Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life 3031296966, 9783031296963

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Victorian Verse The Poetics of Everyday Life Edited by Lee Behlman · Olivia Loksing Moy

Victorian Verse “This wonderful volume gives us a new way to comprehend Victorian poetry. Specifically, it expands the field of Victorian poetry studies by reminding us of the period’s rich terrain of verse forms, their genres, their places of publication or circulation, their readers, singers, and reciters, and their social uses for edification, devotion, or simply just for fun. The volume ‘repeoples’ the world of Victorian poetry by linking  poetic address to historically concrete and situated audiences, and thus it offers us a ‘lived poetics’ that includes the nursery, the parlor, and the workplace as well as venues of print publication. The distinction between verse and poetry will provoke debate—and that debate is also represented in this volume— but it is of great importance to take account of the ubiquity of verse, embedded everywhere in the everyday life of the Victorians. Thus, this project is both necessary and welcome. The Introduction clearly and elegantly lays out the issues—and it is a pleasure to read, as are the individual essays collected here, written by many of the greatest critics of Victorian poetry writing today.” —Carolyn Williams, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University “From the ‘serial rhythms’ of periodical ‘filler poems’ to the ‘measures and immeasures’ of Thomas Carlyle’s historiography; from the generic strains of ‘anti-elitist elitist’ Punch parodies and English Parnassian ballades to the distinct, highly charged poetic composition and circulation histories of industrial workplace writing, hymns, and parlor-game sonnets; from long-canonical authors reconceived (Christina Rossetti as a poet of rhymes, silences, and motherhood, of ‘contingent lyrics,’ and of sonnet-contest entries; Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold as canny practitioners of doggerel; William Barnes as pastoral and ‘pastor poet’), to emerging writers, reoriented (Eliza Hamilton Dunlop as Australian colonial elegist), this exhilarating collection opens up crucial glimpses into the widely and even wildly disparate historical and theoretical practices of Victorian poetic studies in our time. With its revelatory showcasing of the forms and forces of ‘mere verse,’ this is a volume to relish and debate.” —Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita, University of Georgia “While Victorian Verse addresses major poets, particularly Christina Rossetti, it also shows how verse punctuated factory life, occupied physical space, filled periodicals, and wove into worship. Verse offered aesthetic pleasure, performative play, and parodic delight, but also a way to mark moments of historical significance.

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life successfully gives readers a stirring new sense of a heretofore underestimated genre, and anyone who cares about Victorian daily life will find revelatory ideas in this collection.” —Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, City University of New York, Queens College and Graduate Center

Lee Behlman  •  Olivia Loksing Moy Editors

Victorian Verse The Poetics of Everyday Life

Editors Lee Behlman Montclair State University Montclair, NJ, USA

Olivia Loksing Moy City University of New York New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-29695-6    ISBN 978-3-031-29696-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image is from Illustrated Police News (“A Novel Singing Competition--Odds on the Pig,” 25 July 1896) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

In its early stages this volume was produced in collaboration with Dr. Adam Mazel, now of Indiana University Bloomington. We thank him for his important contributions to its conception and development. We are grateful to the following colleagues for their advice and encouragement: Jon Greenberg, Amy Kahrmann Huseby, Simon Reader, Talia Schaffer, Laura Stevens, and Tyson Stolte. Special thanks to the other members of the Victorian Poetry Writing Group: Melissa Valiska Gregory, Emily Harrington, and Casie LeGette. We thank Francis Paul Merencillo for his meticulous indexing work, and Vanessa Arce for her librarian’s touch in helping to procure our precious cover image. This volume is dedicated to our contributors, with our deepest thanks for their patience and fortitude, and to Elinor Behlman, with much love.

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About This Book

Victorian Verse presents new scholarship that recognizes Victorian poetry for what it was: a mass cultural phenomenon that included authors from across the social spectrum, encompassing a wide range of writing, publishing, reading, and listening practices. Victorian poetry entered most readers’ daily lives—not as a set of single-author volumes by canonical authors—but in its less elevated incarnation as verse, which they encountered in such publications as British and colonial daily newspapers, weekly comic magazines such as Punch and Fun, monthly shilling magazines such as The Cornhill, nursery rhyme collections, and hymnals. Victorian verse was a nearly unavoidable part of everyday social life, too. It was heard as much as it was read—at factory picnics and other events, at public speeches, at bedsides, during home parlor games such as sonnet-writing contests, in the schoolroom, in church pews, and at gravesites. The authors in this collection treat such common verse types as light and comic verse, dialect verse, factory verse, colonial verse, nursery rhymes, and hymns, as well as imported forms such as rondeaus and ballades. By advocating for Victorian verse studies, this collection advances the critical conversation in several important areas in Victorian studies, including scholarship on poetry and material culture, periodical history, meter and Historical Poetics, workingclass literature, religion and literature, and children’s literature.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Defining Victorian Verse  1 Lee Behlman and Olivia Loksing Moy 2 The  Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was 21 Herbert F. Tucker 3 Filler  Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry 41 Alison Chapman 4 Workplace  Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker 63 Kirstie Blair 5 Contingent  Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems 83 Elizabeth K. Helsinger 6 Exile  and Elegy: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Colonial Verse103 Anna Johnston

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7 William  Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling123 Annmarie Drury 8 “Of  China That’s Ancient and Blue”: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form143 Justin A. Sider 9 Anti-Elitist  Elitist Verse: Comic Ballades, Rondeaus &c. in Punch and Fun161 Linda K. Hughes 10 “Visions,  half-visions, guesses and darknesses…”: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle183 Kiera Allison 11 Silence,  Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song207 Veronica Alfano 12 Nineteenth-Century  Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: “Leafiness” and Bits of Rhyme229 Olivia Loksing Moy 13 “Hymns  That Have Helped”: Hymnody as Lived Verse for the Victorian Public253 Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Index279

Notes on Contributors

Veronica Alfano  is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Andrew Stauffer, she is co-editor of the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies; with Lee O’Brien, she edited a special issue of Victorian Poetry on the topic of “Gender and Genre.” She leads the Poetry Caucus of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Kiera Allison  is Assistant Professor of Management Communication at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century poetics, rhythm, and sound studies, and has appeared in Victorian Poetry and Journal of British Studies. She is currently developing a monograph on voice-based approaches to college writing pedagogy. Lee  Behlman  is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Montclair State University. He co-edited the collection Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2016) with Anne Longmuir, and has published articles on Victorian classicism, nineteenth-­ century motherhood, and light verse in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Kirstie Blair  is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Her most recent monograph, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (OUP, 2019), won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. From 2018 to 2022 she led the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project xi

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“Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace.” She has published two other OUP monographs and multiple articles on Victorian poetry and working-class literary cultures in the long nineteenth century, with recent pieces in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Journal of Victorian Culture. Alison  Chapman  is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her publications include Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870 (2015), A Rossetti Family Chronology (2007, co-authored with Joanna Meacock), and The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000), as well as the co-edited volumes Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (2003) and A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002). She is the Project Investigator and editor for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councilfunded Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (https://dvpp.uvic. ca/)  and also at work on editing a forthcoming collection of essays for Cambridge University Press on the literary 1870s. Alisa  Clapp-Itnyre  is Professor of English at Indiana University East, Richmond, Indiana. She is the author of Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio UP, 2002), and is co-editor, with Julie Melnyk, of “Perplext in Faith:” Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). She has articles published in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Victorians, Brontë Studies, The Hymn, and the forthcoming Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (ed. Weliver and Ellis). She runs the academic website of children’s hymn-singing at www.soundingchildhood.org Annmarie  Drury  is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New  York. She is the author of Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which received the Sonya Rudikoff Award for a best first book in Victorian Studies. She is working on a book about listening and sound in Victorian poetry and culture. Elizabeth  K.  Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English Literature and Art History Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her books include Ruskin and the Art of the

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Beholder (1982), Rural Scenes and National Representation, Britain 1815–1850 (1997), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts (2008), Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015), and Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (2022). Linda K. Hughes,  Addie Levy Professor of Literature, Texas Christian University, specializes in historical media studies (poetry, periodicals, serial fiction); gender and women’s studies; and transnationality, including transatlanticism. Her monograph Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, June 2022) includes attention to poetry in chapters on Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Michael Field, and Amy Levy. Linda is also co-editor, with Sarah R.  Robbins and Andrew Taylor, of Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures 1776–1920: An Anthology (Edinburgh University Press, March 2022), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (2019). Anna Johnston  is Professor of Literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, with wide-ranging interests in colonial writing and its aftermath. Her books include Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge 2003), Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (coedited with Elizabeth Webby, Sydney University Press 2021), and The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press 2023). Olivia  Loksing  Moy is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, Lehman College. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and has published widely on Romantic and Victorian poetry, the Gothic, and comparative and world literatures. With Marco Ramírez, she is co-editor and co-translator of Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats. Moy is director of The CUNY Rare Book Scholars and serves as a volume lead for the Michael Field Diaries Project. Justin A. Sider  is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address (2018). Herbert F. Tucker  holds the John C. Coleman Chair in English at the University of Virginia, where he works editorially on New Literary History and the Victorian series of the University Press. He has authored several

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books (Browning, Tennyson, the Romantic and Victorian epic), edited several collections, and published numerous reviews and essays, latterly on such topics as the poetry of Charles Kingsley, the utility of beauty during the nineteenth century, and Victorian love charms. His website For Better for Verse offers interactive tutorials in the scansion of traditionally metered poetry.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

E. Matheson. “Verse.” Chambers’s Journal, 8 October 1898, 720. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada47 Unsigned. “To My Two-Wheeled Steed.” Chambers’s Journal, 4 June 1870, 368. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada 53 Jessie C. Howden. Long Ago. Chambers’s Journal, 2 February 1878, 80. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada 58 Title page for XXXII Ballades in Blue China (1883) 153 “The Partiality of Fortune,” Fun, 24 October 1877 164 The French “patriot soul,” Punch, 16 September 1882 170 “Just as I Am”: text by Charlotte Elliott, tune by W. Blow. From Golden Bells (1899); 1925 edition, from the author’s collection268 1880s American Needlepoint of Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” verse 3. Stitched by Agnes Hea Courtis (1847–1930), owned by Annie Elizabeth Courtis Baird, her daughter, and then Karen Baird Clapp, her great-granddaughter and mother of the author. Used with her permission 270

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List of Tables

Table 13.1 Table 13.2

25 top-ranked hymns by over 3400 people in an 1887 survey conducted by Sunday at Home257 25 most frequently appearing hymns in nineteenth-century children’s hymn books 265

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Defining Victorian Verse Lee Behlman and Olivia Loksing Moy

This volume constitutes an invitation to expand the study of Victorian verse, recognizing the value of verse as a critical concept flexible enough to manage the Victorian period’s extraordinarily diverse range of metrical literary production. Our contributors map out an array of verse genres, audiences, publication contexts, and critical vantage points, and collectively the story they tell is that verse was an essential part of the landscape of everyday life, spanning low, middling, and elevated forms and reading publics. Among the sometimes surprising media forms in which verse was embedded include parlor games, public dedications, gift books, letters, comic magazines, broadsides, daily newspapers, monthly shilling magazines, the parliamentary record, and even works of prose history. This unavoidably lived poetics was encountered in physical locations such as omnibus sidings, nurseries, churches and chapels, public  speakers’ platforms, and middle-class sitting rooms.

L. Behlman (*) Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] O. L. Moy City University of New York, Lehman College, Bronx, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_1

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As we will discuss below, a key value of verse lies in a quality for which it has often been dismissed: its fleeting nature, its grounding in the tenuous present tense and in ephemeral cultural objects. Victorian verse came, had its moment, and off it went to the proverbial dustbin, but as our contributors demonstrate, with improved online research tools, collaborative databases, and new critical lenses, it can return to us and help us understand the period anew. Because Victorian verse was largely caught up in the historical present, it did not bear the centuries-old weight of aesthetic expectations that poetry carried with it, and so its ubiquity then stands in stark contrast to its common critical invisibility now. By recovering the lost diversity of verse types, our contributors not only provide a more equal survey of Victorian writing and reading practices, they also show how these seemingly minor forms possessed crucial social functions for the Victorians in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities.

