Aurora Leigh. In several poems, too, but especially “Eve,” Rossetti echoes Browning’s concern in A Drama of Exile to reinterpret the events of the Fall from Eve’s viewpoint, but once again Rossetti does so to a significantly different end than Browning. Yet another deeply ideological concern for both poets was motherhood. Although never a mother Rossetti, the devoted daughter, was preoccupied with motherhood as a source of both rich emotions and female power. On the cultural authority and supreme importance of mothers, the work of Browning and Rossetti is in full agreement. In poems by Rossetti and Browning that traverse such common formal, thematic, or sociological ground, the sharp ideological divergences between them are, at first, difficult to define, even when Rossetti’s work most visibly declares its intertextual relations with that of Browning. Our inability to arrive at such definitions is in part the result of early feminism’s totalizing tendencies in appropriating both writers. We have been guilty of ignoring important but subtle ideological subcultures in Victorian England. Thus, one recent critic can make an almost unqualified argument for Browning’s feminist dispositions, while another asserts her thorough captivity to patriarchal ideological norms. The evidence does, in fact, seem highly contradictory, arguing for a more moderate case: that a “conservative feminism” dominates Browning’s work.13 But some subtler and more historically accurate assessment of Browning’s views on the cultural role of women is essential if we are genuinely to understand the ideological operations of her work. Similarly varied and opposed perceptions of Rossetti have complicated the critical scene in the last few years, and for the

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same reasons.14 Commentators have not been adequately wary of the influence of their own cultural values when attempting to understand the work of either poet, nor have they been adequately conscientious in recovering specific historical contexts and ideologies that inform these important poets’ work. The generalized view often put forward oversimplifies the particular value systems and cultural perspectives at work in poems by Browning and Rossetti in ways that compel us to misconstrue them. Approaching key poems by Rossetti intertextually, that is, as revisionist appropriations of work by Browning, allows us to perceive some ideological fine distinctions operating in poetry by women during the second half of the nineteenth century. These distinctions identify crucial but varied sources of genuine power for women during an era that commentators, a century later, regularly and simplistically castigate for disempowering women, even though a female monarch was, during the lives of both poets, a focus of enormous political power in the world’s richest, strongest, and most influential nation. Victorian Women and Power in Poetry The year after Victoria’s ascension to the throne Elizabeth Barrett published her first book of poems to receive anything like general recognition. She was thirty-two, not quite old enough to be the new queen’s mother and still young enough to pursue poetic fame. Not surprisingly, The Seraphim and Other Poems contains works that discuss both the new queen and poetic ambition. These poems share a concern with the attainment of power in the world by women. Such power is perceived as a direct extension of female subjectivity as it was defined by Victorian ideological norms. That is, the power of the female poet and the power of the queen, presented in both cases as real and considerable, attach to ideals of female sympathy, honesty, sensitivity, and spirituality. These characteristics reinforce worldly power but also assure heavenly rewards for the burden of wielding it in this life. The poems I refer to are Barrett’s elegy on the death of Felicia Hemans, which envisions her sister poetess Laetitia Landon mourning Hemans’s death, and the fascinating pair of poems, “The Young Queen” and “Victoria’s Tears.” “Felicia Hemans” quietly and accurately celebrates the accomplishment of Hemans and presents her as a model for “L. E. L.”: Perhaps she shuddered while the world’s cold hand her brow was wreathing, But never wronged that mystic breath which breathed in all her breathing, Which drew, from rocky earth and man, abstraction high and moving,

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Beauty, if not the beautiful, and love, if not the loving. (Works, 2:83)

Barrett clearly believes that Hemans’s power as a poet derives from generally Romantic and specifically Wordsworthian literary projects, and her accomplishment in that movement (made visible and successful by male poets) will immortalize her. In the poem’s last two stanzas the elegiac turn positions Hemans, “crowned and living,” in heaven and pronounces an oddly admonitory benediction on Landon, advocating a feminine pose idealized by Victorians, but one that, Barrett insists, yields permanent influence in this world, as well as apotheosis in the next: May thine own England say for thee what now for Her it sayeth— “Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing, The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing. (Works, 2:83)

In commemorating Hemans’s achievement Barrett appears merely to reinforce accepted stereotypes of woman’s supreme sensitivity and her angelic nature, which generates “silver song.” From these qualities derives her popularity and power in the world, as well as her heavenly reward, and these she hopes will crown Landon’s career, as they have that of Hemans. “The Young Queen” begins with three stanzas lamenting the death of William IV and freezing the moment of transition between monarchs. While “all things express / All glory’s nothingness” in the face of the king’s death, the “youthful Queen” can remember only “what has been—/ Her childhood’s rest by loving heart, and sport on grassy sod” (Works, 2:107). This projected moment of Wordsworthian reminiscence gives way to admonitions that the queen “call on God” for support, because A nation looks to thee For steadfast sympathy: Make room within thy bright clear eyes for all its gathered tears. (Works, 2:108)

Abruptly, this young woman has become mother of a nation and must act according to the domestic ideals of Victorian motherhood. As students of Victorian history and literature are well aware, throughout Victoria’s reign a widely propagated and generally accepted domestic

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ideology dominated middle-class culture and powerfully influenced both the upper and lower classes as well. Henry Mayhew provided a typical description of the ideal middle-class Victorian home as “a kind of social sanctuary.” He elaborates, “[The family dwelling is] a spot sacred to peace and goodwill, where love alone is to rule, and harmony to prevail, and whence every enemy is to be excluded. . . . whence all the cares and jealousies of life are excluded, where . . . the honest love of children yields a rich compensation for the hollow friendship of men, and where the gracious trustfulness and honied consolation of woman, makes ample atonement for the petty suspicions and heartlessness of strangers.”15 This ideology clearly emphasized woman’s composite role as man’s spiritual comforter, the bearer of his children, and “sweet orderer and arranger” of his household (according to Ruskin in “Of Queen’s Gardens”). The ideal of motherhood, including all of these functions, accrued enormous mythical and iconic power in Victorian England.16 As Lynda Nead has observed, “motherhood was regarded as the most valuable and natural component of woman’s mission; it was woman’s main reason for being and her chief source of pleasure. Maternal love was constructed as the apex of feminine purity and as an unattainable model for all other human relationships.” Further, by means of all the apparatuses of culture—from science to literature and the other arts—this “specific historical construction of femininity was made to seem natural and universal.”17 We must understand as well that this ideology was, insofar as it prescribed women’s role, amatory as well as domestic. In her enormously popular book The Daughters of England, for instance, Sarah Stickney Ellis explained that “To love is woman’s nature—to be beloved, is the consequence of her having properly exercised and controlled that nature. To love is woman’s duty—to be beloved, is her reward.”18 This domestic and amatory ideology is clearly at the heart of “Victoria’s Tears.” Victoria’s reward for renouncing prematurely the Wordsworthian joys of childhood is, as the last stanza insists, both earthly and heavenly: the “grateful isles” she now commands by means of her feminine “sympathy” and spirituality (“bright clear eyes”) Shall give thee back their smiles, And as thy mother joys in thee, in them shalt thou rejoice; Rejoice to meekly bow A somewhat paler brow, While the King of kings shall bless thee by the British people’s voice! (Works, 2:108)

Notable in this poem is the ease with which the familiar Victorian ideology that designates woman as the repository of domestic and spiritual

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values is transposed to the sphere of worldly power traditionally accepted as prohibited to women. The basis of Browning’s apparent advocacy here that the domestic sphere may be expanded into the world of politics can, however, also be discovered in Victorian conduct books. A commentator on the roles of women less well known than Sarah Stickney Ellis, but equally representative in her views, is Mrs. Roe. She agrees with Ellis and Ruskin that woman’s mission is, ultimately, “to superintend and arrange those things which form the physical comforts of the home, and administer to the temporal wants of those who look to her to supply them.” But she adds significantly to these stereotypical functions. It is also woman’s “duty to adorn that home with the refinements of intellectual culture, to make herself a suitable companion to her husband, a mother competent to train her children, and a mistress fit to rule and guide her household.”19 Ruling and guiding are thus by no means foreign to woman’s domestic role as it was commonly defined.20 In “Victoria’s Tears” Browning simply transposes the domestic ideology to a much larger sphere: the kingdom becomes Victoria’s household. The principles of command and control remain unchanged and derive from the unique subjectivity of the female in her acculturated role as spiritual guide and mother. A faith in the power of that subjectivity, unusual because so starkly visible, operates in “Victoria’s Tears,” whose five stanzas all conclude with variations upon the refrain, “She wept, to wear a crown!” Victoria’s childhood is suddenly forced to yield (not unlike the mythicized Virgin’s at the Annunciation) to the supreme responsibilities, but also the supreme power, required of a mother to the nation. Victoria’s tears in this poem signal the advent of an enhanced and expanded mythology of female purity, sensitivity, and spirituality that carries power with it in precisely the same way that Christian mythologies carry with them real power in the world. Commitment to transcendent idealities and supreme moral values, according to the myth that is demonstrably validated in reality, yields supremacy in the mundane spheres of human activity as well: The tyrant’s sceptre cannot move, As those pure tears have moved! The nature in thine eyes we see, That tyrants cannot own— The love that guardeth liberties! (Works, 2:109)

The crucial distinction between this “natural,” “pure,” loving, and prospectively triumphant monarch, on the one hand, and “tyrants” of the past, on the other, has curiously less to do with the nation Victoria now governs and

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the liberties it guarantees its people than with the kind of power Victoria can deploy as a woman who has the liberty to cry and thus to “move” her own and, presumably, other nations. And that power has explicitly divine origins and divine rewards: God bless thee, weeping Queen, With blessing more divine! And fill with happier love than earth’s That tender heart of thine! That when the thrones of earth shall be As low as graves brought down, A pierced Hand may give to thee The crown which angels shout to see! Thou wilt not weep, To wear that heavenly crown! (Works, 2:110)

Skeptical twentieth-century commentators who would perceive this poem as a combination of sentimentality and illusory but commonplace Victorian notions of woman’s (emotionally and spiritually superior) nature thus miss a crucial feature of nineteenth-century gender ideology: middle-class idealizations of women created an arena of real power for them in the domestic sphere that could be extended or transposed, sometimes with subversive subtlety and cleverness, to political, or, for that matter, poetic, spheres of activity. As a young and virtually unknown poet, Barrett seizes the opportunity to proclaim in a now privileged feminine discourse the new queen’s uniquely female power in the world. Barrett’s project serves not only to reinforce the authority of the adolescent monarch, however, but also, reciprocally, to authorize her own prospective stature in the literary world. Assuming the traditional role of visionary poet and proclaiming in public verse the power of the queen, Barrett empowers herself as well—all the while retaining the stance of self-effacement required of women by the Victorian domestic ideology. Despite evidence of “falsetto muscularity,” Browning—and Rossetti after her—repeatedly insist upon differentiating the roles and potential of women from those of men in all spheres of activity. Aurora Leigh at first appears to deny such distinctions. In book 5, for instance, Aurora bewails the degrading necessity of a male muse for female poets, the heroine finally repudiating “This vile woman’s way / of trailing garments” and refusing to “traffic with the personal thought / In art’s pure temple.” She dedicates herself to “Art for art, / And good for God Himself, the essential Good,” as if a man, and determines to “keep our

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aims sublime, our eyes erect.” She concludes, however, by acknowledging the greater likelihood that in this project her “woman-hands” may “shake and fail,” where (implicitly) those of a man would not (Works, 5:3). In this she, and her female creator, seem unexceptional Victorians. Deirdre David has properly observed that Browning modeled “her poetic and intellectual career upon traditionally male lines, yet the work most fully expressing her aesthetic and political beliefs [Aurora Leigh] is the poetic narrative of a woman writer whose experience is rendered through bold imagery associated with female experience.” Ultimately, however, all of Browning’s poetic efforts demonstrate how “the ‘art’ of the woman poet performs a ‘service’ for a patriarchal vision. . . . Woman’s talent is made the attendant of conservative male ideals.”21 David’s position, like that of feminist critics who argue the antithetical case that Browning deliberately defied the constraints a patriarchal culture imposed upon Victorian women, rests upon a view of the situation of Victorian women that allows only two contradictory perspectives on the ideological options available to them. In fact, as the work of Browning and Rossetti demonstrates, other nonconforming strategies for female self-realization and the realization of what must be seen as genuine power for women and influence for their work emerged in Victorian England. Such power seldom took the specifically economic, social, or political forms late twentieth-century commentators typically fetishize as a result of ideological dispositions that limit our perceptions of what constitutes “power” or independence or efficacy in the world. In this respect, we may be more captive to limited and limiting cultural norms than were bright and inventive Victorian women like Browning and Rossetti, each of whom discovered different strategies for exposing, reappraising, and, to a significant degree, circumventing ideologies powerfully felt as constraining. Rossetti’s strategy was, I shall argue, to adopt a position of ideological estrangement authorized by her strict religious beliefs. Browning’s was to parade her poetic and intellectual strengths as visibly as possible before a reading public compelled to become aware that, while not crossing the boundaries of ideological normalcy—as George Eliot did in her private life or as Harriet Martineau did in her publications—she was reassessing those boundaries in a manner that would allow for their future expansion. Both poets thus appear to uphold the fundamental gender roles commonly thought of as patriarchal, and they operate within them. At the same time both relentlessly interrogate those roles along with the social, aesthetic, and intellectual values that support them. Such simultaneous acquiescence and interrogation perplexes recent commentators, who contradict one another in fairly pitched battles, alternately presenting each author as a prospectively radical feminist or a “servant of the patriarchy” (David’s phrase).

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Browning fully accepted the Victorian domestic ideology that exalted women as ministering angels—pure, compassionate, spiritual—but her effective strategy in exploiting that ideology was to reposition it in the public sphere, as I have begun to argue. She wrote poems on politics, social issues, serious religious controversies, and women’s literary ambitions that never relinquish, but instead deliberately employ, Victorian ideals of female subjectivity. Dante Rossetti’s accusations of “falsetto muscularity” result, not from any attempt on Browning’s part to adopt a masculine persona, but rather from her energetic redeployment of ideals of femininity in areas of concern normally off limits to Victorian women. She is, in short, fiercely committed to radically expanding the “domestic” sphere of women’s influence to the world at large. Surprisingly, Browning’s project to extend the boundaries of feminine influence through her poetry, like so much else in her work, is indebted to Wordsworth. Aurora Leigh’s important pronouncements on the function of poetry in the modern world (in book 5) are in fact a literalized transposition of Wordsworth’s descriptions of the proper operations of poetry and the true vocation of the poet. The power of Wordsworth’s influence on Browning has long been acknowledged.22 Browning herself paid homage to him in her Essay on Mind (1826) and in her sonnet “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon” (1844). But that influence culminates in her masterwork when her poet-heroine pronounces upon the contemporaneity of her own poetry: Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world ...... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s, this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal,—foolish too. (Works, 5:7)

Although this passage may appear distant indeed from Wordsworth’s critique (in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads) of the degraded tastes of his own contemporaries, Browning’s insistence here upon realism in poetry reinscribes Wordsworth’s apotheosis of the commonplace: “situations from common life” and the “language really used by men.” If her

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reader thinks that the Romneys and Marian Erles of her epic are unpoetic, she insists through Aurora Leigh that King Arthur’s self Was commonplace to Lady Guenever; And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat As Regent street to poets. (Works, 5:7)

The true “artist’s part” to her is to transfix “with a special, central power” The flat experience of the common man, And turning outward, with a sudden wrench, Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing He feels the inmost: never felt the less Because he sings it. (Works, 5:12)

Here and elsewhere in her work Browning implicitly invokes the blessing of Wordsworth as her preeminent literary forefather in order to appropriate the grand, transcendental enterprise of his poetry defined in the “Prospectus” to the Excursion: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day.23

Wishing to feminize and in every sense realize the poetic ambition Wordsworth expresses in the “Prospectus,” she literalizes his project of creating a Paradise on earth and reads “common” as “ordinary.” But that effort will yield transcendent dividends: We [poets] staggering ’neath our burden as mere men, Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods, Support the intolerable strain and stress

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Of the universal, and send clearly up With voices broken by the human sob, Our poems to find rhymes among the stars! (Works, 5:13)

Aurora Leigh, like Wordsworth, believes in the heroic mission and potential of the poet, but she goes well beyond her Romantic precursor in extending to women the sublime capacity to transfigure the commonplace. To Browning’s articulate claims for the power of poetry and for the potential heroism of women outside the domestic sphere, and to Browning’s corollary insistence on the value of “the world” as the exclusive subject matter of poetry, Christina Rossetti responds in much of her work. “The Lowest Room” is perhaps Rossetti’s fullest poetic discussion of the Victorian domestic ideology, the constraints it imposes upon women, and the propriety of challenges to it. It is a poem that has been criticized for advocating acquiescence under the guise of Christian devotion and “hope deferred”: in the end the speaker, whose “sluggish pulse” has been stirred by reading Homer and who feels ashamed of her unambitious, “aimless” domestic life, resigns herself to “the lowest place” and looks to the Apocalypse for fulfillment, “When all deep secrets shall be shown, / And many last be first.” In doing so she implies the answer to the central question of the long dialogue with her sister that constitutes the “action” of the poem: “Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic strength?” (Poems, 1:203) In effect, the question is answered through the character and actions of the unnamed sister herself, an “intuitively wise,” quietly Christian, and supremely domestic young woman who becomes, during the twenty years that elapse between the first half of the poem and the last, a stereotypical Victorian “Angel in the House.” Though not published until 1864, “The Lowest Room” is dated September 30, 1856, in manuscript, approximately a month before the publication of Aurora Leigh. This historical fact seems at first extraordinary, since Rossetti’s poem appears to be a direct response to issues that emerge in book 5 of Browning’s epic novel-poem. Those issues include not only the possibility of female “heroism,” in opposition to traditional domestic roles for women, but also the more popular controversy over the value of the present age compared to distant “golden ages.” While insisting that poets “represent the[ir] age” rather than an idealized past, Aurora Leigh also debunks the heroic past: I could never deem . . . That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned grey Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;

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And Hector’s infant whimpered at a plume As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All men are possible heroes: every age, Heroic in proportions. (Works, 5:5)

In argument with her sister who adopts the view propounded here, Rossetti’s heroine, by contrast, remains skeptical: “Ah well, be those the days of dross; This, if you will, the age of gold: Yet had those days a spark of warmth, While these are somewhat cold— “Are somewhat mean and cold and slow, Are stunted from heroic growth: We gain but little when we prove The worthlessness of both.” (Poems, 1:202–3)

At issue in Rossetti’s poem, however, are not finally the virtues or deficiencies of the present world in contrast to the past, but rather the nature of genuinely heroic and virtuous behavior for an educated and aspiring young Victorian woman. This is, of course, a fundamental concern in Aurora Leigh, as well, but it is prefigured in a good deal of Browning’s earlier poetry, as we have seen. Although, given its date of composition, “The Lowest Room” cannot be a response to Aurora Leigh, we can specify the single poem by Browning that it deliberately challenges. “Hector in the Garden” appeared in her Poems of 1850. It is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker recalls discovering, at nine years old, “A huge giant wrought of spade” in her garden. She dubs him “Hector, son of Priam!” (Works, 1:195) and manufactures his arms from daffodils and daisies, speculating that he might in fact rise up to face and terrify her. This fantasy she describes as one of “my childhood’s bright romances,” but it has an allegorical significance and a powerful influence upon her later life that she now rehearses for her (presumably) nine-year-old auditor, Canidian. The garden mound where Hector appears, for instance, is described as laurel covered; yet, in “arming” Hector she employs the stereotypical feminine ability to arrange flowers. This is a talent Rossetti particularly attributes to her heroine’s sister in “The Lowest Room”—“she made her choice of flowers / Intuitively wise.” But Browning’s speaker, who is demonstrably a poet, is now determined to employ her memories and her unique abilities as a

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woman ambitiously, in the arena normally reserved for Hectors. In the end she invokes “God’s patience through my soul” to serve a distinctly unfeminine purpose: That no dreamer, no neglecter Of the present’s work unsped, I may wake up and be doing, Life’s heroic ends pursuing, Though my past is dead as Hector, And though Hector is twice dead. (Works, 1:196)

This is precisely the sort of ambition Rossetti’s poem, through its sisterly dialogue, cautions against. Such aspirations reveal “A selfish, souring discontent / Pride-born, the devil’s sin” (Poems, 1:204). In place of such prospectively unwomanly and un-Christian ambitions Rossetti presents two separate but ideologically compatible alternatives. The first is illustrated in the adult life of the speaker’s sister, who has become the ideal domestic embodiment of Victorian womanhood: she is “a stately wife,” “loved and loving” with a “husband honourable, brave” and “next to him one like herself, / One daughter golden-curled” (Poems, 1:206). She “thrives” in this role, however, only because she is one “who learn[s] of Christ.” This “happy” sister is, nonetheless, overshadowed by the “unhappy” speaker, whose lot in life is to “live alone” and “watch.” Having learned with difficulty that “lifelong lesson of the past,” she is “content to take the lowest place.” But this stance is ultimately not just one of superior Christian devotion, it is one that is deliberately estranged both from the activities of the masculine world to which Browning’s speaker appears committed and from the domestic ideology which the younger sister in Rossetti’s poem clearly embraces:24 . . . I sat alone and watched; My lot in life, to live alone In mine own world of interests, Much felt but little shown. (Poems, 1:207)

The position of power in which the speaking voice of most poetry by Rossetti situates itself is precisely this prophetic and monitory one of estrangement from worldly ideologies. Rossetti uses it consistently to challenge the values of her contemporaries: those like Browning who insist upon the value and power in the world of unsequestered femininity, as well as those women

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of the middle classes who view their domestic “angelic” role preeminently as a source of material, rather than spiritual, well-being. Significantly, Rossetti’s alienated stance is one available only to women in her era, and the power that developed from it was also uniquely available to Victorian women. Eve, The World, and the Politics of Motherhood Jerome McGann has begun to explore how ideological estrangement operates in Rossetti’s poetry. Surprisingly, he is the first critic to do so. His arguments that her work “moves . . . aggressively against every current of worldliness” and that its frequent “surreality is an indictment of worldly language and worlded attachments, whether personal or social” is powerfully illustrated in her sonnet “The World”:25 By day she wooes me, soft, exceeding fair: But all night as the moon so changeth she; Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy And subtle serpents gliding in her hair. By day she wooes me to the outer air, Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety: But thro’ the night, a beast she grins at me, A very monster void of love and prayer. By day she stands a lie: by night she stands In all the naked horror of the truth With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands. Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell My soul to her, give her my life and youth, Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell? (Poems, 1:76–77)

That the world is here portrayed by a woman poet as a seductive and sinister femme fatale is striking. Is this depiction, a modern reader with historicist inclinations might well ask, largely a product of the cultural power that attached to the image of the fallen woman in Victorian England (which Rossetti’s brother, for instance, interrogates in his notorious poem “Jenny”)? Alternatively, is Rossetti revising traditional satanic mythologies (including Milton’s), feminizing Lucifer? Or more plausibly, does the sonnet simply function as a radical allegorization of the world as Sin (again borrowing from the tradition Milton refurbishes)? With any of these perspectives, two conclusions are impossible to avoid. The first is that Rossetti’s work (insofar as this poem is representative) distances itself so greatly both from the materialist, progressivist, and domestic ideologies of her age and from

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stances (like Browning’s) that would extend those ideologies, that we are compelled to read her often defiantly ahistorical poetry in its particular historical contexts in order to fathom its critical power. Rossetti, as McGann has observed, is radically alienated not only from the dominant systems of value in Victorian England but also from “most currently accessible forms of thought which would raise up a critique” of them.26 The second conclusion “The World” forces upon us complements the first: this self-consciously postlapsarian poem that ostensibly flaunts woman as the embodiment of evil appropriates, refashions, and conflates Christian mythologies in such a way as to recall and implicitly focus attention upon the figure of Eve, the poem’s presiding absent presence, who was the first woman to defy rigid patriarchal ideologies and reduce the world to a house of sin and temptation. But like most of Rossetti’s fallen women, her Eve figures are usually extraordinarily sympathetic.27 This is the case as well in Browning’s long response to Paradise Lost, a Drama of Exile, published some twenty years before Rossetti wrote her own, much briefer, “Eve.” In nearly twenty-three hundred lines of verse Browning attempts an entirely different project from that of Milton, according to the important Preface to her drama. “Milton is too high, and I am too low, to render it necessary for me to disavow any rash emulation of his divine faculty on his own ground,” she explains. Even her subject is not really the same. The focus of her poem, unlike Milton’s, “was the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; with a peculiar reference to Eve’s alloted [sic] grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonged to her womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the Fall to her offence,—appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than a man” (Works, 2:143–44). Browning wishes to recreate Milton’s Eve as a sympathetic figure, but in the event her success is limited. The male characters—Adam, Christ, and Lucifer himself—are the centers of rhetorical power and dominance in this poem that serves ultimately, like “Victoria’s Tears,” to confirm and reinforce the Victorian domestic ideology, while, paradoxically, demonstrating the efficacy of female poetry on a traditionally masculinist topos. The ideological crux of Browning’s poem appears near the end of it. After Christ has reprimanded the elements and especially the animal world for harshness in blaming Eve for their newly fallen condition, he commands Adam to “Bless the woman.” Adam’s blessing, significantly, is couched in a series of imperatives idealizing womanhood in familiar Victorian terms: Henceforward, arise, aspire To all the calms and magnanimities, The lofty uses and the noble ends,

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The sanctified devotion and full work, To which thou art elect for evermore, First woman, wife, and mother! (Works, 2:211)

Shortly, Adam pronounces upon the (equally familiar) domestic roles of women: Rise, woman, rise To thy peculiar and best altitudes Of doing good and of enduring ill, Of comforting for ill, and teaching good, And reconciling all that ill and good Unto the patience of a constant hope,— Rise with thy daughters! If sin came by thee, And by sin, death,—the ransom-righteousness, The heavenly life and compensative rest Shall come by means of thee. (Works, 2:211–12)

The ideology Browning’s poem supports, like the divine plan Eve’s actions ultimately serve, is patriarchal. Eve eagerly submits to the role Adam prescribes for her: I accept For me and for my daughters this high part Which lowly shall be counted. Noble work Shall hold me in the place of garden-rest, And in the place of Eden’s lost delight Worthy endurance of permitted pain. (Works, 2:213)

We cannot, however, ignore the fact that this ideology empowers women in specific ways that transcend the activities of getting and spending (of economics and politics) in the fallen world. According to the myth that Browning’s ambitious poem reinscribes, mankind can be “ransomed” only through the agency of women. Upon their “righteousness,” goodness, compassion, and patience depends the fate of all men and women. For women like Browning who appear to subscribe to such transcendental views of gender roles, women’s power in the world, especially as mothers, must have seemed not only genuine but supreme. This poem and its composition must

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therefore be understood as an assertion of such power. While to modern feminist readers A Drama of Exile may appear self-subverting in its submission to the patriarchy, this work, like so many of Browning’s poems, nonetheless privileges the female voice in radical ways and is an enabling demonstration that women can take command of the mythologies that have traditionally determined their cultural status and constraints. This demonstration is convincing in part because of the poem’s formal virtuosity. It is more Shelleyan than Miltonic in the diversity of its verse forms and the complexity of its dramatic structure. But the emotional force of the work emerges, not from technical displays, but from Browning’s facility with character depiction. Lucifer, however, not Eve, dominates this poem. His rhetorical tours de force, it would appear, are designed to compete with those of Milton’s Satan. Lucifer’s final speech, for instance, is an energetic malediction upon Adam and Eve. It is Spasmodic both in its passion and in its resistance to the poet’s control: May your tears fall hot On all the hissing scorns o’ the creatures here,— And yet rejoice! Increase and multiply Ye in your generations, in all plagues, Corruptions, melancholies, poverties, And hideous forms of life and fears of death,— ..... Rejoice,—because ye have not, set in you, This hate which shall pursue you—this fire-hate Which glares without, because it burns within— Which kills from ashes—this potential hate, Wherein I, angel, in antagonism To God and his reflex beatitudes, Moan ever . . . And gasp for space amid the Infinite, And toss for rest amid the Desertness, Self-orphaned by my will, and self-elect To kingship of resistant agony Toward the Good round me—hating good and love, And willing to hate good and to hate love, And willing to will on so evermore. (Works, 2:198)

Like Satan in Milton’s epic, Browning’s impassioned Lucifer presides over the first two-thirds of her drama, and his final imprecations echo those

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already pronounced upon Adam and Eve by the animals and natural elements. I quote them at length because they provide a revealing contrast to Rossetti’s economical and highly effective presentation of Satan in the brief closing stanza of her seventy-line poem. Rossetti’s “Eve” presents itself as a kind of minimalist sequel to A Drama of Exile that succinctly achieves Browning’s stated goal: to focus on “Eve’s allotted grief, . . . more expressible by a woman than a man.” More than this, the unpretentious form, tonal simplicity, and characteristically Rossettian, childlike diction of the poem generate a subtle parody of Browning’s far more ambitious and finally unwieldy work. “Eve” successfully demonstrates the power of Rossetti’s “poetics of conciseness,”28 especially when her verse situates itself outside of worldly ideologies in order prophetically to renounce and subvert them. The intertextual operations of her poem subtly rebuke the pride that underlies Browning’s attempt not only to extend and reinforce such ideologies but also to compete with Milton. One effect of Rossetti’s poem is, in fact, to suggest that Browning’s prefatory repudiation of any such intent is disingenuous. “Eve” has a symmetrical, two-part structure, the first thirty-five lines spoken by a grieving Eve, the last by the wholly sympathetic narrator. Mankind’s ejection from Eden is long past in this poem. The occasion of Eve’s lament is the murder of Abel, but as if to recall the situation of exiled Eve in Browning’s work, Rossetti now positions Eve as an exile from her home outside Eden: “While I sit at the door Sick to gaze within Mine eye weepeth sore For sorrow and sin: As a tree my sin stands To darken all lands; Death is the fruit it bore.” (Poems, 1:156)

Eve feels alienated in the world which she, in a sense, created, but Rossetti’s strategy in depicting her estrangement evokes compassion, as does her retrospective wish that Adam, “my brother,” had “said me nay.” Then only she “might have pined away; / I, but none other” (Poems, 1:157). Rossetti’s desexualization of the relationship between Adam and Eve in the poem is subversive. It recalls Milton’s insistence on sexual desire as the motivation for Adam’s collusion in the Fall, while further dividing the responsibility for its repercussions equally between Adam and Eve. Without Adam’s choice to

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join Eve, death and its visible sign in the corpse she now looks upon could never have been conceived. In her anguish, nonetheless, Eve accepts full responsibility for the event:29 “I, Eve, sad mother Of all who must live, I, not another, Plucked bitterest fruit to give My friend, husband, lover;— O wanton eyes, run over; Who but I should grieve?—” (Poems, 1:157)

The poem’s second half, presenting reactions to Eve’s grief from “Each pitious beast” in the fallen world around her, responds to the angry “Second Spirit” of Browning’s drama, the “spirit of harmless beasts,” who castigates Adam and Eve for having brought on them “undeserved perdition” and asks, “Why have ye done this thing? What did we do / That we should fall from bliss as ye from duty?” (Works, 2:88). Rossetti focuses especially on the “birds, with viewless wings of harmonies” (Works, 2:187). Unlike these creatures in Browning’s poem, Rossetti’s eagles, larks, ravens, and conies wholly sympathize with Eve’s distress (Poems, 1:158). Nonetheless, just as the accusations of Browning’s unsympathetic creatures culminate in Lucifer’s curses, the caring gestures of Rossetti’s compassionate beasts are truncated by Satan’s appearance in the brief but powerful final stanza of her poem: Only the serpent in the dust Wriggling and crawling, Grinned an evil grin and thrust His tongue out with its fork. (Poems, 1:158)

Our attention thus focuses, finally, on the original liar responsible for Eve’s profound misery, but Rossetti’s strategy also subtly reminds us of mankind’s promised destiny and Eve’s eventual apotheosis: her seed shall bruise his head. In her prose works, Rossetti produced other significant commentaries on Eve that serve as a gloss on this poem, while providing clear statements of her perspective on the position of women in Victorian culture, and her view turns out to be far more radical than Browning’s. In a passage from Letter and Spirit Rossetti describes Eve as the type of all women and, more specifically,

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of all mothers. Surprisingly, she envisions Eve, “that first and typical woman, as indulging quite innocently sundry refined tastes and aspirations, a castlebuilding spirit (if so it may be called), a feminine boldness and directness of aim combined with a no less feminine guessiness [sic] as to means. Her very virtues may have opened the door to temptation. By birthright gracious and accessible, she lends an ear to all petitions from all petitioners. She desires to instruct ignorance, to rectify misapprehension: ‘unto the pure all things are pure.’ ” This Eve is more of a saint than a sinner, a victim of her desirable feminine qualities: innocence, idealism, “boldness and directness,” compassion. Rossetti declares that such “tenderness of spirit seems . . . lovely in the great first mother of mankind.” In this view, Eve retained her innocence, it would appear, even after the Fall: “she offered Adam a share of her own good fortune.” That she was “talked . . . over to [Satan’s] side”30 serves more to condemn the world in which she found herself vulnerable than to expose her own moral deficiencies. In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti designates Eve’s seminal failings; they are “disbelief and disobedience” rather than pride. The logical extension of Rossetti’s perspective is that, once removed from this world (at the judgment) Eve, “the beloved first mother of us all,” will “stand before the Throne” at the foot of God. (And, she poignantly adds, “Who that has loved and revered her own immediate dear mother, will not echo the hope?”)31 Clearly, for Rossetti, Eve is a name to conjure with, and the image it brings to mind is hardly the traditional one afflicted with pride but rather one that embodies the ideal of motherhood. Genuine attempts to realize this ideal for women, according to Rossetti, uniquely justify their participation, and even their pursuit of power, alongside men, in the world. Rossetti makes clear her general view of the social relations between the sexes in The Face of the Deep, and that view might at first appear conventional. She figures the social body, “whose right hand is man, whose left woman; in one sense equal, in another sense unequal. The right hand is labourer, acquirer, achiever: the left hand helps, but has little independence, and is more apt at carrying than at executing. The right hand runs the risks, fights the battles: the left hand abides in comparative quiet and safety; except (a material exception) that in the mutual relationship of the twain it is in some ways far more liable to undergo than to inflict hurt, to be cut (for instance) than to cut.”32 Read carefully, this passage reveals a thoroughly un-Victorian attitude toward domestic relations, implicitly deidealizing marriage, which is at best for Rossetti a necessary evil for those who are compelled to cooperate in the social organism. In an important letter to Augusta Webster, who had solicited Rossetti’s support for the suffrage movement, she expands upon this view, assuring Webster that it derives directly from the Bible. “Does it not appear as if the Bible was based upon an understood unalterable distinction between