Verse and Poetry Even when characterized as “light,” verse has long been understood to be the dimmer, lesser sibling to the imaginative incandescence of poetry. In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, Daniel Karlin writes, after alluding to some gazette verses of “astounding vulgarity and incompetence,” that “I dwell on such poetry not just because it is enjoyably bad, but because it raises questions about what a period anthology should set out to do … It is arguable that the poetry of the commonplace, of received ideas and derivative language, of conventional religious and ethical sentiment … is indeed representative of what the Victorians wrote and read, just as it would be, mutatis mutandis, of the writing and reading of other periods, including our own.”1 At times, Victorian versifiers themselves will own up to verse’s inferiority, its occasional quality, its superfluity. For some of our contributors, verse is valuable in part because it calls attention to its own formal and conceptual constraints—indulging in clichés, perpetuating generic predictability, and lacking the escape velocity promised by poetic transport. As Herbert F. Tucker writes in his chapter

 Karlin, Daniel (1997). The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, 4.

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below, “mere verse is what we call a poem that has not escaped its dependency on the formal verse medium. Such a poem comes most clearly into its own when frankly conceding that dependency … and announcing as its very purpose the deed of inscription that poetry with higher aims tends to occlude or sublimate.” In Missing Measures (1990), Timothy Steele describes the profound critical impact that the notional verse-poetry distinction has had on poetry since the early twentieth century. Key modernist figures such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford used this distinction to justify their own sharp break from the metrical schemas that had dominated English poetry for centuries and their shift to the now-dominant-free verse form. These writers set mere verse, or “metrically competent writing which lacks poetic fire,” against poetry, defined broadly as “inspired composition,” including “any writing independent of conventional rules of versification.”2 As a result, Steele notes, “an unusual thing happens in the modern period. The commonplace that poetry is something more than meter is transformed into the idea that poetry is something other than meter.”3 Previous poetic innovators such as William Wordsworth and even Gerard Manley Hopkins sought to rework the language of poetry, but they did not set themselves against meter itself, however idiosyncratic Hopkins’s own use of it was. In our own time, the publication of new metered verse is thus often received by audiences as demonstrative of a merely technical proficiency—a creditable but shopworn skill like riding a unicycle—rather than a fresh artistic practice. The modern understanding of poetry as an art form driven by innovation and imaginative power can be traced back at least as far as the mid-­ seventeenth century’s rediscovery of Longinus’s On the Sublime (first century C.E.), a development that portended the Romantic turn from the long-dominant Aristotelian conception of poetry as imitation. By the eighteenth century, with newly developed Romantic theories of art, poetic criticism came to value such qualities as the expression of passion, musicality, and organic growth.4 For later critics, foundational early statements for

 Steele, Missing Measures, 10.  Ibid. 4  Steele, Missing Measures, 150. 2 3

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this Romantic reconception of poetry include such works as Sir William Jones’s “Essay on the Arts Called Imitative” (1772), G.  W. F.  Hegel’s Aesthetics (1820s and 1830s), and John Stuart Mill’s “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833).5

Verse and Lyric It’s clear to us that the verse-poetry divide of the past two hundred years is best understood as resulting from the instantiation of lyric as the quintessential poetic genre, a process begun in the 1820s and 1830s and then codified by a host of twentieth-century Anglo-American critics. Jonathan Culler notes that lyric poetry was finally made one of three fundamental genres during the romantic period, when a more vigorous conception of the individual subject made it possible to conceive of lyric as mimetic: mimetic of the experience of the subject. Distinguished by its mode of enunciation, where the poet speaks in propria persona, lyric becomes the subjective form…. The lyric poet absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity.6

The lyric in this view is not just a subjective form but also an inherently dramatic one, centering a potentially fictive speaking “I” as the lead actor in the poem, whose monologic discourse can be subjected to close reading by New Critics and their followers. In Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005), she makes a compelling case that the post-Romantic establishment of lyric as the default poetic genre, as the beating metaphysical heart of poetry itself, has been a fundamentally dehistoricizing gesture, and it has come at a sharp critical cost: “the object 5  On Jones, see Abrams, “The Lyric as Poetic Norm,” in Jackson and Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, p. 142–143; on Hegel, see ibid., p. 3; on the pervasive use and misuse of Mill’s essay in nineteenth-century poetry scholarship, see Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, p. 3. As Steele argues, though, in broad terms the association of poetry with inspired expression has been transhistorical: “the verse-poetry distinction incorporates a feeling that many readers of different eras and tastes have shared. Fine poetry involves something much more than technical expertise. It involves a richness of feeling, a startling justness of perception, or an impressive exposition of incident or idea. In contrasting verse and poetry, modern critics are partly voicing sentiments that earlier critics have expressed in different ways and terms” (110). 6  Victorian Jackson and Yopie Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, 66.

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that the lyric has become is by now identified with an expressive theory that makes it difficult for us to place lyrics back into the sort of developmental history—of social relations, of print, of edition, reception, and criticism—that is taken for granted in definitions of the novel.”7 The novel has a history, while poetry-as-lyric assumes a dramatic, symptomatic, transhistorical voice that students and instructors explore together in classrooms to this day. This flattening effect of the lyric extends to its audience as well. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has suggested, the audience of the “lyric I” is an anonymous fictional being that is “historically indeterminate”: “A fictional person of all times and all places, the first-person speaker of the lyric could speak to no one in particular and thus to all of us.”8 In 1985, Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker collected essays by Northrop Frye, Jonathan Culler, Paul De Man, John Hollander, Mary Jacobus, Herbert F.  Tucker, and Jonathan Arac, among others, in an effort to collectively extend the reach and power of lyric studies beyond traditional close reading approaches. Lyric Theory: Beyond New Criticism includes examples of lyric analysis from structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and reader-response perspectives. Thirty years later, in their general introduction to the important 2014 collection The Lyric Theory Reader, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins draw from genre critics such as I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, M. H. Abrams, Ralph Cohen, and Fredric Jameson to describe the enshrinement of lyric studies in English departments since the mid-twentieth century. As they summarize at one point, Over a century after Mill and Hegel, the self-absorption of the lyric poet ceased to be a utopian horizon or a problem to be metaphorically solved and was assumed as a normative practice … Thus what began in the nineteenth century as an aspiration became in the twentieth century a real genre— indeed, became not only the genre to which poetry aspired but the genre so identified with poetry that poetry became another name for it.9 7  Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 10. In his essay “Lyric, History, and Genre” (2009) and in his book Theory of the Lyric (2015), Jonathan Culler offers critiques of Jackson’s history-­ centered view of the lyric as genre, countering that genres like the lyric “are always historical yet based on some sort of theoretic rationale”; for Culler, understanding them as both makes them “more defensible as critical categories, essential to the understanding both of literature as a social institution and of the individual works that take on meaning through their relations to generic categories” (Jackson and Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, 64). 8  Quoted in Jackson and Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, 5. 9  Ibid., 4.

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Jackson and Prins go on to note that much nineteenth-century poetry, especially popular verse such as the Corn-Law Ballads, could never meet J. S. Mill’s lyricized definition of poetry as “utterance overheard,” because “such verse directly addressed its readers.”10 Mill’s description of his antithesis to poetry, mere eloquence, serves well to characterize much of the nineteenth-century verse production this volume draws its attention to: “Eloquence is feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.”11 The lyric emphasis in poetry studies continues to dominate the field. This is evident at nineteenth-century literature conferences to this day, where the terms “poem” and “lyric” are often used interchangeably, and “verse,” when it appears, is often recruited as a synonym to prevent repetition or even to denote a work’s relative inferiority. Our collection on Victorian verse imagines an anthology that would gladly welcome works like the Corn-Law Ballads, just as our emphasis on all that is not restrictively lyrical and canonical posits a space to further cultivate and centralize important work that has vitalized Victorian poetry studies for some time now: the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (www.RS4VP.org); Kirstie Blair’s momentous work on working-class poetry in Scotland and beyond, including Blair’s and others’ Piston, Pen, & Press website on factory poetry (www.pistonpenandpress.org/poetry-­ anthologies/); Florence Boos’s Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain (2008) anthology; Mike Sanders’s scholarship on Chartist poetry  in The Poetry of Chartism  (2011); Linda K.  Hughes’s historical media studies scholarship on poetry in periodicals; Alison Chapman’s Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry website (https://dvpp.uvic.ca/); Herbert F. Tucker’s pedagogical website on meter, “For Better for Verse” (https://prosody.lib.virginia.edu); and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre’s (2017) database of children’s hymns (www.soundingchildhood.org). Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life builds on Jackson and Prins’s critique of the critical “super-sizing” of the lyric,12 as well as recent scholarship on non-lyric nineteenth-century forms such as the ballad, to make the case for verse studies.13 Verse studies complements the project of  Ibid., 3.  Mill, “What Is Poetry,” 1216. 12  Ibid., 5. 13  See, for example, the September 2016 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature on the ballad, edited by Michael C.  Cohen, and the Winter 2016 special issue of Victorian Poetry, also on the ballad, edited by Letitia Henville. 10 11

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Historical Poetics developed by Jackson, Prins, Meredith Martin, Jason Rudy, Meredith McGill, Carolyn Williams, and others by centering the material and historical circumstances of these works’ generation, publication, and reception.14 To choose verse over a lyricized poetry as our key term may appear perverse, for doing so risks perpetuating the very verse-­poetry divide that this volume means to challenge. But it’s our sense that centralizing the subordinate term verse  will provide, at least in the short and medium terms, a salutary corrective to what has been until recently an ongoing critical reluctance to engage with the vast proportion of poetic output in the nineteenth century. Such an approach offers a way to counter critical tendencies that have long narrowed our curricula and our scholarly practices.

Peopling Victorian Verse In undertaking the task of centering verse, our contributors understand verse by virtue of a number of related factors: its intended audiences— children, ordinary parishioners, factory workers, and provincial yeomen rather than just an educated elite; its register or tone—comic and playful, childlike, and even silly, more often than serious or profound; and its medium—hymnals, nursery rhyme collections, comic magazines, public declamations, and daily newspapers rather than single-author volumes of poetry. Even works in a serious elegiac register—verses immortalizing a lost child, for example—take on the characteristics of verse when they occur in the medium and under the formal expectations of a nursery rhyme collection. Formally ambitious works like rondeaus and ballades may also be understood to be verse when they are delivered in a comically self-referential register and within the pages of a humor magazine. Verse presumes not Mill’s silent auditor but an active, diverse set of speakers and audiences, and its study holds promise for Victorian studies at a moment when we are seeking more capacious understandings of the era’s full range of literary production and consumption—across class boundaries, both in colonial settings and in the metropole. If New Criticism’s focus on the lyric in the mid-twentieth-century placed Victorian poetry front-and-center as an object of study for middle-class students, reading Victorian verse promises to draw current students from all backgrounds to read and reimagine our field of study, peopling the Victorian  See the Historical Poetics website, https://www.historicalpoetics.com/.

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period through verse studies. The lyric’s transhistorical status thus gives way to the historically embedded worlds of domestic seamstresses and needlepointers, factory workers, and the first- and second-hand audiences of Punch magazine. The spaces of verse consumption include the factory, open fields, churches, parlor rooms, the schoolhouse, gentlemen’s clubs, girls’ birthday parties, sewing circles, and a readership of colonial and indigenous inhabitants across the British empire, from Ireland to Myall Creek, Australia. This commitment to repeopling Victorian poetry through the study of verse requires us not only to ask who wrote it and read it but also how they read it and how they engaged in forms of “nonreading”15—that is, memorizing, reciting, imitating, and even mocking verse.