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men and women, their position, duties, privileges. . . . not merely under the Old but also under the New Dispensation. [There is] no doubt that the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes: and if not all, then a selection must be made and a line drawn somewhere.”33 Rossetti can espouse these beliefs in the sure knowledge of one consolation and inspiration for every daughter of Eve: that in the afterlife, she “will be made equal with men and angels; arrayed in all human virtues, and decked with all communicable Divine graces.”34 For the most part, Rossetti sees women in conventional worldly relationships to men as passive receptors and guardians, a domestic watch of sorts. Their roles most often involve victimization and suffering. In notes on Genesis (never published during her lifetime) Rossetti underscores this view: “There seems to be a sense in which from the Fall downwards the penalty of death has been laid on man and of life on woman. To Eve: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ . . . [F]rom the father alone is derived the stock and essence of the child; the mother, transmitting her own humanity, contributing no more than the nourishment, development, style so to say. The father active, the mother receptive.”35 As these passages from her prose and as many of her poems make clear, Rossetti saw little opportunity for genuine fulfillment in any of the roles prescribed for women during her era.36 “A Triad,” for instance, like the Monna Innominata sonnets, starkly challenges the sentimental ideals of love and marriage that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had reinforced in the Sonnets from the Portuguese and even in Aurora Leigh. Rossetti comments upon the three stations available to contemporary women: the fallen woman “shame[s] herself in love”; the “famished” spinster “die[s] for love”; and the “sluggish wife” grows “gross in soulless love” (Poems, 1:29). Although this social vision is replicated everywhere in Rossetti’s poetry, motherhood provides a space for at least partial escape from unfulfillment. As a biblically dictated and socially necessary vocation for those women who succumb to the fierce ideological pressures upon them, motherhood can be empowering and rewarding—as is clear from “The Lowest Room” as well as “Goblin Market,” for instance—but only if it is pursued with an active awareness of the spiritual (that is, Christian) responsibilities it entails. In an extraordinary passage from the letter to Webster, Rossetti demonstrates a fairly ingenuous faith that men will protect women’s “rights” without the need for women to enter the world of politics. But that this might not be the case leads her to a radical position, based largely on her idealization of mothers as guardians of their children against all prospective predators. If “female rights are sure to be overborne for lack of female voting influence,” she confesses,

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then . . . I feel disposed to shoot ahead of my instructresses, and to assert that female M. P.’s are only right and reasonable. Also I take exceptions at the exclusion of married women from the suffrage,—for who so apt as Mothers—all previous arguments allowed for the moment—to protect the interests of themselves and of their offspring? I do think if anything ever does sweep away the barrier of sex, and make the female not a giantess or a heroine but at once and full grown a hero and giant, it is that mighty maternal love which makes little birds and little beasts as well as little women matches for very big adversaries.37

Under special circumstances, Rossetti appears resigned to the entry of women into the masculinist world that she otherwise wholly renounces, and in this she echoes Browning. But it is crucial to remember that the pursuit of “Life’s heroic ends” for women like Browning’s speaker in “Hector in the Garden” and for Aurora Leigh does not depend upon exceptional circumstances. It is, rather, a matter of principle, pride, ambition, and faith in the value of activity in the world that men dominate. Rossetti’s idealization of mothers exclusively in the spiritualized domestic sphere serves to correct Browning’s adventurous extension of maternal activity, often as a trope, into the male world.38 “Victoria’s Tears” is a touchstone for Browning’s large project of reappraising the restricted cultural situation of women, but even poems like “Mother and Poet” and “Parting Lovers” that express compassion for women constrained within the domestic sphere, whose sons, husbands, and lovers are lost (or prospectively lost) to battle, protest against such sequestration: Some women bear children in strength, And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn; But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length Into wail such as this—and we sit on forlorn When the man-child is born. (“Mother and Poet,” Works, 6:75)

Even more disturbing to Rossetti than such protestations would have been Browning’s literal extrapolation of Tennyson’s metaphor of the “MotherAge” (from “Locksley Hall”) in a key passage from book 5 of Aurora Leigh. Here Browning’s heroine advocates the writing of epic poetry on contemporary subjects: Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch

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Upon the burning lava of a song, The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age: That, when the next shall come, the men of that May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say “Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked! This bosom seems to beat still, or at least It sets ours beating. This is living art, Which thus presents, and thus records true life.” (Works, 5:7–8)

Such “true life” of the . . . throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends . . . passion . . . [and] heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms (Works, 5:7)

constitutes “The World” that Rossetti in her poetry earnestly and repeatedly renounces for its vanities. Using the quintessential act of motherhood to figure a female epic poet’s ambition to render this world would have distressed Christina Rossetti. Equally dismaying was Browning’s celebration, in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, of an active collusion with the amatory ideologies of that world. Poets in Love That Rossetti’s responses to the work of Barrett Browning were conflicted is clear from her headnote to the Monna Innominata sonnets, as well as from her involvement in a slight controversy that arose over its intended meaning. It is worth reprinting the note in full: Beatrice, immortalized by “altissimo poeta . . . contanto amante”; Laura, celebrated by a great tho’ an inferior bard,—have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness. These heroines of world-wide fame were preceded by a bevy of unnamed ladies “ donne innominate” sung by a school of less conspicuous poets; and in that land and that period which gave simultaneous birth to Catholics, to Albigenses, and to Troubadours, one can imagine many a lady as sharing her lover’s poetic aptitude, while the barrier between

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them might be one held sacred by both, yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible with mutual honour. Had such a lady spoken for herself, the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified than any drawn even by a devoted friend. Or had the Great Poetess of our own day and nation only been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the “Portuguese Sonnets,” an inimitable “ donna innominata” drawn not from fancy but from feeling, and worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and Laura. (Poems, 2:86)

This preface has remarkable implications, both for Rossetti’s aesthetic values and for the intertextual relations between her work and Browning’s. Published exactly two decades after Browning’s death, Rossetti’s sonnet sequence demonstrates a simultaneous allegiance to her precursor and quiet compulsion to correct what Rossetti perceived as the mistaken directions of her poetry. Only by 1881 did she feel adequately removed from the shadow of Browning’s reputation to discuss the work of the “Great Poetess” publicly. One aspect of that discussion is its direct and forceful challenge to Browning’s by then well-known insistence on the need for contemporary poets to deal with contemporary issues and employ contemporary settings, to “represent . . . Their age, not Charlemagne’s” (Works, 5:7). The passage also suggests that Browning’s very “happiness” in love constituted a concession to the dominant and, for women (at least from Rossetti’s point of view), often disempowering amatory ideology of their day, in the end preventing her sonnets from entering into successful competition with the work of the great male poets of the past whom Browning elsewhere openly challenges. 39 These perceptions are substantiated by a letter to William Michael Rossetti in which Christina responded to Hall Caine’s review of A Pageant and Other Poems, which had appeared in The Academy. According to Rossetti, he “misapprehended my reference to the Portuguese Sonnets.” She explains, Surely not only what I meant to say but what I do say is, not that the Lady of [Browning’s] sonnets is surpassable, but that a “Donna innominata” by the same hand [Browning’s] might well have been unsurpassable. The Lady in question [the speaker in Sonnets from the Portuguese], as she actually stands, I was not regarding as an “innominata” at all—because the latter type, according to the traditional figures I had in view, is surrounded by unlike circumstances. I rather wonder that no one (so far as I know) ever hit on my

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semi-historical argument before for such treatment,—it seems to me so full of poetic suggestiveness.40

Like the wholesale renunciations of “the world” elsewhere in her poetry, Rossetti’s special interest in distancing her sequence historically allows her to present, from the unique perspective of a woman, a critique of the amatory ideology at the heart of Western culture. The power of this ideology born in the twelfth century had reached its apogee in Victorian England. Designating the contemporary intertext of her work as the Sonnets from the Portuguese, a work that merely uses Victorian language and conventions to reinscribe the ideology of its troubadour, Petrarchan, and Dantean palimpsests, enhances the critical force of Rossetti’s poem. The Monna Innominata itself deploys its persona at first to seduce the susceptible reader who subscribes to that ideology by presenting the familiar figure of an enamored woman who is also a projection of a far less familiar figure, an excellent poet. This poet reveres her beloved as “my heart’s heart” who is “to me / More than myself ” (Poems, 2:88). Her identity is, in traditional fashion, submerged in that of the man she loves until the larger sonnet’s “turn” in the ninth poem, which begins the process of repudiating and subverting the traditional ideology of love that Browning had embraced in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. “Ready to spend and be spent for your sake,” the speaker acknowledges “all / That might have been and now can never be” (Poems, 2:90–91). By the penultimate sonnet, the speaker has renounced all possibility of fulfilling her love in this world and surrenders herself and her beloved to the transcendent love of God, the unique source of genuine fulfillment and one that wholly devalues the kind of amatory experience celebrated by poets in love from the troubadours through Barrett Browning: Searching my heart for all that touches you, I find there only love and love’s goodwill Helpless to help and impotent to do, Of understanding dull, of sight most dim; And therefore I commend you back to Him Whose love your love’s capacity can fill. (Poems, 2:92–93)

Ultimately, as we have seen, Rossetti’s female troubadour positions herself critically and inscrutably in the sphere of female silence beyond worldly vanities. She will “not bind fresh roses in my hair” or “seek for blossoms anywhere, / Except such common f lowers as blow with corn” (Poems, 2:93).

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This position generates considerable cultural power for the female poet, and that power is consolidated in the double distance from “the world” and its seductions that Rossetti creates by means of her headnote to the sequence. The Monna Innominata, that is, presents a historically distant female speaker who finally repudiates commonly accepted patriarchal amatory ideologies (as well as the worldly poetic modes that propagate them). But this figure is self-consciously projected by a contemporary poet deliberately in pursuit of a “semi-historical argument” that will distance her from the illusory seductions of “happy” love in her own era. By contrast with Rossetti’s speaker and the stance Rossetti herself adopts in the metacommentary of her headnote to the Monna Innominata, Browning had, in her Sonnets from the Portuguese, generated a paradigm of the sentimental and patriarchal amatory ideology of mid-Victorian England. Her poet-speaker presents herself as inferior and subservient to her beloved, while literally transformed by his adoration into the conventional Angel of domestic existence: . . . in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. (no. 10, Works, 3:231–32)

The conventional language of heavenly apotheosis and transfiguration punctuates these sonnets, but is, ironically, belied again and again by the speaker’s desire for fulfillment of her erotic love in this world. At last convinced by her beloved’s devotion to her (by sonnet twenty-three), she renounces all renunciatory impulses: As brighter ladies do not count it strange, For love, to give up acres and degree, I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee. (no. 23, Works, 3:238)

Similarly, a refusal to “fashion into speech / The love I bear” expressed in the early sonnets soon gives way to insistent poetic celebrations of her love. The “silence of my womanhood” and its accompanying “dauntless, voiceless fortitude” is replaced by her dedication to generating “perfect strains” that may “f loat / ’Neath master-hands” (no. 32, Works, 3:243), suggesting that woman’s voice can be discovered only through affairs of

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the heart. That voice is, significantly, no longer controlled by woman. Thus, Browning’s speaker “happily” relinquishes her identity, her independence, even her silent spiritual heart, to the manipulations of a man, and she willingly submits to him. In a coy but ideologically disingenuous role reversal, he is transposed as an “angel . . . in the world” (no. 42, Works, 3:247). That world is, when viewed through the lens of love, a “new Heaven” which the “patient angel” who articulates these poems hopes to enter (no. 39, Works, 3:246).41 The Sonnets from the Portuguese reinforce a well-known statement made by Elizabeth Barrett in a letter to Robert Browning concerning the differences between the sexes. In it she acknowledges that women possess “minds of quicker movement, but less power and depth” than men, further explaining that “there is a natural inferiority of mind in women—of the intellect . . . the history of art and of genius testifies to this fact openly.”42 As a woman poet, nonetheless, she felt compelled to venture outside the traditionally sequestered domestic sphere of women into the world whose domination by men she accepted. She genuinely hoped to gain some power in that world, to realize some possibilities for female “heroism.” By contrast, Christina Rossetti insisted, more carefully and evasively, only on “distinctions” between men and women, and those limited to this world, where, she acknowledges, at least the subordination of wife to husband, is proper. But Rossetti keeps her eyes steadily upon another world, the afterlife, a “flowering land / Of love” where sexual equality will be attained (Poems, 2:89). Reading Rossetti, we are in danger of complete misunderstanding if we forget that, as a devout and strict, indeed obsessive, Anglo-Catholic, she consistently repudiated and thus devalorized “the world.” Her repeated ideological challenges to Browning derive from this stance of estrangement from the particular values, especially masculinist and patriarchal values, that Browning consistently reinforces by attempting to enter the field of their operations and lay claim to them in the name of women. Deirdre David has concluded that in all of Browning’s poetry, “she aligns herself with a poetic tradition celebrating a privileged relationship of the poet to God and figuring the poet as enjoined by that relationship to be active in the world.”43 We should now begin to see the extent to which Browning’s perception of woman’s relationship to God, to man, and to the world was ideologically opposed to Rossetti’s. Constitutionally quiet, patient, and polite, Rossetti nonetheless attempted, through the subtle intertextual operations of her poetry, to correct the misguided directions of her singular precursor’s work, but also to demonstrate the genuine admiration she felt for the only seriously accomplished woman poet and foremother she could identify, in Victorian England, as a model to be remodeled.

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Notes 1. Quoted by Mackenzie Bell in Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1898), pp. 329–30. 2. See ibid., pp. 321–30; among recent discussions that attempt to demonstrate Rossetti’s superiority over Browning, see Joan Rees, The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 146–60; and Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 156–57. 3. William Michael Rossetti, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Ellis, 1895), 2:323. 4. Bell, Christina Rossetti, p. 324. 5. Quoted ibid., p. 93. 6. William Michael Rossetti, ed., The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (New York: Scribners, 1908), p. 31. W.M.R. dates the letter as April 1870, but it was doubtless written before 1865. In it Christina refers to her “one first, last, and only book.” 7. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump, 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979–86), 2:93. Future citations to this standard edition of Rossetti’s poetry in this chapter will appear parenthetically in text as Poems, with volume and page numbers. 8. See Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context, pp. 152–57. 9. Bell, Christina Rossetti, pp. 90–91. 10. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1900; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973), 4:53. Future citations to this standard edition of Browning’s works in this chapter will appear parenthetically in text as Works, with volume and page numbers. 11. Quoted by Mary Sandars in The Life of Christina Rossetti (London: Hutchinson, 1930), p. 85. 12. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederick G. Kenyon, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1898), 1:232. 13. For the most extensive argument that Browning’s work is deeply feminist in its impulses, see Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986); in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), Deirdre David asserts Browning’s “firm identification with male modes of political thought and aesthetic practice, whatever feminist sympathies she may be said to possess” (p. 98); Helen Cooper adopts the moderate position in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1988). 14. See, for instance, Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context; Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1986); and Jerome J. McGann, “Christina Rossetti’s Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation,” Victorian Studies 23 (1980): 237–54, for discussions of Rossetti’s “feminist” subversiveness. But compare Margaret Romans, “ ‘Syllables of Velvet’: Dickinson, Rossetti, and the Rhetorics of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 569–93; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 549–54, 564–75, who lament her acquiescence in conventional Victorian roles for women.

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15. Henry Mayhew, “Home Is Home, Be It Never so Homely,” in Viscount Ingistre, ed., Melioria; or, Better Times to Come: Being the Contributions of Many Men Touching the Present State and Prospects of Society (London, 1852), p. 263. 16. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lillies (London, 1865), p. 147. For a helpful introduction to the Victorian ideal of motherhood, see Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 28. For an extended discussion of the relations between Victorian ideals of motherhood and the profession of writing for women in Victorian England see Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), especially chapter 7, “The Author as Mother: Bearing the Word as Nineteenth-Century Ideology,” pp. 153–88. 17. Nead, Myths of Sexuality, pp. 26–27. 18. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Daughters of England (London, 1845), p. 7, quoted in Nead, Myths of Sexuality, p. 28. 19. Mrs. Roe, A Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls (London: 1866), p. 39. 20. For a brilliant analysis of the genuine power accorded to women in the domestic sphere throughout the nineteenth century, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). 21. David, Intellectual Women, pp. 98, 143. 22. For a full discussion of Browning’s debt to Wordsworth, see Kathleen Blake, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as a Woman,” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 387–98. 23. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 590. 24. For an alternate reading of “The Lowest Room,” see Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti, pp. 162–66. 25. Jerome J. McGann, Introduction to The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), p. 7. Surprisingly, McGann does not discuss “The World.” 26. Ibid., p. 11. 27. For the most extensive discussion to date of Eve figures in Rossetti’s work see Diane D’Amico, “Eve, Mary, And Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s Feminine Triptych,” in Kent, ed., The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 175–91. 28. For commentary on this topic see “The Poetics of Conciseness,” chapter 2 in Harrison, Christina Rossetti, (pp. 23–63). 29. See D’Amico, “Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene,” p. 177. 30. Christina Rossetti, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (London: SPCK, 1883), pp. 17–18. 31. Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep (London: SPCK, 1892), pp. 310–11. 32. Ibid., p. 410. 33. Rossetti to Augusta Webster, quoted in Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti, p. 112; my italics. 34. Rossetti, Face of the Deep, p. 310. 35. Rossetti quoted by Lona Mosk Packer in Christina Rossetti (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 330.

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36. Among numerous examples, see “An Apple-Gathering,” “Cousin Kate,” “Twice,” “Maude Clare,” “Wife to Husband,” “May,” “A Pause of Thought,” “Mirage,” “Dead before Death,” “Rest,” “The Convent Threshold,” “A Portrait,” “Light Love,” “Beauty Is Vain,” “Autumn,” and “Memory.” 37. Bell, Christina Rossetti, p. 112. 38. For discussions of Browning’s poems relating to motherhood, see Sandra Donaldson, “ ‘Motherhood’s Advent in Power’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems about Motherhood,” Victorian Poetry 18 (1980): 51–60; and Virginia V. Steinmetz, “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh,” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 351–67. 39. For a complementary reading of Rossetti’s headnote, see William Whitla, “Questioning the Convention: Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet Sequence “Monna Innominata,” in Kent, ed., The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 87–93. The most thorough commentaries on the Monna Innominata to date are those by Whitla (pp. 82–131) and Harrison (Christina Rossetti in Context, pp. 142–86). 40. W. M. Rossetti, ed., Family Letters, p. 98. 41. My reading of the Sonnets opposes Leighton’s feminist argument that in it Browning asserts “the woman’s right to speak” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 110). 42. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–46, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 2:116. 43. David, Intellectual Women, p. 157.

DONALD S. HAIR

Soul and Spirit in In Memoriam

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ennyson uses the words “soul” and “spirit” frequently and confidently in In Memoriam, but late twentieth-century readers are likely to find the words slightly embarrassing, and to feel less than confident of Tennyson’s meaning. My own experience of the response to these words has been mainly in the classroom, and I know that students, undergraduates and graduates both, think that “soul” and “spirit” are synonyms, and that they refer to some vague thing or state that is invisible, immaterial, and largely unknowable. Yet the words are crucial in Tennyson’s elegy, from his desire at the beginning to restore “mind and soul” to “one music as before” (Prologue), to his resolve at the end to dwell “in my spirit” (123), and to his hope, expressed in the elegy’s final section, of closing “with all we loved, / And all we flow from, soul in soul” (131). My purpose in this paper is to examine the ways in which Tennyson actually uses “soul” and “spirit” in the poem, and to do so in the context of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, where he distinguishes between the “natural body” and the “spiritual body,” and where he suggests the kind of perception proper to each. Tennyson too ultimately distinguishes between the two modes of being, and the kind of perception proper to each is central to the movement and resolution of his elegy. Etymology, which, as Patrick Scott has argued, “held centre stage in public awareness” of language in the Victorian period,1 provided Tennyson From Victorian Poetry 34, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 175–91. Copyright © 1996 by West Virginia University Press.

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with a distinction between soul and spirit that was not entirely clear or satisfactory. In a key passage in Book 3 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke gives an empiricist’s etymology of spirit: “Spirit, in its primary signification, is Breath” (3.1.5).2 Tennyson places this same etymology in the mouth of a personified Nature in section 56 of In Memoriam: “The spirit does but mean the breath: / I know no more.” The verb “know,” as Tennyson uses it here, indicates that Nature apprehends spirit only with the senses or through the perception of (to use Paul’s term) the “natural man.” The poet himself, while making full use of the conventional metaphorical identification of spirit and breath, will affirm that spirit is much more than physical. While “spirit” is Latin in origin, “soul” is Teutonic, and appears in Old English as sawol and sawle (among other variations). Charles Richardson, whose A New Dictionary of the English Language (1836–37) was the reference Tennyson used, offers a possible etymology: “Junius suspects it to be an elegant compound to denote the well of life, from Gr. Záw, I live, and Wala, a well or fountain.” Richardson also suggests the conventional link between the soul and one’s individuality, one’s unique and essential nature: “Ihre suspected some etymological connection between Siael, anima, and Siaelf, ipse, self.” Richardson, like many others, obscures the distinction between “soul” and “spirit” when he writes that “We use soul as equivalent to—The spirit, the breath of life.” Yet the distinction is persistent, and has a long history. It appears not only in English but in Latin (spiritus and anima), Greek, and Hebrew. Its locus classicus is, as Northrop Frye points out, in Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.3 There Paul distinguishes the “natural man” (1 Corinthians 2.14), the soma psychikon or “soul-body,” from the “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15.44), the soma pneumatikon. “The soul-body seems to be thought of as a duality, the soul being ‘in’ the body, so that when the physical body dies the soul would either vanish into non-being or survive without its body in a discarnate state” (Frye, p. 122). This view of the soul-body relation is a traditional one, and indeed Locke gives it in a passage from his Essay quoted by Richardson: “But taking, as we ordinarily now do, (in the dark concerning these Matters) the Soul of a Man, for an immaterial Substance, independent from Matter, and indifferent alike to it all, there can from the Nature of things, be no Absurdity at all, to suppose, that the same Soul may, at different times be united to different Bodies, and with them make up, for that time, one Man” (2.27.27). In contrast to the dualism of the soul-body, the “spiritual body” is a unit. In an important parenthesis, Frye writes, “Paul means that it is a body, not that it has one” (p. 124), and it is “the element in us that enables us to understand the scripture and other aspects of revelation” (p. 124). The distinction between the soul-body and the spiritual body is a distinction between two kinds of seeing. “The natural man receiveth not the

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things of the Spirit of God,” Paul writes, “for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things” (1 Corinthians 2.14–15). The passage is a commonplace in Christian teaching, so it is not surprising to find Tennyson parodying it in an 1833 letter to James Spedding, when he writes merrily about “the recollections of the many intellectual, spirituous, and spiritual evenings we have spent together in olden days—evenings, when spiritual things were spirituously discerned.”4 There is no such parody in In Memoriam, where spiritual discernment is the goal and the question of its authority the poet’s concern. Parallels and allusions to Paul’s epistle are, as we shall see, crucial parts of the elegy. The first step toward spiritual discernment involves a rejection of the seeing of the “natural man.” As Tennyson renders in language this kind of seeing, “soul” and “spirit” are not wholly distinguishable, and indeed often seem synonymous, though both are distinct from the body which, in the view of the “natural man,” falls away from them (or it?) at death. In section 13, for instance, Tennyson complains that Death has removed Hallam physically, and made him “A Spirit, not a breathing voice” (l. 12). The sense seems to be that spirit, like soul, dwells in the body until death, when this dualism dissolves and spirit separates itself from matter. Spirit here is something ghostly or invisible, separated even from its conventional metaphor, breath. Other early sections of the poem confirm this doubleness. In section 38, for instance, the poet describes the postmortem state as a time when spirits are “rendered free,” and in section 40 spirits are “breathed away,” the result being, in the grim pun suggested here, that we expire. Tennyson is in fact using the word “spirit” in the sense usually conveyed by the word “soul”: it is created by God, inhabits the body during a person’s lifetime, and is freed at death, being immortal. “Bare of the body” is Tennyson’s phrase in section 43 for such a dissolution. Tennyson never wholly rejects this popular view of the spirit-body or soulbody relationship, and his reason for not doing so is his powerful sense of the soul as unique, created by God and, while capable of development, nonetheless retaining its individuality. Tennyson’s abhorrence of being absorbed in “the general Soul” (47.5) is well known. He constantly affirms that an individual’s “eternal soul” (47.7) remains distinct as well as immortal, unique as well as one with “the general Soul.” In spite of Tennyson’s blurring of the difference between “soul” and “spirit” in the early sections of the poem, a difference is nonetheless discernible, and could perhaps be summed up by grammatical metaphors: “soul” is a past participle (created) while “spirit” is a present participle (creating). We know that we did not create ourselves, but we also know that there is something in us which enables us to make sense of ourselves and the world in

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which we live. Making sense involves consciousness, imagination, interpretation and, in Tennyson’s scheme of things, love. Imagination is among the earliest of these indications of spiritual discernment to become active. In the initial sections of the poem, the imagination acts in the absence of sensation or physical evidence. In section 17, for instance, which is about the voyage of the ship bearing Hallam’s body back to England, the poet follows the vessel’s movement, he tells us, with his spirit. He begins by imaging the physical breeze that “Compelled thy canvas,” and links it with his own prayer, likened to a physical breeze also: it was “as the whisper of an air / To breathe thee over lonely seas” (ll. 3–4). Having introduced the actual breeze, and having troped it through his simile, Tennyson suggests the conventional metaphor in the first line of the second quatrain: “For I in spirit saw thee move.” “Spirit” here means the power of one’s imagination, understood in the seventeenth-century sense as the ability to image things once perceived but now absent or hidden from the senses. (Hence Hobbes asserts that imagination “is nothing but decaying sense.”5) By the time we get to section 55, such perception by the spirit no longer depends upon previous sensible experience. There the wish for immortality, in the face of the contrary evidence of nature, derives from “the likest God within the soul” (l. 4). The “likest God” is, I think, spirit, which shapes and interprets its world, though that interpretation is often at odds with the evidence of one’s physical sight. This lyric, like the following one, contrasts physical sight, which observes only a separate and alien nature, and another kind of sight, whose center of authority is not in the observed but in the observer, not in one’s material existence but in one’s genuinely human (that is spiritual) nature. The poet seems less certain of that authority in section 56, where man’s faith, his trust that “God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law” (ll. 13–14) may be an empty dream, a fiction. The answer to the long question posed in this section—is man only matter, to “Be blown about the desert dust, / Or sealed within the iron hills?” (ll. 19–20)—is “behind the veil.” The preposition in that phrase is crucial: it suggests something hidden by a physical appearance which, if we could only remove it, would allow unmediated sight: nature would be transparent. To seek such an answer, however, is still to act like Paul’s “natural man.” The “spiritual body” will dispense with the preposition entirely: the answer is the veil itself, to be discerned (in a fully spiritual way) as the “lucid veil” of section 67. For the “natural man,” immortality manifests itself only as an insubstantial appearance, a ghost. Ghosts haunt the poet’s strivings to image Hallam after death, and sometimes appear, by default, after moments of genuine spiritual perception. The attempt of the “natural man” to image Hallam after death in section 70 is rewarded with nightmarish appearances: “Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,” “pallèd shapes,” and “puckered faces.” The will, as

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Tennyson treats it here, operates in the physical world, and can produce only “hollow masks.” “Beyond the will” is another kind of seeing, that of the “spiritual body,” which perceives Hallam substantially and bodily: “And through a lattice on the soul / Looks thy fair face and makes it still.” Hallam’s spiritual body is also his name, proper names being, in Tennyson’s scheme of things, one with an individual’s uniqueness. When the “silver flame” steals “Along the letters of thy name” in section 67, Tennyson is, at least for a moment, apprehending Hallam spiritually, until he reverts to being the “natural man” for whom Hallam’s memorial tablet now glimmers “like a ghost.” The “dark house” of the well known section 7 is also a ghost, the empty house being a metaphor for Hallam after death as perceived by the “natural man”: “He is not here.” That statement is both despairing and hopeful, if one is mindful of the Biblical allusion, as Rosenberg is, and of the prosody, as Griffiths is.6 The hope is nonetheless that of the “natural man” for whom death is the separation of spirit and body: Hallam’s hand is one “that can be clasped no more” (7.5). When Tennyson discerns the house spiritually, as he does in section 119, there is no such separation: “in my thoughts with scarce a sigh / I take the pressure of thine hand.” The phrase “in my thoughts” is the deceptively ordinary indication of spiritual discernment, here placed in the context of an imagination that (as in 10 and 17) sees absent things as present: “I smell the meadow in the street.” Such a move toward spiritual discernment is an important part of the growth or development or progress of the individual, the kind of change Tennyson was drawing attention to when he considered calling the poem “The Way of the Soul.”7 In this pattern, beings created by God (“souls”) are themselves creators (“spirits”), shaping their own natures and the world around them, and participating in essential ways in the move of all things toward the “one far-off divine event” (Epithalamium, l. 143). In this context, Hallam is the “noble type / Appearing ere the times were ripe” (Epithalamium, ll. 138–139), and Tennyson characteristically explores the relation between a lower being (himself ) and a higher (Hallam). Both beings are sometimes souls and sometimes spirits, as Tennyson uses the nouns interchangeably. Hallam is “a soul of nobler tone” in section 60 but a “Spirit” in section 61; “my spirit loved and loves him yet,” Tennyson asserts in 60, but in 61 it is his soul that responds to Hallam: “nor can / The soul of Shakspeare [sic] love thee more.” Sometimes, in his development, Tennyson reverts to the view of the soul and spirit as distinct from the body, as he does in the “backward fancy” (l. 46) of section 84. Sometimes he advances, as he does in the “spiritual strife” (l. 54) of section 85 or through the spiritual perception of section 86. Kerry McSweeney has argued in his 1981 book on Tennyson and Swinburne that this lyric, where “ambrosial air,” breathing and breath are the

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central metaphors, indicates an entirely natural consolation,8 but the poem may also be read as the spiritual discernment of nature. The lyric is an invocation. Tennyson asks the “ambrosial air” to heal him (“fan my brows and blow / The fever from my cheek,” ll. 8–9) and to nourish him, to feed “thy breath / Throughout my frame” (ll. 10–11). The chief characteristic of spirit is its energy, and the chief characteristic of spiritual discernment is energy shaped and ordered. McSweeney, like Alan Sinfield before him and Elaine Jordan after him,9 comments on the lyric’s movement, the “controlled onrush of this one-sentence poem (none of its first three quatrains is end-stopped, and there are syntactic or breath pauses at the end of only six of the sixteen lines, and three of these occur in the final stanza)” (p. 86). Energy which is controlled and disciplined rather than shapeless and amorphous, visible and actual rather than invisible and potential, is the spiritual body in action, and the form of the lyric itself suggests, paradoxically, that the longed-for state is already being realized. That form—the single sentence—makes syntax the embodiment of spiritual perception, where opposites are held together in a single dynamic pattern. The emblem of such perception is the “wild bird” of section 88, in whom “senses mix,” “passions meet,” and “fierce extremes employ / Thy spirits.” “The glory of the sum of things,” the ultimate goal of spiritual perception, seems within reach. The achieving of such perception, though brief and unsustainable, is the consolation in this elegy. That achievement is, as every reader of the poem knows, in section 95, for which sections 90 through 94 are a preparation. For instance, the resignation of 93—“I shall not see thee”—is that of the “natural man,” for whom the spirit–body relationship is that of something invisible which is “claspt in clay” (l. 4). Hence, when the poet explores the possibility of renewed contact with Hallam, he cannot imagine the physical having any part in it. He wants “No visual shade of some one lost” (l. 5) but “the Spirit himself ” (l. 6), and he wants that spirit to come “Where all the nerve of sense is numb” (l. 7). Their relation will be one of “Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost” (l. 8), and the word “ghost” indicates the “natural man’s” view of the afterlife. Section 94 contrasts sharply with 93: the poet’s spirit is alert and intensely receptive to “communion with the dead,” though the intensity is free of tension and anxiety. “My spirit,” Tennyson says, must be “at peace with all” (l. 8). That spirit is clearly an inner order, a cosmos—to use Carlyle’s diction— which the individual makes out of the chaos he was born with. (Carlyle told Emerson in 1844 that Tennyson was “carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!”10) Chaos manifests itself as noise (“when the heart is full of din”), while cosmos is associated with silence, calm, and rest—not a slothful rest, one hastens to add, but a state of relaxed alertness, the state in which spiritual perception becomes possible.

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In 1 Corinthians 15.35, Paul writes, “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?” Paul’s evasive answer (in verse 44) is that resurrection “is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. And,” Paul continues in the next verse, “so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” Paul is quoting Genesis 2.7 (“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”), and I quote it because the phrase “living soul” is the one Tennyson uses for his experience of Hallam in section 95: “And all at once it seemed at last / The living soul was flashed on mine” (ll. 35–36). He uses “living soul,” I think, to indicate, not just a repetition of creation, but a recreation or rebirth, both like and unlike the first. It is like the first because Tennyson wants to affirm Hallam’s continuing life, the unbroken connection of the “living soul” with the Hallam Tennyson knew (and hence Tennyson does not, like the English translators of Paul, shift from “living soul” to “quickening spirit”). It is unlike the first because Hallam has clearly progressed to another stage of his being, and because Tennyson apprehends him in a new way. The language of this climactic passage is the language of physical sensation, particularly touch (“mine in this was wound,” l. 37) and kinesthesia (which “caught / The deep pulsations of the world,” ll. 39–40), but the agent experiencing these sensations is Tennyson’s own living soul, indicated by the possessive pronouns “mine” in relation to “this” or (as in the first editions of the poem) “his” living soul.11 When Tennyson elsewhere describes his perception of his own living soul (made possible by his repeating his own name and thus intensifying his “consciousness of individuality”), he leaves indeterminate the relation of body and soul: “ ‘This might,’ he said [according to his son], ‘be the state which St. Paul describes, “Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell” ’ ” (Memoir, 1:320). Tennyson is quoting 2 Corinthians 12.2, 3, where Paul is dealing with “visions and revelations,” but there is no such indeterminacy in section 95 of In Memoriam. Tennyson perceives “the living soul” with his own living soul, and the perception is not through the physical (or indeed in terms of any other doubleness that any preposition might indicate): it is physical. That identity, however, is only momentary, as “that which I became” (l. 48) is almost instantly in the past tense, and spiritual discernment gives way to the ordinary sensations of the five senses. In the remaining lyrics, Tennyson struggles to make sense of this experience by exploring the nature of spiritual perception. In this struggle, “soul” more and more clearly means a being created by God (always, in Tennyson’s thinking, unique), while “spirit” is the soul’s interpretive and imaginative power, reflecting God’s creative power and participating in a creation which,

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Tennyson ultimately affirms, is progressive. The sense-bound perception of the natural man, haunted by ghosts, gradually gives way to the expanding perception of the spiritual man, for whom all sensible things are changing manifestations of mysterious powers. For instance, in section 97, where Tennyson tropes himself and Hallam as “Two partners of a married life” (l. 5) and thinks “of my spirit as of a wife” (l. 8), spirit is an active power within him, responding to the higher, and mysterious, power of Hallam: “I cannot understand: I love” (l. 36). The line “She darkly feels him great and wise” (l. 34) is an allusion to a familiar verse in 1 Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13.12). Seeing through a glass, darkly, is not the perception of the natural man (who would see only the glass), but the beginning of spiritual discernment. The nature of spiritual discernment is clear in section 116, which presents a resolution to the poet’s striving to see Hallam’s face and to clasp his hand. Such striving was initially that of the natural man, and it was doomed to failure, but in 116 the poet confidently affirms that Hallam’s “fair face” (70.16) will indeed appear, and will shine Upon me, while I muse alone; And that dear voice, I once have known Still speak to me of me and mine. (ll. 10–12)

This affirmation is not just an empty wish for the future; present sensible experience is the promise of future spiritual discernment, as the second stanza of 116 indicates: the songs, the stirring air, The life re-orient out of dust, Cry through the sense to hearten trust In that which made the world so fair.