Three Critical Reference Points for Verse Studies In additional to the critical work discussed above, there have been three important developments in nineteenth-century literature scholarship that have influenced our conception of verse studies and that have helped set the stage for our contributors’ innovative new approaches. These include recent  work on the social functions of poetry in the U.S., on marginal reading publics in Britain and the empire, and on the crucial periodical context for Victorian verse production. Michael C.  Cohen’s book The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-­ Century America (2015) demonstrates that verse was something to be used by the public in a range of behaviors not addressed by traditional literary scholarship. Informed by recent work on the history of the book, Cohen details several forms of “nonreading” in nineteenth-century America, “from ignoring, forgetting, and suppressing to copying, transcribing, reciting, memorizing, collecting, exchanging, and mimicking.”16 Cohen draws attention to consumption (and for that matter, rejection) practices not limited to reading, ones which until recently were invisible to history. He provides scholars with a means of mapping the social relations made possible by Victorian verse, of “explor[ing] the encounters between nineteenth-century people and their poems.”17 Our contributors, in turn, do many different things with Victorian verse beyond subjecting it to  Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems, 1.  Ibid. 17  Ibid. 15 16

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traditional literary analysis, including compiling works of verse in databases, describing their publication contexts, and juxtaposing them with relevant images—even locating the cadences of verse within prose. Cohen’s emphasis on “a shared [American] poetic culture characterized by a heady delight in the cheap, the sensational, the timely, and the lurid” finds its equivalent across the Atlantic, and his celebration of such pungent textual qualities is an inspiration for us.18 Where our contributors differ implicitly from Cohen is that they do not exclude close reading as a valid approach toward popular verse, nor do they generally concede that verse necessarily has a “vexed connection to literariness,” both for us and their nineteenth-­ century audiences.19 While Cohen argues that a “large majority of nineteenth-­century poems seem unable to hold up to the rigors” of “interpretive scrutiny,” most of our contributors discuss works of Victorian verse that reward such attention—and indeed, they frequently summon our admiration for the aesthetic and formal features of these texts.20 Jason Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) provides another useful critical framework for verse studies with his notion of “poetry everywhere.” Even as our collection seeks to “people” Victorian poetry through an emphasis on verse, accounting for the wide range of people who created, transmitted, and engaged with Victorian verse in more historically accurate ways, Rudy reminds us of the dangers of failing to pay heed to the full scope of those publics. To make redress for the marginality of verse (as compared to poetry) in Victorian studies requires that we attend to the archive of colonized voices that we have often left unexplored. Rudy takes care to emphasize popular poetry’s cultural centrality: as he notes, “[t]here could be no genre more interwoven with the everyday lives of nineteenth-century British individuals,” for it “was built into the lives of British citizens both at home in the United Kingdom and abroad.”21 But despite this ubiquity, his scholarship reminds us that Victorian colonial and indigenous writing, and verse especially, suffered scholarly neglect and invisibility for years. The marginality of form thus overlapped with that of minority identities. This work, he notes, has “historically been understood as second-rate, leaving a vast and diverse body of colonial literature largely unexamined, general misunderstood,  Ibid., 22.  Ibid., 2. 20  Ibid., 7. 21  Rudy, Imagined Homelands, 14. 18 19

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and absent from historical accounts … Both the tone and function of colonial poetry have tended to read local verse cultures as necessarily unsophisticated. From this perspective, colonial culture takes the guise of a reproduced, lesser version of British culture.”22 In her chapter in this volume, Anna Johnston attends, like Rudy, to intersecting presumptions about race, ethnicity, gender, and genre, revealing, like other contributors, that marginality is a complex experience of multiple minor identities and overlapping dispossessions. The ahistoricism of the lyric “I” functions, like empire, to erase non-standard voices, and both share a racial logic that devalues forms of writing along with peoples. Victorian poetry studies remains quite limited in its coverage of indigenous and diasporic voices, and we hope that theorizing new approaches to develop verse studies will make for more hospitable and fertile grounds for such scholarship, helping to decenter the framework that has long upheld and vindicated “canonical” lyric poems. A final critical resource that underlies our advocacy for verse studies is the scholarship of the past few decades on the nineteenth-century periodical context for Victorian verse. Key contributions in this field have been made by our contributors Linda K.  Hughes, Kirstie Blair, and Alison Chapman, and they and others further this legacy in this volume. As Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski have noted, “around 4 million poems were published in  local newspapers” alone in the Victorian period.23 In Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical (2018), Caley Ehnes describes the gradual transition during the period away from increasingly unpopular single-author poetry volumes and toward publication in annuals, literary journals, local newspapers, working-class publications, and a variety of other periodical forms.24 Even as verse studies promises to decenter traditional notions of lyric subjectivity and middle-­ class reading audiences, it follows the work of periodical scholars in decentering the book as our object of study. Verse studies should, in turn, follow Mark W.  Turner’s advice for periodical scholars to turn against “the smash-and-grab approach” to using periodical materials, resisting “the intellectual limitations of going  Ibid., 4.  Cited in Ehnes, Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, 2. 24  Ehnes writes, “[b]y the early decades of the nineteenth century, consumers were no longer buying volumes of original poetry by a single author. As a consequence, publishers were no longer willing to risk publishing single-author poetry volumes” (1). 22 23

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to a title, pulling out a specific contribution from it, and using it in isolation from any discussion about its periodical source.” He adds that this type of “mining willfully neglects the ways that a single text is part of a wider, more complicated media and communications network of literary, and often visual texts.” Instead, we should take full account of “the periodical-­ ness of periodicals,” and indeed, many of our contributors follow this approach in reading verse against and alongside their periodical contexts.25 As many of the volume’s chapters demonstrate, an appreciation for the full array of verse documents also lends increased critical weight and ­permanence to what were previously understood to be merely ephemeral cultural productions, profoundly altering the idea of what Victorian texts we deem valuable and worthy of study. Attention to verse even reframes our understanding of canonical Victorian authors, such as Thomas Carlyle, whose innovative prose style, as contributor Kiera Allison demonstrates, was indebted to verse forms. In considering  the massive scope of Victorian periodical publication, verse studies also tarries with the everyday. Victorian lives were saturated in verse, not just via daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications, but at factory events, public holidays, church services, and in the nursery. There was no getting around it. As our contributors demonstrate, even the relatively rarified world of fashionable “light” verse could be embedded in up-to-the-moment debates about literary forms newly imported from France, including rondeaus, ballades, and bouts-rimés. As Lee Behlman has written elsewhere, light verse “dwelled in a conceptual middle ground defined by balance and detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical … This is lightness understood both in gravitational and visual terms; light verse lacks the dark ballast of the ostensibly pervasive sentimentality and portentuousness to be found elsewhere in Victorian poetry.”26 Adam Mazel’s notable  study of Cambridge verse has shown how the ostensibly “sophomoric” rhyme play of young men at Cambridge allowed them to claim status as members of a cultivated social elite.27 Such examples of Victorian verse doing cultural work and promising social mobility are echoed in volume contributions by Blair and Moy, among others, though in differing working- or middle-class contexts.

 Turner, “Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies,” 310.  Behlman, “The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Societé,” 478. 27  Mazel, “The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge.” 25 26

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Victorian verse was by its very nature topical, occasional, referential, and otherwise locked into the present. And because the everyday is the often-overlooked substrate of human experience, it is, as Joe Moran has observed, “a kind of remainder which evades conventional definitions of knowledge.”28 As such, it presents a challenge to our historical imagination and to our usual modes of analysis, one which our contributors have in several ways expressly met.

Chapter Summaries The following chapters each tackle different facets of verse production, particularly those of audience, practice, and palpability. For whom was verse composed? The auditors of Victorian verse included children, parents singing to children, students repeating and reciting, gentlemen competing against one another, workers seeking to impress their employers, and mourners. Concepts of practice and performance also bear special weight in verse studies. Our contributors sometimes describe verse as a mode of training and rehearsal—that is, as a practice run or process that can be viewed as an object of study in its own right, separate from the final product. We see this with essayists in training, poets in training, gentlemen club’s members, and sonnet-writing competitors. Finally, our contributors describe how the non-literary locations and materiality of verse are seminal to understanding its palpability, portability, and circulation. Where is verse found and where does it move? Many of the chapters below identify verse through the idea of the material substrate: transcribed onto a sampler, a plaque, a pedestal; etched onto a headboard; or sewn into a pattern. To study verse carefully is to pay attention to the physical medium of where verse lived in Victorian life, including textual media not made of paper or recycled rags. In Chap. 2, “The Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was,” Herbert F. Tucker revisits the centuries-old verse-poetry distinction with characteristic brio, in readings of works by William Morris, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Rather than seek to discard this largely Romantic-­ era artifact, he inspects the conceptual undercarriage of the debate to determine what parts of it remain functional and what needs repairing. As he suggests, even if we accept an essential difference in aesthetic quality  Moran, Reading the Everyday, 8.

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between verse and poetry, there are more interesting questions to consider, including whether verse as commonly understood “makes too little of formal parameters, or too much? Does verse underwhelm us by cheapening its given form with banal topics or does it compensatorily overcharge its form and tumble into bathos?” If verse remains lashed to its medium while poetry transcends it, verse deserves our respect precisely because it makes us fully attend to form itself, “deflecting attention from message to medium.” In Chap. 3, “Filler Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry,” Alison Chapman looks to serial print and defines the category of “filler poems,” establishing this type of opportunistically deployed periodical poetry as a valid literary form. Filler poems were usually very short works that served to fill up column space at the ends of articles in a range of publications. Though it was often dismissed as “diminutive” and “second-rate,” filler poetry was also pervasive and thus collectively enormous in scale. It was, on the one side, characterized by brevity and narrative constriction, and on the other, by ubiquity. Looking to their print locations and listening for their repetitive rhythms, Chapman reads filler poems as functioning both as “a diminutive aside” and as a “prevalent essential”: they are “the glue that hold the collaborative miscellaneity of serial print together.” Chapman’s resourceful reading of filler poems amounts to a “manifesto for minor poetry’s value in its derivative, simple, and lowly forms and themes, based on truth and affect.” In Chap. 4, “Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker,” Kirstie Blair addresses the songs, published verse, and public recitations of Victorian-era factory workers. Blair identifies a substantial body of occasional factory verse, including works saluting employers and marking factory excursions. A factory “bard” would document key events, entertain workers, and model worker behavior and loyalty, hence increasing productivity. Drawing on her prodigious research on Scottish and Northern English industrial workers, Blair reads workplace verse as itself a form of labor. She recognizes poetry writing as a transferable industrial skill, a sign of employability, and an asset for career advancement among workers. This glimpse into sociality at the workplace conjures the intersection of play in the form of light entertainment and work. And though these workers were not directly paid for their verse, the stakes of their creative labor were high, often promising the difference between employment and unemployment, housing and homelessness, comfort and hardship. As Blair demonstrates, workplace dynamics were complicated by the

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involvement of “paternalistic Victorian industrialists” who commissioned works or set up readings at reading rooms, sporting clubs, or theatrical groups. Such complications of defining labor and leisure in this capitalistic framework of industrial Scotland and England reminds us, ultimately, of “the ways in which poetry is also work.” In Chap. 5, “Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems,” Elizabeth Helsinger begins by asking whether there is a substantive difference between the volumes Rossetti titled “Poems” in the middle of her career and those she titled “Verses” at its beginning and end. As marketing devices, the “Verses” collections signaled to Rossetti’s readers two distinct strategies: first, Rossetti as a “young Victorian girl” sought to avoid being seen “as unacceptably seeking the public eye”; second, the mature Rossetti sought to publicly subordinate her poetic skills to the religious truths her work was meant to demonstrate. But as Helsinger shows, when individual works in Rossetti’s “Poems” and “Verses” collections are examined closely, this distinction collapses. Instead, all of these works are more suitably understood as “lyrics” that subtly undermine the generic expectations commonly associated with that form, as Rossetti’s are both deeply embedded in contextual relations with earlier literature and playfully resistant to those influences. In this contingent quality, Helsinger locates qualities of exceptional freedom, innovation, and mystery. The lyrics that appear in Rossetti’s Maude (published posthumously in 1897) and Sing Song (1872) in particular demonstrate multiple forms of contingency which serve to question “what counts as a (lyric) poem.” Helsinger helps to reshape our understanding of the classificatory schemes often used to define such terms as “lyric” and “verse,” and by so doing extends the critique of lyrical studies initiated by Virginia Jackson. In Chap. 6, “Exile and Elegy: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Colonial Verse,” Anna Johnston explores the work of an important figure who was under-studied until the 1990s, when feminist scholars rediscovered neglected colonial women writers. Dunlop, who emigrated from Northern Ireland to Australia in 1838, wrote “The Aboriginal Mother” (1838), a work now included in major international anthologies, and almost one hundred other poems that first appeared  in Australian colonial newspapers. “The Aboriginal Mother” was a response to the Myall Creek massacre, the most notorious attack on indigenous people by Australian colonists of the time. This and other poems by Dunlop take up exile and colonial Australian culture, including indigenous themes, and they provide sketches of a diasporic family and literary community. Dunlop was already a

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published writer, with verse on various light topics appearing in Irish and Indian magazines inflected by the diasporic Anglo-Irish culture facilitated by the nineteenth-century British empire. Johnston thus addresses the trans-national or trans-colonial world of English verse forms—contentious because these writers wrote from within “an Anglophone culture [and sought to] construct civilised society in remote antipodean climes.” Focusing on the elegiac mode in Dunlop’s verse, she shows how colonial verse enabled privileged settlers to negotiate manners and mores in a dual conversation with emergent colonial society and the broader British world. Elegy proved a versatile form through which Dunlop mapped colonial society, evaluated the morality of colonization, and explored the affective and political economies of emigration. In Chap. 7, “William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling,” Annmarie Drury argues that we should view Barnes not just as a “pastoral poet” but also as a “pastor-poet,” taking into much fuller account Barnes’s vocational mission as an Anglican minister and how it informs his dialect poetry in Dorset English. In resourceful readings of Barnes’s often fragmentary sermons and his verse, Drury identifies Barnes’s dual artistic and Anglican vocations as “two sides of a complex endeavor centered in communicating, and communicating about, emotional experience.” Using Sara Ahmed’s work on affect as a reference point, Drury describes how Barnes’s poems and the sermons serve to “manage” the emotions of his Dorset community, with both types of writing offering a phenomenology of feelings. By exploring such characteristic Barnesian rhetorical gestures as the “‘token’ of love” as well as his gestures of refusal and recalibration, Drury reveals how studying Barnes’s poems and sermons alongside each other “points to an instability in the binary division between ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’ that has become something of a critical commonplace.” In Chap. 8, “‘Of china that’s ancient and blue’: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form,” Justin A. Sider describes how form itself emerges as a figure in the notably restrictive poetics of the late-­ nineteenth-­century English Parnassian poets. Sider centers his discussion on the senior member of this group, the prominent folklorist, editor, translator, and critic Andrew Lang, and his ballades, a verse type imported from France by the earlier Pre-Raphaelite poets. Notably attuned to contradiction and paradox, Sider argues that for Lang, “allegiance to the decorative, the superficial, and formulaic” entices readers to dwell on form itself until it becomes an abstraction, a sign for lyric, and an object of

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desire. These works’ narrow fixation on formal propriety teaches us that the lyric is a “process, or even an aesthetic effect,” and not a fixed product. Our pleasure in the Parnassians’ surface effects derives from their “autoekphrastic” mirroring of their own aesthetic production and circumstances. In Chap. 9, “Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse: Comic Ballades, Rondeaus &c. in Punch and Fun,” Linda K.  Hughes addresses the uses and abuses of imported fixed-form French verse in a different context: the popular weekly comic magazines of the late 1870s and 1880s. Extending her important scholarship on Victorian periodicals, Hughes maps out how Punch and Fun both popularized and satirized ballades, triolets, and villanelles, and with them the aesthetic movement they had become associated with. Punch, she observes, could be “deliberately philistine” in attacking aesthetes as a way of appealing to its middle-class conservative readership, while the “cheaper Fun … tended to be oriented towards distinguishing even the lower rungs of the middle class from the workers below them on the social scale.” For these publications, publishing mock versions of fixed-form verse served to flatter middle-class readers in two ways: first, by suggesting that their readers had the “discernment to appreciate the verses’ craft”; and second, by allowing them to hold themselves above these works’ “pretensions” and those of social others, both high and low. Even Andrew Lang himself, Hughes points out, seems to have been affected by these critiques, as he came to distance himself from fixed-­ form verse. This chapter demonstrates that during its relatively brief period of popularity, fixed-form verse could serve as both a zesty vehicle for comic expression and its own comic target. In Chap. 10, “‘Visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses …’: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle,” Kiera Allison finds in the prose of Thomas Carlyle a fuller range of metrical freedom and vitality than in his “dull verse.” By turning to an author more highly regarded for his prose than poetry, Allison shows how Carlyle’s historical writings train the reader to discover formal invention in irregular shapes. In particular, these shapes are more suitably characteristic of verse like that of Robert Burns, which is not “poetry” but rather “rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense.” Drawing on Carlyle’s background in mathematics, Allison locates Carlyle’s use of meter in the elevated, “volatized sense in which the Romantics understood the term: not the dead-letter metrics of the classical poets but the living, moving measures of body and breath, the ‘beating’

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and ‘thrashing’ of the poetic heart and brain.”29 Situating her discussion of verse and the poetical in a broader historical context, metrification—the standardization of weights of measures, and the adoption of a decimal time and currency—overlaps with the years of the new French Republic and the Reign of Terror. These “measures and immeasures” that course through Carlyle’s history show the author “quiet[ly] repurposing verse for a grander scheme of historical and narrative work through his essays and novels.” Allison shows how Carlyle’s metrical experiments in prose were key to building a literary vision that encompassed prophecy, religion, social commentary, and history, all under what G. B. Tennyson called “the generous rubric of poetry.” In Chap. 11, “Silence, Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,” Veronica Alfano addresses two qualities central to Rossetti’s poetics—her use of brevity and rhyme. As she notes, brevity in particular was often dismissed as a “minor and trivial” quality endemic in verse by Victorian women. In discussing Rossetti’s 1872 nursery rhyme book Sing-­ Song, Alfano defends the poet’s mastery in deploying silence and aural repetition, as well as the implications of these qualities for Rossetti’s understanding of the relationship between mothers and children. Rossetti’s skillful truncations of her stanzas’ final lines point to her speakers’ “exhaustion or baffled unspeakability” in the face of an infant’s death, as well as the challenges inherent in motherhood itself. Just as these “intrapoetic silences” have spiritual import, their “iterative brevity” through rhyme makes them memorable. Rhyme in these lullabies presents a counterpoint to the silences that signal loss, for rhyme reinforces the inescapability of the mother’s memory of loss. At the same time, Alfano notes that both rhyme and silence “can be read more positively,” for rhyme “can associate children with abundant potential, while infantile wordlessness can indicate the purity and potency of the mother–child bond” as well as “faithful imagination and hope.” Rossetti’s brief nursery rhymes present in microcosm the full scope of her career-long concerns. In Chap. 12, “Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: ‘Leafiness’ and Bits of Rhyme,” Olivia Loksing Moy finds value in the repetitious verses born of competitive sonnet-writing contests, as practiced by the Hunt-Keats circle and the Rossetti siblings. Moy designates these “bits of rhyme” as verses made special by virtue of their “leafiness”— materially rough around the edges, often rushed, imperfect, and just good  Carlyle, Past and Present, 133.

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enough not to destroy. Preserved in publications such as Leigh Hunt’s Foliage and Christina Rossetti’s novella Maude, such verses were composed in multiples, often presented as sequences of similar items. From London’s poetry clubs for young men to the fictional sphere of a girl’s birthday party in a Victorian household, these verses may seem unoriginal—at times even interchangeable—but understood collectively, they serve the important function of enacting sociality and marking social difference, individuating one character from another. Attending to the “leafiness” of contest sonnets helps Moy to reframe the discussion of “winners and losers,” moving beyond a world in which print publication measures a poem’s success, showing instead how ephemera, scribal publication, and informal circulation can shed light on how everyday nineteenth-century people used sonnets for experimenting, drafting, rehearsing, skill-­building, practicing, performing, and playing. Endearingly, these verses often merited not laurel crowns but a crown of ferns, bestowed upon one another in celebrations that spurred the creation of yet more poems. Moy thus explores the usefulness of the sonnet in everyday use by pastime writers, treating the sonnet as verse. Such verse sonnets challenge the poetry-verse divide by recasting the Romantic and Victorian sonnet as poems that were composed in community, not in solitude, and as works marked by similitude and play, rather than by solemnity and perfection. In Chap. 13, “‘Hymns that Have Helped’: Hymnody as Lived Verse for the Victorian Public,” Alisa Clapp-Itnyre emphasizes the utility or “helpfulness” of hymns to the Victorian public. Hymns conveyed religious comfort, provided auditory and reading pleasure, and were extraordinarily popular. Clapp-Itnyre tracks this popularity, pointing to the twenty-five top-ranked hymns, as determined by a poll of over 3400 people in an 1887 survey conducted by Sunday at Home, as well as the most frequently appearing hymns in nineteenth-century children’s hymn books. Clapp-­ Itnyre thus essentially offers us a historical “top forty” hit list of Victorian hymns. A close reading of Augustus Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” a hymn often sung by children, reveals how the melody, poetry, and power of hymns served as a daily occasion for confronting pride, sin, and guilt— even in slightly irreverent ways, as a schoolboy’s hymnbook doodles show us. The popularity of hymnody, a category of verse used in everyday living, persists today, though it frequently goes unnoticed, at inaugurations, memorial services, and even sporting events. * * *

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The contributors to this volume teach at institutions across the globe, reading and discussing Victorian verse alongside a broad range of students, many of whom are also workers, artisans, parents, and citizens. Sharpened attention to the makers and shapers of Victorian verse can only strengthen the connection between contemporary students and Victorian studies, a field often construed as distant, unrelatable, or irrelevant. By challenging stereotypes of canonicity—by stretching the canon’s shape and expectations—verse studies can reshape the study of Victorian literature in the classroom, providing welcoming access points to engage colonial and working-class poets, religious versifiers, songwriters, leisure and lay poets, caretakers and children. We hope this collection will fuel new anthologies and scholarship to support more syllabi and reading groups. And while this collection leaves many topics yet uncovered, we hope its publication will encourage further scholarship on non-canonical Anglophone verse from the nineteenth century. Just as the study of lyric has been so painstakingly theorized over the past decades, we hope to provide new modes of interrogation specific to the study of verse. The chapters in this collection offer a collective practical contribution to the poetics community, allowing us to centralize what was for so long left unread or read only through methods and spaces of alterity in contradistinction to the lyric. The fact is that most of the poems composed in the Victorian era were works of Victorian verse. We are grateful to the contributors who, in peopling our understanding of the period, have invited us to recover what may have been lost through our inattention to historical practices of composition, reading, and even non-reading. They remind us, too, to be attentive to the ways that verse continues to be an artifact of everyday life.

References Abrams, M.H. 2014 [1953]. The Lyric as Poetic Norm. In The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, 140–143. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Behlman, Lee. 2018. The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Societé. Victorian Poetry 56 (4): 477–491. Blair, Kirstie (ed.). Piston, Pen & Press, www.pistonpenandpress.org/poetry-­ anthologies/. Accessed October 2022. Boos, Florence. 2008. Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain. Ontario: Broadview Press.

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Carlyle Thomas. 2000 [1843]. Past and Present. New York: New  York University Press. Chapman, Alison (ed.) and the DVPP team. Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry. Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project, Edition 0.98.5beta, University of Victoria. https://dvpp.uvic.ca/index.html. Accessed 14 October 2022. Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. 2017. Sounding Childhood, coll. Phyllis Weliver, http://www. soundingchildhood.org/. Cohen, Michael C. 2015. The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Culler, Jonathan. 2014 [2009]. Lyric, History, and Genre. In The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, 63–76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2015. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ehnes, Caley. 2018. Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hošek, Chaviva, and Patricia Parker, eds. 1985. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jackson, Virginia. 2005. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, eds. 2014. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Karlin, Daniel. 1997. The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. New York: Penguin. Mazel, Adam. 2017. The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge. Nineteenth-Century Literature 72 (3): 374–401. Mill, John Stuart. 1990 [1833]. What Is Poetry. In The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J.  Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, 1212–1220. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. London and New York: Routledge. The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, www.RS4VP.org. Rudy, Jason. 2017. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sanders, Mike. 2011. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History, 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steele, Timothy. 1990. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter. Fayetteville, AK and London: University of Arkansas Press. Tucker, Herbert F. For Better for Verse. https://prosody.lib.virginia.edu. Accessed October 2022. Turner, Mark W. 2006. Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies. Victorian Periodicals Review 39 (4): 309–316.