In the phrase “the stirring air” Tennyson uses the etymology of spirit in a rich way. “Stirring” suggests the physical movement of the air, the inspiration for the “songs,” and the effect of them on the listener. “Air” itself, neatly double, is both one of the four elements that make up our physical world, and also a song for a solo voice: the paronomasia fuses the physical and its shaping spirit, preserving the particular characteristics of both while identifying them in a single word. “Stirring air” is in apposition to “songs,” as is “The life re-orient out of dust” (the images—dust, orient—are those associated with God’s original creation of man), and apposition is a rhetorical

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scheme of elaboration and explanation in which the parallel units, distinct in themselves, all point to the same thing. The scheme or word order—apposition—supports and strengthens the trope—paronomasia—and the meaning of the proposition in this stanza is already apparent. The songs, the air, and life itself “Cry through the sense to hearten trust / In that which made the world so fair” (ll. 7–8). The crucial phrase is “through the sense.” Spiritual discernment is not some disembodied activity, but the act of our ordinary senses, now understood as energized by a shaping power—spirit—which makes perception both possible and intelligible. Section 122 is yet another exploration of the nature of spiritual perception, but here Tennyson attempts to suggest the excitement, the joy, and the magic of such seeing. As we would expect, he distinguishes between “my soul” (l. 7), the being created by God, and his active and creative spirit (here called “the strong imagination”) when he yearns To feel once more, in placid awe, The strong imagination roll A sphere of stars about my soul, In all her motion one with law. (ll. 5–8)

The “sphere of stars” is a conventional trope for the created universe, here pictured in its rolling not as a static thing but as a dynamic order or “law” (perhaps even with suggestions of a cosmic dance). We note, however, that the sphere is not an independent creation, but one in which the imagination participates; we also note that the article “the” is deliberately neutral. It allows one to ask, whose imagination? God’s? The poet’s? Both, one must conclude. God’s creative spirit is reflected in man’s imagination, which shares actively in shaping its world. Like its companion lyric (93), section 122 is an invocation to Hallam. The earlier imperatives (“Descend, and touch, and enter”) become this lyric’s “be with me now, / And enter in at breast and brow” (ll. 10–11). He wants to be inspired “Till all my blood, a fuller wave, / Be quickened with a livelier breath” (ll. 12–13). The adjective (“livelier”) and verb (“quickened”) indicate that the breath is not just material but a life-giving and animating power. Its effect is like that of “the former flash of joy” (l. 15), a reference to the climactic moment in section 95: And all the breeze of Fancy blows, And every dew-drop paints a bow, The wizard lightnings deeply glow, And every thought breaks out a rose. (ll. 17–20)

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The images here are realized in sharp physical detail, and yet every object of sense—and of mental attention—is a node of spiritual energy, apprehended by an inspired Fancy. Fancy and imagination are, I think (pace Coleridge), synonymous in this lyric, and are one with spirit. The view that material things are unstable and changing centers of force, and that spirit is the ground of all existence, is the substance of section 123, which completes the invocation of 122. This section, well known for its account of geological time speeded up (“They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go”), ends with an affirmation crucial to the consolation of the elegy: But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For though my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell. (ll. 9–12)

Spirit is the shaping and creative power which produces (what others with empiricist assumptions would call) “dreams,” which Tennyson (with his idealist assumptions) identifies with truth. “My spirit” may be an individual power, but it is also one with the power that pervades all of creation. “My spirit”—the spiritual body, that is—is a center of force, and it enables Tennyson to recognize all other centers as they truly are. In sections 125 and 126, that spirit is Love, and Love, Tennyson affirms, is “fixed in truth” (125.8). The numbered sections of the elegy end with the words “soul in soul” (131.12), but the “living will” that this section apostrophizes seems synonymous with spirit. Tennyson asks this will to “Rise in the spiritual rock.” The image is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 10.4, where Paul, anxious to read typologically the story of Moses striking the rock and bringing forth water, identifies the rock with Christ, whose pierced side on the cross also gave forth water. Moses’ followers, Paul writes, “did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.” The rock is metaphorically identical with the cornerstone of the temple, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 3.16 uses the temple image for human beings themselves: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Hallam Tennyson records in his Memoir the fact that the temple image was an important one for his father: “St. Paul’s expression ‘The temple of the Holy Ghost’ he thought had had a powerful effect on the Christian appreciation of the meaning of life” (Memoir, 1:318n). From this perspective, every human being or “soul” is a type of Christ, and spiritual discernment takes the form of typology, extended forward beyond the Old

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and New Testaments to the “we”—all human beings—of section 131. The seeing of the natural man is still apparent in this lyric, particularly in the line “The truths that never can be proved” (l. 10), but this line is not end-stopped, proceeding as it does immediately to the crucial “Until” at the beginning of line 11: “Until we close with all we loved, / And all we flow from, soul in soul.” “From” indicates the origin of each soul in God, whose presence is conventionally troped as a flow of water; “close” indicates the end or purpose of human life, which we shape through love. That comprehensive perspective from origins to endings is the seeing of the spiritual man.12 I have been examining soul and spirit largely in terms of the ideas expressed in the poem, but paraphrase and generalization can carry us only so far toward understanding the spiritual body and its way of seeing. We need to encounter not only the content of the poem but also its form, and its form grows out of Tennyson’s understanding of language, one aspect of which I am going to focus on here: the relation between consonants and vowels, and between the written and the spoken word. The conventional analogy for these relationships is the relation of body and soul, and the techniques Tennyson uses to resolve that duality suggest the nature of the spiritual body itself. An important context for understanding the relation between vowels and consonants is provided by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies of the Hebrew Bible. How much Tennyson knew about such studies I do not know, but one major work, Richard Simon’s Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Paris, 1680), was in his father’s library at Somersby, and Tennyson would certainly be aware of Paul’s distinction, in his second epistle to the Corinthians (3.6) between a letter that kills and a spirit that is life-giving. Simon and, a hundred years after him, Eichhorn, both Hebraists, undertook a history of the text of the Hebrew Bible, from its earliest state, where the letters are consonants, through the punctuation of the text by the Masoretes, who added signs to indicate vowels and thus fixed the voicing of the text. The punctuating of the text by the Masoretes raises questions of human interpretation in relation to divine inspiration—questions central to the Higher Criticism—but our interest is in the values attached to vowels and consonants, and Maurice Olender’s recent discussion of Simon in his The Languages of Paradise is immensely helpful in defining these values. In the Hebrew tradition (Olender quotes Spinoza here), consonants, the written letters, are “bodies without soul,” while the vowels, unrepresented by letters, are “the soul of letters.” Spinoza goes on to say that “in truth, the difference between letters and vowels can be explained more clearly by taking the example of the flute, which is played with the fingers. The vowels are the sound of the music; the letters are the holes touched by the fingers.”13 The consonants are silent and dead signs, until they are animated and brought

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to life by the vowels. The vowels—and here we move on to a crucial metaphor—breathe life into the text; they inspire it. That inspiring breath is invisible to the eye in the original Hebrew Bible, but it appeals to the ear, so that the meaning of the text emerges only when it is voiced. Tennyson is, I think, alluding to this whole cluster of ideas and images in section 5 of In Memoriam, where he says, in a familiar passage, that “words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.” One could read these lines in the context of expressionism, since he is talking about putting “in words the grief I feel,” and in this context language is both incommensurate with emotion and a shameful revelation of it. But a more suggestive context is the one we have just been exploring: “the Soul within” words is the vowels, the animating breath, which is partly stopped or obscured by the consonants. The vowels are the expression of the I who is speaking and, in Tennyson’s view, the individual voice is ultimately a reflection (in Coleridge’s sense) of the voice of God, the “I am that I am” sounding from the burning bush. In Tennyson’s view, language is effective only when words are voiced, when the animating breath of the reader brings to life the printed text. We know from the biographies that reading aloud was an habitual act of Tennyson’s, and there are plenty of ear-witness accounts of the experience of listening to him. His characteristic lengthening of vowels and his retarding of the movement of the lines struck many of his listeners as chanting, and if one goes through the accounts in the Memoir or the Tennyson “Interviews and Recollections” collected by Norman Page, one finds again and again the words “chanting,” “intoning,” and “incantation” used by those who heard Tennyson read. The tone of these accounts is invariably reverential, but there is a dissenting view from a Mr. Carr, who turns up in Mangles’ diary: “Carr told [Tennyson] that his reading would never do for public audience. They wanted more action & less chaunting.”14 Tennyson’s way of reading aloud was perhaps idiosyncratic, but it is also, I think, the expression of assumptions about language: that speech is primary, while writing is secondary, a record of speech; and that God is to be apprehended primarily through the ear as a voice (not always comprehensible) which is echoed by human voices. This assumption has a place inside the Judaeo-Christian view that identifies God with the Word, but Tennyson’s primary interest is in the spoken word rather than the written one—in the God who speaks from the burning bush rather than the God who sends down a written text from Mount Sinai. The voice with its life-giving breath seems to be for Tennyson the chief manifestation of spirit. We may begin to comprehend the extent to which human speech reflects spirit if we look at a lyric where voice is the subject or content, and where the prosody and voicing of the lines are crucial to the meaning and effect. That lyric is section 130 of In Memoriam.

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“Thy voice is on the rolling air,” Tennyson begins this lyric addressed to Hallam; “I hear thee where the waters run.” Hallam is now “mixed with God and Nature,” and the second half of that pairing is problematic when one remembers Tennyson’s earlier agonizing over the opacity of nature and its failure to provide to the eye any evidence for his faith. Here, however, Tennyson focuses on the ear. The sound of nature, unlike the sight of it, is an animating and sustaining power which enables him to make the affirmations of faith in the last stanza of this section: “I have thee still”; “I shall not lose thee.” The sights of nature are analogous to consonants which block and obscure; the sounds of nature are like vowels which quicken and reveal. One notes that the appeal to the eye of that final stanza is minimal—“circled” is the only word that gives us a precise visual image—while its appeal to the ear is subtle and complex, a sensible manifestation of spirit itself. A brief analysis of the prosody of that stanza and of the ways in which it might be voiced may be helpful. One might begin with the rhyme, one of the defining characteristics of the In Memoriam stanza. The a b b a pattern is, in relation to the one visual image in this stanza, a double circling round: Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice; I prosper, circled with thy voice; I shall not lose thee though I die.

The “b” rhyme is “rejoice” and “voice,” and it realizes in sound the meaning of the phrase, “circled with thy voice,” since the repeated sound at the end of the third line brings the inner two lines to closure. The “a” rhyme is “nigh” and “die,” and it encloses or encircles the “b” rhyme. The emotion associated with the “b” rhyme is joy, but the emotion associated with the “a” rhyme is more mixed and complex, “nigh” suggesting comfort and security, “die” suggesting anxiety and pointing back to the principal source of grief and doubt in the elegy. Moreover, when we listen to the whole stanza, we hear the “a” rhyme, with its long “i” sound, echoing through all the lines, in the pronoun “I.” The stanza is made up of a series of assertions: “I have thee still,” “I rejoice,” “I prosper,” and “I shall not lose thee,” assertions the poet makes because “thou art . . . nigh” and “though I die.” That long “i” vowel begins to sound like the primal voice, the spirit animating the individual speech of the poet. It is a sound able to generate words with different meanings, some comforting, like “nigh,” some threatening, like “die,” but all of them the expression of the spirit which sustains and guides creation. The “I” who articulates this primal sound is speaking for himself, but the truth

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of his statements is guaranteed by his sharing in the divine voice. The statements, we note, are not statements of fact but affirmations of faith: “I have thee still,” “I shall not lose thee.” The voicing of these affirmations is the assurance that they are not simply empty dreams or pathetic wishes. This holding together of opposites (“nigh” and “die”) by sound is anticipated by the syntax of the first line, “Far off thou art, but ever nigh.” “Thou art” is a statement of faith, and it is framed by the contrasting adjectives, “Far off ” and “ever nigh.” The paradox circles the statement of faith, and anticipates the circle image which is the content of the third line. Spirit manifests itself not only in the rhyme but in the meter, particularly Tennyson’s handling of the iambs, with variations and substitutions, and his placing of the caesuras. In the first two lines, the caesuras are indicated by the commas, and they appear in the exact middle of the lines, after the fourth syllable. The first four syllables of both lines can all be read as accented: “F´ar óff | thóu árt,” “Í háve | thée śtill.” After the caesuras, the lines clearly consist of ⫻ ⫻ ⫻ ⫻ two iambic feet: “but é | ve r nígh,” “and Í | re joiće.” We note that the iambic feet coincide with words of comfort and joy, while the spondees coincide with statements indicating anxiety (“Far off thou art”) or ambiguity (“I have thee still”). The spondees slow the tempo of the lines, while the iambs speed it up. A retarding movement, a forward movement: this doubleness anticipates the ambiguity of the word “still” in the second line. As an adverb, it means “now as before” and “always, ever”; as an adjective, it means “motionless,” without voice or movement. The ambiguity of that word creates a paradox like the “silent-speaking words” of Hallam in section 95 of the poem. Those words were the words of Hallam’s letters which the poet was reading, and one sense of the statement “I have thee still” is that he has Hallam in the letters of this poem, “still,” motionless and dumb, until the voicing of the line breathes life into the dead letters and gives him Hallam “now as before.” He can “rejoice” when he hears the sound, and the rhyming of that word with “voice” now appears as crucial to the sense. In the third line of the stanza, Tennyson varies the placing of the caesura: it comes earlier, after the third syllable rather than the fourth one, and its placing contrasts with that of the caesura in the final line, which is late. An early caesura often gives a line a brisk and happy feeling, and it certainly does so here. The precise feeling in this line is one of security, and that feeling comes about because the caesura breaks up the iambic foot and lets us hear “circled with thy voice” as a unit beginning and ending with an accented syllable, circling round from the first accented syllable to the last, and thus achieving closure. The final line is much more problematic in its sound and movement. To begin with, the caesura comes late, after the fifth syllable, and there is no

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comma to mark it, so that the pause depends upon the syntax and is not so pronounced as in the first three lines. When a caesura is late, the line usually labors toward the pause, and a slow struggle is suggested by the tempo here. There is no comfort in the last three words, though the poet’s subordination of this clause to his main affirmation of faith perhaps suggests the ordering of spiritual discernment. The quantity of the syllables is problematic, and I think there are at least two ways of voicing the line. If one gives each syllable equal time (“I shall not lose thee though I die”), the tone is one of determination and personal effort. If one gives the “I shall” and “though I” syllables half the time of the others (“I shall not lose thee though I die”), we have an affirmation of faith which is much more confident. So we begin to glimpse one limitation of voicing: one cannot read that last line both ways at once, if one is reading aloud, and we are thrown back on the “silent-speaking words” that make possible both readings. The letters, finally, are just as essential as the voice. Form (the letters) and content (the voice) are both distinguishable and paradoxically identical, and their identity is like that of the “spiritual body” in which opposites are one. The elegy, then, ultimately rejects Nature’s materialist understanding of spirit as nothing more than physical breath, and it ultimately rejects the vulgar and empiricist view of soul as a disembodied and insubstantial ghost. In their place, Tennyson affirms the continuing existence of the “spiritual body” and the continuing authority of spiritual seeing, which for him is mainly spiritual hearing. “In my spirit will I dwell” (123.9) is a pledge that preserves the particular and substantive nature of every thing, while affirming the ultimate identity of all things—a genuine resolution to his desire both to retain the uniqueness of each soul and to affirm that is it one with “the general Soul.”

Notes 1. Patrick Greig Scott, “ ‘Flowering in a Lonely Word’: Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language,” VP 18 (1980): 371–381. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 3. Northrop Frye, Words With Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990), pp. 121–122. 4. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981–1990), 1:87. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968), p. 88. 6. John D. Rosenberg, “The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam,” JEGP 18 (1959): 230; Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 127. 7. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London, 1897), 1:393.

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8. Kerry McSweeney, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 85–87. 9. Alan Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 61–63; Elaine Jordan, Alfred Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 119–122. 10. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1834–1872, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London, 1883), 2:66. 11. Michael Wheeler, who traces not only the Biblical sources of “the living soul” but the literary sources as well, argues that “the quickening effect of his/ the living soul being ‘flash’d’ on ‘mine’ is that of a new creation which can best be described as mystical” (Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], pp. 252–253). I argue not just for the new but for continuity with the past. 12. Typology is another way of describing this seeing, as George P. Landow demonstrates in “Moses Striking the Rock: Typological Symbolism in Victorian Poetry,” in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 315–344. “Since each type is a synecdoche for the entire Gospel scheme, it possesses the property of being able to generate the entire vision of time, causality, and salvation contained in that scheme” (p. 327). Landow analyzes section 131 of In Memoriam in the context of the popular Victorian type of Moses striking the rock. “To appreciate the full meaning of the type,” Landow argues, “we must perceive that the living will is that of the speaker, Christ, and Hallam, or at least an embodiment, like him, of the highest element in man kind” (pp. 335–336). 13. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p. 24. 14. Tennyson at Aldworth: The Diary of James Henry Mangles, ed. Earl A. Knies (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1984), p. 107.

GAIL MARSHALL

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy

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he poet who famously bemoaned her lack of literary grandmothers was not lacking in gratefully acknowledged male forebears, particularly Shakespeare and Homer, whom she describes as the “colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments of the world’s age . . . the antique and modern literatures.”1 But her relationship with those figures, as she acknowledges through Aurora Leigh’s encounters with earlier poets, has to be carefully managed, the possibility of her dependent and derivative status scrupulously recognized: My own best poets, am I one with you, That thus I love you,—or but one through love? Does all this smell of thyme about my feet Conclude my visit to your holy hill In personal presence, or but testify The rustling of your vesture through my dreams With influent odours?2

That such encounters are effected through her father’s “Books, books, books” (1: 832) underlines the perils of the female poet’s seeking to claim a part within a literary history told mainly through its published male poets.

From Victorian Poetry 44, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 467–86. Published by West Virginia University Press. Copyright © 2006 by Gail Marshall.

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This essay examines diverse dimensions of the relationship between EBB and Shakespeare, assessing her responses to the earlier writer in the light of her fascination with the playwright and poet, and in particular with his depictions of young women. I consider the fascination wrought by the daughters in Shakespeare’s plays and the extent to which EBB was herself lauded and constrained by the accolade of being a fit candidate for Shakespeare’s daughter. I will examine the strategic manipulations involved in according the accolade “Shakespearean” to a woman writer, the ways in which EBB both recognizes and resists the lure and the straitjacketing of such a term, and how instead she effects a “dialectic of trust” in her reading and writing of Shakespeare. The phrase is George Steiner’s, and alludes to the mode of translation: it is a “dialectic of trust, of reciprocal enhancement [which] is, in essence, both moral and linguistic . . . it is an instrument of relation.”3 In these terms, I would argue, we might also most aptly speak of EBB’s relationship to Shakespeare. She is not a servile and circumscribed transcriber of his words, but rather one who makes his reputation anew by her attention to, and quotation from, his works. Her quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare, which are most notable and frequent in her correspondence, are acts that can usefully balance and accommodate the recognition of historical difference and contemporary exigency and that emphasize transmission and sympathetic interrelation. The model of translation suspends both authors in a delicate relationship of mutual recognition and co-existence, of cooperation and potential creativity. It signals the enriching of the source within a new set of resonances, rather than the wresting of power from the original source, and it highlights the intellectual and creative activity which accrues to the translator. From this intimate relationship, EBB achieves a language of intimacy in which to speak to her closest friends and her lover Robert Browning. It is a language which enables her, through role playing, through the license of shared knowledge and almost silent allusion, to find a means of articulation trammelled neither by Victorian conventions nor by expectations, which allows for the exposure of private thoughts in a context which subtly protects and cherishes the speaker. In Aurora Leigh and her Sonnets from the Portuguese, Shakespeare’s presence is perhaps most visible in EBB’s poetry. Shakespeare’s sonnets linger unavoidably in the mind as one reads EBB’s own sonnet sequence, and yet, what precisely is the relationship between the two sequences? Dorothy Mermin argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets are one of the many contexts for EBB’s poems, which also include the Iliad and Milton’s sonnets.4 Other recent critics have paused only briefly over the name of Shakespeare in writing of EBB’s Sonnets, stressing rather the extent to which, as Angela Leighton points out, she is characteristically concerned with making over a tradition, the better to

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articulate her female, nineteenth-century consciousness.5 The challenges are only too obvious: she not only has to tackle formal issues, but the assumption at the heart of the sonnet tradition that the woman is traditionally placed as the beloved, and not the speaker. That she is speaking of another poet as the beloved also puts her in the tricky position of having to write of one who can speak for himself, rather than as one occupying the traditionally mute subject-position of muse and inspiration. Shakespeare may seem to act primarily as a stimulus to a range of expectations which are not met in EBB’s work. Yet, her sonnets contain some distinct echoes of Shakespeare; for instance, as Dorothy Mermin notes (p. 138), we hear sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”)6 in EBB’s sonnet 2: Men could not part us with their worldly jars,— Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests, bend; Our hands would touch, for all the mountain bars;— And, heaven being rolled between us, at the end: We should but vow the faster, for the stars.7

We can also hear Romeo and Juliet in the image of the beloved looking down at the “poor, tired, wandering singer” of sonnet 3, and Ophelia’s doomed fate in the images of the poet’s fearing to “sink” in sonnet 4, and in her retrieval of the flower-imagery associated with Ophelia in sonnet 44: Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers Plucked in the garden, all the summer through And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers. So, in the like name of that love of ours, Take back these thoughts which here, unfolded too, And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart’s ground. (Indeed, those beds and bowers Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine, Here’s ivy!)—take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine, Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.

But Shakespeare’s images of powerless despair are transmuted by EBB into the signs of her love. The folkloric significations which are Ophelia’s only means of telling her despair become EBB’s means of reaching out to

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Browning, telling her love in ways which invite his participation too as the cultivator of her words. She makes some of Shakespeare’s most plangent symbols into the signs of her love, but transforms them in her speaking them as a woman, finally retrieving the silence of some of Shakespeare’s heroines, and transforming the tradition by its immersion in the particularities of her female modernity. For instance, instead of the passion of earlier sonneteers, we read in sonnet 38 of the intimacy of the individual kisses first given to EBB: First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; And ever since, it grew more clean and white, ................................... The second passed in height The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed, Half falling on the hair. ................................... The third, upon my lips was folded down In perfect, purple state. (ll. 1–3, 7–9, 12–13)

Delicacy and specificity are the key-notes of the whole sonnet sequence’s description of Victorian ardor, rather than the “difficult and fumbling affair” that Erik Gray finds it.8 EBB’s sonnets also work within a different time-frame. Shakespeare is convinced that his sonnets can confer immortality, both on his love, his lover, and the poetry itself, whereas for EBB, death is not an ending, but the beginning of love’s after-life in a specifically Christian heaven. Though contemporary critics were relieved at the discipline which the sonnet form might force EBB into (see below), these sonnets are nonetheless, and particularly when compared with Shakespeare’s beautifully complete conceits, straining and full of effort in their attempts to convey an experience of love which the sonnet had not yet encompassed, the love of a Victorian woman poet for a contemporary writer. She seems to find the consolations of the form as exploited by Shakespeare unsatisfactory for her own ends and rather transmutes them into efforts to realize the visceral effect of her passion, its roots in a familial love, and in trying to find a form of accommodation for her and for Browning’s poetry. In the case of both the Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, EBB takes a moment or an inspiration from Shakespeare and transposes it into a new setting, translates it for another world, rather than appropriating it

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or taking it over. Her words work best when read alongside, in full knowledge of, the original which inspires them. EBB is not aiming at what her character describes as “lifeless imitations” (AL, 1.974) of older poets, but rather at a poetics which is “the witness of what Is / Behind this show” (7.834–835). She goes on explicitly to repudiate imitation: If this world’s show were all, Then imitation would be all in Art; There, Jove’s hand grips us!—For we stand here, we, If genuine artists, witnessing for God’s Complete, consumate, undivided work: —That every natural flower which grows on earth, Implies a flower upon the spiritual side, Substantial, archetypal, all a-glow With blossoming causes. (7.835–843)

I would suggest that EBB’s use of Shakespeare involves a similar form of transference. Just as she Platonically translates God’s work from the spiritual to the material world, writing of it so that it may be seen as being immanent in that material sphere, while the original persists unperturbed and discrete, so do Shakespeare’s words inhabit EBB’s poem. Shakespeare’s works are both of the past and of the present within EBB’s poetry. They live within, and give life to her words, where her source is discernibly Shakespearean. In turn her words bear witness to Shakespeare’s creative richness, but from another sphere and another century, which do not seek to supersede Shakespeare’s own place and authority but simply to make them available, in some sense to translate them, for EBB’s contemporaries. This “double articulation,” to borrow Richard Halpern’s phrase, draws attention to both EBB’s own innovations and the persistence of Shakespeare alongside EBB’s own voice.9 The achievement of this relationship within Aurora Leigh takes place in parallel with a similar resolution within Aurora’s relationship with the figure of the eponymous poet’s father who has haunted the poem since his death. Aurora’s return to Italy is a necessary step in achieving her eventual acceptance of her orphaned state and her decision no longer to seek for meaning primarily through the past. Indeed, the invoking of Shakespeare in some measure disputes the relative positions and connotations of past and present, specifically those which might site authority, judgment, and superiority within the past. In Book One of the poem, Shakespeare had been associated with the father-figure. In Aurora’s description of her father’s teaching her, we hear echoes of Prospero’s instruction of Miranda:

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My father taught me what he had learnt the best Before he died and left me,—grief and love. ................................... out of books, He taught me all the ignorance of men, And how God laughs in heaven when any man Says “Here I’m learned.” (1.185–192)

And later Aurora comes to believe that “I thought my father’s land was worthy too / Of being my Shakespeare’s” (1.1091–92), despite her initial incredulity on arriving from Italy that “Shakespeare and his mates” were able to “Absorb the light here” (1.266–267). Shakespeare initially carries the weight and resonance of that paternal authority, but as the poem progresses, he comes to be more firmly associated with the person of Aurora and with emotional, rather than pedagogic, possibilities: “God has made me,—I’ve a heart / That’s capable of worship, love, and loss; / We say the same of Shakespeare’s” (7.734–746). The unmediated directness of the analogy with Shakespeare here is one more sign of Aurora’s growing maturity and her emotional as well as literary deviation from the coercive influence of her father’s memory. A crucial part of the narrative of Aurora Leigh is, then, the achievement of an enabling relationship with those literary predecessors who inform EBB’s poetics. The poem is, in a sense, its own witness to the success of this project. However, the question of literary debts and precedents, and specifically her relationship with Shakespeare, was not so easily settled for EBB’s critics, as the concentration on those questions in a range of obituaries and memorial articles on the poet demonstrates. They are concerned to reveal where responsibility for her achievements lies, be it with her husband or the other writers whom she read. A year after her death, the North American Review was asserting that Aurora Leigh “was written, not by Elizabeth Barrett, but by Browning’s wife,” and made of the epic tale simply a “story of love, as it lay concealed in the heart of a woman, to rise in overmastering strength at the fulness of time.”10 In the same year, the Dublin University Magazine asserts that “she would never have reached so high a point if she had not married a great poet.”11 The greater EBB’s achievement, the greater her reliance on Browning; the broader her reading, the greater her indebtedness to a range of predecessors. The evaluation of EBB’s “genius” inevitably involves extended comparisons with Shakespeare, both in general terms, but also on the grounds of their sonnet sequences. EBB’s Sonnets were regarded by some critics, including William T. Arnold and Edmund Gosse, as her best works. For Mary

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Russell Mitford and the North American Review, respectively, the Sonnets were “glowing with passion, melting with tenderness. True love was never more fitly sung” than in them, making them “the finest love poems in our language.”12 As Tricia Lootens notes in her study of the critical reception of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, however, they are far from typical poems about love, revealing psychological peculiarities in EBB’s position which would have been shared by few readers.13 Indeed, for G. B. Smith, in the Cornhill Magazine, the Sonnets “are more explanatory” of “her own very distinct individuality” “than any other of her writings.”14 Yet, for most critics, the Sonnets offered an opportunity for comparing EBB with other poets which the rest of her determinedly more experimental oeuvre precludes. The sonnet form offers a measure. The rigorousness of the form was felt by Arnold, Gosse, and G. B. Smith to discipline EBB’s more accustomed exuberance of imagery and the “loose, wild form” of her lyrics, which were “fit to receive her chains of adverbial caprices and her tempestuous assonances.”15 More specifically, Gosse adds that “her love of Shakespeare and Wordsworth drove her to emulation” (p. 6), while for W. H. Smith, she equalled or exceeded those figures: “we will venture to say—if we may reduce our general praise to a numerical specification—that from no English writer, with the exception perhaps of Wordsworth, shall you select half-a-dozen sonnets so excellent as you might with ease extract from these volumes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In saying this we do not forget that Shakespeare wrote sonnets.”16 Shakespeare’s sonnets could be, as Smith goes on to suggest, problematic for the Victorians, in terms of attribution and subject-matter. As Gosse writes in the more self-conscious 1890s, EBB’s are “more wholesome” in treating of “a mood that [by comparison with Shakespeare’s] is not rare and almost sickly, not foreign to the common experience of mankind, but eminently normal, direct, and obvious” (p. 10). As Lootens notes, “If Gosse terms Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘wholesome’ Sonnets more ‘intelligible,’ it is clearly because . . . they express a love that dares to speak its name” (Lootens, p. 143). Long before the 1890s, however, Shakespeare’s was a name which could readily be invoked both to praise and to delimit a woman writer’s achievements. The North British Review critic begins his assessment of EBB’s works by asserting that woman “has not yet produced her Shakspeare, her Newton, her Bacon, her Handel; and most likely never will” (p. 514). Of EBB in particular, he writes that she is “so much in earnest, that she cannot hide her efforts to grasp reality,” whereas with Shakespeare, “All is,” in that most fundamentally loaded term, “natural, and like the working of natural forces without personal effort. He is so perfectly en rapport with his work, that his mastery over it seems as natural as play” (pp. 530–531). For the North American Review, she “was not, indeed, another Shakespeare, but she came nearest

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to being Shakespeare’s counterpart” (p. 353). The precise nature of that relationship remains to be specified here, but was given a name in the following decade by the American critic E. C. Stedman. His account of EBB works on two axes which he somehow needs to bring together into fruitful relationship: she is both the best-educated of women poets who spent “her novitiate in the academic groves and at the fountain-heads of poetry and thought” and the woman in whose life “the chief event . . . was her marriage.”17 Within his description of her as “Shakespeare’s daughter” that resolution, between academic and literary learning, and domestic inspiration, is achieved in a neat synthesis of appropriate femininity. He writes: “The English love to call her Shakespeare’s Daughter, and in truth she bears to their greatest poet the relation of Miranda to Prospero. Her delicate genius was purely feminine and subjective, attributes that are made to go together” (p. 147). This suggestion was taken up by G. B. Smith in the Cornhill who, after having rejected a number of comparisons between EBB and her contemporaries as unsatisfactory, expanded on the conceit thus: That was a happy observation passed upon by one critic, who described her as Shakspeare’s daughter. The same large-heartedness which pertained to the great dramatist is shown by the later poet. The benevolent eye looks out on men and nature with the same imperishable love. If the world has at any time possessed its ideal poets, she is worthy to be counted one of them. (p. 475)

But a sting lies hidden in this particular compliment: “We can feel that her genius stands in the same relation to that of the transcendent poet of the world as does a daughter to her parent. The lesser is the true miniature representation of the greater” (p. 480). In some respects, of course, these critics are simply taking up the suggestion made by EBB herself in Aurora Leigh about the conjunction between Shakespeare and the poet’s father, but they ignore the concomitant development in the poem which shows the poet explicitly, and necessarily, outgrowing the familial dimension—specifically the obedience of a daughter—to evolve her own aesthetic. The apparent accolade traps her within a dynamic of preordained limits, of emulation and imitation, which her own poetry was constantly seeking to override. As would have been readily appreciated in the 1870s, by which time the story of EBB’s upbringing was well known, the family metaphor also operates with a particularly coercive resonance in the case of EBB. Stedman’s explicit reference to the relationship of Prospero and Miranda is worth investigating further. The peculiarities of that relationship are

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extreme, though echoed in other of Shakespeare’s plays, where the daughter’s function is often crucial,18 but revealing about what was currently believed about EBB. For twelve of Miranda’s fifteen years, she had lived alone with her father save for the presence of Caliban and Ariel. She depended on him for all language, learning, and practically all her company. Through his authority as a father, and his skill as a magician, he controlled her environment, her knowledge, and her interactions with others. That both fathers are also implicated in slavery, in the mistreatment of Caliban and in the ownership of slaves on the Barretts’ Jamaican plantations, solidifies the authoritarian nature of these fathers’ relationships with their daughters. Prospero attempts to orchestrate Miranda’s relationship with Ferdinand, but finds the limit of his powers when he is forced to realize the autonomy generated in her by Miranda’s love for another man: Ferdinand. What is your name? Miranda. Miranda.—O my father! I have broke your hest to say so. (III.i.36–37)

Among the gallery of disobedient daughters created by Shakespeare, this is a relatively minor offense, and, as Charles and Mary Lamb note, in some ways simply furthers Prospero’s plans: “Prospero only smiled at this first instance of his daughter’s disobedience, for having by his magic art caused his daughter to fall in love so suddenly, he was not angry that she showed her love by forgetting to obey his commands.”19 To insert EBB into this narrative is to suggest that, like Miranda, she was effectively at the behest of her father until Robert Browning came along, to tempt her to speak out of turn, albeit without Mr. Browning’s connivance. So not only does EBB gain a determining father-figure in Stedman’s allusion, but also a husband to usurp the father’s place in the normal course of things. 20 Anna Jameson’s account of Miranda highlights the ways in which she shares in EBB’s early isolation from society and the extent to which the poet had been known to be emotionally declarative. Jameson writes of Miranda that “she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace,” and celebrates her apparently naive giving of herself to Ferdinand by suggesting that Miranda was: “Only conscious of her own weakness as a woman, and ignorant of those usages of society which teach us to dissemble the real passion, and assume (and sometimes abuse) an unreal and transient power.”21 In EBB’s case, the iconic status of Miranda works to naturalize and smooth out an intractability by which earlier critics had been troubled, and to re-write EBB’s canon as a de-politicized one of love poems and Aurora Leigh, which, though self-described as “unscrupulously epic” (5.213), is molded into a more

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tractable and tamer autobiographical shape. The ultimate irony is that, via this analogy with Miranda, EBB could ultimately be re-written, recuperated, as the dutiful daughter which she had notoriously not been. The image of Shakespeare’s daughters could also work in reverse, however, making of the playwright’s creations more dutiful daughters within a Victorian economy of the family. Such a result might plausibly seem to accrue from Mary Cowden Clarke’s accounts of the girlhood of a number of Shakespeare’s heroines. Originally published in 1850–51, her narrativized versions of the pre-life of fifteen of Shakespeare’s women are particularly interesting in the ways in which they seek to anticipate the details of the lives to be revealed in Shakespeare’s plays, to such an extent that they remove any possibility of agency from the women themselves. A small example of this is the way in which the double death of Romeo and Juliet is anticipated in her mother’s witnessing a distraught young man’s committing suicide on the bier of his secretly wed wife. The young heroines become blameless because they are so clearly the result of their upbringing. This is made particularly clear in the extent to which the heroines are the sums of their parents, one of whom is usually dotingly, neglectfully benevolent, while the other is equally dangerously coercive and strong-willed. The failure of parenting which results produces women who cannot help but live out the dynamics of the place assigned to them. Lady Macbeth’s determined bloodthirstiness and ambition emerge out of her mother’s thwarted ambition and her father’s easygoing neglect of the opportunity to correct his daughter’s political scheming by attaching her more firmly to him by ties of emotion and duty. Desdemona’s deceit in secretly marrying Othello is engendered in her by her father’s own clandestine marrying of her mother, and by that mother’s various acts of subterfuge in seeking not to antagonize her choleric husband: “the courage of transparent truth . . . that would have proved her best protection against the diabolical malignity by which she was one day to be assailed, and borne her scathless through the treachery which wrought her fate,” were not taught her.22 That a daughter can be blamelessly bad and/or disobedient seems to be the cumulative message of Cowden Clarke’s work. Those daughters who dared to disobey were only fulfilling their fate and were being in fact perversely dutiful. Trained in how to read Shakespeare at school, encouraged by Mary Cowden Clarke to speculate on her stories, which would “afford scope for pleasant fancy, and be productive of entertainment” (1: xi), and encouraged to emulate aspects of Shakespeare’s heroines, Victorian women might, it is possible to argue, all be seen as, in some sense, Shakespeare’s daughters. Such was clearly the determination of the actress Helen Faucit who chose to be parented by Shakespeare in her narrative of her early years, substituting him for the

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raffish and unreliable professional actors who were her biological parents.23 Such would certainly seem to be the implication of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1864), in which he famously invokes the “perfect woman” of almost every Shakespeare play: “steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose: Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia.” All, he goes on, are “faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.”24 This is a highly selective list, and a highly selective vision, and one which excuses the sins of daughters such as Desdemona and Imogen in the light of their virtues as wives. It is also a list which notably excludes Ophelia, Shakespeare’s “one weak woman,” who fails Hamlet “at the critical moment”and on whom “the bitter catastrophe” of Hamlet is said to rest (§58). Within Shakespeare’s orbit, these examples of Victorian readings seem to suggest, a daughter’s disobedience is not necessarily a bad thing, in so far as it is seen to recognize a higher form of authority and the most readily invoked is that of Shakespeare. The suggestion that EBB is most appropriately fathered by Shakespeare is both an admission of her disobedience, emotional, familial, and generic, and of the need to place that disobedience within a carefully policed regime which can absorb acts of disobedience within an ultimately sanctioned framework. Such a framework was permitted to Shakespeare, who thus is made to act as both emotional and literary guarantor and jailer to EBB’s love and creativity. Within EBB’s own writing, however, as we have seen, an entirely different kind of dialogue is being established between the two writers. As her letters show even more acutely than her poems, that dialogue emanates from within the familial setting, while eluding its conventional power structures. EBB’s first recorded encounter with Shakespeare appears in a letter to her aunt Arabella Graham-Clarke, when at the age of eleven, she makes a joke about being an idle correspondent, then writes, “tho’ perhaps ‘rude am I in speech,’ yet I can justify myself by repeating I do not love you less,” quoting Othello, I.iii.81.25 The identification with the spell-binding Othello, whose very rudeness, which he is defending before the Duke of Venice, is the source of the witchcraft which has seduced Desdemona away from her father, is an intriguing and proleptic instance of self-aggrandizement, in which EBB is both captivated by, and (through her act of quotation) the source of, a language of fascination. Othello continues to haunt her letters. It is one of the plays from which she quotes most frequently (the one most frequently referred to being Hamlet) in part perhaps because it enables her imaginative identification with a world absolutely beyond her own, the world of the “pomp and circumstance of glorious war” (Othello, III.iii.354), and with the battles she enthusiastically discussed as a young woman in letters with Uvedale Price (December 30,

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1826; BC, 1:280; and January 11, 1827; BC, 2:4). It is, however, important to note that in the letters which quote Othello’s despairing speech, in which he turns away from his vocation and claims he would have been happy for the “general camp” to have “tasted” Desdemona’s body, “So I had nothing known” (III.iii.346–348), EBB is applying the words to her dog. Flush “does not seem to understand the glory of fighting—Whether through philosophy or good temper, ‘the pomp and circumstance of glorious war’ never move his ambition” ( June 11, 1841; BC, 5:53), and he “turn[s] his back on the ‘pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’ ” ( June 23, 1843; BC, 7:202). The usage acutely debunks Othello’s self-pity and the grossness of his denial of Desdemona’s dignity, while it also, in a maneuver typical of EBB, domesticates Shakespeare within her own world. Shakespeare is a crucial part of the intimate language EBB and her family use to address each other in birthday poems and in letters where he provides a means of approaching the most delicate of subjects with tact and humor. On December 30, 1825, her mother writes to EBB: “The mind cannot retain its powers, if the casket which contains it, be injured or weakened, and you cannot encrease your hours of study, without sacrificing your health. You may think this ‘stale and unprofitable’ [Hamlet, I.ii.133] but it is the anxiety of our hearts dearest BA!” (BC, 1:229). The letter risks turning EBB’s cherished literature against her, but its gentle and self-effacing humor, the very homeliness of her mother’s concern, and the recuperation of Hamlet’s despair within a family dynamic manage in fact simply to acknowledge that literature as being of a piece with the family’s own love of EBB. The letter is also an instance of the variety of voices which are extracted from Hamlet in EBB’s correspondence. She ironizes the play’s words, in describing her own aching head as a “distracted globe” (November 4, 1841; BC, 5:162) from Hamlet, I.v.97, but also uses the play to write lovingly to numerous correspondents, including Mary Russell Mitford, to whom she writes that it is “ ‘Stale and flat’, to take more from Shakespeare” (Hamlet, I.ii.133), to talk by pen and ink rather than in person (November 8, 1844; BC 8:37). She is also fond of providing new and lighter contexts for Hamlet’s “though by your smiling you may seem to say so,” for instance in challenging Richard Hengist Horne’s ironic amusement at the news that EBB was having a portrait of herself painted ( June 13, 1841; BC, 5:56). The affection and domesticity of these letters are echoed later by EBB as she seeks to distinguish between the competing dignities of love and familiarity and of title and position in a letter to Mitford, in which she uses her love of Shakespeare as an exemplar of the former: “Which of us wdnt. like to know how Shakespeare came down stairs one Wednesday morning with his hose ungartered? Wdnt. you climb your ladder ten times, to catch the colour

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of the garters?” ( July 15, 1841; BC, 5:75). The ease and familiarity of her relationship with Mitford is both enabled by, and an extension of, her relations with Shakespeare. Her first letter to Mitford thanks her for “[naming] me as a ‘household word’ [Henry V, IV.iii.52] to your father” ( June 8, 1836; BC, 3:175), and later that summer she writes: “For all the kindness, the far far too much kindness of your words to me, how can I thank you enough? Let me be silent, & love you” (September 29, 1836; BC, 3:192). The letter alludes to Cordelia’s words to her father in King Lear, I.i.62–63, and is the first of EBB’s references in her letters to the vexed question of women’s voices, speaking, and silence in King Lear. The allusion here silently acknowledges EBB’s affection, and also enacts a necessarily unspoken acknowledgement of the two women’s shared experiences of living with demanding fathers. Furthermore, the allusion itself is silent, being without quotation marks, and thereby all the more delicately enacting its thanks. The omission of quotation marks enables a greater intimacy with Shakespeare as he seamlessly moves into the texture of EBB’s own language, but it can also promote the intimacy between correspondents, as the recipient recognizes and responds to the Shakespearean offering placed before her, and the writer’s trust that it would be recognized. That Shakespeare in particular, among the many writers from whom EBB quotes, was a vehicle of intimacy is shown in the pattern of references to, and quotations from, him in EBB’s correspondence. These references tend to cluster around the person with whom she was most intimate at any one time. From 1836 to 1845, this was Mitford, before she was succeeded by Robert Browning.26 The first correspondent with whom EBB was intimately Shakespearean, however, was the blind Classical scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, with whom she studied, and who lived near the Barretts at Hope End. The relationship is both based in and conveyed through texts. Her visits to Boyd seem to have been rather an obsession with EBB. Relatively early in their relationship, she writes anticipating an imminent visit to the Boyd household, and continues, “You have made me very curious, & have induced me to think of many things in Heaven & Earth never dream’t of in any PHILOSOPHY, since Cornelius Agrippa’s!” ( June 6–7, 1828; BC, 2:147). The quotation from Hamlet, I.v.166–67 inverts the intellectual relationship between the speaker and auditor of the original to flatter the older man, even to set up a form of intellectual flirtation with her tutor.27 As is the case elsewhere, EBB uses Shakespeare to play, to act, to extend the range of roles and voices available to her. For her, as for many women later in the century, EBB finds in Shakespeare a means of escape from the limitations and dimensions of her social, and even her literary, roles. She enjoys that freedom here while remaining confident and secure in her intellectual status, for her compliment only works

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if the knowledge in which it is based is acknowledged as being shared; and she is confident too that the freedoms permitted by the quotation are balanced by the distance also implicit in the use of someone else’s words. Indeed the frisson of the letter, which would of course have been read to Boyd by his daughter or wife, rests in the fine judgment EBB expends in seeing how far she can go within boundaries while still acknowledging Shakespeare’s mediating authority. The lack of quotation marks seems to signal the intimacy both of the relationship with Boyd and with Shakespeare that she is setting up here, rather than to seek to elide Shakespeare’s part in the letter. The relationship in play here is a three-way one, resting on a joint ownership of the language of the letter. Shakespeare retains ultimate authority and ownership of the words, his continuing presence investing EBB’s quotations with distance and timelessness, or at least a temporal otherness, which is itself a crucial part of the freedom which Shakespeare gives to the nineteenthcentury woman; EBB and Boyd actively meet in recognizing and interpreting the quotation; and EBB herself exercises her learning and autonomy in using Shakespeare, in re-making his words for her own ends, but in never entirely subduing the poet and the original context of his writing. As is so often the case in EBB’s quoting from Shakespeare, her use of the quotation from Hamlet rests here upon a tacitly intended recognition of the force of the original context of the quotation and of the way in which EBB is adopting it here; the success of her allusion rests upon a mutual acknowledgement of the persistent otherness of Shakespeare’s words. Furthermore, the shared intellectual activity of using and recognizing the allusion works as part of the force of her letters’ meaning, as well as acting as the vehicle for developing her epistolary relationships through the mixture of intellectual and emotional interaction that seems for EBB to be peculiarly the essence of Shakespeare. When reading EBB’s correspondence, one is struck by two inter-related factors: first, how very intimate is the relationship between EBB and Shakespeare, the way it almost seems to inhabit her emotional being, as Shakespeare inhabits her written language. For EBB, Shakespeare is “inner than the bone.” And secondly, we see how profoundly her Shakespeare is of the page, rather than the stage. Their relationship is one that can be brought into being only in intimacy. EBB writes skeptically of the more public forms in which the playwright was made available to Victorian audiences, whether in the undue speculation of publicly available criticism28 or in the theater. For her, the latter can only involve the “translation [of poetry] into a grosser form” (to Hengist Horne, June 3, 1840; BC, 4:273). As she writes later to the same correspondent, himself a fervent believer that contemporary theater could be redeemed by Shakespeare, even that playwright bowed “his starry head” to “write down his pure genius into the dirt of the groundlings” ( January 9,

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1841; BC, 5:5). The following year she writes to Mitford, herself a successful playwright, again invoking the mechanism of interpretation, that: In regard to the drama, I have been to the theatre—I have seen Shakespeare in London—but it was when I was a young child: and I admit to you willingly that in reading & taking pleasure from the written Drama, my ideas of it never enter the theatre from first to last. I have a notion,—that the theatre interprets between the dramatic poet and the unpoetic multitudes,—& always where the poetry is high, desecrates it in translation. ( July 4, 1842; BC, 6:26)

We cannot, of course, be sure that what EBB was taken to see was Shakespeare, rather than one of the many adaptations which were more usually seen in the early nineteenth century, but what comes most clearly through her letter is her profound distrust of theatrical space, and of the unruly multitudes.29 She is agitated by this distrust of the theatrical process, by the metamorphosis of the mob into an audience, and fails to envisage that the multitude could be trusted to be one part of the mutually consenting dyad upon which the mechanism of translation rests. It is in EBB’s correspondence with Browning that we see the culmination of this mode of translation in their shared intimacy with Shakespeare and in her expression of exactly what Shakespeare means to her. She writes to Browning of her isolated childhood in a letter of March 20, 1845: You seem to have drunken of the cup of life full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly,—or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I was secluded still—& there are few of the youngest women in the world who have not seen more, heard more, known more of society, than I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the country . . . had no social opportunities, . . . had my heart in books & poetry, . . . & my experience, in reveries. . . . It was a lonely life—growing green like the grass around it. Books & dreams were what I lived in—& domestic love only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about the grass. And so time passed, and passed—and afterwards, when my illness came & I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done, & no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the threshold of one room again,—why then, I turned to thinking with some bitterness . . . that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to leave . . . that I had seen no Human nature . . . that my brothers & sisters of the earth were names to me, . . .

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that I had beheld no great mountain or river—nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read Shakespeare . . . & it was too late! (BC, 10:133).30

EBB sets herself up here as potentially Mariana-like in her description of a life entrapped and sinking ever deeper into seclusion, but her account invokes Daniel Karlin’s “scepticism in the light of her Diary (1830–31), in which ‘social opportunities’ are not so much absent as spurned when available.”31 He is equally scathing about the letter’s final analogy, in which EBB seeks to convey the full horror of her fear of an early death which would rob her of the potential of experiencing all that she had so far missed. Karlin comments, “How revealing that last analogy is of the very bookishness it laments! The perverse aptness of it is almost suspect” (p. 68). And yet it need not be: Shakespeare does not operate here as simply an analogy for life in a curiously gender-inverted model, but as life itself. In this case, the art–life split collapses as EBB invokes the experience of living in Shakespeare, not as a substitute for a more active life, but as an image of what that more active life might be. We get our sense of the potential of life through its proximity to Shakespeare, rather than vice versa. Browning enters into EBB’s letters through a Shakespeare quotation which she uses in explaining her enthusiasm for Paracelsus to Mitford: I . . . wd. wish for more harmony & rather more clearness & compression—concentration—besides: but I do think & feel that the pulse of poetry is full & warm & strong in it, & that,—without being likely perhaps to be a popular poem,—it “bears a charmed life” [Macbeth, V.viii.12]. There is a palpable power! a height & depth of thought,—& sudden repressed gushings of tenderness which suggest to us a depth beyond in the affections. (August 10, 1836; BC, 3:186)

She later uses the same play to rebuke a by now determinedly skeptical Mitford for her severity to Browning: “Ah—you speak more severely of Mr. Browning, than I can say ‘Amen’ to. Amen wd. stick in my throat [Macbeth, II.ii.29–30]—even suppose it to rise so high” (October 1842; BC, 6:111). The quotations convey a self-deprecatory humor about the extent of EBB’s enthusiasm for the other poet, a humor which continues in EBB’s first letter to Browning, in which she asks “only for a sentence or two of general observation—and I do not ask even for that, so as to teaze you—but in the humble, low voice, which is so excellent a thing in women—particularly when they go a-begging!” (January 11, 1845; BC, 10:19). As Daniel Karlin notes, EBB adds “humble” to Lear’s memory of the dead Cordelia’s voice as “ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman” (King Lear,

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V.iii.273–275), and also interpolates the notion of begging, which, as Karlin also notes, is not something that Cordelia ever does (Karlin, p. 57). Possibly EBB hears an echo in the word “humble” of the slightly brutal use which Hamlet, ever to the forefront of her writing mind, makes of it to describe his perception of the proper state of his mother’s blood at a period when she ought not to be falling in love at all, and least of all with his uncle: “You cannot call it love, for at your age / The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble, / And waits upon the judgment” (IV.iii.69). EBB’s letter comes to seem both emotionally timorous and freighted with a sense of the potential enormity of the relationship about to be commenced here. She feints behind Shakespeare’s language, using him as an emissary, as a more modern girl might use a best friend to sound out a potential romance. EBB had used the King Lear quotation from V.iii twice before in letters to Mitford, once to express her own liking for a “soft, low voice” (August 12, 1843; BC, 7:278) and once to describe the state of her own voice, as “still too low for Lear” after a cold (December 16, 1844; BC, 9:282). Within a month, the quotation is transformed in her letter to Browning with a selfdeprecating humor which not only flatters the younger poet, and tentatively acknowledges her own eagerness for the correspondence to last, but which also draws attention to the changes she has made to her source and thus engages Browning from the start in a written relationship which foregrounds Shakespeare but in which EBB is unafraid to take liberties with her source. She is confident in her literary status, but diffident emotionally. As she humbles herself to Browning, she plays in humbling Shakespeare to her own ends and presumably expects Browning to recognize her doing so. If this seems overly ingenious or to demand too much of her correspondent, the challenge is ably met by Browning, who writes to Barrett on July 31, 1845 of his equally demanding expectations of her that, “In all I say to you, write to you, I know very well that I trust to your understanding me almost beyond the warrant of any human capacity—but as I began, so I shall end” (BC, 11:8). This letter itself carries a muted reference to Julius Caesar, V.iii.24, in its last words, and again the context of the original, once recognized, carries an even greater freight of meaning. The words are Cassius’: “This day I breathed first; time is come round, / And where I did begin, there shall I end.” Browning adopts these words to suggest that in EBB he has found a form of new birth, and were she to leave him, she would effect a kind of death. Through Shakespeare, Browning picks up and adopts the metaphor of death which had previously been the fearful EBB’s domain in their correspondence. So resonant are these lines of Browning that EBB repeats them in her next letter to Browning ( July 31, 1845; BC, 11:10). Browning’s first use of the lines picks up on his punning conclusion to his previous letter, in which he quotes

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IV.iii.218–219 of the same play when he writes that “If I venture to weary you again with all this, is there not the cause of causes, and did not the prophet write that ‘there was a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the E.B.B. led on to the fortune’ of your R.B.?” ( July 25, 1845; BC, 11:3). Though both were entirely capable of using Shakespeare humorously, Browning’s letter of July 31 to EBB insists here on the gravity of their situation; it is not a question of “fortune” but, as for Cassius, of life and death. One of EBB and Browning’s most intimate exchanges involves an absolutely silent quotation from Shakespeare, which neither needs to quote on the page because they are sufficiently sure of the reference being clear to the other without further prompting. Browning writes of a word of Juliet’s which rises to his lips, and EBB assures him in her next letter that she “guessed at once” what his meaning was ( January 27, February 3, 1845; BC, 10:44, 53). Under the guise of an exchange about their friendship, the two poets seem to be referring to Juliet’s “It is an honour that I dream not of ” (Romeo and Juliet, I.iii.66), words which are applied in the play to the young lovers’ marriage. Shakespeare is not simply the language in which EBB and Browning speak to each other, the way in which they acknowledge their shared status and knowledge as poets; he is of the very essence of their relationship, and it can come as no surprise when EBB describes her response to Browning’s proposal with a reference to Shakespeare: “How would any woman have felt . . . who could feel at all . . . hearing such words said (though ‘in a dream’ [Tempest, I.ii.487] indeed) by such a speaker?” (September 26, 1845; BC, 11:100). In the courtship correspondence, we see the evolution of a number of relationships. Most notable, of course, is that between EBB and Browning, but we also see her trust in Shakespeare increase too, as she uses him as a medium, a bridge, through which she can reach Browning. She uses his words not only to translate herself to Browning but also perhaps to present her emotions to herself as well, to give them form. Yopie Prins writes of translation as a “contractual agreement [that] depends on an awareness of difference that does not reduce the other to identity, but allows for a mediation between ‘my tongue’ and ‘the other’s.’ ”32 In this transaction, there is “a necessary displacement of meaning” (p. 436) which also occurs in EBB’s use of Shakespeare. Prins is primarily concerned with the use by EBB and Browning in their courtship correspondence of Prometheus Bound, by means of which “they perceive their language as interchangeable, secondary, and not subject to ownership. Instead, each translates and is translated by the other” (p. 436). Precisely the same might be argued of their use of Shakespeare in their letters and of EBB’s use of Shakespeare in her poetry. In her preface to her translation of Prometheus Bound, EBB specifically distinguishes between the two modes of imitation and translation. Defending

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her decision to attempt a translation of an ancient writer against claims that an age ought more properly to aim to be “original,” she writes that the act of translation does not mean that an age is in “servilely imitative” thrall to its predecessors. Rather, she goes on: “Surely [an age] may think its own thoughts and speak its own words, yet not turn away from those who have thought and spoken well.”33 Translation then is defined in opposition to imitation in EBB’s early aesthetic and is an act which, crucially for this writer, is simultaneously a form of conveying information and an opportunity for self-expression: “It is the nature of the human mind to communicate its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language” (Preface, p. 81). Indeed, it comes to seem that translation is of the essence of the creative act for EBB, an act which necessarily involves an imaginative translation of something already in existence. She writes, for instance, of images of natural beauty that they do not demand slavish imitation: rather we should make them “subjects of contemplation, in order to abstract from them those ideas of beauty, afterwards embodied in our own productions; and, above all, in order to consider their and our Creator under every manifestation of His goodness and His power. . . . All beauties . . . are multiplied reflections . . . of one archetypal beauty” (Preface, p. 83). The works of the poet and artist thus translate divine power and splendor for the world. G. B. Smith wrote in 1874 of EBB’s Prometheus Bound, that, “in this, as in her other translations, she desired it to be understood that her one great idea was to catch the spirit of the original” (p. 478). However, one might as easily apply that judgment to the rest of her work, while bearing in mind her comment in “The Book of the Poets” that “Art lives by nature, not by the bare mimetic life generally attributed to Art: she does not imitate, she expounds. Interpres naturae—is the poet-artist” (p. 153). We should remember too that EBB’s most famous work is ostensibly a translation. Sonnets from the Portuguese are advisedly so called, and elaborately and transparently feign transmission of an original source which simultaneously gives voice to the contemporary woman poet. The maneuver exactly mirrors EBB’s use of Shakespeare, as she uses his words to voice her emotions and gives to those words a powerful nineteenth-century resonance while insisting on the persistent presence of the playwright.

Notes 1. “The Book of the Poets,” in The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1900; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1973), 6:272; subsequently cited as CW.

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2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1996), 1: 881–87; subsequently cited as AL. 3. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 396. 4. Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 138. 5. See, for instance, Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 95–113. 6. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (1905; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980). All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition. 7. Sonnets from the Portuguese, CW, 3 227–248, Sonnet 2, ll. 10–14. 8. Erik Gray, “Sonnet Kisses: Sidney to Barrett Browning,” EIC 52 (2002): 137. Despite this apparently unsympathetic phrase, however, Gray also pays important attention to the “self-conscious physicality of her sonnet-kisses,” p. 139. 9. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), p. 7. 10. “Poems. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” North American Review 94 (1862): 353. 11. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Dublin University Magazine 60 (1862): 158. 12. Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places, and People, 3 vols. (London, 1852), 1:282; North American Review 94 (1862): 353. 13. Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1996), pp. 116–157. 14. G. B. S[mith], “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Cornhill Magazine 29 (1874): 486. 15. Edmund Gosse, “The Sonnets from the Portuguese” (1894), in Critical Kit-Kats (London: Heinemann, 1913), p. 6. 16. [W. H. Smith], British Quarterly Review 34 (1861): 353. 17. E. C. Stedman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Boston, 1877), pp. 120, 132. 18. See also Lagretta Tallent Lenker, Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001). 19. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare (1807; Harmondsworth: Puffin, 2003), pp. 9–10. 20. Marjorie Stone notes in Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) that much of her critical reception renders her “one man’s daughter and another man’s wife” (p. 16). 21. Anna Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines (London: Nister, n.d.), pp. 124, 126. 22. Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 3 vols. (London, 1850–51), 1:278. 23. Helen Faucit’s account of her early years can be found in Faucit’s On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh, 1885). 24. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (1865; London: Allen, 1911), §56. 25. The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, 15 vols. to date (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1984–98), 1:54; c. January 1818. 26. Notably, after her departure for Italy with Browning, EBB’s sisters, Henrietta and Arabella, become the most frequent recipients of her Shakespeare references and quotations.

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27. The quotation is one which EBB used frequently in her letters, including a later letter to Boyd, on August [10?], 1837 (BC, 3:266) and a letter to Mary Russell Mitford on November 18, 1841 (BC, 5:172), in which she makes very varied uses of the quotation. To Mitford, for instance, she writes somewhat testily that “there are more things in Heaven & earth than are in other people’s philosophy just now.” 28. EBB writes slightingly to Mitford of Joseph Hunter’s A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. of Shakespeare’s Tempest (1839): “I do hate all those geographical statistical historical yea, & natural-historical illustrators of a great poet. I hate them & excommunicate them! I dont care a grain of sand on the shore whether Prospero’s island was Bermuda or Lampedusa” (January 1–6, 1842; BC, 5:199). 29. In Aurora Leigh, EBB writes that: I will write no plays; Because the drama, less sublime in this, Makes lower appeals, depends more menially, Adopts the standard of the public taste To chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch The fashions of the day to please the day, Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands Commending chiefly its docility And humour in stage-tricks,—or else indeed Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog, Or worse, we’ll say. (5:267–278) 30. EBB used the same analogy in letters to Mary Russell Mitford on October 3–5, 1843 (BC, 7:350) and to Mary Minto on June 30–July 1,1846 (BC, 13:100). The analogy is less fully developed in these letters, however, where the comparison is rather between not reading Shakespeare and not traveling. 31. Daniel Karlin, The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 68. 32. Yopie Prins, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and the Différance of Translation,” VP 29 (1991): 436. 33. “Preface to Prometheus Bound,” CW, 6:82.

FRANCIS O’GORMAN

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opularity still eluded Browning while writing Men and Women (1855), and accordingly he tested scenarios of poetic celebrity and popular perception of art forms, processing an insistent element of his thought in aesthetic form and, at times, wittily dispersing his vexation. “How it Strikes a Contemporary” ironized the idea of the writer’s cultural visibility by setting comic distance between a spectator and a poet, believed to be someone quite other from himself. “Popularity” addressed the matter of originality and celebrity directly as Browning reflected ruefully on the fate of the inventive, original poet—imagined, probably, as Keats but with at least a glance at himself—whose developments of poetic discourse served to enrich not the national corpus of valuable poetry but merely the second-rate writers who followed and purloined. While Hobbs, Nobbs, Nokes, and Stokes, the minor scribblers, enjoy the results of poaching from their progenitor, the original creator is doomed to poverty, his genius uncredited, his necessarily frugal diet merely “porridge” (65).1 “Popularity” is a complaint, not without humor in its turns, about the injustices of fame and the vexations of originality in the modern market for poetry. It is also an uncomfortable reflection on the way in which others efface an individual’s literary legacy and on how an originating intellect can be eclipsed by discriminating but remorselessly self-advancing hacks.2

From Studies in Browning and His Circle 27 (December 2006): 75–90. Copyright © 2007 by Baylor University, Armstrong Browning Library.

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Browning, challengingly innovative and fully aware of his lack of contemporary recognition in 1855, was searching a theme that mattered. His relationship with fame and his concern with the possibility of literary legacy have recently attracted important critical work. John Woolford saw Browning’s aspirations for popularity as the guiding force behind his extensive selfrevision that would lead to the reorganization of Men and Women in 1863 in an effort to make the logic of the collection more apparent. “Giving as he did a high priority to pleasing a contemporary audience,” Woolford argues, “Browning found himself compelled into a continuous modification of his work, a long-sustained quest for ‘words and forms’ with which to achieve popularity”3 He did not rewrite, but if a work failed, he set out to create a new one that might more satisfactorily answer the perceived needs of his readership. Supplementing Woolford’s account, Michael Millgate considers the broader question of Browning and public identity in Testamentary Acts (1992), discussing the poet’s “painfully achieved personal reconstruction”4 after his wife’s death, his preservation of her memory, and his fostering of the “BrowningBarrett legend” as part of an effort to determine authorial identity in the public domain. Browning emerges from Millgate’s study as a writer investing heavily in the management of a public image, the other side of the coin to Woolford’s description of Browning’s responsiveness to audience expectations. Woolford is right to see the hopes for popularity as a motor for Browning’s invention in the years before the solid establishment of his public reputation after The Ring and the Book (1868–1869). But neither he nor Millgate has exhausted the subject of Browning and the possibilities of cultural presence and endurance, in fact a complex subterranean theme of significant poems in Men and Women. Indeed, the matters of Browning and literary posterity, the idea of the survival of self through writing, the capacity of the past and the dead to continue to live in the present through art, have hardly been considered. Andrew Bennett’s study of the “culture of posterity” among Romantic writers in 1999 was a fresh argument for understanding the complex mythology of the Romantic poet as repudiated in life but celebrated after death.5 Bennett discusses the multiple versions of this early nineteenthcentury culture of futurity, its ironization and reversals, which he sees crucial for Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Bennett’s persuasive study opens up intriguing questions for post-Romantic poetics. What happened to this idea—to put the most obvious issue in its crudest form—in the early Victorian period? How did the Romantic culture of posterity travel into posterity, into the post-Romantic terrains of the 1840s and 1850s? More particularly for my purposes here, what are the ideas of artistic immortality with which Browning’s first major collection of monologues engages?

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Does Browning—who so admired Byron and Shelley—have a distinctive contribution to make to a post-Romantic conception of posterity? Browning could not agree with his wife over spiritualism. But one of the curious results of considering his reflections on posterity and the endurance of art is to see Browning metaphorically in the role of medium, summoning up, as it were, the voices of the past to make them speak again. Browning’s mediumistic use of the dramatic monologue of the artist-speaker in Men and Women was not a Tennysonian effort to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, but its impulses were to do with the theme of art’s relation to selfhood and the self ’s endurance beyond death nevertheless. It was urged by a desire—born of the matters that I consider in this essay—to achieve some kind of union between a text, an artifact woven of language or indeed built of stone, and a deceased human personality. This was the closest Browning would come in Men and Women to accepting the idea that art could provide a form of perpetual earthly endurance. More prominently, it was in realizing the inability of the artifact to sustain personality, to preserve individual identity in the gradual unfolding of history, that Browning, in some of the poems of Men and Women, discerned the greatest difficulty with the idea he had inherited from previous generations that artists might obtain earthly permanency through their work. Others had little difficulty with this hope. “Age and Song” (Poems and Ballads second series, 1878), Swinburne’s elegy for “Barry Cornwall” (Bryan Procter), hailed, like “Ave Atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire” and “Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier” from the same volume, the power of poetry to endure: . . . a Muse that bears upon her Raiment and wreath and flower of honour, Gathered long since and long since woven, Fades not or falls as fall the vernal Blossoms that bear no fruit eternal, By summer or winter charred or cloven. (7–12)

Browning’s Men and Women could approach nothing like such a position, where Swinburne’s enjambment, the driving on of sense, reinforced the idea of the continuation of art through time. In his fretful consideration of the Romantic culture of posterity, his resistance to a Swinburnean surety about art and preservation, and in his meditation on the doubtful receptions that greeted works of art and human reputations as they migrated into the future, Browning’s distinctive contribution to the idea of art as a mode of earthly survival is to be found.