CHAPTER 2

The Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was Herbert F. Tucker

What is verse? I broach this question partly in homage to one of our editors, whose exemplary essay on “light verse” begins much the same way, and partly in recognition that, with a handful of mainly recent exceptions, the definition of verse has gone far more honored in the breach than the observance.1 Of the half-dozen guidebooks to Victorian literature and poetry that I have consulted, not one puts “verse” in the index, although sporadically “blank verse,” “free verse,” and “verse libre” appear there, as do the generic “verse drama” and “verse novel,” along with correlative generic terms like “sonnet,” “villanelle,” and “ballad,” and a smattering of metrical terms, conspicuously “Sprung Rhythm.” Even “prose” crops up in more than one index where “verse” doesn’t. And in Matthew Bevis’s admirably comprehensive Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, our topic while often in play does not stand among the seven 1

 Behlman, “Light Verse,” 477.

H. F. Tucker (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_2

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keyword articles gathered under “Form” in the first part of the book, but must be gleaned at the very end, in the subtitles for chapters 50 and 51, under cover of an epithet: “Comic Verse,” “Bad Verse.” But verse per se, what do we mean by it? If we were to crank up the differential-logic engine that a young John Stuart Mill applied to the similar question “What is poetry?” it would divide to conquer, by a process of nested classification that established what verse wasn’t.2 It would first axiomatically define verse as one of the language arts, then disclose that verse pertained to the written, not the oral domain of those arts. Next it would show that, within the literate domain, verse was formally distinguished from its historically younger sibling prose by such acoustic markers as meter and rhyme, and such paginal visibilia as stanzaic grouping and unjustified right margins. But then the next step, the one discriminating verse from poetry, would jam up the mill of ratiocination at once, and from much the same cause that, circa 1830, drove the self-medicating young Frankenstein of utilitarianism into the arms of poetry, when he needed an imaginative supplement and emotional corrective to inveterate logic-splitting. All poetry is by definition verse, but any reader except Jeremy Bentham—and even his bracingly irreverent comparison between poetry and the board game push-pin loses traction as it degenerates from mischief into malice—will recognize instances of verse that just don’t merit the name of poetry.3 For there is such a thing as verse that is merely verse. In fact, there’s quite a lot of it, and we think we know it when we see it. If an education in literary taste is asserted each time we do, it’s also the case that our education advances each time we change our minds and decide, as the present chapter hopes to find now and again, that an ostensible run of mere verse turns out to have been poetry after all. Those of us who teach Victorian poetry try to foster such an educational advance within our classrooms, where the very versifiedness of the object under study counts as a fouled strike against it right off the bat. Those who have professed the subject long enough may further attest how faithfully, and with what success, a couple of recent scholarly generations have labored to promote a comparable educational advance within the academy. Among English professors nowadays Victorian poetry needs little or no apology, but it was for decades broadly discounted and seldom taught, thanks in part to its heavy dalliance with verse’s stiffest conventions. Victorian poems were so 2 3

 Mill, Literary Essays, 49–63.  Bentham, Rationale, 206–207.

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relentlessly versed, in fact, that it was easy for the mid-twentieth century to write them off as merely that—verse and nothing more. When is verse not verse? Why, when it’s Poetry.4 Where to disaggregate poetry from the verse it is unquestionably written in is a learned intuition—that is, a function without an operable algorithm—and where to call a verse passage children’s or newspaper or society verse is no tautology but a widely practiced value judgment, then our words may be playing us false; maybe our categories are too. It is tempting to summon Bertrand Russell, Bentham’s heir and Mill’s, and ask whether in wielding the term verse we may not be tangling with a subacute inversion of Russell’s Paradox in set theory.5 For verse, verbally considered, appears to belong in that set of sets which are members of themselves, along with other collective nouns like wood or air that name at once a large category and one or more of its constituent units. (To wit, in the case of verse: the overall medium, as defined above; the lesser subgenres, such as nonsense verse; the individual line, as in a biblical psalm; the grouping of lines into a stanza, as in a song with a refrain.) In truth, the confusion is terminological rather than ontological, and because we have to do with hierarchies of evaluation rather than being, we may leave Russell out of it. Still, raising the analogy to set theory is helpful if it prompts curiosity as to why we should, like Victorian readers, use the same term verse, on the one hand, to denote neutrally an artistic medium and, on the other hand, to demote prejudicially a distinct portion of the work done in that medium. The ambiguity of the term must betray some instability, either in the judgment itself or in the relation between formal means and aesthetic effects on which the judgment is based. When verse takes a modest second seat to genuine poetry’s radiant throne, as across the nineteenth century it distinctly did, is it because the prized item (poetry) transfigures its medium (verse) or transcends it? Does it convert form into something rich and strange, or does it leave the letter behind in order to breathe in a realm where only the spirit giveth life? As for mere verse, is it deemed inferior because it makes too little of formal parameters, or too much? Does verse underwhelm us by cheapening its given form with banal topics or does it compensatorily overcharge its form and tumble into bathos? In any case, 4  The distinction at issue here focusses Steele’s learned third chapter, “The Reverses of Time: The Origin and History of the Distinction between Verse and Poetry”; see especially pp. 109–111 and 149–166. 5  Russell, Principles, pp. 101ff.

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mere verse is what we call a poem that has not escaped its dependency on the formal verse medium. Such a poem comes most clearly into its own when frankly conceding that dependency, flaunting the material substrate of mediation, and announcing as its very purpose the deed of inscription that poetry with higher aims tends to occlude or sublimate.6 For that reason most of the examples to be considered here either present themselves as inscriptions, identify themselves by title as verses or verse components, or do both those things together. I hope that one or two of them may arise, in my reader’s estimation and by dint of the creative occasions that form can offer when candidly embraced, into a prestige that ranks with poetry’s own. Take as a first case the last ten lines of a poem that William Morris wrote in 1891 to be embroidered in Gothic script on the valance of an antique bed in the family home. The preposition that starts the title—“For the Bed at Kelmscott”—both acknowledges this purpose and prepares us to receive the lines as a script to be delivered by the furniture on which it is displayed:  I am old and have seen Many things that have been; Both grief and peace And wane and increase. No tale I tell Of ill or well, But this I say: Night treadeth on day, And for worst or best Right good is rest.                           (lines 19–28)7

Rhymed couplets in dimeter verse: the two-by-two format matches the rectangular structure these verses were composed for, and Morris doubles down on the effect by building so many individual lines out of a pair of semantic opposites. Playing no favorites and (a rarity with this poet) telling no tales, the old bed subtends within the monosyllabic finality of “rest” every antithesis the foregoing lines have itemized. “All verse,” Samuel Daniel had long ago declared in his 1603 “Defence of Ryme,” “is but a 6 7

 Williams, “Jokes in the Machine,” 819–820.  Morris, Choice, 158.

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frame of wordes confined within certaine measure.”8 Morris’s certain carpentry of rhyme, meter, and alliteration converge in “rest,” securing within the lineated form of the verse a jointure aligning that form with the materiality of the bed frame it was written at once to adorn, and be supported by. Morris here was writing verse, not poetry, though of that verse he made a deft work of verbal art. Transcribe a passage of the loftiest, deepest poetry you can find onto so substantially material a fabric—a sampler, a plaque, a pedestal—and it will abide there as verse instead, trumped by the manifest substrate into revealing the formal features that melt or evanesce in whatever airier, richer habitat poetry flourishes in. If it bonds to the format, it’s verse; or, in other words, to the extent that you concentrate on the format of a poetic passage, it’s as verse that you are reading it. Hence, throughout the career of Robert Browning, media-theorist avant la lettre that he was, verse persists as a term of choice for the made verbal object, while poetry pertains to the process of its making: mystified, even spiritualized, if also for that very reason occasionally subjected to Browning’s irony.9 In Paracelsus (1835) a sunset over Constantinople “black and crooked runs / Like a Turk verse along a scimitar” (part 2, lines 5–6), a crafted inscription whose significance, to the alienated mind of the eponymous European hero in a strange land, inheres in its contour as a textual artifact whose beauty is strictly that of an undeciphered calligraphic signifier. Half a century later, and a world away in tone, come Browning’s last verses, a couplet scribbled on a pencil sketch of him made the month before he died. The portraitist asked the poet to sign his name, which is and is not what he did: Here I’m gazing, wide awake, Robert Browning, no mistake!                      (Browning vol. 2, p. 972)

Is he gazing from the portrait or at it? Object of the draftsman’s lines, or author of the lines of verse? The bifold rhymes and matching caesurae of this scrap echo the visual mirroring that a look at oneself in any medium  Daniel, “Defence,” in Essays, vol. 2, p. 359.  See, for example, the 1872 lyric “Amphibian”: “We substitute, in a fashion, / For heaven—poetry” (55–56), in Browning, The Poems, ed. Pettigrew and Collins, vol. 2, p. 7. Except where otherwise indicated, all subsequent Browning citations are to this edition. 8 9

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focalizes, even as the physical inscription of the verses directly onto the sketchbook page performs a minor auto-ekphrasis: low-demand, admittedly, and yet sufficient to claim last word in the rivalry of the sister arts. Browning composed, often ex tempore, lots of such stuff—a term that, in a context of material poetics, should be used advisedly but should be used all the same. Most of the stuff that his scholarly editors garner in an annex at the back of their edition the poet left untitled; so it is up to editorial diligence to give each stray piece a name. The editors’ choice of titles gravitates less often to generic terms (“epigram,” “dialogue,” “impromptu”) than to the sheer components verse is made from: “rhyme,” “couplet,” “limerick,” and, leading the pack, “lines.” These choices bespeak the cardinal editorial virtue of neutrality, in the service of descriptive bibliography by other means. On at least one occasion, however, Browning may be credited with having created such a label on his own. “Terse Verse” names an octave on the Carlyles, facetiously subtitled “Being a Contribution to a Scottish Anthology,” that the poet apparently improvised for fun while visiting Tennyson in the early 1880s: Hail, ye hills and heaths of Ecclefechan! Hail, ye banks and braes of Craigenputtock! T. Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Jane his wife was born in Craigenputtock: She—a pearl where eye detect no speck can, He—ordained to close with and cross-buttock Cant, the giant—these, O Ecclefechan, These your glories be, O Craigenputtock!                      (Browning vol. 2, p. 960)

The stunt, obviously, lay in finding any rhyme except themselves for the outlandish birthplaces of homespun Thomas and Jane. Those rhymes which Browning did find overshadow a lesser tissue of internal chiming that is nevertheless distinctly present—“Hail” with “hills,” “detect” with “speck,” “close” with “cross,” most subtly “Cant” with “giant”—and that informs the self-rhyming self-description “Terse Verse.” No bed here, no scimitar or sketchbook, but the thickening precipitation of phonemes brings out with elementary force the upstaging of genius by ingenuity, and the foregrounding of the signifier (with corresponding semantic attenuation), toward which verse, qua verse, tends. Shallow-pocketed diffidence to invest in big ideas lets verse travel light. Play the poetaster and, as

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T.  Carlyle himself might have said, you get to lessen your denominator and so make off with a higher dividend. Doggerel can offer even the most earnest of poets a way to beware the high-serious doggedness to which, it will be agreed, mainstream Victorian literary culture was especially liable. A case in point is Matthew Arnold, whose last poem “Kaiser Dead” (1887) elegizes in stanzas of a “plain stave” (84), and in a suitably mongrelized tonal register, a mixed-breed collie-dachshund who is missed for, among other things, his own “jokes in doggish language said” (71).10 The opening stanza suffices to show how literary Arnold’s graceful tribute is: What, Kaiser dead? The heavy news Post-haste to Cobham calls the Muse, From where in Farringford she brews   The ode sublime, Or with Pen-bryn’s bold bard pursues   A rival rhyme.                            (lines 1–6)

The bereft bard’s summons goes forth from his Surrey cottage to the English laureate Tennyson, the Welsh best-seller Sir Lewis Morris and, through the confessed loan of a Scottish stanza, the shade of Robert Burns—who was the last, W. H. Auden affirmed, of the great verse writers (lines 11–12).11 Arnold’s news is as heavy with rhyme as it is with poetic allusiveness, and its art will be to sustain the obligation to produce four a-rhymes per six-line stanza, without either claiming Burns’s dialectal license or indulging the elaborate slapstick we just saw in Browning. This formal balancing act figures the emotional equipoise with which Arnold’s pet elegy steers between twin hazards: on the one hand, a failure of loyalty in parting from a favorite; on the other hand, a public lapse from composure into sentimentality—or (same difference) cuteness. That the reins of verse could become guidelines governing a heart that craved temperance no less keenly than it did such things as faith, love, and renown is a principle also attested by the oddly bland titles Arnold bestowed on several inwardly turbulent poems with much higher stakes. His visit to a famed Carthusian monastery evoked severe meditations on the mid-Victorian crisis of belief that, in their substance, might furnish  Arnold, Complete Poems, 609. All subsequent Arnold citations are to this edition.  Auden, Light Verse, xvii.