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Obtaining some form of control over one’s reception after death, determining how the self might be remembered, emerges as a prominent theme in the first of Browning’s celebrated dramatic monologues in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) as it is the objective of Browning’s much-discussed Bishop at Saint Praxed’s ordering his tomb. In issuing directions for his conspicuous, Ciceronian monument, the Bishop endeavors to secure a hold over his future that will preserve a memory of his version of his public identity—his sexual conquests, his affection for the sensuous pleasures of high Renaissance living, his human vitality. The Bishop’s efforts to build the tomb as a legible testament to his nature express his peculiar, heretical, comically distorted version of the Christian faith in the afterlife. This secular idea of the continuation of the soul imagines the monument’s endurance as a form of perpetual existence. Indeed, the Bishop becomes sufficiently involved in this stony hope of the resurrection that he is unable to imagine himself, so long as he secures the tomb he desires, as properly dead.6 To have controlled the artifice of the final resting place is, in his private logic, to have conquered death. Lying within it as a corpse, he will “watch at leisure if he leers—/ Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone” (123–24), his present tense declaring an expectation of continued endurance as personality beyond the grave. The anxiety in the poem is not, accordingly, about demise but the failure of the “sons mine” (3) to carry out the salvific ecclesiastical plan and secure the Bishop’s chiselled, eccentric immortality. Browning’s monologue is suffused with a keenness to be heard, with a restless energy longing for control over continued presence beyond death. It is the association between the endurance of an artifact and the endurance of the self that is bequeathed to some of the poems in Men and Women to be searched and problematized. But this is not the sum of Browning’s reflections on the kind of future art offers. Indeed, what must be taken into account first is the volume’s nervous reflection on patterns of reading and decoding art after the artist’s death, on Rezeption Geschichte, on what happens to a work of the creative imagination—literature, painting, music—or even to a human reputation when it leaves the custody of its creator and enters the public world. In this anxiety is the basis of the text-artist split that is so prominently thematized elsewhere in the volume. The Bishop does not explicitly worry about being misunderstood in the future, only now; some monologues in Men and Women ponder that with which the Bishop does not trouble himself. One of the silent questions in reading “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” is about the legitimacy of the listener’s response to music, the status of his interpretation of an eighteenth-century keyboard toccata, and this is a symptomatic instance of Men and Women’s contact with ideas of doubtful reception that relate to the volume’s anxious handling of ideas of futurity. In addition

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to the provincial, never-out-of-England speaker’s technical inadequacy as a commentator on music, he understands what he hears as if musical sound might be plainly translated into rational sense, that octaves and sevenths and fifths have directly paraphrasable meanings, that understanding music shares something of Jude Fawley’s view of learning classical languages: it is a matter of comprehending the cipher. Browning’s speaker, with a provincial surety/ naiveté about his grasp of another culture and his understanding of nonprogrammatic keyboard music, is provocatively confident in associating his interpretation with Baldassare Galuppi’s intentions. “I can hardly misconceive you,” he begins with complacent certainty, “it would prove me deaf and blind; / But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!” (2–3). The joke is against him. Browning does not allow his reader any surety that the monologist has “taken” the composer’s meaning at all, even assuming for a moment that Galuppi’s keyboard toccatas have meaning in the way that the monologist prefers to assume. Revealingly mistaking the composer’s name in the first line, he suggestively signs his relationship with Galuppi from the start in terms of error. The business of misconceiving the artifact or the artist persists across monologues, providing the central interest and uncertain joke of “How it strikes a Contemporary” and an uncomfortable question behind the provincial earnestness of “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.” Here, in a manner cognate with “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” the organist believes that a clear intellectual message is discernible behind dense counterpoint, the most abstract of musical form: “What do you mean by your mountainous fugues?” (4). The fact that he cannot find such meaning does not convince him that he might be asking the wrong questions, that he might be trying to interpret contrapuntal music with erroneous assumptions about what it communicates. “A Grammarian’s Funeral” belongs in this trajectory of anxious thoughts about reception and misunderstanding too. Browning does not concern himself here with what happens to a musician’s creations when they leave the composer’s brain but with the uncertainties of reputation of a different kind of culturally significant life, the doubtful passage of a seemingly distinguished scholar’s public identity into posterity. The argument between Richard D. Altick, Martin J. Svaglic, and Robert L. Kelly hinged on whether or not the reader of “A Grammarian’s Funeral” should distinguish between speaker and subject.7 But the poem, as a variant of the dramatic monologue, clearly asks that such a distinction be made. A key result of this distinction—which A. D. Nuttall disregards in the most recent article8—is the impossibility of judging the appropriateness of the students’ view of their former master. The reader may comprehend their reverence and readily perceive their admiration for one who decided not to “Live but Know” (139). But equally he or she may doubt they

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are right to admire such a choice between living and knowing, and recognize all too plainly that their competence as language users is inadequate, that they produce more comedy than funereal solemnity in their pompous circumlocutions, deflating rhythms, and amusingly egregious rhymes. Verbal ineptitude hardly qualifies them, as has been well established, as judges of a man whose work has been in the minutiae of language. But none of this gives the reader a sure sense of the Grammarian himself. His identity continues only in the lives of his followers, and how far they are faithful to his true character and ability is unknown. Edgar Harden says of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” that the performance of the music “represents a secular artistic immortality,” yet this is exactly the reading that is problematized.9 In the “Toccata,” “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” the passage of the creator’s achievements into the new is through a network of interpreters, via whom an identity is at once sustained but also, perhaps, created, shaped, or distorted as the Bishop’s sons’ failure to carry out his plans will disfigure his identity in times unseen. Interpretation is the necessary condition of survival; no future for the artist or writer or scholar or musician is possible without it. But the interpreted life is, as “A Grammarian’s Funeral” makes troublingly apparent, one in which real personality may become teasingly unknowable and frustratingly dispersed amid the conspicuous identities of friends, disciples, and the perhaps ignorant bearers of the legacy. Browning’s implied reader in Men and Women is made the spectator of the strange fate of a variety of artists’ and writers’ work as it passes into public life, a witness of the way in which identity becomes social after death and work becomes available for reading without the tutelary guidance of the author. When Browning comes to think of the artist’s own spectatorship of his fate beyond death, what was previously subtly formulated anxiety becomes a glimpse of sharper uncertainty. In “Old Pictures in Florence,” thoughts of inheritance and transmission are figured in an image of haunting and decay, in which the trope of ghostliness bespeaks not, as it would for Francis Thompson in “Ode for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 1897,” the persistence of fame beyond the grave in a great national procession of glorious ghosts, but the loss of audience and the dissolution of the work of art itself.10 Browning’s poem presents not merely misunderstanding but an absence of comprehension and affection. Each crumbling ancient Florentine fresco is seen with its attendant mournful and impotent spectre: Wherever a fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains:

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One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, —A lion who died of an ass’s kick, The wronged great soul of an ancient Master. (41–48)

The fate of Keats in “Popularity” was unjust, yet “Old Pictures in Florence” briefly images a differently gloomy future not for the living but the dead. Greatness, like the crumbling fabric of medieval Venice of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) published shortly before Men and Women, dissipates in ignorance and indifference, just as the poet’s grave in “Fame” from the ironically titled “Earth’s Immortalities” in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics is transformed by decay into a mute symbol of posterity’s unconcern. As “Headstone and half-sunk footstone lean awry” (5), they mark the loss of the poet’s name in the years after his death—his “crisp-cut name and date” (8) all but erased by grey lichens. The ghosts in “Old Pictures” are other versions of artists bereaved of cultural presence; deprived of power they are not free of sensitivity and, like the victims of the vivisector’s curare, suffer without the capacity for self-preserving action. Browning memorably invoked a Romantic myth of origin for “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” saying that it came to him “as a kind of dream” which he felt compelled to write down. “I did not know then what I meant,” he continued, “ . . . and I’m sure I don’t know now.”11 In offering himself in this gesture as his own worst interpreter, uncomprehending before the production of his own pen, Browning was issuing a challenge to his readers—a deliberate irony coming from the author of the infamous Sordello (1840)—to make sense of an interpretive conundrum, to outdo the author in discerning routes into the poem. He invited his reader to unsettle the myth of authorial intention as the guiding force of response. But the question of perceiving authorial intention, and the matter of the reader’s interpretation, was peculiarly bound up with the issue of posterity in 1855. Browning’s account of the genesis of “ ‘Childe Roland’ ” retrospectively ironized one of the patterns of thought with which Men and Women had, in a number of ways, negotiated. In offering himself as the baffled reader of his own work, Browning was safeguarding his creation from the fate that he suggested in “A Toccata” and “Master Hugues,” ironically commenting that this poem was secure from misunderstanding in its journey into futurity and the waiting groups of future interpreters. The artist’s intention could not be misapprehended because it was, in Browning’s myth of origin, divorced from the burden of authorially sanctioned meaning from the start. Where the “appeal to a posthumous reception” is “central to the project of Romantic poetics” in Andrew Bennett’s reading then, for the author of Men and Women, posthumous reception is a

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site of uncertainty, a locus of doubtfulness about audiences and their necessary role in the preservation of life beyond death through art and artifacts, to be escaped only inadequately with an authorial admission of incomprehension.12 Artifacts survive their creators, or those whom they represent. But the survival of art after death in Men and Women provokes another uncertainty in Browning’s mind. Andrew Bennett does not see the need to distinguish between the work and the artist in his study of two generations of Romantics, invoking a crudified Romantic period parallel between the sincere author and the confessional text almost unquestioned throughout. Although he writes of afterlives and even, in relation to Percy Shelley, of ghosts, Bennett’s approach allows him always to synonymize the author and the oeuvre so that he can move without observing borders between the way in which, say, Shelley’s ideas of “poetic immortality” are bound up with publishing technologies, mass book production, and the imperishability of print (the endurance of his writing) and Shelley’s claim that he will “live beyond ‘this life,’ imperishably” (the endurance of the self, it seems, bound up with its preserved textual productions).13 Bennett does not discern the need to distinguish, in this period, between forms of afterlife or adjudicate between different kinds of identity preserved beyond death. In the distinction overlooked here, in the gap between the creator and the work, lay Browning’s most insistent question about ideas of posterity. The Bishop at Saint Praxed’s could not imagine a distinction between the corpse in—or effigy on—his tomb and his own living corporeality. Projecting into the future, his assumption that the properly built funereal monument was inseparable from the survival of self was threatened only by the carelessness of his unlawful progeny to his deathbed intentions. But it is the Bishop’s silent assumption about the bond between materiality and personal identity that is richly problematized in Men and Women. Reaching its climax in the anxieties of “Cleon” and finally expressed in the tribute to Elizabeth in “One Word More,” the last poem of the 1855 volume, the separation between art and self beyond death serves as an agitating if productive matter beneath a succession of Browning’s monologues even as, perhaps, it provides a motivating force for investment in 1855 in the monologue qua monologue. In “My Last Duchess,” from 1842, the painting of the Duke’s wife merges smoothly, it appears, with her living identity, so that the speaker’s opening direction “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall” can be swiftly followed by “Looking as if she were alive” (1–2). Painting and living presence are not clearly distinguished. In the title, the fusion and confusion between art and personality is plainer: “My Last Duchess” collapses person and painting into inseparable form (to which does it refer?), making a transparently ironic comment on the Duke’s regard for his wife as less than a human being, a

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mere object, whose cessation is implicitly ruled as something less than murder because she was never properly alive. The irony recurs, a premonition of a repeat, perhaps, to the terrible pattern of the Duke’s marital history, in the franker statement he delivers to the emissary while walking downstairs at the end of the poem. Setting aside matters of dowry, he remarks, his next wife, the Count’s “fair daughter’s self ” is, first and foremost, “my object” (52–53). The words are a deft instance of the kind of reading that the freshly minted form of the Browningesque dramatic monologue invites and rewards for they accidentally disclose the grave limitations of the speaker’s moral being. Here, they reveal an egocentric sensibility ready to assimilate a woman into mere materiality, to deprive her of breathing human life through an objectifying gaze that can also issue commands of death. The Duke’s slippage between human identity and object, between sitter and portrait, is a disturbing version of a relationship that is present in various forms in Men and Women and in which Browning’s reflections on the artist’s relationship with posterity are most complexly processed. If Bennett’s assumption is an unrefined Romantic equivalence between self and work, Browning’s sense of the inadequacy of the artifact to convey authorial identity is precisely that which helps define his post-Romantic identity and his distance from the Romantic lyric with its myth of coincidence between self and text.14 In “The Statue and the Bust,” the art objects—the statue and the bust of the title—at once allow the preservation of the history of the Duke and his adulterous, reciprocated desire, and embody the loss of life that is, on several levels, the moral of their frustrated love. Browning’s poem locates the statue and the palace in which della Robbia has carved the bust as the point d’embarcation, the scene that precipitates the poem: There’s a palace in Florence, the world knows well, And a statue watches it from the square, And this story of both do our townsmen tell. (1–3)

The iteration of the “story,” the afterlife of the Duke and his lover, is dependent, in this stanza’s formulation, on the continuation of the art objects; they are the condition of history’s survival, the terms by which the man and woman’s tale persists beyond death. Yet also they are expressive tokens of lost life; they are memorials, silent epitaphs to personalities, living identities, which are forever departed. In commissioning della Robbia to fashion the bust and John of Douay to construct the statue, the words of both Lady and Duke ironically comment on their monuments. The Lady desires that her representation will resist the mutations of time and fix “a beauty never to fade.” But what is created is a statement of loss:

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But long ere Robbia’s cornice, fine, With flowers and fruits which leaves enlace, Was set where now is the empty shrine— (And, leaning out of a bright blue space, As a ghost might lean from a chink of sky, The passionate pale lady’s face— Eyeing ever, with earnest eye And quick-turned neck at its breathless stretch, Some one who ever is passing by—). . . . [187–95]

An artifact that has little of the ambiguity of Keats’s Grecian urn replaces a living being. Its “breathless stretch” is, to be sure, the artist’s representation of the Lady’s eager waiting but more obtrusively a sign of the image’s absence of life, far removed from all breathing human passion. Art does survive after the Duke and Lady, but most insistently it suggests loss. It speaks partly of ungrasped opportunity, memorializing lives that were unfulfilled, ironically mimicking in clay and bronze the immobile separation between lovers that characterized their chastely divided lives. But more obviously it confirms and memorializes their real death, even if they had not fully lived before. The continuation of art in the Florentine square is the signature of life departed, of death and deficit. “The Statue and the Bust” may have haunted Browning with a peculiar force after the death of his wife in 1861. Certainly, the inability of an art object to preserve the full complexity of personality, variously suggested in Men and Women, struck him at this dreadful point of bereavement all too personally. Browning rejected any kind of memorial statue, as art’s insufficiency as a mode of endurance made itself painfully felt. “In that face,” he wrote to the North American sculptor, W. W. Story, “which I shall not apply an epithet to, the inner light of the soul was used to fill up all deficiency, and—for me—transfigure all actually there: this light gone, what can replace it?”15 The sculptor’s stone could not, any more metaphorically than literally, be transmuted into light; and it would fail always to preserve the essence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as poetry had failed, in “Two in the Campagna,” to hold on to the “good minute” of their relationship which existed beyond the representational limits of art. Cornelia D. J. Pearsall thinks that Browning’s rejection of any statue with which to commemorate his wife is part of a wider anxiety about the “disquieting effects of memorialization of the dead and in particular the consequences of marking the departed with structures that may invite too literal a contemplation of the body itself.”16 Half-suggestive as a reading of “The Bishop Orders his Tomb,”

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this approach to the broader question of art’s commemorative power omits the more deeply felt realization, explored in Men and Women, of the disabling gap between art and human personality which, in Browning’s perception, leaves memorialization an impossible ideal and the (non-) representation of Elizabeth in an artifact too painful to be contemplated. The persistence of a text after death is revealingly disturbed in Men and Women as well, just as the volume is fretful about the practice of interpretation in which art can be safeguarded from future misunderstanding only by authorial declaration of uncertainty about original meaning. “De Gustibus—” fantasizes with the idea of the continuation of some form of selfhood and desire after death, so that a record of love can be left exactly in the way the stalled romance of “The Statue and the Bust” forbids. But it is hesitant. Musing on the continuation of self beyond the grave, Browning ponders the nature of spectral life, wondering whether “our loves remain” (2) if human beings continue as phantoms. The question is one of uncertainty about the persistence of recognizable features of human personality, even for the revenant. Of himself, Browning describes, in the erotic language of the lover, his passion for an idea, a seductive myth of Italy, concluding with the memorable self-fashioning of Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary’s saying services for me— (When fortune’s malice Lost her—Calais)— Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, ‘Italy.’ Such lovers old are I and she: So it always was, so shall ever be! (39–46)

Browning is not interested here in the survival of his work; posterity will not remember him through the endurance of his poetry but of his loves. He seeks preservation of a recognizable form of lived life, of personal identity recollectable through the remaining traces of his desire, the insistence of his hope for a ghostly perpetuation of self suggested in the cascade of terminal words rhyming with “me.” Yet, ironically, the self ’s ambition to outlive its mortal life is figured in terms that half-unravel its selfhood and partially query its authenticity. Browning offers the anecdote of a word engraved on his heart as a guarantee of his love for Italy. But he is explicit about its derived nature. Queen Mary may bitterly have believed that “Calais” was inscribed upon her heart after she had lost it in 1558, but Browning still imitates her self-defining gesture—and he deliberately foregrounds the fact of his imitation—suggesting the perpetuation of his own identity through a technique

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appropriated from another. “De Gustibus—” proposes survival through the intertext, through the immortality of borrowing, by repeating a variant of another’s identifying anecdote. In doing so, it at once does preserve something of Browning’s own desire—the words are appropriately reproduced on a memorial plaque on the Ca’ Rezzonico—and makes it paradoxically parasitic on another’s act of definition. The deliberately problematized deployment of quotation at the end of “De Gustibus—” neatly deconstructs the notion that traces of human desire, defining features of selves as individual human beings, can be innocently sustained beyond death through words. The poem upsets an idea of the artist’s relation with posterity by querying what forms of textual survival for the authentic self are possible, at once seeming to celebrate the endurance of desire through words and undermining it. James Montgomery said in lectures to the Royal Institution published in 1833 that the poet was, above all men, secured of renown. Great writers, he remarked, “have built monuments upon rocks above the high-water mark of time, which the flood of years (amidst perpetual vicissitudes, perpetually advancing,) shall never overwhelm.”17 For Browning, the continuation of a text could not be so buoyantly celebrated, for he perceived first of all the lost life that lay behind it. But nowhere does a hope for the self ’s endurance, the sum of personality, over the artifact become so clear in 1855 than in the reflections of the painter-poet Cleon, where an idea of survival in posterity meets the possibilities of the Christian afterlife in a distinctive fusion of regret and limited hope. What creates the anxious energies of “The Statue and the Bust” becomes explicit in Cleon’s responses to his correspondent the King’s assumptions about poetry and immortality, part of the poem’s wider consideration of the preservation of identity on the cusp of the Christian dispensation with its claims of paradise. The King’s association between the endurance of expressive art after the death of the artist is that which is made uncertain in Men and Women: And next, of what thou followest on to ask. This being with me as I declare, O king, My works, in all these varicoloured kinds, So done by me, accepted so by men— Thou askest, if (my soul thus in men’s hearts) I must not be accounted to attain The very crown and proper end of life? Inquiring thence how, now life closeth up, I face death with success in my right hand: Whether I fear death less than dost thyself The fortunate of men? ‘For’ (writest thou)

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‘Thou leavest much behind, while I leave nought. Thy life stays in the poems men shall sing, The pictures men shall study; while my life, Complete and whole now in its power and joy, Dies altogether with my brain and arm, Is lost indeed; since, what survives myself ? The brazen statue to o’erlook my grave, Set on the promontory which I named. And that—some supple courtier of my heir Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps, To fix the rope to, which best drags it down. I go then: triumph thou, who dost not go!’ (158–80)

Anxiety about effacement is gathered, as for the Bishop at Saint Praxed and “The Statue and the Bust,” around a memorial, here a statue destined, it seems, to be demolished by those who inherit the King’s place. For the monarch facing the annihilation even of that last remaining trace of his earthly presence, Cleon is, as the King sees it, enviably gifted with the hope of endurance through art: “[His] life stays in the poems men shall sing, / The pictures men shall study.” The King’s uninterrogated equivalence between art and life—the latter simply inheres, “stays,” in the former—recognizes not one of the problems of interpretation that some of the poems of Men and Women probe, offering instead an unperturbed fusion between Cleon’s human presence and the works of art he has created that seemingly will be comprehended in the future as transparent accounts of unmediated, uninterpreted and permanently enduring personality. Cleon’s response, in keeping with the broader pattern of Men and Women, is to reject the equivalence that the King makes and to insist on the starkest version of the disturbing gap between life’s and art’s endurance in Browning’s volume. A culture of posterity in which the artist secures a form of immortality through admiring readers, viewers, or listeners after death is gloomily repudiated because the persistence of the work of art—even if it happens—cannot be understood in terms of the unmediated survival of the self. Cleon’s summoning of the figure of Sappho, known only to the Victorians in the smallest of poetic fragments, is peculiarly eloquent of the dispersal of human identity amid the shreds of a literary legacy: ‘But’, sayest thou—(and I marvel, I repeat To find thee trip on such a mere word) ‘what Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,

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And Aeschylus, because we read his plays!’ Why, if they live still, let them come and take Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? Say rather that my fate is deadlier still, In this, that every day my sense of joy Grows more acute, my soul (intensified By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; While every day my hairs fall more and more, My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase— The horror quickening still from year to year, The consummation coming past escape When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy— When all my works wherein I prove my worth, Being present still to mock me in men’s mouths, Alive still, in the praise of such as thou, I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, The man who loved his life so over-much, Sleep in my urn. (301–23)

“Cleon” is poised at a moment of historical transition; the poet-painter’s monologue is delivered on the edge of the emergence of the new Christian faith, championed by the Paulus by whom Cleon is so baffled, with his redeeming conception of the longed-for “future state . . . / Unlimited in capability / For joy” (325–27). Cleon the Christian—were he ever to convert to a faith he dismisses as insanity at the end—might learn to celebrate a doctrine that offers consolation to his fears of death at the coming loss of individual personality. Here alone does the poem offer a solution to its restless encounter with the afterlife, for Christianity in Browning’s text is the only answer—teasingly on the edge of Cleon’s consciousness—to the question of immortality. What art can offer, under paganism or under Christianity, falters in comparison with this form of permanency, a continuation not in history, in the consciousnesses of living men, but in the ethereal spaces of paradise. Art, confined to the terrestrial, provides no prospect of life’s preservation in the sublunary world, and “literary immortality” is a phrase merely oxymoronic.18 The aspirations and historical achievement of the dramatic monologue as a genre gain impetus from this problem of the artist’s relation with earthly posterity most clearly dramatized in “Cleon,” suggestively linking the motivational forces behind dramatic poetry in 1855 with concerns about cultural preservation independent from any Christianized conception of a spiritual afterlife. Browning’s dramatic monologues, as if spectral voices called from

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the grave by an author-medium, can offer the heartening illusion, the pleasing myth, of some kind of personality survival beyond death and one that occurs on earth rather than in a heavenly “future state.” These are not innocent survivals of self, of course, for they are subject to the poet’s interpretation and mediation, but they comprise a version of perpetuation, a way for a self to be revived, nonetheless. Such an idea might be discerned most convincingly behind “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” In creating poetry from the imagined speech of long dead Florentine painters, Browning lends to them— as he ironically lends to the perturbed Cleon, contemplating his extinction, too—the appearance of something like their living personalities, which their art itself, however “faultless” or exuberant or dedicated to the representation of “life,” has not preserved. The dramatic monologue, the imagined language of the painter as revenant, generates the chimera of the artist living again, speaking anew, and performing an identity that is audible to centuries long after him. In Browning’s hands, and regarded from the context of anxieties about the continuance of self through earthly artifacts I am considering here, the dramatic genre becomes tentatively a mode for the preservation of an artist’s fugitive personality separate from the Christian possibility of an eternity beyond the world. The monologue of the artist-speaker gains strange momentum in 1855 from the troubling question of the relation between text and self after death, and it forms perhaps a displaced response to the problems this essay analyses. But Browning’s contemplation of art’s inability to preserve the living moment resolves more frequently into elegy or silent regret. This, certainly, is the substance of his final reflection on the subject in the epilogue of Men and Women, “One Word More: To E. B. B. 1855.” Browning’s dedicatory words are the last, wistful comment on the problem of art’s inadequacy, caught between the pleasure of a sentimental moment and the regretful acknowledgment of human transience. This tribute to a muse is a gesture that at once suggests and simultaneously disguises that uncomfortable narrative of future loss and division glimpsed in the volume elsewhere. The poet is able to offer both self and art in the context of a domestic dedication: There they are, my fifty men and women Naming me the fifty poems finished! Take them, Love, the book and me together: Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. (1–4)

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suggested elsewhere. The “book and me together” is a fond gift, but knowing the patterns of the Men and Women, the reader cannot recognize it as stable, and Browning is careful to make clear its provisionality. Dating his title, he silently insists on the poem’s moment in a temporal sequence, in the flow of history that will ultimately divide “book” and “me.” To do otherwise would be to imply a security that could only be illusory. The rhetoric of “One Word More” hides within it the narrative of future earthly bereavement, the history of human loss that is the absent-present of Browning’s text. Christianity, as “Cleon” hints, may provide a solution to the broadest question of the soul’s immortality. But the matter of endurance beyond the grave through art, the maintenance of personality and individual human identity in the terra incognita of earthly futurity, cannot be considered without remembering first of all the grave itself. Browning’s poetics in 1855 emphasize the uncertain processes of reading, listening, and viewing which mediate a man’s ideas, creations, and reputation as they travel through history; he foregrounds the fragility of the corporeal and undermines the saveability of individual human identity through art; but he also perhaps offers the dramatic monologue of the artist-speaker as the closest he can come to imagining a form of perpetuation through texts, a survival of self through the artifact different from the hope of the survival of the soul through faith glimpsed in the Christianity on the edge of “Cleon.” In “Memorabilia” from Men and Women, the narrator addresses a man, who had known Percy Shelley, in the first stanza of a poem that would later be radically reconfigured in Hardy’s “Shelley’s Skylark” (published 1902): Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new! (1–4)

The tone is urgent, the mood astonished. For Richard Cronin, the stanza expresses the poet’s “difficulty of imagining that anyone had ever actually spoken to Shelley. [Browning] is not saddened by Shelley’s death so much as startled by the thought that he had ever been alive.”19 But the astonishment is more than this and in some ways the opposite of it. What stirs is the encounter with a different form of memory from that offered by writing. Shelley’s poems cannot, the treatment of posterity in Men and Women would suggest, offer a mode of self-preservation; but here, in the memory of a living man, Browning has momentarily stumbled on a different way of accessing a different Shelley. “Memorabilia” is awed by the business of coming nearer to the real presence of the drowned poet through human remembrance rather

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than through oeuvre, momentarily forgetful of the questions of interpretation that trouble Browning elsewhere in his reflections on the preservation of lives through man’s recollection. For Thomas Hardy, the long dead bird that inspired the poet of the skylark ode helps him half-sceptically and halfnostalgically map the distance between Shelley and what Hardy offers as the much-diminished late Victorian conception of the poet and the poetic faculty. Hardy, looking back to the Romantic, sees difference and distance. Browning in “Memorabilia,” clinching a particularly important element of his consideration of the artist’s relationship with futurity, discerns an enthralling proximity, the presence of the poet that endures, as he sees it, more successfully in his imagination of another’s memory than in Shelley’s writing. In this excitement is the essence of his regard for a “culture of posterity” and his views in Men and Women on art as a mode of earthly survival.

Notes 1. All numbers in parentheses refer to line numbers in Robert Browning: The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). 2. For the most recent discussion of this poem, see Sarah Wood, Robert Browning: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) 126–32, who considers “Popularity” as an exemplum of Browning’s poetics in Men and Women. 3. John Woolford, Browning the Revisionary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) ix. 4. Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 6. 5. See Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). 6. Ian Jack misses the point when he says that “Instead of caring for the salvation of his soul, the Bishop is only concerned with the destination of his body” (Browning’s Major Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon, 1973], 200) as the destination of his body is inseparable from his idea of personal endurance. 7. See Richard D. Altick “ ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’: Browning’s Praise of Folly?” Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 449–60; Martin J. Svaglic, “Browning’s Grammarian: Apparent Failure or Real,” Victorian Poetry 5 (1967): 93–104, and Robert L. Kelly, “Dactyls and Curlews: Satire in ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral,’ ” Victorian Poetry 5 (1967): 105–12. 8. See A. D. Nuttall, “Browning’s Grammarian: Accents Uncertain?” Essays in Criticism 51 (2001): 86–100. 9. Edgar F. Harden, “A Reading of Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’ ” Victorian Poetry 11 (1973): 333. 10. Haunting and ghostliness as tropes of influence are briefly considered in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Literary Influence in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). Other uses of the spectral in the period aside from the question of influence and endurance have most recently been examined in Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

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11. Quoted in Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield, eds., The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 129. 12. Bennett 5. 13. Bennett 163, 167. 14. Matthew Rowlinson considers “Fra Lippo Lippi” and its critique of lyric in “Lyric” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) 62. Other important considerations of this include Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric” in Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 226–43, and Isobel Armstrong’s discussion of “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johannes Agricola” in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) 136–46. Warwick E. Slinn offers a more broadly conceived argument about the shift from self to text between the Romantic and Victorian periods as a dominating metaphor in The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), and my argument continues to affirm the importance of this shift and Browning’s significant place in effecting it. 15. Quoted in Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, “Browning and the Poetics of the Sepulchral Body,” Victorian Poetry 30 (1992): 43. 16. Pearsall 59. 17. James Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry and General Literature Delivered at the Royal Institution in 1830 and 1831 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1833) 221. 18. Clyde Ryals, like many, recognizes Browning’s interests “in the possibility of an afterlife” in both “Cleon” and “Karshish” but does not recognize the former poem’s involvement in a discussion about art’s survival in counterpoint with this. See Clyde de L. Ryals, The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 123. 19. Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) 7.

TIM KENDALL

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ardy’s Boer War poetry shows little interest in soldiers until they die. More concerned with the effects of their departure and return—or failure to return—it allows them only a posthumous voice, so that they may confront the cause for which they were sacrificed. Soldiers are tragic figures in Hardy’s work, tramping gloomily to their inevitable fates. Of their experiences in battle, their daily routines, their sense of duty, their camaraderie, even their attitudes to military and civilian leaders, Hardy says nothing. It falls to Rudyard Kipling, a long-standing veteran of the barrack-room, to break that silence; in doing so, he (more than Hardy) fosters the earliest significant generation of soldier-poets, which will emerge during the Great War over a decade later. Kipling had always been well placed to study the military, first as a schoolboy in the United Services College which trained sons of officers to follow their fathers, and then as a tyro journalist in the Punjab where the British army controlled the civil administration. By instinct a war poet (and prose writer) long before his nation was at war, Kipling in his early work returned frequently to tales heard around ‘a Mess-table at midnight’1—tales of skirmishes at the frontiers of Empire, in Afghanistan, Sudan, Burma, Khartoum, and north-west India. The fascination was profound and enduring: army men, Kipling gratefully concluded, do not ‘spout hashed libraries | Or think the next man’s thought’.2 Whether they avoided thinking Kipling’s

From Modern English War Poetry, pp. 26–45. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2006 by Tim Kendall.

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thought is a different matter. As Sir George Younghusband, a retired subaltern, recalled in 1917, I myself had served for many years with soldiers, but had never heard the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling’s soldiers used . . . But sure enough, a few years after, the soldiers thought, and talked, and expressed themselves exactly like Rudyard Kipling had taught them in his stories . . . Kipling made the modern soldier.3

Kipling’s poetry proved as influential as his prose. The Barrack-Room Ballads of 1892 offered a model for soldier-poets, who produced what Malvern Van Wyk Smith has described as a ‘small library of Kiplingesque verse’ during the Boer War.4 That level of productivity reflected new educational circumstances. The conflict in South Africa was the first to involve a predominantly literate British army, and its poets’ overwhelming indebtedness to Kipling signalled the extent to which literature had previously neglected the experiences of private soldiers. As Lionel Johnson had remarked when reviewing the Barrack-Room Ballads, ‘of the British army, as a way of daily life, as composed of individual men, as full of marked personal characteristics and peculiarities, our poets great and small have had little conception’.5 Kipling attempted to rectify that ignorance, but not every British soldier in South Africa was persuaded of the authenticity of his portrayals. ‘Rudyardkiplingese’, published in the Bloemfontein Friend (an information sheet for soldiers which Kipling helped to edit briefly), pointedly suggested that the famous poet need not bother researching his subject: The man that writes a poem In praise of our Tommy A.’s Ain’t got no call to study Their manners, nor talk, nor ways, ’E’s only to fake up something What’s Barracky—more or less— And civilians don’t know as it’s rubbish and so The Ballad’s a big success.6

This barracking of the more or less ‘Barracky’ constitutes an ambivalent criticism, forged out of what it purportedly condemns: attacking Kipling’s depiction of soldiers’ ‘manners’, their ‘talk’ and ‘ways’, as fake, the poem depends on his Cockney dialect for its expression. The more serious charge against Kipling predicts the anger of Great War poets against long-range civilian commentators. However much he may know of the barrack-room

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compared with other civilians, Kipling will never be a ‘Tommy A.’ Like Hardy, he wants to serve as advocate for the downtrodden and dispossessed, but the act of giving the voiceless a voice remains ethically fraught. He teaches them poetry, and (in poems like ‘Rudyardkiplingese’) their profit is that they know how to curse him. If such criticisms are to be trusted, Kipling also shares with Hardy a reluctance to draw distinctions between speaking for and speaking through. Hardy’s soldiers think and sound like Hardy; the issue is whether, for all their disguise of Cockneyfication, Kipling’s think and sound like Kipling. Arguments in favour of an experiential war poetry did not begin with the Boer War. Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, inspired by an account of the incident in The Times, had become possible because the Crimean War was the first to be covered by reporters and photographers. Yet, within a decade, Walt Whitman in Drum Taps (1865) had created a war poetry based on first-hand experience. Spending the American Civil War as a voluntary hospital help and wound-dresser, Whitman concluded that only the witness could understand the nature of the conflict: ‘I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is . . . without some such experience as this I am having.’7 Kipling had once considered Whitman his favourite poet,8 and the American’s example may have influenced Kipling’s own behaviour in the Boer War. Just as Whitman had travelled with a trainload of wounded soldiers, tending their injuries, so Kipling joined a Red Cross ambulance train to collect casualties from the Battle of Paardeburg; and Kipling, like Whitman before him, wrote letters on behalf of wounded soldiers to their families. (He would later recall in Something of Myself that, among the rank and file, he unofficially gained a status ‘above that of most Generals’.9) Nevertheless, Kipling’s threemonth visit to South Africa during early 1900 does not sustain comparison with Whitman’s years of altruism in the field hospitals. As war correspondent, politician, tourist, entertainer, celebrity, and charity-worker, he enjoyed feeding his intellectual curiosity, reporting after his return to England that ‘there happened to be a bit of a war on, and I had the time of my life. Carrie and the children stayed at Cape Town and I sort of drifted up country looking at hospitals and wounded men and guns and generals.’10 One glimpse of Kipling in early 1900 describes him with ‘his nose to the ground for subject-matter’ as he examines ‘every mortal thing from the Maxims to the officers and privates’.11 Whereas Whitman never saw fighting, Kipling seized the opportunity to spectate when the British advanced on some Boer positions just north of Bloemfontein. Even his having unexpectedly come under fire, as he watched from a nearby farmhouse, brought writerly compensations: ‘I wasn’t hit, which was the main thing; and I certainly managed to pick up a good deal of mixed and valuable information.’12

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Kipling’s Boer War poetry exploits the authority of experience. Most of his output divides between the Cockney poems spoken by low-ranking soldiers, and the high pronouncements, in propria persona, on the justifications for war and (subsequently) the lessons to be learnt from it. These two types might be expected to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. As the soldiers’ friend, witnessing war at first hand, Kipling accumulates the right to a political poetry. But his own politics rarely informs the attitudes of his soldiers, who convey a diversity of responses which resists dilution to a simple pro-war message. So often caricatured as a jingoist and apologist for empire, Kipling writes a poetry which can be tentative, self-doubting, and compassionate. Received wisdom requires that his Boer War writings do not live up to expectations: ‘neither in his Boer War poetry nor in his prose, did Kipling produce the South African book which many of his admirers expected of him’;13 ‘the Boer War stories are very disappointing’;14 ‘the fifteen “Service Songs” in The Five Nations, in the style of Barrack-Room Ballads, are inferior to their predecessors’;15 ‘[during this period] he published verse that was too fluently and easily written’;16 ‘The war inevitably prompted him to much writing both in prose and verse, but it cannot be said to have elicited any of his best work.’17 Not all universally acknowledged truths warrant an instant dismissal, but these critical judgements neglect Kipling’s success in achieving a polyvocal range in prose and poetry which at least gestures towards the variety of opinions about, and experiences of, the Boer War. Although he writes no individual poem as great as Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ or ‘The Souls of the Slain’, Kipling creates a body of Boer War poetry which is, in toto, the match of any contemporary. The Five Nations appeared in 1903, the year after the end of the war. Collecting most of his Boer War poems from the previous four years, Kipling emphasizes through his title a broader theme: the mutually beneficial relationship (as he saw it) between Britain and her daughter nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Their willingness to aid the British Empire during the Boer War is celebrated in the balladic fourteeners of ‘The Parting of the Columns’, as the British troops bid farewell to a mixed detachment of ‘colonials’ who, despite having ’ad no special call to come’, had lent brave support to the imperial cause: We’ll never read the papers now without inquirin’ first For word from all those friendly dorps where you was born an’ nursed. Why, Dawson, Galle, an’ Montreal—Port Darwin—Timaru They’re only just across the road! Good-bye—good luck to you!18