10 11

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plenty of matter for a Tennysonian “ode sublime.” But Arnold called them just “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” not writing them off, exactly, but keeping their plangency within the perimeter of verse’s surveillance. Likewise, it is part of the stern sobriety of Arnold’s important 1850 elegy for Wordsworth—it measures how much more the poet in Arnold felt this death than he did that of his friend Clough in the ornately brittle loftiness of “Thyrsis” (1866)—that the poem is captioned so sparely: “Memorial Verses: April, 1850.” The depth of reserve behind this stone-faced title corresponds, at some level, to the depth of Arnold’s reservations about the state of European literature at mid-century, though the title risks belying how earnestly that theme is handled in the poem itself. Major poetic ambition is underbid once more in the comparable deadpan of “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens” (1852), a poem that in closing all but commends the Arnoldian habit of selling inspiration short lest it seduce to rapture: “Make it mine / To feel, amid the city’s jar, / That there abides a peace” (37–39). The jar of opposing impulses virtually snaps into witty focus a few lines later with the oxymoronic lyric cry “Calm, calm me more!” (43). The dissonance between this tranquilizing message and its verbal (punctuational!) insistence epitomizes the way “Lines” and “Verses” and “Stanzas” all camouflage passion in a plain brown wrapper. By now these titles are so well known as to feel inevitable, as indeed the entire titling convention they observe is long since naturalized in nineteenth-century poetry.12 But the convention is peculiar nonetheless. We might reclaim its peculiarity by imagining that Arnold had titled his signature prose collections not Essays in Criticism but Sentences in Print or Polemical Paragraphs. Such stubbornly retrenched advertisement of nothing but the medium of conveyance we might deem literally prosy. But then isn’t the discounting of “Memorial Verses,” by the same token, versy? Arnold wrote the same stoical brokerage large when in 1853 he withdrew from publication his most prepossessing work to date, Empedocles on Etna, on the plea that it lacked the great “action,” or inward structuring form, displayed by classic masterpieces, and thereby traduced “the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws” (p. 671). Better trust the discipline of versing, this Victorian consistently maintained, than succumb to the cult of the spontaneous.13  Ferry, Title, 155–160.  Behlman, “Light Verse,” 478; Williams, “Jokes in the Machine,” 823; Steele, Missing Measures, 160–161. 12 13

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Verse’s way of turning down the volume, and deflecting attention from message to medium, emerges with special force when poets expressly take up the aspirational medium of their own art, the published book. Poems written on books constitute an entire nineteenth-century subgenre, and if we work both sides of that ambiguous preposition on we will probably discover more poems that are physically inscribed into books, and at that by authors from a far wider social range of the literate public, than poems that are composed about books as material objects.14 In the latter category The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) remains the Victorian era’s most conspicuous exemplar, although Browning’s earlier biblio-grotesque squib “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis” (1845) makes for easier handling. Both senses of writing-on-books obtain in a Browning poem that is less well known: The Inn Album (1875) braids the two categories together within a single fiction, making the inscription of stereotypical rhymes by sundry hands in a hill resort’s guestbook (“Queer reading! Verse with parenthetic prose”: Browning vol. 2, p. 338; line 130) into the motor that drives an entire book-length mystery in verse. Published poems about verse inscription constitute literature of an exceptionally literary sort, parading as they do a writtenness that hovers somewhere between manuscript and print, and that invites readers to shuttle between the replicated commodity in the hand and the auratic original in the mind. The genre of the verse-letter, together with its Victorian spinoff the epistolary monologue, brings this fanciful traffic distinctly into view. Browning’s Alexandrian aesthete Cleon (1855), whom we are to imagine not speaking aloud but silently writing, shows us the way when he endows his correspondent with a prosthetic voice: “They give thy letter to me, even now: / I read and seem as if I heard thee speak” (5–6). So deeply immersed is Cleon in literate culture that when recalling his own “epos,” he sees it as an incised artifact on a “hundred plates of gold” (47). His concession that “I have not chanted verse like Homer” (139) subordinates, as by learned reflex, archaic oral “chant” to what comes uppermost in his mind: not an illiterate bard’s acoustic performance, but the visibility of “verse,” which presupposes an alphabetic medium taking its turn, plow-­ like, across a legible surface. We readers then reciprocate the patronizing compliment Cleon pays to Homer. For we actually hear nary a word of Cleon’s jotted musings, but Browning bets that we’ll think we do, and he 14  See Stauffer’s monograph Book Traces and his “Book Traces” database: https:// booktraces.lib.virginia.edu/.

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wins. Reader, do you hear this voice? Maybe; it depends who’s asking. “Do you see this square old yellow Book?”15 Yes, if only in the no-man’s-­ land of literary mediumship whose rules of engagement mere verse excels in observing. Browning works verse’s writtenness for all it’s worth in books 8 and 9 of his epic, where we overhear (in English blank verse) his lawyers thinking (in Italian, presumably) about the pleadings they are composing (in Latin prose), pleadings that, according to the legal practice of their time and place, will never be delivered orally. But really the entire poem—twenty thousand lines, in twelve books, serially published in four volumes across two years—owes no small portion of its gravitas to a bookedness that we might think of as the materiality of verse, enlarged by several orders of magnitude. Something of the same kind holds, at less daunting scale of course, for the poems-on-books to which we turn next, each of which differently exploits verse’s material debt to the writtenness of the word and the printedness of its medium. In “Lines Written for a Blank Page of ‘The Keepsake’” (1830), the very early Victorian poet W.  Mackworth Praed makes verse the instrument of a flirtatious gallantry that still savors, like the gift-book annuals themselves, of the Regency when he came of age. Whether or not Praed’s three stanzas written “for” their intended Keepsake page ever reached that destination in handwriting, the commodified gentility of the proposed medium and its sublimated sensuality too afford an ample entrée to courtship that shows what this poem is really for: Lady, there’s fragrance in your sighs,   And sunlight in your glances; I never saw such lips and eyes   In pictures or romances; And Love will readily suppose,   To make you quite enslaving, That you have taste for verse and prose,   Hot pressed, and line engraving.                          (lines 1–8)16

The “pictures or romances” that adjoined album verse within the elegantly produced Keepsake are such as to have excited “sighs” and “glances” in the reader these lines address. And because the “taste” they cater to is an  Browning, The Ring and the Book, 4 (book 1, line 33).  Praed, Poems, vol. 1, p. 406. Subsequent Praed citations are to this edition.

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affair of the senses, to which in their degree both the images rendered by “verse and prose” and those pictorially presented by “line engraving” minister, that “taste” correlates strongly with the lady’s “lips” and the “fragrance” of her person. Pictures and romances in a book are all very well, but they fade beside what matters here much more, which is how they affect their tender reader bodily, and how this in turn affects her “enslaved” admirer. “Hot pressed” gets the temperature of these verses about right, and also of the remainder of the poem, which warmly invites her to be pressed in his arms waltzing on the dance floor at the next opportunity: “dream of me tonight, / And dance with me next season” (23–24). And the whole display has much to do with versing, as repeated puns on turn, the root sense of verse, roguishly let on. “Your partner’s head is turned, they say, / As surely as his ankles” (11–12); a promising waltzer will pivot on the ankle, and look about him on the dance floor, all the better when dizzied aright by love. Where “one / Good turn deserves another” (15–16), the graceful turning of a verse—enjambed for good measure— solicits the dance turn that is to come later on, after the lovers have each turned a page or two. If the entire gambit works, it is thanks to the way verse has leveraged the physicality of the book against that of the courting couple: vers de société, trimmed to meet a burgeoning industrial revolution in print.17 Our next entry by Praed is on the whole less happily conducted, but it claims the signal merit of having actually gotten itself inscribed in the intended volume. This title, “Verses Written in the First Leaf of a Child’s Book, Given by ----- to her Godson, Aged Four” (1837), is even more circumstantially detailed than the last. “Verses” here, like “Lines” above, post the by now familiar warning (or reassurance) that readers should not expect too much; the enumeration of contextual data puts verse in its unassuming place more firmly still. Most of the introductory pointers are technically redundant, since a diligent reader will infer them from things said in the verses that follow, but then Praed means to make everybody at home by dispelling all interpretive anxiety in advance. “First Leaf,” therefore inscribed to appear prefatorily to the printed leaves; “Child’s Book,” therefore juvenile literature, and “Aged Four,” therefore on target; “Given,” therefore a present, and “Godson,” therefore a family setting for the emotional cargo transmitted by the entire poem:

 See Auden, Light Verse, xviii; Behlman, “Light Verse,” 484.

17

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My little Freddy, when you look Into this nice new story-book   Which is my Christmas present, You’ll find it full of verse and prose, And pictures too, which I suppose   Will make them both more pleasant. Stories are here of girls and boys, Of all their tasks, and all their toys,   Their sorrows and their pleasures; Stories of cuckoos, dogs, and bees, Of fragrant flowers and beauteous trees,   In short, a hoard of treasures. When you have spelled the volume through, One tale will yet remain for you,—   (I hope you’ll read it clearly;) ’Tis of a godmamma, who proves By such slight token, that she loves   Her godchild very dearly.                       (Praed vol. 1, p. 439)

I hope little Freddy liked the book, because I doubt that, at the age of four, he could like the poem very much. That’s because the poem while nominally addressing him was manifestly written for the ghostwritten godmother. Her withheld identity (“-----”) is the uniquely, and gratuitously, abiding mystery within the prolix title; and the stanzas mystify her further by a certain sleight-of-pronoun. For the first-person donor in lines 3 and 5 (“my Christmas present,” “I suppose”) turns without notice into the third-person benefactress whom the last three lines indirectly praise. By that point we understand that she has been the implied audience throughout. This we know because, even supposing a precocious boy who can decipher cursive script, the poem for all its feigned condescension keeps talking over his head at somebody older. We may assume Freddy likes a good picture and a nice story. But the difference between “verse and prose” (line 4) can’t mean much to him; “beauteous” he may guess but will hardly find boy-friendly; and to regard his own godmamma’s love as a “tale” he must “read” seems downright Pumblechookian. In truth Praed,