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The war, such poems argue, might yet strengthen a sense of identity and shared purpose amongst the scattered nations of the Empire: as Kipling reported in early 1901, the regular regiments and the colonials had become brothers who ‘eat out of the same dish’.19 His work does its best to honour that brotherhood, although hope for the future exists alongside a greater fear that British decadence will bring about defeat. The Boer War may have been, as Kipling’s British general says in his story ‘The Captive’, ‘“a first-class dress parade for Armageddon”’, 20 but the repeated insistence on the urgency of preparing for a still more catastrophic conflict—in poems like ‘The Dykes’ and ‘The Lesson’—indicates the extent of their author’s foreboding. Ignoring chronology, Kipling ends The Five Nations with ‘Recessional’, written two years before the outbreak of war in 1897. This arrangement frames the Boer War poems and invites understanding of the conflict as another confirmation of the dangers of national complacency. Calling on the ‘Judge of the Nations’ to ‘spare us yet’, 21 ‘Recessional’ is a fitting conclusion to a volume which is at least as preoccupied with the war to come as with the Boer War. If ‘Recessional’ indicates Kipling’s belief that urgent lessons needed to be learnt even before the Boer War, the Boer War proves that most were not learnt. Kipling’s campaign in poetry and prose to raise the status of the British soldier among civilians—‘For it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!” | But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot’22—blames a national hypocrisy which he fears will lead, if uncorrected, to destruction. His letters of the period harp on the potentially purifying effects of the war: in May 1901 he remembers how before its outbreak, ‘We were bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride as we were with material luxury and over much ease’; whereas now ‘Every thing we have—church school and craft—has, so to speak, been challenged to show cause why it should continue on the old unthinking hide-bound lines.’23 The Boer War may have been ‘new and terrible’, but out of it, Kipling hoped, would come the opportunity for ‘immense gain both to the land and the Empire—not to mention the Army’.24 His call for military reform and for a shift in public opinion, given added passion by his expectations of a larger and looming war against Germany, would end in angry disappointment. Yet, even if their prophecies go unheeded, the poems of The Five Nations do their duty for their country, attacking failures and shortcomings in the hierarchies of power in ways which Great War poets would have ample reason to repeat. Proleptic but not prophylactic, ‘Stellenbosh’ expresses an appalled disdain for the generals whose incompetence prolongs the war and wastes the courage of their young charges:

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The General saw the mountain-range ahead, With their ’elios showin’ saucy on the ’eight, So ’e ’eld us to the level ground instead, An’ telegraphed the Boojers wouldn’t fight. For ’e might ’ave gone an’ sprayed ’em with a pompom, Or ’e might have slung a squadron out to see— But ’e wasn’t takin’ chances in them ’igh an’ ’ostile kranzes— He was markin’ time to earn a K. C. B.25

The poem’s perspective is that of the low-ranking everyman soldier, whose criticisms of army strategy suggest that he would make a better leader than the leaders. Kipling’s General, inevitably, ‘got ’is decorations thick’, leaving the rank and file with ‘the work to do again’. His direct descendants are Sassoon’s scarlet majors toddling safely home to die in bed, or the cheery old General who ‘did for’ his men ‘by his plan of attack’. 26 But although the result is the same, ‘Stellenbosh’ encounters the opposite problem: there is no ‘plan of attack’, the General’s reputation being more important to him than a military strategy which, striving for victory, would risk defeat by engaging directly with the enemy. Kipling plays out the same battle between high-ranking idiocy and low-ranking wisdom in his Boer War short stories. ‘The Way That He Took’, for example, relates a captain’s discovery of a Boer ambush. When he tells his colonel not to advance because of the trap, the colonel doubts the wisdom of the advice: ‘“D’you expect any officer of my experience to believe that?”’ Against such arrogance, the only possibility is to acquiesce: ‘“As you please, sir,” said the Captain hopelessly.’27 It is the colonel who, tactically ‘hopeless’, instils that lack of hope in the soldiers serving under him; and so the story ends, in the expectation that the colonel will sacrifice his men by marching blithely into an ambush about which he has been fully warned. Kipling’s own experiences in South Africa exacerbated his dismay. ‘I knew for sure we were fools,’ he wrote in the summer of 1900, ‘but I didn’t know how thick and wide and consistent our folly was.’28 The conflict in his poems and stories is not so urgently between Empire and Boer as it is between generations of Englishmen: the ‘old men’, in Kipling’s poem of that title, ‘shall abide till the battle is won ere [they] amble into the fray’.29 They—the ruling classes in both the political and the military sphere—are the cowards, and Kipling denounces them angrily and often as the product of a society more interested in ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’ (‘The Islanders’).30 Poem after poem reports the betrayal: the nation has neglected the dykes left by its fathers, and the sea will sweep over its defences to drown it imminently. Kipling’s letters

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continue the theme. England has been ‘criminally weak’, he tells one correspondent,31 and to another he complains that if only ‘the Show had been run as a war in this Colony, instead of as a cross between a lying-in-hospital and a Sunday school picnic it might have been over a good long time ago’.32 That desire for a thorough, committed, and, consequently, brief and less costly war should not be mistaken for bloodlust. Kipling’s grudging admiration for the Boer stands apart from the murderous hatred he directs at the Russians, who had provided a steady threat to British rule of India during the 1880s. His anti-Russian parable in The Five Nations, ‘The Truce of the Bear’, illustrates the dangers of sympathizing with your enemy when he is at your mercy. The speaker remembers how he hunted down the bear, but hesitated as he was ‘Touched with pity and wonder’.33 The next touch, as the bear totters towards him ‘with paws like hands that pray’, is altogether more decisive: ‘From brow to jaw that steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!’ Hesitation born out of pity, this lesson concludes, is a self-mutilating weakness. If Kipling’s portrayal of the Boers harbours no such animosity, it is not least because he preoccupies himself so completely with his own nation’s shortcomings. While Swinburne could call on God’s England to ‘scourge these dogs agape with jaws afoam, | Down out of life’,34 and by so doing, come to embody what he attacked, Kipling’s more measured tones dignify a worthy adversary. ‘I’m offended with no one except the “simple and pastoral” Boer who seems to be having us on toast,’35 he acknowledged, immediately before sailing to South Africa and observing British incompetence for himself. By the end of the war, he could admit to admiring ‘the Burgher of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony’: ‘for some reasons I was almost sorry to see them go under’.36 (That generosity did not extend to the ‘Cape Colonial rebel’, who was ‘not at all a nice person’,37 and whose perfidy provides the occasion, in ‘A Sahibs’ War’, for one of Kipling’s most brutal stories of revenge.) Kipling’s poetry notices the Boers only in ‘Half-Ballad of Waterval’ and ‘Piet’, and in each case the tone is respectful: after all, ‘What is the sense of ’ating those | ’Oom you are paid to kill?’38 The contrast with his attitude not only to the Russians, but also to the Germans in late 1918—he would call for the ‘sword | Of justice’ to be wielded against ‘ancient sin’ and ‘Evil Incarnate’ (‘Justice’)39—could hardly be more obvious. The Boer is enemy and brother, praised for his bravery and ingenuity, and pitied in defeat by captors who (in ‘Half-Ballad of Waterval’) recall how they were obliged to endure a similar misery earlier in the war: They’ll get those draggin’ days all right, Spent as a foreigner commands,

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An’ ’orrors of the locked-up night, With ’Ell’s own thinkin’ on their ’ands. I’d give the gold o’ twenty Rands (If it was mine) to set ’em free . . . For I ’ave learned at Waterval The meanin’ of captivity!40

That depth of fellow-feeling, especially when combined with their contempt for military and political leaders, raises the question of why Kipling’s soldiers choose to fight at all. It is a question which the rallying cry of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, collected in The Five Nations, does not forestall, and which, in spite of Kipling’s unshaken political certainties, his Boer War poems increasingly struggle to answer. Giving voice to his soldiers, Kipling explores the schism which would open still more damagingly during the Great War between what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge would come to characterize as ‘the Fighting Forces’ and ‘the Rest’.41 That later war confirms the importance of Kipling’s ambition in his poetry to bridge the divide; it also confirms that, in this crucial respect, his warnings were ignored. While making plain his own allegiances in the common soldier’s fractured relationships with both the civilian and the General, Kipling resists the temptation to idealize. Like Tommy Atkins of Barrack-Room Ballads, he advocates nothing more than fair and equal treatment: ‘We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too’.42 ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, Kipling’s fund-raising poem for the families of Boer War servicemen, even concedes that Tommy’s ‘weaknesses are great’, and that ‘There are girls he married secret, asking no permission to | For he knew he wouldn’t get it if he did’.43 And yet, Kipling stresses, these are trivial misdemeanours compared with the far greater shame which would fall on a society failing to support the soldier’s dependents while he was ‘out on active service, wiping something off a slate’. (Appalled before long by its jolly propaganda, Kipling never collected ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, though the poem served its cause by raising £250,000.) Kipling’s clear-sighted defence of Tommy Atkins allows his Boer War poetry to express unlikely sympathies, as in ‘Wilful-Missing’, spoken by the British army’s deserters who have taken their ‘chance to cut the show’. The dramatic monologue excludes criticism, and pleads instead for the understanding that the men’s torment cannot be understood: There is no need to give our reasons, though Gawd knows we all ’ad reasons which were fair; But other people might not judge ’em so, And now it doesn’t matter what they were.44

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Kipling grants the reader little opportunity to join the ranks of the ‘other people’ who would condemn the deserters by refusing the assurance that their reasons were ‘fair’. ‘What man can size or weigh another’s woe?’, the poem continues; its question may not command the severity of ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’, but it still outflanks the judgemental by obliging a generous response. ‘“Wilful-Missing”’ typifies Kipling’s reluctance to censor the common soldier no matter how deleterious his behaviour. It is a poem of negative capability: when Keats describes how, in a room of people, each person’s identity presses on him until he is ‘in a very little time annihilated’,45 he describes what will become one of Kipling’s greatest imaginative resources. As a Boer War poet, Kipling carries out these acts of sympathy and self-annihilation more successfully than Hardy, so that his dramatic monologues become worthy of the name. While Hardy writes disguised lyrics, and channels his own ethical and political predilections through the cipher of other people, Kipling’s poems accommodate rather than manipulate. They immerse themselves in the tedium of relentlessly ‘foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin’ over Africa’ (‘Boots’),46 or report the jokes told by men under bombardment (‘The Instructor’), or imagine enduring the vulnerable isolation of being posted into the Oudtshoorn ranges to guard a railway line (‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’). These attempts to share the soldiers’ experiences may never convince the anonymous poet of the Bloemfontein Friend that Kipling is doing more than faking up something—all dramatic monologues being, in a narrow sense, fake—but at the very least they offer a powerful championing of the underdog’s interests. Kipling’s identification with, and support for, the British soldier against his undeserving nation ensure that the wilful-missing represent only the most immediately dangerous symptom of a widespread disillusionment. Not only are the generals inept, but the freedom promised by the South African landscape, and the brotherhood forged with foreign nationals, compare favourably with the smallness of life back home. Filled with pleas for Britain to prepare its defences, The Five Nations struggles to find reasons why anyone should bother. It is significant that ‘Lichtenberg’, expressing a Boer War soldier’s homesickness, is voiced for an Australian. ‘Smells are surer than sounds or sights | To make your heart-strings crack,’ the soldier begins, before reporting how the smell of wattle suddenly and vividly evoked the glories of his distant nation: And I saw Sydney the same as ever, The picnics and brass-bands; And the little homestead on Hunter River

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And my new vines joining hands. It all came over me in one act Quick as a shot through the brain— With the smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg, Riding in, in the rain.47

Nostalgia is a deadly force, as violent and overpowering as that other everpresent danger, ‘a shot through the brain’. Nowhere in The Five Nations does a British soldier experience anything comparable. The ‘married man’ looks forward to finishing his ‘little bit’ and going home ‘to ’is tea’,48 but his are purely family reasons, bereft of patriotism. More often, the nostalgia is for South Africa herself, that ‘woman wonderful’ who, for all her ‘drouth’, ‘plague’, ‘dust’, and ‘lies’, can never be abandoned for long by the men she treats ‘despiteful-wise’, and who remains in their eyes ‘most | Perfect and adorèd’ (‘South Africa’).49 ‘One curses it but one comes back to it,’50 Kipling acknowledged in 1907, having returned yearly to South Africa since the outbreak of the Boer War. Only after a new Liberal government in Britain had ceded control of the Transvaal to the Afrikaners did his affair end: to Duckworth Ford, later that year, Kipling wrote, ‘I’m going down to the Cape . . . about December ( just to watch the corpse being (in)decently buried) and then I suppose I must hunt about for another country to love.’51 Bitterly complaining that the British government had given away everything the Boer War had been fought for, Kipling never again visited South Africa. His soldiers are less easily dissuaded. The speakers of several poems in The Five Nations face the choice of remaining or returning, and their vacillations hint at the poverty of opportunities in their native land. Hardy in ‘Drummer Hodge’ had portrayed South Africa as threateningly alien, with its ‘strange-eyed’ and ‘foreign’ constellations, its linguistic oddities of ‘kopje’, ‘veldt’, and ‘Karoo’,52 and its landscape’s antagonistic colonization of the British dead. Kipling does not disguise its threats, but he limns a land which is magnificent and awe-inspiring in scale. ‘Bridge Guard in the Karroo’, one of the strongest of his Boer War poems, harrows with fear and wonder: Sudden the desert changes, The raw glare softens and clings, Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges Stand up like the thrones of kings— Ramparts of slaughter and peril— Blazing, amazing—aglow

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’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl And the wine-dark flats below. Royal the pageant closes, Lit by the last of the sun— Opal and ash-of-roses, Cinnamon, umber, and dun.53

The landscape embodies a terrible majesty which emphasizes the loneliness of vulnerable humans—here, the ‘Details guarding the line’. They also serve who only stand and wait, and their posting amidst such a glorious conflagration is a reminder that the Boer is not the only, or even the most impressive, threat to the foreign army which must fight in and for South Africa. The Five Nations never loses sight of a dangerously strange country— ‘bought by blood, | And by blood restorèd’54—even though the British speakers of Kipling’s poems eventually make their peace with, and sometimes their home in, the landscape they might have feared. That price of blood is not forgotten: ‘Half [her land] was red with battle,’ Kipling notes in ‘South Africa’; the epigraph of ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’ situates the guards at the ‘Blood River Bridge’; and in ‘The Settler’, as ‘the deep soil glistens red’, the speaker talks of neighbours atoning for ‘the set folly and the red breach | And the black waste of it all’.55 However, that last example also paints Kipling’s vision for a future South Africa, one which does not forget the bloodshed of the past but which repairs wrongs as one-time enemies start ‘Giving and taking counsel each | Over the cattle-kraal’.56 The battle sites where bullets fell and shrapnel burst will become fruitful as trees are planted and wells dug. Revenge would be an indulgence condemned by ‘the ungrazed upland, the untilled lea’ and the ‘fields forlorn’, so neighbours must unite in a spirit of reconciliation against a new and still more formidable antagonist: Here will we join against our foes— The hailstroke and the storm, And the red and rustling cloud that blows The locust’s mile-deep swarm; Frost and murrain and floods let loose Shall launch us side by side In the holy wars that have no truce ’Twixt seed and harvest tide.57

Redness is no longer the product of man’s, but of nature’s, inhumanity to man, as rival factions are brought together in the face of this environmental

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challenge. ‘The Settler’ looks forward to a future enjoyed by the inheritors of this union (‘After us cometh a multitude’) who will, regardless of race, be sustained by the shared labour which produces ‘our land’s food’.58 The rhyme ‘multitude/food’ stresses practical considerations. Nevertheless, the resolution is only problematically achieved, as the elements are tamed into ‘a healing stillness’ and a ‘vast, benignant sky’. Reconciliation between warring humans may be possible, but reconciliation with nature looks more like wishful thinking. The poem’s repetitive use of the first person plural leaves no distinction between Boer and Briton: they are all settlers alike, and they must ‘atone’ and ‘repair’ together, for the sake of ‘the living and the dead’ as well as for ‘the folk of all our lands’. (That phrase, like most contemporary and many subsequent debates about the Boer War, passes silently over the black Africans who belong among the ‘folk’ of the ‘lands’ but do not share in the ownership.) As a propitiative conclusion to the poems of war in the main section of The Five Nations, ‘The Settler’ prepares for the ‘Service Songs’ which immediately follow, and which pursue this hope of a peaceful and prosperous future for South Africa. After a short, untitled dedicatory poem, the songs begin with ‘Chant-Pagan’, in which a dissatisfied soldier, having arrived home, decides to head back to South Africa: there is, he believes, ‘a Dutchman I’ve fought ’oo might give | Me a job were I ever inclined’.59 That dilemma is repeated in ‘The Return’, just before the hymnic solemnity of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, except that the speaker this time chooses to remain in England. The positioning of the poems implies a progression out of disenchantment and towards renewed fealty to the Empire’s mother-nation. Yet the poems themselves prohibit that patriotic solace: ‘The Return’ answers any indifference to England with a rhetoric of blind faith which is everywhere challenged by the available evidence. ‘Chant-Pagan’ lays numerous charges against England, but they are all distilled into the complaint that ‘there’s somethin’ gone small with the lot’.60 After the Boer War, England appears to Kipling’s irregular soldier a petty and prissy nation, with its absurdly deferential society and its ‘ ’ouses both sides of the street’.61 Paul Fussell quotes Sassoon’s observation that ‘[t]he man who really endured the [Great] War at its worst was everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers’.62 Fussell’s insistence on viewing the Great War as an unprecedented and paradigmatic catastrophe ensures that the Boer War rates barely a mention in his work. Yet a poem like ‘Chant-Pagan’ illustrates, once again, the extent to which Kipling’s poetry of the Boer War acts as a dress parade for—rather than a faking up of—the salient themes of the Great War. His soldier is no longer satisfied with the prospect of returning to a class-ridden society where he must touch his hat to the gentry and earn a living by mowing the squire’s lawns. As Sassoon would

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later find, he is everlastingly differentiated from everyone at home, even to the point where he feels more kinship not only with his ‘fellow soldiers’ but with the enemy he once fought against. Just as England repels, so South Africa attracts, with the immensity of its ‘valleys as big as a shire’ and its ‘ ’igh, inexpressible skies’.63 Most of all, its severe magnificence opens a direct relationship with the soldier’s God, free from obstructive intermediaries such as the parson who gets ‘between’ the ‘two sides of the lane’ earlier in the poem. The religious language used to describe South Africa in The Five Nations—its ‘firmament’, its ‘hosts of heaven’, its plagues of ‘pestilence’ and locusts—is confirmed in the soldier’s plain-spoken desire to live ‘Where there’s neither a road nor a tree—| But only my Maker an’ me’.64 In contrast to this primitive glory, England is enclosed, its sunshine ‘pale’, and its breezes ‘stale’—trite rhymes befitting triteness. ‘Chant-Pagan’ opens the ‘Service Songs’ with a persuasive denunciation of both English society and the English landscape and climate. Accordingly, it falls on ‘The Return’, the last of the Cockney-soldier poems, to defend the nation’s honour. The speakers of the poems share a sense of having been transformed by their wartime experiences. In ‘Chant-Pagan’, the soldier can never ‘take on’ with ‘awful old England again’,65 having seen what he has seen. ‘The Return’ begins with the same problem: ‘Peace is declared, an’ I return | To ’Ackneystadt, but not the same’.66 The Africanization of Hackney and London (‘Thamesfontein’) does little to blur distinctions, as the soldier exultantly remembers the personified South African landscape he has left behind: Rivers at night that cluck an’ jeer, Plains which the moonshine turns to sea, Mountains that never let you near, An’ stars to all eternity . . . 67

Also included are memories of burnt towns, starving dogs, and dead comrades, all of which have contributed to ‘The makin’s of a bloomin’ soul’. Yet even this diversion into the distresses of war cannot prevent a longing for the ‘thousand Places left be’ind’ and the brotherhood and companionship among soldiers. Discharged and back in England, the speaker must regretfully ‘fall away | To do with little things again’.68 Only the chorus which ends the poem salvages some hope from the profound disappointment of serving a nation which may be guiltier than Kipling of faking up something: If England was what England seems, An’ not the England of our dreams,

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But only putty, brass an’ paint, ’Ow quick we’d chuck ’er! But she ain’t!69

This is potentially a dubious and, at worst, a self-deluding consolation. The speaker of ‘The Return’ decides not to follow his counterpart from ‘ChantPagan’ back to South Africa, purely on the basis that the real England is not ‘what England seems’ but rather ‘the England of our dreams’. Nothing in the poem has encouraged that faith, especially as the stanza’s protasis is more feelingly detailed than the rebuttal; nor is it clear, as the chorus steps out of italic in its final words, who is responsible for that stark unargued riposte. Earlier in The Five Nations, South Africa had been portrayed as a woman ‘wonderful’, ‘perfect’, and ‘adorèd’, attracting men who, despite their ‘sore duresse’, keep returning ‘for orders’.70 England is fortunate that, despite the dissatisfaction and whatever the cost, the nation can still inspire a similar fidelity in many of her ill-treated subjects. Watching army manoeuvres over a decade later, in the summer of 1913, Kipling claimed to have felt ‘the whole pressure of our dead of the Boer War flickering and re-forming as the horizon flickered in the heat’.71 That the dead of one war haunt the doomed of the next becomes a provocative image for twentieth-century war poetry, with its grim implication that there is never an end to sacrifice.72 Kipling’s soldiers fight and die for an England of their dreams, which, he alleges, is nevertheless more real than the putty, brass, and paint of appearances. Quite why that dream should be believed is a question which will increasingly concern the poets of the Great War. Kipling’s Boer War poetry, for all its best efforts, fails to include in its legacy a satisfactory answer.

Notes 1. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’, in Wee Willie Winkie, ed. Hugh Haughton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 300. 2. Quoted by Michael Edwardes, ‘“Oh to meet an Army Man!”: Kipling and the Soldiers’, in John Gross (ed.), Rudyard Kipling: The Man, his Work and his World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), 38. 3. Ibid. 44. 4. M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 111. 5. Lionel Johnson, quoted in Peter Keating, Kipling the Poet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994), 54. 6. Quoted in Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 110. 7. Walt Whitman, ‘Specimen Days’, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 735. 8. See Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 91. 9. Kipling, Something of Myself, ed. Robert Hampson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 121.

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10. Kipling to James M. Conland, 24 July 1900, in The Letters, iii: 1900–1910, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Macmillan, 1996), 26. 11. Quoted by George Shepperson, ‘Kipling and the Boer War’, in Gross (ed.), Rudyard Kipling, 86. 12. Kipling to James M. Conland, 24 July 1900, in Letters, iii. 26. 13. George Shepperson, ‘Kipling and the Boer War’, in Gross (ed.), Rudyard Kipling, 85. 14. Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), 217. 15. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge, 107. 16. Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire (London: Cape, 1975), 145. 17. J. I. M. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling (London: Gollancz, 1966), 146. 18. Kipling, The Five Nations (London: Methuen, 1903), 178. 19. Kipling to James M. Conland, 20 Feb. 1901, in Letters, iii. 42. 20. Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries (London: House of Stratus, 2001), 20. 21. Kipling, Five Nations, 214. 22. Kipling, ‘Tommy’, in The Complete Verse (London: Kyle Cathie, 1996), 322. 23. Kipling to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 May 1901, in Letters, iii. 53. 24. Kipling to William Charles Scully, 14 Feb. 1900, ibid. 12. 25. Kipling, Five Nations, 195–6. The ‘ ’elios’ are heliographs—mirrors which reflect sunlight to flash messages in Morse code. 26. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The General’, in Collected Poems 1908–1956 (London: Faber, 1984), 69. 27. Kipling, War Stories and Poems, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 144. 28. Kipling to Walter Lawrence, 21 June 1900, in Letters, iii. 23. 29. Kipling, Five Nations, 50. 30. Ibid. 135. 31. Kipling to Edward Lucas White, 11 Nov. 1902, in Letters, iii. 112. 32. Kipling to an unidentified recipient, 14 Jan. 1902, ibid. 83. 33. Kipling, Five Nations, 46. 34. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Transvaal’, in The Poems, vi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), 385. 35. Kipling to William Alexander Fraser, 8 Jan. 1900, in Letters, iii. 9. 36. Kipling to Edward Lucas White, 11 Nov. 1902, ibid. 112. 37. Ibid. 38. Kipling, ‘Piet’, in Five Nations, 199. 39. Kipling, Complete Verse, 317. 40. Kipling, Five Nations, 198. 41. Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 89. 42. Kipling, ‘Tommy’, 322. 43. Kipling, Complete Verse, 372. 44. Kipling, Five Nations, 204–5. 45. Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, in The Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 228. 46. Kipling, Five Nations, 185. 47. Kipling, Five Nations, 101–2.

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48. ‘The Married Man’, ibid. 188. 49. Ibid. 149–52. 50. Quoted in Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, 503. 51. Kipling to Duckworth Ford, 16 Sept. 1907, in Letters, iii. 262. 52. Thomas Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge’, in The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 90–1. 53. Kipling, Five Nations, 113. 54. ‘South Africa’, ibid. 151. 55. Ibid. 149, 113, 153. 56. Ibid. 153. 57. Ibid. 154. 58. Ibid. 155. 59. ‘South Africa’, ibid. 162. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 159. 62. Quoted in Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 90. 63. Kipling, Five Nations, 160. 64. Ibid. 162. 65. Ibid. 159. 66. Ibid. 210. 67. Ibid. 211. 68. Kipling, Five Nations, 212–13. 69. Ibid. 213. 70. ‘South Africa’, ibid. 149–52. 71. Quoted by George Shepperson, ‘Kipling and the Boer War’, in Gross (ed.), Rudyard Kipling, 86. 72. See, e.g., Ted Hughes, ‘Scapegoats and Rabies’, in Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003), 187.

DANIEL KARLIN

Tennyson, Browning, Virgil

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ir Edward Clarke, K. C., addressing a London Workingmen’s Club on Victorian literature, thus expressed his opinion of the comparative merit of Tennyson and Browning: ‘The two great poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. The first named would always stand at the head of the literature of the Victorian period. It was difficult to overrate the enormous influence for good that his splendid intellect and true and clear conscience exercised over this country. There was no poet in the whole course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends would wish to see blotted out. Robert Browning was a poet of strange inequality and of extraordinary and fantastic methods in his composition. However much one could enjoy some of his works, one could only hope that two-thirds of them would be as promptly as possible forgotten—not, however, from any moral objection to what he wrote. He was the Carlyle of poetry.’1 * * * It is easy to laugh at Sir Edward’s boneheaded prejudice, mastery of cliché, and preposterous attempt to reverse Ben Jonson’s quip about Shakespeare (‘The players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in

From Tennyson Among the Poets, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, pp. 95–114. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2009 by the various contributors.

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his writing (whatsoever he penn’d) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand”’). Yet Sir Edward has hold of something true. Tennyson and Browning divide the age, and Tennyson is always ‘the first named’. Browning resented Tennyson’s priority, and friends of Tennyson, in turn, resented Browning’s pretensions. Browning wrote to Isabella Blagden in 1865, following the success of Dramatis Personae: ‘There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought . . . but at last a new set of men arrive who don’t mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another’.2 It is obvious who ‘another’ is. Edward FitzGerald, on the other hand, viewed Browning’s rising reputation in the 1860s and ’70s as evidence of the decline of civilization and common sense. He said so to Tennyson himself whom he called, by way of mock-depreciation, the ‘paltry Poet’: to compare [Browning] with my own paltry Poet is to compare an old Jew’s Curiosity Shop with the Phidian Marbles. They talk of Browning’s metaphysical Depth and Subtlety: pray is there none in The Palace of Art, The Vision of Sin (which last touches on the limits of Disgust without ever falling in)[,] Locksley Hall also, with some little Passion, I think—only that all these being clear to the bottom, as well as beautiful, do not seem to Cockney eyes so deep as Browning’s muddy Waters.3

FitzGerald’s ‘an old Jew’s Curiosity Shop’ links Browning’s vulgarity with that of Dickens, and also helps to explain the rumours which circulated later in the century that Browning had Jewish ancestry. It may overstep our ‘limits of disgust’ but it, too, has a tang of truth. Lovers of Browning relish what nauseates FitzGerald, and lovers of Tennyson have continued to protest at the charge that there is nothing to him but surface. The charge of anti-intellectualism has stuck, most memorably in Carlyle’s mordant summation: ‘Browning has far more ideas than Tennyson, but is not so truthful. Tennyson means what he says, poor fellow!’ 4 Tennyson’s status as a gentleman, which gave him so clear an advantage over Browning in FitzGerald’s eyes, has probably, in the long run, done him more harm than good. I propose to revisit the Tennyson–Browning pairing, but not with the aim of confirming or reversing such judgements. Instead, I shall juxtapose their ‘parleyings’ (to use Browning’s term) with Virgil, because each illuminates and subtilizes the other’s. I shall concentrate on two poems: Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’ (R 394) and Browning’s ‘Pan and Luna’.5 These are both late works that triumphantly resist belatedness, though they do this by radically different

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means. I wish Browning’s poem had been written after Tennyson’s: it could so clearly be read as a reply to it. Even so, the juxtaposition suggests the revisionary impulse which, in their relation, came almost always from Browning’s side. Virgil marks a faultline in Victorian aesthetics, not between high and low culture but between two kinds of high culture, the polished and the rough. There are many ways of framing this division—Classic and Gothic, music and speech, soul and body (or soul and mind)—and the division itself is linked to other oppositions, notably those of religion and class. It may be unjust, but it is undeniable, that Virgil has been read as a poet of the ruling class, and of the ruling class of poets: Poet Laureate to Augustus, a favourite of England’s first Poet Laureate, Dryden, and, before him, two other court poets, Spenser and Chaucer. Tennyson’s love of Virgil was not the product of his having been born a gentleman, baptized into the Church of England, educated at Cambridge, and awarded the laureateship by favour of Prince Albert, but it is not separable from those contexts, just as Browning’s upbringing in suburban Dissenting Camberwell ensured that his classical learning would be a personal choice, not a social given. Browning’s account of this process, in one of his last poems, ‘Development’, begins ‘My father was a scholar, and knew Greek.’6 Knowledge and love begin in the family circle, but even in this poem, written in the last year of his life when his fame was secure, there is also a touch of prickliness, of one-upmanship. Latin was still ubiquitous in the education of boys, and Virgil, together with Horace, ruled the kingdom; but Greek was a much rarer accomplishment, and had the prestige of being both harder in itself and anterior to Latin. ‘Development’ is about Homer, who takes precedence over Virgil, and who is greater because both grander and more primitive. Tennyson crowns ‘To Virgil’ with a declaration of love: ‘I that loved thee since my day began’ (l. 19). He cannot mean ‘since birth’—even as a hyperbole that would be absurd—and must mean something like ‘ever since I knew anything about poetry’, with the further implication ‘ever since the dawn of my own creative life’. Browning could not have said the same. He did not love Virgil; ‘Development’ is typical of Browning’s ‘classical’ poems, all of which (with the exception of ‘Pan and Luna’) are on Greek subjects and refer to, or translate, Greek authors.7 Virgil is mellifluous even (or especially) in his moments of greatest seriousness and pathos, and the unresolved conflicts in what he says about love, or empire, or mortality are easy to miss, or gloss over; he is a gifted phrasemaker, and left an involuntary legacy of cliché for the support of impoverished orators. An early draft of ‘To Virgil’ acknowledges that he is ‘Quoted in the halls of Council, | speaking yet in every schoolboy’s home’ (R 394: ll. 15–16 n.). Tennyson wisely cut this two-edged compliment. Browning, as we

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shall see, heartlessly tagged Virgil as a fount of condescension (though not in ‘Pan and Luna’; that is what makes the poem so interesting), but it would be quite wrong to imply that ‘To Virgil’ is ‘Virgilian’ in this sense. The case is exactly the opposite: Tennyson’s poem is Virgilian because its poise, its ‘finish’, are threatened by forces it barely holds in check. ‘To Virgil’ The subtitle of ‘To Virgil’—‘Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death’—marks its origin as a public and occasional poem. It invites a stock response to the later Tennyson as the author of too many such poems, composed out of a sometimes weary sense of obligation. The poem’s multiple allusions to Virgil’s poetry may then work against it: they amount, after all, to the expected homage, and demonstrate no more than Tennyson’s professional sense of what was proper. Moreover they remind us that Virgil was public and private property in the nineteenth century. It will hardly repay us to look too deeply into what ‘every schoolboy’ knows. A. A. Markley, whose book Stateliest Measures takes its title from ‘To Virgil’, is perfunctory about the poem itself: While the rhythm of the poem approximates the rhythm of Virgil’s hexameters, the allusions in the poem move through Virgil’s works, from the Aeneid in the first couplet to the Georgics in the following two, to the Eclogues in couplets 4 and 5, and back to the Aeneid in 6 and 7. Tennyson concludes this tour through Virgil’s opera with a salute in the final three couplets to Virgil’s poetry generally, which lives on despite the fall of Rome itself.8

‘Moves through’, ‘back to the Aeneid’, and ‘this tour through Virgil’s opera’ do not exactly suggest impassioned engagement on either Tennyson’s part or his critic’s; but it is wrong of Markley to suggest that the conclusion to the poem is of a piece with the rest, and that the whole constitutes a smoothly functioning mechanism. Another kind of stock response would reflect the perceived affinity between Tennyson and Virgil. Anyone who knew Tennyson personally would recognize that his declaration of love for Virgil at the end of the poem was unaffected and truthful. He carried Virgil with him on journeys and walks, read his poetry aloud to friends and family, and recited lines to his children. His ‘voicing’ of Virgil especially moved others, and himself. ‘I had no idea Virgil could ever sound so fine as it does in his reading,’ wrote Savile Morton in 1844; Edward FitzGerald wrote that he had only once seen tears in Tennyson’s eyes, ‘when reading Virgil—“dear old Virgil” as he called him—together’.9 Tennyson’s private feeling for Virgil

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was, so to speak, ‘outed’ by critics who mapped the modern poet onto his classical precursor and traced the Virgilian contours of Tennyson’s genres, themes, sentiments, and style. The parallel appears early (in John Sterling’s praise of the ‘English Idyls’ in his review of the 1842 Poems, for example), and ‘To Virgil’ helped its deployment as a summative judgement: J. M. Robertson, in an essay published in 1889, borrows from the climax of the poem to ‘salute that singer of our youth who is the Virgil of our time’.10 If we read ‘To Virgil’ with the notion that Tennyson himself was conscious of his status as the ‘English Virgil’, we risk making the poem sound smug and opportunistic. Does Tennyson really intend his readers to think of him as a ‘lord of language’ because he, like Virgil, was a ‘landscape-lover’ (l. 3) in his ‘English Idyls’, and was ‘majestic in [his] sadness’ (l. 12) in In Memoriam, and had a position at the imperial court?11 And then the parallel itself is double-edged. To John Churton Collins, writing (perhaps vindictively) in 1891, Tennyson and Virgil were indeed alike in being secondary, imitative writers, whose ‘material is derived not from the world of Nature, but from the world of Art’.12 Moreover, the ‘English Virgil’ is doubly secondary: in a Platonic series, Tennyson’s art is the imitation of an imitation. To think of Tennyson as Virgil also invites the thought of Virgil as Tennyson, an invitation taken up by Browning’s admirer Ezra Pound: ‘Virgil is a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’.13 Perhaps, by the 1880s, Tennyson’s regard for Virgil could not be wholly free from self-regard. But as we have seen, he speaks in the poem not of his likeness to Virgil but of his love of him, and this love is complex and (in the best sense) critical. To return to the subtitle: it looks plain enough, but it is a little disingenuous. ‘Written at the Request of the Mantuans’ is grand, popular, vague; actually the request came from a learned society, the Vergilian Academy of Mantua, and the poem was inserted (with an Italian translation) in their commemorative ‘Vergilian Album’. Nevertheless, the request had a political edge. Luigi Carnevali, the representative of the Academy who solicited Tennyson’s contribution, put it in these terms: ‘What better honour will the singer of Eneas be able to receive than that which would be tributed to him by the venerable poet of free England?’ (L III. 231 n.). Normally the payment of tribute is not a sign of freedom, but in this case the tribute is one of ‘honour’, and viewed from nineteenth-century Italy England figures not as a reincarnation of imperial Rome but as a modern nation, the kind that Italy aspires to become; it is as though ‘the singer of Eneas’ could be deemed, with Tennyson’s endorsement, to have seen beyond the foundation of imperial Rome to a more progressive destiny. Tennyson took the request more seriously than he had done in the case of Virgil’s admirer Dante, for whom he dashed off six lines in 1865 which

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he then ‘entirely forgot’ until he included them in Ballads and Other Poems in 1880. But the contrast is instructive for other reasons. ‘To Dante’ (R 345) is subtitled ‘Written at Request of the Florentines’ (a claim as dubious as that of ‘To Virgil’) and begins by identifying Dante as a ‘King’ who has ‘reigned six hundred years’; Florence, ‘now the crown of Italy’ (referring to the fact that it had just replaced Turin as capital of the new kingdom), has ‘sought the tribute of a verse’ from Tennyson, who, ‘wearing but the garland of a day | Cast[s] at thy feet one flower that fades away’ (ll. 1, 4, 5, 6–7). The modesty topos allows Tennyson to get off lightly, and it implies that as Poet Laureate he was bound to make an effort only for British royalty. The appeal of ‘the Mantuans’ was more subtle, and more stimulating. It exacted from Tennyson a ‘tribute’ he could pay with interest—in part by remembering Dante, too. ‘To Virgil’ is a poem of ten stanzas, each containing two long lines in a trochaic metre designed to recall, but not replicate, the Virgilian hexameter.14 As for the proliferation of Virgilian allusions, Tennyson took a rare opportunity to be deliberate here. He railed against mechanical source-hunting by critics such as Collins, ‘men of great memories and no imagination, who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate’ (Mem. i. 258); but in this instance he practically bookmarked the pages of the ‘old volume’, since one of the poem’s intentions is to manifest the imprint of Virgil on the fabric of English poetic imagery and diction. Yet a list of the passages that Tennyson ‘quotes’, though it tells us of the poet’s skill in incorporating allusions to every one of Virgil’s major works (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid ), does not tell us much about the nature of this influence on Tennyson himself, or about the poem’s more inward and reflective design. The poem is one long sentence, whose basic syntactical structure is extremely simple. The main clause arches from the first to the final stanza: ‘Virgil . . . I salute thee’. The apostrophized subject, ‘Virgil’, is qualified in a number of ways. To begin with, in the opening words of the poem, he is ‘Roman Virgil’. Then he is decorated with an elaborate set of parallel subclauses, some beginning with ‘thou’ (‘thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire’: l. 1), others beginning with an attribute (‘Landscape-lover, lord of language’: l. 3). This surge of epithets concludes at l. 14 with an ominous allusion to ‘kings and realms that pass to rise no more’; what follows is a different kind of qualification, one that describes not Virgil but the double time of history—the time in which he wrote, and the time in which he is now being addressed: Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar’s dome—

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Though thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound for ever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perished, and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island sundered once from all the human race, I salute thee . . .