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who was quite clever enough to estimate another reader’s experience in his Keepsake verses, has not on this occasion troubled to imagine what it might be like for Freddy to read much of anything. Granted a remote general awareness that children care for “cuckoos, dogs, and bees,” the challenges and rewards of construal that might bring these creatures to life out of a book count here for nothing. If anything, reading emerges from Praed’s “Verses” as a chore. The charge to “spell the volume through” looks like toil not play, and the alliteration of “toys” with “tasks” sounds like a deterrent for any boy who has yet to internalize the adult work ethic of his culture. Pretty pictures may sweeten the deal and make the labor “more pleasant,” but that’s only because in itself the act of reading verse and prose is no fun. Neither, we may fear, is loving your godmother, especially one who switches identities as she does in the final stanza after an ambiguous parenthetized “I” has intercepted the message and commandeered the address. To “read it clearly” is just what line 15 seems designed to render impossible: we who gather that its “I” is the inscribing poet are conscripted into a knowing wink among grownups to whom the niceties of polite compliment are child’s play. The proper home for writing like this was never the manuscript leaf, always the printed page of a book quite different from the one it refers to. It found its place there only posthumously, since Praed died young in 1839 (after a brilliant poetic start at Eton and Cambridge and early rhetorical successes in Parliament); his miscellaneous verses, often occasional in kind and published in periodicals, were collected in book form within five years of his decease and at intervals thereafter. The ratio of manuscript to print is inverted in our last exhibit, a much more appealing poem about the childhood reading and adult oversight of verse that Christina Rossetti wrote “To Lalla, Reading My Verses Topsy-Turvy”: Darling little Cousin,   With your thoughtful look Reading topsy-turvy   From a printed book English hieroglyphics,   More mysterious To you, than Egyptian   Ones would be to us;—

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Leave off for a minute   Studying, and say What is the impression   That those marks convey?                           (lines 1–12)18

Rossetti was still a teenager, half a child herself, in 1849 when she wrote the poem these stanzas begin, and the “printed book” of hers indicated in the title must be the Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother that had been privately published by her maternal grandfather two years previously. Like Praed’s patronizing “Verses,” these make their appointed rounds within the family circle and, while ostensibly addressed to a child, quickly show by their diction and syntax that they are meant for adult eyes: family members, surely, but crucially the grownup whom the poet keenly regards herself as becoming.19 Lalla approaches her elder cousin’s Verses as containing verse in the most radically material sense. They are engrossing if unmeaning “marks” on a page, “More mysterious” than “hieroglyphics” from ancient Egypt, yet still mysterious in much the same way as hieroglyphics: their lineated order betokens, we might say, a literate-symbolic order that Lalla is in the first stage of entering. At that stage it hardly matters that she is perusing them “topsy-turvy,” upside down. Horizontal parallels, stanzaic groups and the spaces between, the strong vertical rule enforced on the right side of each page as she beholds it, all attract her “thoughtful look”; indeed, she is probably “Reading” and “Studying” these verse visibilia more attentively than we do who, reading right-side-up and left-to-right, get distracted by verbal interpretation. Lalla is likewise apter than we to note and trace the “impression” left by inked type pressed into paper, and in that way to come closer to the book’s embodied three-dimensionality. “Impression” is the poet’s pun, not Lalla’s, of course, and on its hinge the poem swings into its reflective second part: Only solemn silence,   And a wondering smile: But your eyes are lifted   Unto mine the while.

 Rossetti, Complete Poems, vol. 1, p. 170.  Karlin, Victorian Verse, xlii.

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In their gaze so steady   I can surely trace That a happy spirit   Lighteth up your face. Tender, happy spirit,   Innocent and pure; Teaching more than science,   And than learning more.                           (lines 13–24)

We can only wonder what Lalla is “wondering” at, the text she has been called away from or the interpellating presence of its fond author—a choice of wonders that incidentally recapitulates the dialectic of book and body that animated those Keepsake lines by Praed. At all events, it becomes Rossetti’s turn here to play the reader and “trace” the meaning of the “gaze so steady,” the just interrupted yet already again quite absorbed “pure” regard, with which her little cousin looks back at her. What Rossetti beholds there may be more than she can say with scientific precision, but then she doesn’t need to say it that way. “There is ‘light verse’ which is better,” as Daniel Karlin points out, than verse that’s merely comic: better, “and more distinctive, and whose effect is not to make you laugh but to make you see.”20 Where childhood’s “happy spirit” giveth life, and the wisdom of innocence holds firm in Lalla’s gaze, there need be little worry about the killjoy liabilities of literacy. At least not yet. Struck dumb meanwhile by a vision, which is also a not-so-distant memory, of that primal state of mere being beside which all written poetry is reduced to verse degree zero (a mere formal constellation of marks on a page), Rossetti remands Lalla unalarmed to the keeping of her book—“your book” and not my book, even though I did write it. The poet advises the child to “Read on,” secure for the time being on the looking-glass side of that knowledge which Rossetti can answer for only by the writing of so charming a poem. How should I give answer   To that asking look? Darling little Cousin   Go back to your book.

 Karlin, Victorian Verse, lxii.

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Read on: if you knew it,   You have cause to boast:— You are much the wisest,   Though I know the most.                           (lines 25–32)

So concludes a poem that Rossetti knew enough, at this early point and throughout a productive literary career, not to publish. She kept a more intimate faith with the wisdom of these verses by retaining them in manuscript alone. Concluding Tergiversation. If you read the phrase “topsy-turvy” upside down or backward, with a weather eye for anagrammatic shuffle and an ear open to lateral motion, you can recompose from its phonemic elements each of our leading terms, poetry and verse. Such reversals and inversions take to an extreme the inside-outings of verse that we have considered here, and they crop up in poetry with surprising persistence. They are nearly business as usual in, of all places, In Memoriam, whenever Tennyson turns to meditate upon the state and prospects—also, more to our purpose here, the form and medium—of the verses he is writing. It seems proper to take our examples in topsy-turvy order, back to front. “What hope is here for modern rhyme / To him, who turns a musing eye / On songs …?”21 Nowhere in the entire elegy does Tennyson insist harder than here in lyric 77 on verse’s material substrate, the paper pages that “May bind a book, may line a box, / May serve to curl a maiden’s locks” (6–7, emphasis added et passim). So the reader’s “musing eye,” alerted perhaps by the pun in “turns,” has reason to find the missing term verse curled up inside its anagram “serve”: an oddly mutated, and muted, device for “modern rhyme” to conjure with. Just two lyrics earlier our key word verse has appeared uncamouflaged, though again in a context of poetic self-depreciation: I leave thy praises unexpress’d   In verse that brings myself relief,   And by the measure of my grief I leave thy greatness to be guess’d.                         (lyric 75, lines 1–4)

 Tennyson, In Memoriam, 53 (lyric 77, lines 1–3).

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Expressly airing the inadequacy of humble verse lets Tennyson imply what he can’t deliver: the full-throated greatness of a poetry that would vindicate Hallam’s promise could the poet but achieve it. Yet that apology is half retracted by “the measure of my grief,” a phrase that at once denotes verse’s mere scansion and asserts its proportional dignity as a metric for poetry’s loftier but unrealized ideal—an effect underscored by the way the phrase harbors verse, if we agree to hear as a v the voiced fricative in “of” and scavenge “measure” for spare parts. Claiming for such inverse opportunism a bit more labial license, a few stanzas down we may hail in both “breeze” and “praise” (11–12) sidelong phonemic proxies for the verse they are about. Tennyson thus conjures up the poetry he says he can’t write by muttering in broken spells a word he seems reluctant to declare. Each of the five stanzas in lyric 20 rigs a version of this anagrammatic shell game, which comes out into the clear as “open converse” (17) only after the great pretender verse has been disguised in “atmosphere” (14), “freeze” (12), “service” (8) and “servants” (3), and, with least salience but utmost poignancy, “griefs” (1, 11). The challenge this lyric confronts, at a level of generality that affords vantage too on Rossetti’s communion with illiterate Lalla and Arnold’s with aphasic Kaiser, remains what to say about the ineffable or (reciprocally put) how to bespeak the speechless. Here again Tennyson takes up the challenge by means of a subliminal shuffle that enciphers his medium. In the better-known apology that lyric 5 tenders for verbal therapy’s “sad mechanic exercise” (7), versing is at once indicted and encoded as “half a sin” (1); once more “grief” stands in twice, and symmetrically (2, 11), for its incognito secret sharer verse. Earlier and obscurer still is one of the elegy’s most disturbing cruxes—by the same token fraught with intuition and mined past understanding— where the poet imagines crushing his sadistic mistress Sorrow, “like a vice of blood, / Upon the threshold of the mind” (lyric 3, lines 15–16). Let “vice” summon to mind its vowel-distorted homonyms voice and verse, and the well-made In Memoriam stanza shapes up as a horror chamber, tormenting the poet with thoughts that his art may be nothing but a painstakingly structured vacuum, the reductio ad absurdum of verse’s insubstantiality: “A hollow form with empty hands” (10–12). Reversing direction to follow the usual reading sequence reveals in the above samples a pattern of gradual clarification that parallels most thematic accounts of In Memoriam taken whole, as the poem works its patient way through religious, psychological, and other issues. At the outset disorientation and occlusion prevail, leaving blind intuition to fend for itself,

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but eventually the verse that dared not speak its name emerges into a distinct articulation that is the stronger for its baffled, lengthy incubation in the dark. “That reverse of doom” (lyric 72, line 6) may be read, by a literal reversal of printed characters, to identify a mood swing that verse’s therapies are helping to bring about. Lyric 77, with which our brief tour of the poem began, forecasts how posterity will “turn the page that tells / A grief, then changed to something else” (10–11). By that point in the poem, the anagrammatical reader who has spelled out the transpositions making griefs and verse each other’s metamorphs will be prepared to regard verse as a change agent of formidable versatility.

References Arnold, Matthew. 1979. The Complete Poems. Ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott. London and New York: Longman. Auden, W.  H. 1938. Introduction. In The Oxford Book of Light Verse, vii–xx. Oxford: Clarendon. Behlman, Lee. 2018. The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société. Victorian Poetry 56: 477–491. Bentham, Jeremy. 1825. The Rationale of Reward. London: Hunt. Bevis, Matthew, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bristow, Joseph, ed. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browning, Robert. 1981. The Poems. Ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 2001. The Ring and the Book. Ed. Richard D. Altick and Thomas J. Collins. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Cronin, Richard, Alison Chapman, and Antony H.  Harrison, eds. 2002. A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell. Cunningham, Valentine. 2011. Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Daniel, Samuel. 1904. A Defence of Ryme. In Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, vol. 2, 356–360. Oxford: Clarendon. Ferry, Anne. 1996. The Title to the Poem. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Karlin, Daniel. 1997. Introduction. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, xxxv– lxxv. London: Penguin. ———. 2013. ‘The Song-Bird Whose Name Is Legion’: Bad Verse and Its Critics. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 834–852. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mazel, Adam. 2017. The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge. Nineteenth-Century Literature 72: 374–401. Mill, John Stuart. 1967. Literary Essays. Ed. Edward Alexander. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Morris, William. 1969. A Choice of William Morris’s Verse. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Faber and Faber. Praed, W.  M. 1865. The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Ed. Derwent Coleridge. New York: Widdleton. Rossetti, Christina. 1847. Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother. London: Polidori. ———. 1979–1990. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition. Ed. R.  W. Crump. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stauffer, Andrew. 2014. Book Traces. https://booktraces.lib.virginia.edu/. Accessed 24 March 2021. ———. 2020. Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, the Marks of Reading, and the Future of the Book. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Steele, Timothy. 1990. Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Tennyson, Alfred. 2004. In Memoriam. Ed. Erik Gray. New York: Norton. Williams, James. 2013. The Jokes in the Machine: Comic Verse. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 817–833. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Filler Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry Alison Chapman

Filler poems represent perhaps the most read and most denigrated poetry of the long Victorian era. Thousands upon thousands of these poems, published widely in ephemeral serial print that saturated the literary market, were recognizable to readers through a combination of placement (positioned in a small space on the periodical page, within narrow columns, between miscellaneous prose contributions or concluding an issue), poetic form (conventional, generic), and subject matter (trite, sentimental). And yet the reclamation of periodical poetry as literature worthy of recovery is often framed by critics against the grounds of its original

Research for this chapter was possible thanks to generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as research conducted in the National Library of Scotland and the University of Victoria’s Special Collections. See Chapman for access to periodical poems discussed in this chapter. A. Chapman (*) University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_3