‘Now’ in line 15 looks as though it marks the present indicative, but at line 17 we realize that it is a form of conditional, ‘Now that’: ‘now that the conditions in which (and of which) you once wrote have disappeared, I am able truly to acknowledge your greatness’. The closing lines of the poem introduce two further qualifications, one relating to Virgil, the other to the poet: I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.

‘Roman Virgil’ has become ‘Mantovano’, Mantuan: grandeur gives way to familiarity, and the imperial metropolis to the provincial birthplace.15 The change lies on the far shore, so to speak, of the changed historical conditions which have replaced ‘the Rome of slaves’ with ‘the Rome of freemen’. ‘Mantovano’ comes from Dante’s Purgatorio, canto vi, and, as Ricks puts it, ‘allows T[ennyson] to join Dante in venerating Virgil’. But the matter is more complicated. Dante, after all, was not a Mantuan, and the apostrophe to Virgil’s fellow countryman is made not by him but by the troubadour Sordello (Browning’s Sordello). Dante and Virgil encounter Sordello standing aloof among the crowd of the Late-Repentant, and Virgil inquires the way to the Valley of Negligent Rulers: e quella non rispose al suo domando; ma di nostro paese e della vita c’inchiese. E il dolce duca incominciava: ‘Mantova’, . . . e l’ombra, tutta in sè romita, surse ver lui del loco ove pria stava, dicendo: ‘O Mantovano, io son Sordello della tua terra.’ E l’un l’altro abbracciava.16

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(It answer to his question none returned; But of our country and our kind of life Demanded. When my courteous guide began, ‘Mantua,’ the shadow, in itself absorb’d, Rose toward us from the place in which it stood And cried, ‘Mantuan! I am thy countryman, Sordello.’ Each the other then embraced.)17

Sordello ‘salutes’ Virgil not as a fellow poet but as his ‘countryman’; Tennyson cannot claim this affinity, and indeed reverses it, emphasizing his own origin in the ‘Northern Island’ that was ‘once’ on the margins of Empire, and is now its centre.18 Yet though Britain’s imperial destiny is latent in ‘once’, Tennyson does not point the moral; rather, he qualifies himself as one ‘that loved thee since my day began’: and the ground of this love is poetry, and specifically metre. Perhaps it does not quite amount to a disclaimer, but it suggests some resistance on Tennyson’s part to being cast as Virgil to Victoria’s Augustus. A further complication arises from the fact that Tennyson is juxtaposing his own attitude to Virgil with two passages from Dante, not one. Sordello’s greeting markedly contrasts with Dante’s own apostrophe to Virgil when he meets him at the outset of the poem (Inferno I. 79–87). In this passage (much more famous than the one involving Sordello, and the template both for the acknowledgment of poetic influence and the claim to supersession) Dante is completely preoccupied with Virgil’s status as a poet, and especially with his language: ‘Or se’ tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte che spande di parlar sì largo fiume?’ risposi lui con vergognosa fronte. ‘O degli altri poeti onore e lume vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore che m’ ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore; tu se’ solo colui da cui io tolsi lo bello stile che m’ ha fatto onore. (‘And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?’ I with front abash’d replied. ‘Glory and light of all the tuneful train!

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May it avail me that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn’d it o’er. My master thou and guide! Thou he from whom alone I have deriv’d That style, which for its beauty into fame Exalts me.’)19

Dante is possessed by, and possesses himself of, Virgil’s ‘bello stilo’, and has been ‘authored’ by it. What Tennyson says is not quite that, but his supreme final compliment to Virgil as ‘Wielder of the stateliest measure | ever moulded by the lips of man’ carries its own personal freight. ‘Stateliest’ is one of only two instances of the superlative of this favourite word (70 occurrences in 40 poems and plays; Browning has 16 in 10). In a note to ‘Milton: Alcaics’ (R 333), written in 1863 although the note dates from much later, Tennyson qualified his opinion: ‘The Horatian Alcaic is perhaps the stateliest metre in the world except the Virgilian hexameter at its best’; but in ‘To Virgil’ he is unequivocal. Why, then, ‘stately’? In ‘Break, break, break’ the term is associated with a certain kind of movement, deliberate and also emotionally poised: And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! (R 228: ll. 9–12)

The stateliness of the ships’ movement is removed from, if not indifferent to, the speaker’s anguish; the fulfilment of their journey, their attainment of ‘their haven’, is marked by the joining word ‘And’, not the severing word ‘But’. The contrast between balanced and unbalanced movement, linked to ‘touch’, is also in ‘Locksley Hall’, where it is immediately followed by a violent emotional recoil: Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips. O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more! O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore! (R 271: ll. 37–40)

Here the conjunction of ‘stately’ and ‘rushed’ turns out to be delusive and barren; yet this is not all. In the conclusion to ‘The Epic’, the frame-poem

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around ‘Morte d’Arthur’, the speaker recounts how he dreamed of King Arthur’s return: To me, methought, who waited with a crowd, There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port; and all the people cried, ‘Arthur is come again: he cannot die.’ (R 225: ll. 292–6)

This, too, is delusive; arguably the fantasy is benign, if we think of another Arthur, Arthur Hallam, as the ‘modern gentleman | Of stateliest port’; but the ship that brings Arthur home (to its port or haven) in Memoriam is carrying a corpse. We can see the pressures that the word ‘stately’ has to resist in order to sustain its poised ‘measure’. Virgil is like Arthur Hallam in being both dead and gone and ‘sound[ing] for ever’, lighting a ‘phantom shore’ which is like, yet unlike, the ‘barren shore’ of ‘Locksley Hall’. The phrasing of the final tribute to Virgil is significant for a second reason: it attributes metre to voice. The ‘stateliest measure’ is ‘moulded by the lips’, and is in its origin a song, not a text. Yet there is at the same time something shaping and sculptural about this act. The lips make a natural mould, and the conceit of them fashioning words is found in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature, where the goddess of love ‘moulds with rosy lips the magic words, | That bind the heart in adamantine cords’;20 but Tennyson’s image has Virgil’s lips moulding a measure, not particular words but the rhythm or pattern in which they are chanted. Virgil wields this measure as though it were a physical implement: a ‘measure’ can, of course, be a ruler (a yardstick), but in its primary sense of poetic metre it must of necessity be an abstraction. Looking back over the poem we can see, not a conflict exactly, but a shift in emphasis in the way that Tennyson praises Virgil’s poetic power. The poet whom Tennyson salutes is the ‘lord of language’, but the poet whom he has always loved is the ‘Wielder of the stateliest measure’. There is no mention of his metrical skill in the first part of the poem. As a singer and ‘lord of language’ (l. 3) his power manifests itself in ‘many a golden phrase’ (l. 4), and ‘All the charm of all the Muses | often flowering in a lonely word’ (l. 6). Again, it is the fall of Rome that marks the change from praise of language to praise of rhythm: Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar’s dome— Though thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound for ever of Imperial Rome—(ll. 14–17)

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Neither a ‘roar’ nor an ‘ocean-roll’ suggest articulate speech, and the verb ‘sound’ falls deliberately short of an utterance. What Virgil’s lips shape, in the ending of the poem, is something both greater and less than words. 21 ‘Pan and Luna’ ‘Pan and Luna’ bears a Latin epigraph, ‘si credere dignum est’ (if the story is worthy of belief), and begins by translating and commenting on this phrase and the story to which it applies: ‘O worthy of belief I hold it was, | Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines!’ It becomes clear that the ‘strange three lines’ occur in a passage from the third book of the Georgics, though Browning never explicitly identifies this source; and, as we shall see, Virgil uses the phrase ‘si credere dignum est’ elsewhere. Georgics III concerns the care and breeding of domestic animals, and ll. 384–93 are about sheep: Si tibi lanitium curae, primum aspera silua lappaeque tribolique absint; fuge pabula laeta; continuoque greges uillis lege mollibus albos. illum autem, quamuis aries sit candidus ipse, nigra subest udo tantum cui lingua palato, reice, ne maculis infuscet uellera pullis nascentum, plenoque alium circumspice campo. munere sic niueo lanae, si credere dignum est, Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit in nemora alta uocans; nec tu aspernata uocantem. (If wool delight thee, first, be far removed All prickly boskage, burrs and caltrops; shun Luxuriant pastures; at the outset choose White flocks with downy fleeces. For the ram, How white soe’er himself, be but the tongue ’Neath his moist palate black, reject him, lest He sully with dark spots his offspring’s fleece, And seek some other o’er the teeming plain. Even with such snowy bribe of wool, if ear May trust the tale, Pan, God of Arcady, Snared and beguiled thee, Luna, calling thee To the deep woods; nor thou didst spurn his call.)22

The last three lines, evidently, constitute the ‘legend’ which Browning goes on to elaborate. Where Virgil got it from is not certain, and the meaning of ‘munere sic niueo lanae’ is also debatable. It might mean that Pan bribed

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Luna with a gift, or that he disguised himself as a ram with a snow-white fleece, as Jupiter seduced Europa in the guise of a white bull. R. A. B. Mynors, who offers this latter explanation, comments that ‘The white ram, then, with black points about him which will spoil his progeny, is as dangerously misleading as Pan was that day with his white fleece and his black heart’.23 Although Browning alludes to post-Virgilian interpretations of the myth which link it to eclipses of the moon, he is not interested in this kind of anthropological decoding; what fascinates him about the ‘strange three lines’ is their evocation of a primal scene of sexual transgression. The poem re-tells, or re-imagines this scene by means of an extraordinary and unauthorized metaphorical transposition, that of the snow-white fleece into a fleecy, snow-white cloud. The story begins with an evocation of ‘One black night in Arcadia’ (l. 4), a landscape of intense and total darkness, in which the moon-goddess suddenly appears in glory and nakedness. The revelation of her beauty is both triumphant and catastrophic: the moon is the ‘full-orbed antagonist | Of night and dark’ (ll. 21–2), yet the very extent of her triumph is a means of sexual shame. In the cloudless sky she becomes, by her own light, an object of universal desire and consumption: ‘heaven was linked | In one accord with earth to quaff the joy, | Drain beauty to the dregs without alloy’ (ll. 30–2). In this predicament she catches sight of a ‘succourable cloud’ hanging just above a pine-tree, with ‘fleece on fleece of piled-up snow’ (ll. 34, 37). She plunges into this ‘shroud’ as a refuge (l. 40), only to find that its ‘downy swathes’ are a trap, a ‘feathery springe’ (ll. 49, 56) set by ‘rough red Pan, the god of all that tract’ (l. 66).24 And here the poem re-engages with Virgil, returning to the passage from the Georgics with what must, by now, seem an ironic compliment: He [i.e. Pan] it was schemed the snare thus subtly wrought With simulated earth-breath,—wool-tufts packed Into a billowy wrappage. Sheep far-sought For spotless shearings yield such: take the fact As learned Virgil gives it,—how the breed Whitens itself for ever: yes indeed! If one fore-father ram, though pure as chalk From tinge on fleece, should still display a tongue Black ’neath the beast’s moist palate, prompt men baulk The propagating plague: he gets no young: They rather slay him,—sell his hide to caulk Ships with, first steeped in pitch,—nor hands are wrung In sorrow for his fate: protected thus,

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The purity we love is gained for us. (ll. 67–80)

The violence of the black ram’s fate is not in Virgil, and neither is the graphic description of rape that follows: So did Girl-Moon, by just her attribute Of unmatched modesty betrayed, lie trapped, Bruised to the breast of Pan, half god half brute, Raked by his bristly boar-sward while he lapped —Never say, kissed her! that were to pollute Love’s language—which moreover proves unapt To tell how she recoiled—as who finds thorns Where she sought flowers—when, feeling, she touched—horns! (ll. 81–8)

Browning could be coarse when he liked, but there is little in his work to match this tone of mingled gloating and revulsion, with, in the last line, an obscene joke which makes one wonder, again, at the liberties he felt able to take with his female readers. I used the term ‘rape’ because that is what it looks like; but Browning has not forgotten the ‘elegant understatement’, as Mynors calls it, of Virgil’s ‘nec tu aspernata uocantem’. With horror, but also with gusto, the poem forces itself, and us, to confront what this understatement understates. The explanation of the legend as a symbol of the moon’s eclipse is puzzling, because the moon ‘dips | Into the dark, a minute and no more’ (ll. 91–2) before reemerging ‘faultless as before’ (l. 94), as though virginity could be ravished and then restored at will. Does that mean that Luna has left ‘No lesson for a maid’, even though she was ‘a maid herself thus trapped, betrayed?’ (ll. 95–6). We have reached the end of the poem, and the final challenge to Virgil: Ha, Virgil? Tell the rest, you! ‘To the deep Of his domain the wildwood, Pan forthwith Called her, and so she followed’—in her sleep, Surely?—‘by no means spurning him.’ The myth Explain who may! Let all else go, I keep —As of a ruin just a monolith— Thus much, one verse of five words, each a boon: Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon. (ll. 97–104) That sardonic parenthesis—‘in her sleep, | Surely’—mocks the desperate expedient of a reader wishing to preserve his image of female modesty. Both this image, and its antithesis—that women are responsive to men’s sexual

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aggression—are products of fantasy; Browning represents neither as true (in an absolute sense); each enables, yet disallows the other; the myth Virgil tells is worthy of belief but cannot be explained. It is a structure of the past, a ‘ruin’ which we interrogate without end and without result. ‘The myth | Explain who may!’ To the poet its value lies in its being further broken, further reduced: from ‘ruin’ to ‘just a monolith’. After expanding Virgil’s ‘strange three lines’ to a hundred, the poem reduces them to ‘one verse of five words’—Browning’s last line, an Imagist poem before its time. If we think of the poem as Browning’s critique of Virgil, we have to take account of the other appearance in Virgil’s work of the phrase ‘si credere dignum est’. It comes from book VI of the Aeneid (ll. 171–4), and describes the fate of Misenus, whose body Aeneas finds washed up on the shore. Misenus, we are told, had no equal as a trumpeter—at least, no human equal: Sed tum, forte cava dum personat aequora concha, demens, et cantu vocat in certamina divos, aemulus exceptum Triton, si credere dignum est, inter saxa virum spumosa inmerserat unda. (But today, as he sent his horn’s notes ringing over the sea, Most rashly challenging the gods to a musical contest, Jealous Triton caught him off guard—if we may credit The story—and plunged him down in the surf among those rocks.)25

The context of this other occurrence of the phrase—the fatal error of a mortal artist who ‘Challenge[s] the gods to a contest’—suggests that Browning has in mind the implications of challenging Virgil (or Tennyson) to a singing-contest. Such contests always end badly—Browning’s great song ‘Thamuris marching’ celebrates the daring of the bard who challenged the Muses, but the modern poet is vividly conscious of his precursor’s terrible fate, and wards it off by leaving the song unfinished, and, for good measure, only ‘publishing’ it in the mouth of a dramatic character.26 We can see a similar evasion of hubris in the last lines of ‘Pan and Luna’, where authority is dispersed and belongs neither to Virgil, nor to those who purport to ‘explain’ the myth he relates, nor to the poet whose ‘hold’ on the story (‘O worthy of belief I hold it was . . . ’) enables him to ‘keep’ no more than fragments, however potent. Nevertheless, the challenge makes itself felt in part because it is suppressed and implicit.

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‘Pan and Luna’ is antithetical to ‘To Virgil’ in a number of ways. The epigraph may consist of only four Latin words, but that is four more than Tennyson used. They mark the poem’s authenticity—ironically, given the swerve that it takes from the original; whereas Tennyson’s individual allusions take you back with loving fidelity to their origins. Browning’s perspective is not synoptic, but concentrated on a single work. His Virgil is not so much a ‘lord of language’ as a figure of uncertain authority; the powerful enigmatic compression of his verse, which Tennyson represents as supreme organic mastery (‘All the charm of all the Muses | often flowering in a lonely word’, l. 6), in ‘Pan and Luna’ generates bewilderment and even terror. There is violence in Tennyson’s reading of Virgil across time (from ‘Ilion falling, Rome arising’ in line 2, to ‘fallen every purple Caesar’s dome’ in line 15, where Rome repeats Troy rather than replacing it) but the violence we have seen in ‘Pan and Luna’ is of a different order: sexual, visceral, discomfiting to both male and female readers. Two contexts are relevant to the anti-Tennysonian Virgil of ‘Pan and Luna’. One concerns its publication in the second series of Dramatic Idyls. Browning had previously published Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), and Dramatis Personae (1864), but his choice of Dramatic Idyls, despite the different spelling of the word, could not help seeming to contemporaries a reflection on his rival’s ‘idylls’, whether the ‘English Idyls’ or Idylls of the King. Tennyson knew as much: ‘I wish he hadn’t taken my word Idyll’, he told William Allingham.27 The second context is that of the general image of Virgil in Browning’s work. Allusions to (borrowings from) Virgil are rarer than in Tennyson, but references to him are more frequent. These are almost all disparaging in some way, not directly of Virgil but of his readers. Characters who cite Virgil in Browning do so in ways that make him seem the recourse of the pompous, the hypocritical, or the self-serving. The Ring and the Book has a cluster of such citations. Guido’s fat, jolly, callous defence lawyer, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, is delighted that the case will enable him to shine in his son’s eyes: How falls plumb to point This murder, gives me Guido to defend Now, of all days i’ the year, just when the boy Verges on Virgil, reaches the right age For some such illustration from his sire, Stimulus to himself !28

The poet of filial piety is subjected to coarse handling here. Not that Archangelis allows his literary taste to run away with him: as he begins composing his

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speech, he remarks ‘Virgil is little help to who writes prose’ (l. 136). 29 Perhaps Browning was thinking of all those critics who accused him of doing just that. The Pope, who has the final judgment in the case, imagines the worldly, cynical pleas for Guido to be let off couched in suave Virgilian tones: The pardon, Holy Father! Spare grimace, Shrugs and reluctance! Are not we the world, Bid thee, our Priam, let soft culture plead Hecuba-like, ‘non tali ’ (Virgil serves) ‘Auxilio’ and the rest! Enough, it works!30

(He doesn’t serve, and it doesn’t work.) For his part, Guido, in his deathcell, savages the two high-born priests, Cardinal Acciaiuoli and Abate Panchiatichi, who have been sent to ‘convert’ him before his execution. He has never really been a milk-and-water Christian, Guido tells them; rather he is a ‘primitive religionist’, One sprung,—your frigid Virgil’s fieriest word,— From fauns and nymphs, trunks and the heart of oak, With,—for a visible divinity,— The portent of a Jove Aegiochus Descried ’mid clouds, lightning and thunder, couched On topmost crag of your Capitoline— ’Tis in the Seventh Aeneid,—what, the Eighth? Right,—thanks, Abate,—though the Christian’s dumb, The Latinist’s vivacious in you yet!31

It is a complex hit: he is ‘your frigid Virgil’ because deemed to promote Christian values of conformity and piety, of renunciation, of the sublimation of desire; but Christians like the Abate are actually more preoccupied with their classical learning than with their religion, and Guido seizes on the wretched Abate’s interjection, designed not to save his soul but to correct his scholarship. For his part, Guido claims ‘Virgil’s fieriest word’ as his own, though the poem exposes his manliness as sham and bluster. Not surprisingly, then, ‘Pan and Luna’ rather confronts Virgil than salutes him. Unlike the passages just cited, however, it does so in Browning’s own voice, or at any rate in the voice of an impersonal narrator. When he published the first series of Dramatic Idyls in 1879, Browning implicitly defended himself against the charge of borrowing Tennyson’s term: An idyl, as you know, is a succinct little story complete in itself; not necessarily concerning pastoral matters, by any means, though

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from the prevalency of such topics in the idyls of Theocritus, such is the general notion. These of mine are called ‘Dramatic’ because the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet himself.32

This definition more or less accords with the poems of 1879, but not with those of the ‘Second Series’, the majority of which are not ‘dramatic’ in this sense at all.33 The ‘I’ of ‘Pan and Luna’ is both reader and critic of Virgil; so is the ‘I’ of ‘To Virgil’, but Tennyson’s is the criticism of a lover, and Browning’s that of a sceptic and ironist. It is rare for him to show his hand in this way, and may be a sign of the provocation posed by Virgil’s lordly equanimity. Tennyson, too, could provoke Browning in this way: he did it with the ending of ‘Enoch Arden’, which drove Browning to supply his own very funny, but very prejudiced alternative treatment. 34 But there is no apparent sign that the provocation worked the other way. I said at the start of this essay that it would seem natural for ‘Pan and Luna’ to have been written as a riposte to ‘To Virgil’. No one, on the other hand, would think that Tennyson had Browning’s poem in mind when he composed his own. Only we might observe that, in the same diary entry which has Tennyson’s plaintive objection to Browning’s appropriation of ‘his’ term ‘idyll’, William Allingham records the following comment: ‘I said the other day and you took it as a jest, but I meant it seriously, “if the pronunciation of the English language were lost, Browning would be considered the greatest modern poet”.’35 The judgement that Tennyson delivers here—as brilliant, and as partial, as anything Browning ever said about him—is at the opposite end of the scale from the one he delivers on Virgil’s ‘measure . . . moulded by the lips’. In the long sentence that ends with his salute to Virgil, Tennyson effectively shuts the gates on Browning’s poetic presence. Browning could not—or felt he could not—do the same. Tennyson, for him, was always within the gates.

Notes 1. ‘Tennyson and Browning’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 1902. 2. Letter of 19 Aug. 1865, in E. C. McAleer (ed.), Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), 219–20. 3. Letter of 12 Jan. 1870, in A. McK. Terhune and A. B. Terhune (eds.), The Letters of Edward FitzGerald (4 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), iii. 184. 4. William Allingham’s Diary (Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1967), 28 June 1871, 205. 5. ‘To Virgil’ was published in The Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1882, and then in Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885. ‘Pan and Luna’ was published in Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880. Browning is cited from the first editions of the poems. Those written before 1861 are reprinted in The Poems of Browning, 3 vols. (Harlow: Long-

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man, 1991 [vols. i and ii, ed. J. Woolford and D. Karlin] and 2007 [vol. iii, ed. J. Woolford, D. Karlin, and J. Phelan]. 6. ‘Development’ was published in Asolando, issued on the day of Browning’s death, 12 Dec. 1889. 7. Homer himself is more a tactical choice in ‘Development’ than an acknowledged influence. Browning’s favourite Greek writer was Euripides, two of whose plays he translated and incorporated into works of his own (Balaustion’s Adventure, 1871, Aristophanes’ Apology, 1875). 8. A. A. Markley, Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 104. 9. Cited in Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London: Macmillan 1968), 202, 237. 10. CH 122, 443. Tennyson continues to be adorned (or dogged) by the phrase: the introduction to A. A. Markley’s Stateliest Measures, for example, is headed ‘The English Virgil’. 11. The phrase ‘lord of language’ was written by Tennyson, but not by Lord Tennyson: his barony was conferred in December 1883, between the periodical publication of ‘To Virgil’ in 1882 and its volume publication in 1885. However, many (if not most) readers would have read the poem first in 1885, and if they were a bit hazy as to the date implied by ‘the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death’ they might take ‘lord of language’ as an expression of aristocratic fellow feeling. For a different, more positive view of Tennyson’s self-identification with Virgil, as a poet who projects himself into a post-imperial future, see Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (London: Ashgate, 2007), 96–7. 12. CH 450. In his lifetime Tennyson violently rejected many of the ‘borrowings’ attributed to him by Collins in articles in the Cornhill; he called Collins ‘a louse upon the locks of literature’ (Alfred Tennyson, 490). 13. Letter to Iris Barry, 20 July 1916, in The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 138. 14. Tennyson’s manuscript reveals that he originally intended the lines to be laid out as long couplets, so that the seventh stanza, for example, looks like this: Light among the vanished ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more; This was probably deemed impractical by the printers, and the published layout divides the lines in two after the fourth beat: Light among the vanished ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more; See R 394 headnote, citing J. B. Trapp’s reproduction of the MS (TLS, 18 Sept. 1981. 15. The Mantuan countryside, like Tennyson’s Lincolnshire, is marshy: Virgil points this out to Dante in his disquisition on the origins of Mantua, Inferno XX. 79–81. 16. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio VI. 69–75.

Tennyson, Browning, Virgil

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17. Henry Francis Cary, The Vision: or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri (1814). 18. Eclogue I. 66: ‘et penitus toto divisus orbe Britannos’ (and the Britons, wholly sundered from all the world). 19. Cary, Inferno I. 75–84 (in The Vision . . . of Dante Alighieri; see n. 17 above). Cary’s ‘My master thou and guide’ lessens the force of ‘mio maestro e ’l mio autore’, but Tennyson probably knew the Italian text. 20. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1803), I 103–4. 21. That Tennyson had a particular reason, in this poem, for dwelling on Virgil’s metre is confirmed by the fact that when he simply wanted to allude to Virgil’s craftsmanship he did so in wholly graphic terms: ‘Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, | At dawn, and lavish all the golden day | To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes’ (‘Poets and their Bibliographies’: R 399: ll. 2–4; my emphasis). The poem was probably written in 1883, and published in the same volume as ‘To Virgil’ in 1885. 22. Latin text from the edition of the Georgics by R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); translation by J. B. Greenough. 23. Ibid. 239. 24. The sexual ‘roughness’ of Pan clearly evokes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s trampling goat-god in ‘A Musical Instrument’: see Corinne Davies, ‘Two of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Pan Poems and their After-Life in Robert Browning’s “Pan and Luna”’, Victorian Poetry 444 (2006), 561–9. The appearance of Pan in Browning’s ‘Pheidippides’, a poem from the first series of Dramatic Idyls, is quite different: ‘majestical . . . the eyes grave-kindly . . . the goat-thighs grand’ (ll. 64, 66, 68). The image, as so often in Browning, is shaped by dramatic context, not preconception. 25. Latin text from the edition by J. B. Greenough; translation by C. Day-Lewis. 26. The Muses blinded Thamuris (sic; Browning’s spelling follows a supposedly more literal phonetic system) and took away his power to sing: the story is in Homer (Iliad II. 594–600). ‘Thamuris marching’ was first published in Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), where it is attributed to Sophocles and recited by Aristophanes; it is written in terza rima, beginning at l. 5182 and ending at l. 5268 with a broken tercet and a deliberate suspension of the outcome: ‘Here I await the end of this ado: | Which wins—Earth’s poet or the Heavenly Muse. . . . ’ But the manuscript (now at Balliol College, Oxford) makes it clear that the song was composed earlier as a separate piece, then pasted in to the page. 27. 20 Aug. 1880; William Allingham’s Diary, 291. In the same entry Allingham repeats the spelling error, referring to ‘Browning’s Dramatic Idylls’. 28. The Ring and the Book, VIII. 75–80. McAleer points out the parallel with Browning’s own son, who, the proud father boasts in a letter of 1865, ‘reads without previous preparation, a hundred lines of Virgil in an hour’ (Dearest Isa, 224, 225 n. 8). 29. The Ring and the Book, VIII. 136. 30. Ibid., X. 2085–9. The allusion is to Hecuba pleading with Priam not to go to battle as Troy falls: ‘non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis | tempus eget’ (‘it is not such help, nor such defenders, that the time demands’, Aeneid II. 521–2. 31. Ibid., XI. 1920–8. The allusion is indeed to Aeneid VIII. 14–15, where King Evander describes the first inhabitants of Rome, and 351–4, where he describes the religious superstitions of the Arcadians.

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32. Letter of 10 April 1879 to Wilfred Meynell, cited in his article ‘The Detachment of Browning’, Athenaeum (14 Jan. 1890), 18. 33. The volume consists of six narrative poems interspersed with shorter lyrics. Of the narratives, only one (‘Clive’) has a dramatic speaker who is an ‘actor’ in the story he tells. 34. Letter of 2 Sept. 1864, Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood, ed. R. Curle (London: John Murray and Jonathan Cape), 75–7. 35. William Allingham’s Diary, 291.

Chronology

1806

Elizabeth Barrett born on March 6 at Coxhoe Hall, the first child of Edward Moulton-Barrett and his wife Mary GrahamClarke. Edward was heir to vast plantation estate in Jamaica, and Mary was the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

1809

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is born on August 6 at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth son of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson.

1812

Robert Browning is born on May 7 in Camberwell, near London, to Robert Browning and Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning.

1826

Elizabeth Barrett’s An Essay on Mind and Other Poems is published. Emerson officially sanctioned to preach as a Unitarian minister.

1827

Publication of Poems by Two Brothers, actually containing poems by Alfred Tennyson and his brothers Charles and Frederick.

1830

Christina Rossetti is born on December 5 in London to Frances (Polidori) and Gabriele Rossetti, a poet.

1832

Tennyson publishes Poems. Emerson resigns post at Second Church; travels in Europe.

1838

Elizabeth Barrett publishes The Seraphim and Other Poems. Tennyson announces engagement to Emily Sellwood. Emerson delivers “The Divinity School Address” at Harvard, which causes him to be banned from speaking at Harvard.

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Chronology

1840

Tennyson’s engagement is broken.

1842

Robert Browning publishes Dramatic Lyrics. Tennyson publishes Poems, in two volumes.

1844

Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning published. Gerard Manley Hopkins born at Stratford, Essex, England, to a successful family.

1845

Robert Browning’s Dramatic Romances and Lyrics is published. Robert Browning writes first letter to Elizabeth Barrett. In May, first calls upon her.

1846

On September 12, after many mutual postponements, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett elope. Elizabeth’s father breaks off all communications, although Elizabeth makes many attempts at reconciliation.

1847

After moving about in Italy, the Brownings settle permanently at Casa Guidi, in Florence.

1849

First collected edition of Robert Browning’s work published.

1850

Publication (anonymous) of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson marries Emily Sellwood; appointed poet laureate.

1851

Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes Casa Guidi Windows.

1855

Robert Browning publishes Men and Women. Tennyson publishes Maud and Other Poems.

1856

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is published simultaneously in London and New York.

1859

Tennyson publishes four Idylls of the King.

1861

Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies on June 29.

1862

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Last Poems is published in March. Most reviews declare Elizabeth the greatest of women poets. Christina Rossetti publishes Goblin Market and Other Poems.

1864

Robert Browning publishes Dramatis Personae.

1865

Tennyson’s Selected Poems published. Rudyard Kipling born on December 30 in Bombay, son of Alice and John Lockwood Kipling.

1866

Hopkins is received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry Newman. Rossetti publishes The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems.

Chronology

185

1868–1869

Robert Browning publishes The Ring and the Book.

1868

Hopkins enters Jesuit novitiate at Roehampton; burns his poems; in the next seven years, he writes only two new poems. In 1869 Tennyson publishes The Holy Grail and Other Poems.

1872

Rossetti publishes Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book.

1875

Rossetti publishes collected volume Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems.

1877

Hopkins ordained as a priest.

1879

Robert Browning publishes Dramatic Idyls. Rossetti publishes Seek and Find.

1880

Tennyson publishes Ballads and Other Poems.

1881

Founding of the Browning Society in London. Rossetti publishes A Pageant and Other Poems and Called to Be Saints.

1883

Tennyson accepts baronetcy.

1885

Tennyson publishes Tiresias and Other Poems. Rossetti publishes Time Flies: A Reading Diary.

1886

Death of Tennyson’s son Lionel. Kipling publishes Departmental Ditties, his first collection of verse.

1888–1889

Robert Browning’s publication of sixteen volumes of Poetical Works. In 1888 Kipling publishes first collection of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, followed by the other Indian Railways Series titles: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsby’s, In Black and White, Wee Willie Winkie, The Phantom Rickshaw, Under the Deodars. In 1889 Hopkins dies of typhoid.

1889

On December 12, Robert Browning dies at his son’s house in Venice. On December 31, buried in Westminster Abbey. Tennyson publishes Demater and Other Poems.

1892

Tennyson dies on October 6; his Death of Oenone is published. Kipling marries Caroline Balestier; publishes Barrack-Room Ballads. Rossetti publishes The Face of the Deep; has surgery for breast cancer.

1893

Rossetti publishes Verses.

1894

Kipling publishes The Jungle Book. Rossetti dies from cancer on December 29.

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Chronology

1895

Kipling publishes The Second Jungle Book.

1896

Kipling publishes The Seven Seas, poems. Publication of Rossetti’s New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected, edited by William Michael Rossetti.

1897

Kipling publishes Captains Courageous.

1899

Kipling publishes Stalky & Co.; eldest child, Josephine, dies.

1901

Kipling publishes Kim.

1902

Kipling publishes Just So Stories.

1903

Kipling publishes The Five Nations, poems.

1904

Publication of The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, edited by William Michael Rossetti.

1907

Kipling awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

1910

Kipling publishes Rewards and Fairies.

1915

Kipling’s son John missing and believed killed in France.

1917

Kipling publishes A Diversity of Creatures.

1918

Publication of first edition of Hopkins’s collected poems.

1936

Kipling dies on January 18 in London; his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

1937

Kipling’s Something of Myself, an autobiography, published.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. Educated at Cornell and Yale universities, he is the author of more than 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In addition, he is the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, and editorial introductions. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. DOROTHY MERMIN is a professor emerita of Cornell University. She coedited Victorian Literature: 1830–1900. Her publications include The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets. J. HILLIS MILLER is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, European, and American literature and on literary theory. Among his works are Victorian Subjects and The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy.

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Contributors

ANTONY H. HARRISON is a professor at North Carolina State University, where he also is director of graduate programs in English. His publications include Christina Rossetti in Context and The Letters of Christina Rossetti in four volumes, available from the University Press of Virginia. He serves on the editorial boards of Victorian Poetry, The Victorians Institute Journal, and other publications. DONALD S. HAIR is an emeritus professor of the University of Western Toronto. He coauthored Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning. Among his other publications are Browning’s Experiments with Genre and Tennyson’s Language. GAIL MARSHALL is reader in nineteenth-century literature and research director in English at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Actresses on the Victorian Stage (1998) and Victorian Fiction (2002) and has edited George Eliot (2003), two volumes of essays on Victorian Shakespeare (2003) with Adrian Poole, and The Fin de Siècle, part of the Cambridge Companions to Literature series. FRANCIS O’GORMAN is a professor at the University of Leeds, where he also is Head of School. He has published Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology and many other works; he is editor of the Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. He is advisory editor (for Victorian poetry) for The Oxford Companion to English Literature. TIM KENDALL is a professor at the University of Exeter, where he also is head of the department of English. He edited The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. He has published works on poets and also has published his own poetry. DANIEL KARLIN is a professor at the University of Sheffield, where he also is graduate director for the School of English (literature programme). He is a coeditor of three volumes of The Poems of Browning for Pearson Longman. He is the author of The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett and editor of works of Browning, Kipling, and FitzGerald.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. London; New York: Routledge, 1993. Billone, Amy. “Elizabeth Barrett’s and Alfred Tennyson’s Authorial and Formal Links.” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 779–789. Binhammer, Katherine, and Jeanne Wood, ed. Women and Literary History: “ for there she was.” Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Bosco, Ronald A., and Joel Myerson, ed. Emerson: Bicentennial Essays. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006. Bristow, Joseph. Robert Browning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Bristow, Joseph, ed. The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona. London; New York: Croom Helm, 1987. . Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Brooks, Roger L., ed. Selected Papers from an International Conference: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Culture, II. Studies in Browning and His Circle: A Journal of Criticism, History, and Bibliography 20 (1993): 7–151. Chapman, Alison, ed. Victorian Women Poets. Cambridge [England]; New York: D.S. Brewer, 2003. Crowder, Ashby Bland. Poets and Critics, Their Means and Meanings: Including Essays on Browning, Ruskin, Stevens, Heaney, and Others. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. Faas, Ekbert. Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

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Grafe, Adrian, ed. Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period. London; New York: Continuum, 2008. Gray, Erik. “ ‘Out of Me, Out of Me!’: Andrea, Ulysses, and Victorian Revisions of Egotistical Lyric.” Victorian Poetry 36, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 417–430. Gray, F. Elizabeth. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2010. Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Harrison, Antony H. Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Harrison, Antony H., and Beverly Taylor, ed. Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992. Hassett, Constance W. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Levine, Richard A., ed. The Victorian Experience: The Poets. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. Machann, Clinton. Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading. Farnham, England; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010. McSweeney, Kerry. Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry. Aldershot, England; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998. Mermin, Dorothy. The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Mermin, Dorothy, and Herbert F. Tucker. Victorian Literature, 1830–1900. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt College Publishers, 2002. Muller, Jill. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding. New York: Routledge, 2003. O’Gorman, Francis. “Browning, Grief, and the Strangeness of Dramatic Verse.” Cambridge Quarterly 36, no. 2 (2007): 155–173. Painter, Megan Gribskov. The Aesthetic of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Parry, Ann. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation. Buckingham [England]; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992. Pearce, Brian Louis. Varieties of Fervour: Portraits of Victorian and Edwardian Poets. Salzburg, Austria; Oxford, UK: University of Salzburg, 1996. Phillips, Catherine. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Richards, Bernard. English Poetry of the Victorian Period, 1830–1890. London; New York: Longman, 1988.

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Richardson, James. Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D.G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Riede, David G. Allegories of One’s Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Risden, E. L. Heroes, Gods and the Role of Epiphany in English Epic Poetry. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Rowlinson, Matthew. Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Schur, Owen. Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. Slinn, E. Warwick. The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. . Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Starzyk, Lawrence J. The Dialogue of the Mind with Itself: Early Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1992. Stone, Marjorie. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. . “Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Victorian Poetry 32, no. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1994): 339–364. Thesing, William B. The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Response to the City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Woolford, John. Browning the Revisionary. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. . “Elizabeth Barrett and the Wordsworthian Sublime.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 45, no. 1 (January 1995): 36–56.

Acknowledgments

Dorothy Mermin, “The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet.” From Critical Inquiry 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 64–80. Copyright © 1986 the University of Chicago Press. J. Hillis Miller, “Naming and Doing: Speech Acts in Hopkins's Poems.” From Religion and Literature 22, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1990): 173–91. Copyright © 1990 Department of English, University of Notre Dame. Antony H. Harrison, “In the Shadow of E. B. B.: Christina Rossetti and Ideological Estrangement.” From Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology, pp. 108–43, 219–22. Copyright © 1990 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Donald S. Hair, “Soul and Spirit in In Memoriam.” From Victorian Poetry 34, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 175–91. Copyright © 1996 by West Virginia University Press. Gail Marshall, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy.” From Victorian Poetry 44, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 467–86. Published by West Virginia University Press. Copyright © 2006 by Gail Marshall. Francis O’Gorman, “Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855) and the Idea of Posterity.” From Studies in Browning and His Circle vol. 27 (December 2006): 75–90. Copyright © 2007 Baylor University, Armstrong Browning Library.

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Acknowledgments

Tim Kendall, “Rudyard Kipling’s Dress Parade.” From Modern English War Poetry, pp. 26–45. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright © Tim Kendall 2006. Daniel Karlin, “Tennyson, Browning, Virgil.” From Tennyson among the Poets, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, pp. 95–114. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright © Daniel Karlin 2009.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.

Index “Absent-Minded Beggar, The” (Kipling), 154 Academy, 83 Aeneid (Virgil), 166, 176, 181 “Affliction of Margaret, The” (Wordsworth), 8 “After Death” (Rossetti), 29 “Age and Song” (Swinburne), 131 Agrippa, Cornelius, 119 Alastor (Shelley), 10, 12 Albert (prince), 165 Allingham, William, 177 Altick, Richard D., 133 “Ancient Sage, The” (Tennyson), 6 “Andrea del Sarto” (Browning), 7, 16, 30, 143 Anglican revivalism, 17 Anglo-Saxon verse, 20 anima, 9, 92 animal poems, 26, 35 apotheosis, 63, 68 “Apple-Gathering, An” (Rossetti), 61 amatory poetry/ideology, 35, 57, 84 Arnold, Matthew, 18, 22, 24, 36 Empedocles on Etna, 30 Sohrah and Rustum, 24 Arnold, William T., 112 Art and Ideas (Yeats), 5 “Ash Wednesday” (Rossetti), 31 “At Home” (Rossetti), 29

Augustine, 47, 55 Confessions, 45, 54 Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning), 35, 58, 60, 61, 66–67, 80, 81–82, 110–112, 115–116, 127 Aurora Leigh in, 69, 70, 107 publication of, 70 Austin, J. L., 40, 42, 45 authorial distance, 32 authorial intention, 135 “Ave Atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire” (Swinburne), 131 Aytoun, William Edmondstoune, 60 Ballads and Other Poems (Tennyson), 167 Barrack-Room Ballads (Kipling), 148, 150, 154 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 1–5, 33, 57, 107–127 Aurora Leigh, 35, 58, 60, 61, 66–67, 69, 70–71, 80, 81–82, 107, 110–112, 115–116, 127 death of, 3, 112, 130, 138 “The Deserted Garden,” 22 Diary, 122 A Drama of Exile, 60, 61, 74, 76 Essay on Mind, 68 “falsetto muscularity” and, 66 “Felicia Hemans,” 62–63

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196 feminine influence and, 68 gender identification and, 21–22 as “Great Poetess,” 83 “Hector in the Garden,” 71–72, 81 isolated childhood of, 121–122 “L. E. L.,” 62 Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 27 “A Lay of the Early Rose,” 25 “The Lost Bower,” 22–23, 27 love letters of, 25 “Mother and Poet,” 81 “A Musical Instrument,” 2–3, 181 “My Doves,” 26 “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon,” 68 “Parting Lovers,” 81 as poet laureate contender, 60 The Poet’s Vow, 26, 28–29 “political and philanthropic” poems, 58, 61 Prometheus Bound translation, 124–125 “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” 31 “The Seraphim,” 60, 62 Shakespeare and, 107–127 sisters of, 126 Sonnets from the Portuguese, 27, 35, 36, 59, 80, 83–86, 108, 110–111, 112–113 sonnets of, 110 “Victoria’s Tears,” 62, 64–66, 74, 81 Wordsworth’s influence on, 68, 69 “The Young Queen,” 62, 63 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 9 Bell, Mackenzie, 58 Bennett, Andrew, 130, 135–136 “Better Resurrection, A” (Rossetti), 30 biblical references. See also Christianity/Christ Corinthians, book of, 97, 98, 100

Index

Eve/the Fall, 73–80 Satan/Lucifer, 73, 74 Bishop, Elizabeth, 35 “The Gentleman of Shalott,” 24 “Bishop Orders His Tomb, The” (Browning), 138 Blagden, Isabella, 164 Blake, William, 13 “Mad Song,” 8 The Mental Traveller, 7 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 10, 14 Bloom, Harold, 1–20 Boer War, 147–162 “Boots” (Kipling), 155 Bowers, Edgar, 15 Boyd, Hugh Stuart, 119, 120, 127 “Bridge-Guard in the Karroo” (Kipling), 155, 156–157 Bridges, Robert, 19, 48 Brontë, Emily, 32–33, 38 “Silent Is the House,” 33 Browning, Robert, 6, 15–17, 60, 115, 119, 129–146 “Andrea del Sarto,” 7, 16, 143 “The Bishop Orders His Tomb,” 138–139 “Caliban upon Setebos,” 16–17 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 7, 15–16, 135 “Cleon,” 136, 142, 144, 146 “De Gustibus,” 139, 140 Dramatic Idyls, 177, 178–179, 181 Dramatic Lyrics, 177 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 132, 135, 177 Dramatis Personae, 164, 177 “Earth’s Immortalities,” 135 feminism and, 87 “Fra Lippo Lippi,” 16, 143, 146 “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” 133, 134 “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” 133, 134 “Memorabilia,” 144–145

Index

Men and Women, 129–146 “My Last Duchess,” 16, 31, 136–137 “Old Pictures in Florence,” 134–135 “One Word More: To E. B. B. 1855,” 143–144 “Pan and Luna,” 164–165, 173– 179, 181 Pauline, 9–10 Pippa Passes, 24 “Popularity,” 129, 135 The Ring and the Book, 130, 177–178, 181 Sordello, 135 “The Statue and the Bust,” 137– 138, 139, 140 “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” 133, 134, 135 “Two in the Campagna,” 138 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 24, 36 Burke, Kenneth The Rhetoric of Religion, 54 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 130, 131 Caine, Hall, 83 Caliban, 15, 115 “Caliban upon Setebos” (Browning), 16–17 Carlyle, Thomas, 96, 163 Carnevali, Luigi, 167 “(Carrion Comfort)” (Hopkins), 52 “Chant-Pagan” (Kipling), 158, 159, 160 “Charge of the Light Brigade, The” (Tennyson), 149 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20, 165 Chiefly Lyrical (Hallam), 6 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (Browning), 7, 15–16, 135 Christianity/Christ, 36. See also biblical references; devotional poetry afterlife, 96, 132, 140, 142–143

197

devotion and, 72 grace and, 43–44, 47, 51 vanitas mundi stance, 60 Churton Collins, John, 167 Clarke, K. C., Edward, 163–164 “Cleon” (Browning), 136, 142, 144 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 100, 102, 130 Confessions, (St. Augustine), 45, 54, 55 constative poems, 48 “Convent Threshold, The” (Rossetti), 61 Cornhill Magazine, 113 Cowden Clark, Mary, 116 Crane, Hart Passage, 12 Crashaw, Richard, 17 “Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The” (Miller), 39 Cronin, Richard, 144, 146 damsels/knights, 21–38 Dante Alighieri, 27, 167–168, 170–171 Inferno, 170 Purgatorio, 169 Darley, George, 9 Darwin, Erasmus The Temple of Nature, 172 Daughters of England, The (Ellis), 64 David, Deirdre, 67, 86, 87 “De Gustibus” (Browning), 139, 140 de Man, Paul, 45, 54 “Dead City, The” (Rossetti), 23, 25 Derrida, Jacques, 51, 54, 55 “Deserted Garden, The,” 22 Devil and the Lady, The (Tennyson), 6 devotional poetry, 30–31, 35, 36, 60 Diary (Barrett Browning), 122 Dickinson, Emily, 18, 33–34, 35, 38 discursiveness, 7 Dixon, Richard Watson, 42 Dolben, Digby, 18 Donne, John, 17, 18

198

Index

“Dora” (Tennyson), 8 Drama of Exile, A (Barrett Browning), 60, 61, 74, 76 Dramatic Idyls (Browning), 177, 178–179, 181 Dramatic Lyrics (Browning), 177 dramatic monologue, 31 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Browning), 132, 135, 177 Dramatis Personae (Browning), 164, 177 “Dream Land” (Rossetti), 29 Drum Taps (Whitman), 149 “Drummer Hodge” (Thomas), 150, 156 Dryden, John, 165 du Bos, Charles, 40 Dublin University Magazine, 112 “Dykes, The” (Kipling), 151 “Earth’s Immortalities” (Browning), 135 Ecclesiastical Sonnets (Wordsworth), 6 Eclogues (Virgil), 166 Eliot, George, 67 Eliot, T. S., 15, 18 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 64, 65 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 96 Eminent Women series (Ingram), 60 Empedocles on Etna (Arnold), 30 Endymion (Keats), 10 English Decadence, 10–11 English devotional poets, 17 “English Idyls” (Tennyson), 167 “English Virgil,” 167 “Epic, The” (Tennyson), 171–172 Epipsychidion (Shelley), 9 Essay on Mind (Barrett Browning), 68 “Eve” (Rossetti), 61, 74 Excursion (Wordsworth), 69 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 12 Fall of Hyperion, The (Keats), 7 “falsetto muscularity,” 31, 58, 66, 68

father figure, 112 Faucit, Helen, 116–117 Fawley, Jude, 133 “Felicia Hemans” (Barrett Browning), 62–63 female subjectivity, 62. See also male/ female; women Fiat/Fiat lux, 44, 45–47, 51 FitzGerald, Edward, 164, 166 Five Nations, The (Kipling), 150– 151, 153, 155, 156–157, 158, 159 “Fra Lippo Lippi” (Browning), 16, 143, 146 Friend, 155 Frost, Robert, 15 Frye, Northrup, 92 Fussell, Paul, 158 Galuppi, Baldassare, 133 gender. See male/female Georgics (Virgil), 166, 173, 174 Germ (magazine), 29 Gilbert, W.S. Iolanthe, 24–25, 37 Glendower, 41 Goblin Market (Rosetti), 17–18, 23, 26, 35, 61, 80 Gosse, Edmund, 112 Graham-Clarke, Arabella, 117 “Grammarian’s Funeral, A” (Browning), 133, 134 Graves, Robert, 10, 154 Gray, Erik, 110 Great War, 147, 148, 151, 154, 158, 160 Greenwell, Dora, 60 Hair, Donald S., 36, 91–106 “Half-Ballad of Waterval” (Kipling), 153–154 Hallam, Arthur, 5, 10, 11, 12–13, 94–95, 99, 103, 172 Chiefly Lyrical, 6 “five distinctive excellences,” 7 Halpern, Richard, 111

Index

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 117, 118, 120 Harden, Edgar, 134 Hardy, Thomas, 147, 149, 155 “Drummer Hodge,” 150, 156 “Shelley’s Skylark,” 144, 145 “The Souls of the Slain,” 150 Harrison, Antony H., 57–89, 146 “Hector in the Garden” (Barrett Browning), 71–72, 81 Hemans, Felicia, 62, 63 Hengist, Richard, 118 “Henry Purcell” (Hopkins), 41 Herbert, George, 17, 30 High Romantic style, 18 Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Simon), 101 Hobbes, Thomas, 94 Hodge, Alan, 154 Homans, Margaret, 26, 37, 88 Homer, 2, 70, 107, 165, 167, 180, 181 Illiad, 108, 181 Hopkins, Bridges, 41, 42, 43 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 17, 18–20 apostrophic address, 49–50 birth of, 18 “(Carrion Comfort),” 52 “Henry Purcell,” 41 “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” 51 performative speech acts, 40–53 publication and, 48–49 “sigh”/inescape of speech, 53 “(The Soldier),” 51 “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” 48, 50 “Spring and Fall,” 48 “sprung rhythm,” 52 temporal structure and, 40 “terrible sonnets” of, 48 “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” 48 “To R.B.,” 48 “To What Serves Mortal Beauty,” 51 undertone/“underthought,” 52

199

“vowelling on and vowelling off,” 49, 50–51 “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 7, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 51, 52 “yes” in poetry of, 51–52 Horace, 165 Horne, Hengist, 120 Howard, Richard, 15 “Hymn of Pan” (Shelley), 3–5 ideological estrangement, 73–79 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 177 Iliad (Homer), 108 In Memorium (Tennyson), 7, 11, 12, 24, 91–106, 167 dualism and, 92, 93 ghosts/ghostly imagery, 94, 95, 96, 98, 105 Hallam and, 93, 94–95, 103, 172 main movement of, 14 section 103, 13 soul and spirit in, 91–106 spiritual perception in, 99 Inferno (Dante), 170 Ingelow, Jean, 60 Ingrams, John Eminent Women series, 60 “Iniquity of the Fathers, The” (Rossetti), 61 “Instructor, The” (Kipling), 155 intimacy, language of, 107–127. See also love Iolanthe (Gilbert and Sullivan), 24–25, 37 “Islanders, The” (Kipling), 152 “Jenny” (Rossetti), 73 “Jerusalem” (Blake), 7 Johnson, Lionel, 148 Jordan, Elaine, 96 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 123 Jung, Carl, 9 “Justice” (Kipling), 153 Karlin, Daniel, 122, 163–182

200 Keats, John, 7, 14, 17, 18, 19, 130, 135, 155 Endymion, 10 The Fall of Hyperion, 7 humanism/naturalism of, 9 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 138 Scene of Instruction, 17 Keble, John, 17 Kelly, Robert L., 133 Kendall, Tim, 147–162 King Lear (Shakespeare), 119, 123 Kipling, Rudyard, 18 “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” 154 Barrack-Room Ballads, 148, 150, 154 Boer War writings, 147–162 “Boots,” 155 “Bridge-Guard in the Karroo,” 155, 156–157 “Chant-Pagan,” 158, 159, 160 “The Dykes,” 151 The Five Nations, 150–151, 153, 155, 156–157, 158, 159 “Half-Ballad of Waterval,” 153–154 “The Instructor,” 155 “The Islanders,” 152 “Justice,” 153 “The Lesson,” 151 “Lichtenberg,” 155 “The Parting of the Column,” 150 “Piet,” 153 “Recessional,” 151, 158 “The Return,” 158, 159–160 “A Sahibs’ War,” 153 “Service Songs,” 150, 158, 159 “The Settler,” 157–158 Something of Myself, 149 “Stellenbosh,” 151–152 “The Truce of the Bear,” 153 “The Way That He Took,” 152 “The White Man’s Burden,” 154 “Wilful-Missing,” 154–155

Index

“Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 11 “L. E. L.” (Barrett Browning), 62 Lady Geraldine’s Courtship (Barrett Browning), 27 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 115 Landon, Laetitia, 62, 63 Lang, Andrew, 57, 58 Languages of Paradise, The (Olender), 101 Lawrence, D.H., 8 “Lay of the Early Rose, A” (Barrett Browning), 25 “Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, The” (Hopkins), 51 Leigh, Aurora, 25 Leighton, Angela, 87, 89, 108–109 “Lichtenberg” (Kipling), 155 “literary immortality,” 142 “Literature and Religion” (Miller), 53 Locke, John, 92 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 81, 171 Logique du Port Royal, 54 Lootens, Tricia, 113 “lord of language,” 167, 172, 177, 180 “Lost Bower, The” (Barrett Browning), 22–23, 25, 27 love, 28, 33, 34, 64, 85, 139. See also intimacy, language of “Lowest Room, The” (Rossetti), 31, 70, 71, 80 “Lucretius” (Tennyson), 15 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge), 68 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 122 “Mad Song” (Blake), 8 male/female. See also patriarchal world; women damsels/knights, 21, 22, 23, 26, 32, 33–34, 36 devotional poetry and, 30–31 dramatic monologues, 31 “falsetto muscularity,” 31, 58, 66, 68

Index

gender identification and, 26–27, 36, 58–59 gender ideology, 66 gender roles, 67, 76 merging of roles, 28 social relations between, 79–80 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10 Mantuans, the, 167–168, 169 Marian Erles (Aurora Leigh), 69 “Mariana” (Tennyson), 8–9, 11 Markley, A.A., 166 Marshall, Gail, 107–127 Martin, Patchett, 58 Martineau, Harriet, 67 “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha” (Browning), 133, 134, 135 Mayhew, Henry, 64, 88 McGann, Jerome, 73, 74, 87 McLuhan, H.M., 11 McSweeney, Kerry, 95, 96 “Memorabilia” (Browning), 144–145 “Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier” (Swinburne), 131 Men and Women (Browning), 129–146 epilogue of, 143 excerpt, 140–141, 141–142 reorganization of, 130 Mental Traveller, The (Blake), 7 Mermin, Dorothy, 21–38, 108, 109 Merope, 6, 7 Michael (Wordsworth), 8 Middlemarch (Eliot), 25 Miller, J. Hillis, 39–55 “The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins,” 39 “Literature and Religion,” 53 Millgate, Michael Testamentary Acts, 130 Milton, John, 10, 18, 73, 74 Paradise Lost, 8 Samson Agonistes, 20 sonnets of, 108 Mitford, Mary Russell, 112–113, 118–119, 121, 122, 127

201

Monna Innominata (Rossetti), 36, 59, 60, 80, 82, 84, 85 Montgomery, James, 140 “Morte d’Arthur” (Tennyson), 172 Morton, Savile, 166 “Mother and Poet” (Barrett Browning), 81 motherhood, Victorian, 63–64, 89 “A Musical Instrument” (Barrett Browning), 2–3, 181 “My Doves” (Barrett Browning), 26 “My Dream” (Rossetti), 26 “My Last Duchess” (Browning), 16, 31, 136–137 “My Sister’s Sleep” (Rossetti), 29 Mynors, R. A. B., 174, 175 nature, 26, 48 Nead, Lynda, 64, 88 North American Review, 113 North British Review, 113–114 Nuttall, A.D., 133 Ode: O Bosky Brook (Tennyson), 6 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 138 “Ode to Memory” (Tennyson), 12, 134 “Of Queen’s Gardens” (Ruskin), 64 O’Gorman, Francis, 129–146 Old English, 20 “Old Pictures in Florence” (Browning), 134–135 Olender, Maurice, 101 “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon” (Barrett Browning), 68 “One Word More: To E. B. B. 1855” (Browning), 143–144 Othello (Shakespeare), 117–118 Oxford Movement, 18 Page, Norman, 102 Pageant and Other Poems, A (Rossetti), 83 “Palace of Art, The” (Tennyson), 15

202

Index

“Pan and Luna” (Browning), 164– 165, 173–179, 181 Paracelsus (play), 122 Paradise Lost (Milton), 8, 74 “Parting Lovers” (Barrett Browning), 81 “Parting of the Column, The” (Kipling), 150 Passage (Crane), 12 Pater, Walter, 18 Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton, 18 patriarchal world, 33, 35. See also male/ female fallen world and, 75 feminist readers and, 76 gender roles and, 67 ideological norms in, 57, 74, 85 masculinist values, 86 Pauline (Browning), 9–10 Pearsall, Cornelia D.J., 138 perception/detachment, 19 performative speech acts, 40–53 Fiat/Fiat lux, 45–47 God’s grace as, 47 putative speech act, 45 Petrarch, 27 phantasmagoria, 9 “Piet” (Kipling), 153 Plath, Sylvia, 34 Plato, 2 Poe, Edgar Allan, 10, 25 Poems (Tennyson), 11 Poems of 1850 (Barrett Browning), 71 poet laureate, 60, 165, 168 Poet’s Vow, The (Barrett Browning), 26, 28–29 “Poor Ghost, The” (Rossetti), 29–30 “Popularity” (Browning), 129, 135 posterity, idea of, 129–146 postromantic art, 7 Pound, Ezra, 15, 167 Prelude, The (Tennyson), 7, 10 Pre-Raphaelites, 8, 17, 19, 23, 26, 29 Price, Uvedale, 118 Prince’s Progress, The (Rossetti), 25–26

Princess, The (Tennyson), 25 Prins, Yopie, 124, 127 Procter, Bryan, 131 Proctor, Adelaide, 60 Prometheus Bound, 124–125 Promethianism, 13 “Prospectus” (Wordsworth), 69 “pure English,” 19 Purgatorio (Dante), 169 “Recessional” (Kipling), 151, 158 “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” (Tennyson), 11–13 “Remember” (Rossetti), 29 “Resolution and Independence” (Wordsworth), 7 “Return, The” (Kipling), 158, 159–160 Revolt of Islam, The (Shelley), 11 Rezeption Geschichte, 132 Rhetoric of Religion, The (Burke), 54 Richardson, Charles, 92 Ricks, Christopher, 37, 169 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 130 Robertson, J.M., 167 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 109– 110, 116 Romney (Aurora Leigh), 25, 35, 69 Rossetti, Christina, 17–18, 33, 57–89, 73 “After Death,” 29 “An Apple-Gathering,” 61 “Ash Wednesday,” 31 “At Home,” 29 “A Better Resurrection,” 30 biographer for, 58 “The Convent Threshold,” 61 “The Dead City,” 23 “Dream Land,” 29 “Eve,” 61, 74 “falsetto muscularity,” 58, 66 “feminist” subversiveness, 87 gender identification and, 21–22 Goblin Market, 17–18, 23, 26, 35, 61, 80

Index

“The Iniquity of the Fathers,” 61 “The Lowest Room,” 31, 70, 71, 80 Monna Innominata, 36, 59, 60, 80, 82, 84, 85 “My Dream,” 26 A Pageant and Other Poems, 83 “The Poor Ghost,” 29–30 The Prince’s Progress, 25–26 “Remember,” 29 “A Royal Princess,” 31 silence/strength and, 59, 84, 85 “A Sketch,” 26 “Sleeping at Last,” 30 “The Solitary Rose,” 25 “Song: When I Am Dead, My Dearest,” 29 “Up-Hill,” 30 “What Would I Give!,” 30 “Winter: My Secret,” 26 “A Wish,” 25 “The World,” 73–74 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 17, 18, 31, 57–58 “falsetto muscularity,” 68 “Jenny,” 73 “My Sister’s Sleep,” 29 Rossetti, William Michael, 83, 87 “Royal Princess, A” (Rossetti), 31 “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, The” (Barrett Browning), 31 Ruskin, John, 7, 18, 88 “Of Queen’s Gardens,” 64 Sesame and Lilies, 117 The Stones of Venice, 135 “A Sahibs’ War” (Kipling), 153 Sand, George, 36 Schlegel, Friedrich, 18 Scott, Patrick, 91 Scotus, Duns (“Subtle Doctor”), 19 “Seraphim, The” (Barrett Browning), 60 Seraphim and Other Poems, The (Barrett Browning), 62

203

“Service Songs” (Kipling), 150, 158, 159 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin), 117 “Settler, The” (Kipling), 157–158 Sexton, Anne, 34–35 sexuality, 10, 12, 17, 21, 22, 24, 35 Shakespeare, William, 15, 17, 107–127 Barrett Browning and, 107–127 Hamlet, 117, 118, 120 Julius Caesar, 123 King Lear, 119, 123 Macbeth, 122 Othello, 117–118 Romeo and Juliet, 109–110, 116, 124 The Tempest, 16 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19, 130, 131, 136, 144 Alastor, 10, 12 Epipsychidion, 9, 14 “Hymn of Pan,” 3–5 The Revolt of Islam, 11 “The Triumph of Life,” 7 “Shelley’s Skylark” (Hardy), 144, 145 “Silent Is the House” (Brontë), 32–33 Simon, Richard Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament, 101 Sinfield, Alan, 96 “Sketch, A” (Rossetti), 26 “Sleeping at Last” (Rossetti), 30 Smith, G.B., 113, 125 Smith, W.H., 113 “(The Soldier)” (Hopkins), 51 “Solitary Rose, The” (Rossetti), 25 Something of Myself (Kipling), 149 “Song: When I Am Dead, My Dearest” (Rossetti), 29 Sonnets from the Portuguese (Barrett Browning), 27, 35, 36, 80, 83–86, 108, 110–111 critics on, 112–113

204 Sordello (Browning), 135 “Souls of the Slain, The” (Thomas), 150 South Africa, 147–162 Spedding, James, 93 speech acts. See performative speech acts “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (Hopkins), 48, 50 Spenser, Edmund, 8, 20, 165 Faerie Queene, The, 12 Spinoza, Baruch, 101 “Spring and Fall” (Hopkins), 48 Stateliest Measures (Markley), 166 “Statue and the Bust, The” (Browning), 137–138, 139, 140 Stedman, E.C., 114, 115 Steiner, George, 108 “Stellenbosh” (Kipling), 151–152 Sterling, John, 167 Stevens, Wallace, 6 Stevenson, Lionel, 9 Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin), 135 Story, W.W., 138 Sullivan, Arthur Iolanthe, 24–25, 37 Supposed Confessions (Tennyson), 8 Svaglic, Martin J., 133 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 10–11, 18, 95, 153 “Age and Song,” 131 “Ave Atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire,” 131 “Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier,” 131 “Tears, Idle Tears” (Tennyson), 30 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 16 Temple of Nature, The (Darwin), 172 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 5–15, 17, 18, 22, 31 “The Ancient Sage,” 6 Ballads and Other Poems, 167 “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 149

Index

“Despair,” 6 The Devil and the Lady, 6 “Dora,” 8 “English Idyls,” 167 “The Epic,” 171–172 as the “English Virgil,” 167 “five distinctive excellences,” 7 Idylls of the King, 177 In Memorium, 7, 11, 14, 24, 167, 172 “Locksley Hall,” 81, 171 “lord of language” phrase, 167, 172, 177, 180 “Lucretius,” 15 “Mariana,” 8–9 “metaphysics of night,” 11 “Morte d’Arthur,” 172 Ode: O Bosky Brook, 6 “Ode to Memory,” 12,134 “The Palace of Art,” 15 Poems, 11, 167 as poet laureate, 168 The Prelude, 7 The Princess, 25 “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” 11–13 Supposed Confessions, 8 “Tears, Idle Tears,” 30 “Tithonus,” 15 “To Dante,” 168 “To Virgil,” 164–173, 177, 179, 181 “Ulysses,” 15 Testamentary Acts (Millgate), 130 “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection” (Hopkins), 48 The Ring and the Book (Browning), 177–178, 181 Thompson, Francis “Ode for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 1897,” 134 “Tithonus” (Tennyson), 15, 30 “To Dante” (Tennyson), 168 “To R.B.” (Hopkins), 48

Index

“To Virgil” (Tennyson), 164–173, 177, 179 excerpt, 168–169, 169–170 phrasing of, 172 “Roman Virgil,” 168, 169 stanzas/meter of, 168, 171, 181 syntactical structure of, 168 “To What Serves Mortal Beauty” (Hopkins), 51 “Toccata of Galuppi’s, A” (Browning), 133, 134, 135 “Triad, A,” 80 “Triumph of Life, The” (Shelley), 7 “Truce of the Bear, The” (Kipling), 153 “Two in the Campagna” (Browning), 138 “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 15 “Up-Hill” (Rossetti), 30 Van Wyk Smith, Malvern, 148 Vaughn, Henry, 17 Vergilian Academy of Mantua, 167 Victorian England amatory ideologies and, 57, 84, 85 fallen woman in, 73 female self-realization in, 67 feminity in, 25 ideological subcultures in, 61 motherhood in, 64, 88 poetess role models, 86 value systems in, 74 “Victoria’s Tears” (Barrett Browning), 62, 64–66, 74, 81 Virgil, 164, 165 Aeneid, 166, 176, 181 Georgics, 166, 173, 174 as “landscape-lover,” 167 as “lord of language,” 172, 180 opera, 166 “voicing” of, 166 virginity, 10 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake), 10, 14

205

Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats), 10 Warren, Austin, 19 “Way That He Took, The” (Kipling), 152 Webster, Augusta, 79, 80 “What Would I Give!” (Rossetti), 30 “White Man’s Burden, The” (Kipling), 154 Whitman, Walt Drum Taps, 149 “Wilful-Missing” (Kipling), 154–155 “Winter: My Secret” (Rossetti), 26 “Wish, A” (Rossetti), 25 women, 29, 35, 63, 71, 80 cultural role of, 61–62 domestic sphere of, 64–65, 67–68, 70, 72, 75, 81 “fallen,” 61, 74 love and, 28, 64 self-realization/fulfillment of, 67, 80 submissiveness/self-suppression, 35–36 Woolford, John, 130 Wordsworth, William, 6, 25, 28, 68, 88, 130 “The Affliction of Margaret,” 8 Barrett Browning and, 68, 69 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 6 Excursion, 69 Michael, 8 The Prelude, 10 “Prospectus,” 69 “Resolution and Independence,” 7 “World, The” (Rossetti), 73–74 “Wreck of the Deutschland, The” (Hopkins), 7, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 51, 52 Yeats, W.B., 6, 7 Art and Ideas, 5 The Wanderings of Oisin, 10 “Young Queen, The” (Barrett Browning), 62, 63 Younghusband, George, 148