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exclusion, as mere filler, in opposition to more elevated forms of poetry.1 This chapter turns to the original charge against these poems, to consider the importance of poetry as filler within its specific ephemeral print ecology, which forged for the readers graphic and generic rhythms across issues and titles as a form of seriality where the diminutive and second-rate filler poem accrued mass, and value, over time. Read cumulatively in their contemporary print environment, filler poems challenge conventional approaches to the agency of the poet and uniqueness of the poem, fruitfully disrupting and de-familiarizing Victorian (and indeed periodical) poetry as a literary category. Critics typically define serial poems as separately published but constituent parts of a longer poem by the same author, overtly linked together and published in sequence like the Victorian serial novel, but periodical seriality is in fact a much more heterogeneous phenomenon. The concept of seriality has recently opened up: Clare Pettitt, for example, identifies it as the nineteenth-century’s dominant literary and socio-political form, and Mark Turner argues for a complex and diverse understanding of serial print based on miscellaneity, expansiveness, and the containment of information (Pettitt 2020; Turner 2020). Generally, however, definitions of seriality do not include poetry. Peppering multiple kinds of serial print, crammed into corners and squeezed into narrow columns, poetry was ubiquitous, sharing features of layout and poetic conventions that were repeated abundantly across issues and titles, establishing a major form of serial rhythm that was widely prevalent and roundly denigrated. As with the metrical rhythms of these periodical filler poems, which have a hyper-­ regularity in line with the poetry’s reassuring conventionality and triteness, the spatial rhythms of filler poems have a familiar and diminutive hyper-regularity too, suggesting a cumulative poetic and affective value over time. Categorizing these poems as part of a periodical verse culture does not quite fit. While recent critics have identified specific Victorian verse cultures, such as Lee Behlman’s account of vers de société, Kirstie Blair’s study of working-class Scottish newspaper poets, and Adam Mazel’s work on University of Cambridge poets, filler poems as they appeared across an immense range of Victorian periodicals are less a coherent verse culture than an enormous number of heterogeneous and miscellaneous poems that share generic graphic and formal conventions (Behlman 2018; Blair 2019; Mazel 2017). And poems by established poets that were 1

 See Hughes (2007) for an influential argument about the value of poetry to periodicals.

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published within tight periodical print constraints, often before book publication, also meet the definition of filler poems in their serial contexts. Christina Rossetti’s “The Round Tower at Jhansi,” for example, was published in Once a Week at the very bottom of the page, after a prose contribution, with a misspelled authorial name and a missing section (Rossetti 1859). The middle stanza of the full five-stanza version of the poem, as published in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), may have been omitted by the magazine to fit the poem into its small two-­column space, but that stanza also describes the murder-suicide of an English army captain in the Indian Uprising, and its omission makes the poem more palatable for the middle-class family Once a Week readership. Crammed into a small space, superficially trite, and formally conventional are key attributes of filler poetry, and the case of Rossetti’s poem suggests that filler poetry’s subjection to the ephemeral mise en page and editorial intervention subsumes textual integrity and authorial agency. The poem’s place within multiple serial rhythms, in other words, disrupts our critical conventions of the singularity, wholeness, and uniqueness of the poem and the poet. Some titles repeatedly feature filler poems as a distinctive attribute of their cohesive identity, such as Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal, All the Year Round, Household Words, and Good Words, which according to the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project between them published over 6300 poems up to 1901. Among these titles Chambers’s published by far the most poems over the Victorian period, with the highest number of individual poets—over 3400 poems and over 1290 different poets—and offers rich information about filler poetry. While filler poems are set out on the page to appear diminutive, the mise en page offers a distinctive visual break. Sometimes this position was on the bottom section of the righthand column and then continuing on the next page, as with many All the Year Round poems, and other times the poem held the last place on the issue’s final page, as with almost every weekly Chambers’s Journal issue from the second series that began in 1844. Filler poetry paradoxically draws attention to itself as diminutive and trivial, self-consciously offering a serial pattern of placement on the page in terms of small size and specific page location, which discloses the collaborative agency embedded in periodical poetic seriality, with the hidden hands of the editor, sub-editor, compositor, and typesetter (and any illustrators, decorators, and engravers too) shaping how readers encounter and understand the poems. Indeed, the filler’s formal poetic and print qualities are based on a knowing code of brevity and constriction, ubiquity and genericism. Filler poetry is both

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tiny and enormous in scale. The repetitive rhythms and print locations of filler poems are a glue that holds the collaborative miscellaneity of serial print together, a cut-and-paste space designed for sharing by other serials and in readers’ scrapbooks, constructing the complex temporal rhythms of serial time—the multiple times (of start/stop, progress/pause) and disparate content—as a shared reading moment of separation and community.2 These poems, often amusing and bewildering, disparate and various, need to be read collectively and cumulatively within their print environment to make sense, and indeed the filler poems often gesture self-consciously to their place in such a network of poetics and print. Filler poems often embraced their minor status. These meta-textual poems are openly and playfully derivative, such as the unsigned “Stanzas by Shakespeare, and Somebody Else” (Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 9 March 1850), which borrows as its opening stanza the first quatrain of Sonnet 54, as well as some other rhymes, to transform Shakespeare’s sonnet into a four-quatrain poem addressed to a woman rather to Shakespeare’s “lovely youth.” “Somebody Else” praises the addressee’s beauty as an ephemeral signifier for a higher permanent value. Shakespeare’s sonnet ends with a triumphant claim for his poem as a permanent memorial to the youth’s beauty. The filler poem, however, suggests that material forms cannot signify transcendent meaning, which remains within the lady’s soul: […] in thy being does most beauty lie; As summer flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die.

The lady’s “present mansion,” although beautiful, “’tis not thee,” implying also that the form of the poem, unlike Shakespeare’s sonnet, has representational limits. If we read the mansion as a conventional figure for the poem, and the stanzas etymologically as rooms, then the poem also can only give a fleeting representation of beauty. This derivative poem by “Somebody Else,” a resonant name that captures the pervasiveness of the filler poems’ absent authorship, depends on and yet departs from Shakespeare’s sonnet to emphasize its ephemerality: pointedly, the final word of the poem, and this particular issue, is “die,” but without any of 2  For a discussion of periodical poetry and scrapbook practices, see Easley (2019). Turner (2006) and Hughes and Lund (1991) offer analyses of serial time as a complex set of temporal rhythms.

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the original’s sexual puns. This diminutive poetic space is supremely performative. Filler poems commonly praise the high value of “little things,” such as the unsigned “Little Things” in Chambers’s (21 October 1865) that gives a catalogue of conventional poetic tropes to praise “little things” that “recall” joyful and bitter memories (Unsigned 1865). Another unsigned “Little Things,” the inaugural poem in the non-denominational Good Words (a major periodical for poetry, publishing over 1300 poems from its beginning in January 1860 to 1901), celebrates the religious importance of “the slightest word or deed,” that, like a seed, bears fruit in the powerful affect it grows within the receiver (Unsigned 1860).3 The association of periodical poetry with the diminutive was exploited by Elizabeth Barrett Browning when, following the rejection of her poem about adultery, “Lord Walter’s Wife,” from The Cornhill Magazine on the grounds of indecency, she offered “Little Mattie” instead (Browning 1861). This poem, more suited to the family reading promoted by the editor, William Thackeray, is an apparently sentimental poem offering consolation for a young child’s death. Mattie and implicitly the poem itself are both “little,” inoffensive, and uncontroversial, and yet with the conclusion that such a little child is now, on her death, made spiritually very large indeed, and that is the reason for the terrible grief of the mother because she has felt her child “Rise up suddenly full-grown” (737). As a peace offering to Thackeray, “Little Mattie” also implies that the filler poem is bigger than it seems, that its small size and stature masks expansive meanings. The words “little” are everywhere in filler poems and feature in many poem titles, working as code for the performativity of the filler space and developing the earlier nineteenth-century poetical value given to restricted poems that exceed their formal constraints, as influentially expressed in Wordsworth’s sonnets on the sonnet (“Scorn not the Sonnet” and “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”). For filler poems, the little space is doubly embedded in their size and material placement on the page. The culture of filler poems involved a meta-textual knowing about their status, a common understanding with the reader that they are both insignificant and valuable. Many poems refer meta-textually to their graphic position as last poems and final words. For example, consider the Irish poet Jane Moresby’s “Last Words,” positioned at the end of the 26 December 1868 3  This was a much-reprinted poem, and set to music as a hymn, but its publication in Good Words symbolizes the power of the filler poem.

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issue of Chambers’s Journal.4 This poem resembles a frenzied dramatic monologue where a spurned lover utters parting words, with the last line even beginning with the word “Issue,” implying the magazine issue is a generative space: […] some hope be revealed Out of this loneliness, longing, some bliss Issue, that never had been but for this!

The finality of “Last Words” is underscored by the fact that this poem concludes the final issue in volume 5, series 4, noted in the editorial comment under the poem. The female poet R.  Daman’s “Last Words” (Chambers’s Journal for 19 October 1889) offers parting words to a lover expressed in an insistent formal hyper-regularity of anapests in abab rhyming quatrains, all wrapped up in a poem about the failure to communicate adequately.5 These Chambers’s poems all come at the very end of their issue. Other “Last Words” poems refer to final dying words, as in two unsigned “Last Words” poems in All the Year Round (17 December 1870a, 26 March 1892). Little words and last words perform the cultural work of filler poems, overdetermining and memorializing the diminutive and ephemeral. “‘Verse’” by E. Matheson (Chambers’s Journal, 8 October 1898), a prolific female contributor to Chambers’s, gives, in eleven iambic tetrameter stanzas rhyming abab, an audacious defense of filler poetry and earned Matheson the remarkable sum of £1 1s (among the highest amounts the weekly paid throughout the era, reserved only for a minority of poems)6 (see Fig.  3.1). The speaker defends poems known with the common derogatory term “verse,” “a minor poet’s rhyme,” with the easy tuning of meter to conventional “lowly things” rather than the sublime wing-soaring of loftier poets. With a “simple strain” yet “silver measure,” the verse writer celebrates “humblest lives”: “The world is better for his song.” Even though these poems are “of little worth,” and the poems’ themes “seldom new,” their value is immeasurable. In the last two stanzas, the speaker contrasts this “simple strain” to prose:  This poem is unsigned; author attribution from Chapman.  The poem is unsigned; author attribution from National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/370). 6  See Chambers’s Journal ledger entry for the poem (National Library of Scotland, Dep 341/371). 4 5

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Fig. 3.1  E.  Matheson. “Verse.” Chambers’s Journal, 8 October 1898, 720. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada

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And while he sees that Spring is fair,   And finds a poem in a rose, And hears God’s music everywhere,   Why should he yoke himself to Prose? The ivy cannot choose but climb,   The blossom cannot choose but spring; And—though you may not read his rhyme—   Ah well! ah well! he still must sing.

This poem’s familiar form gives a manifesto for minor poetry’s value in its derivative, simple, and lowly forms and themes, based on truth and affect. And the versifier is compelled, as a religious imperative, to choose the well-trodden measures of verse over the yoke of prose. Implicitly, reading these poems cumulatively gives them power to transcend their filler status, something that the unsigned “With a Present” (Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 21 September 1878c) suggests by comparing the poem to a “wav’ring spark” that lights up the “little things” catalogued in the poem. Filler poems—“little things,” “last words”—performatively claim synecdochal power, transcending their small space and diminutive stature when read. Filler poems repeatedly figure the richness of their poetic agency, especially when acknowledging the poverty of their form and size, as if potentiated by the serial reader. Reading, then, is figured as a deeply social and serial activity, cumulatively building a sense of the value of this mass of filler poems over time, depending on and exceeding the print ephemerality. Ironically, just below this poem, an editorial note for contributors states that “Poetical offerings should be accompanied by an envelope, stamped and directed,” indicating that submissions are often returned unpublished, having been read only by the discerning eyes of the editors, something also demonstrated by the Chambers’s Journal author’s ledgers that log incoming offers of contributions that will later be sifted.7 Filler poems often also refer to their material place on the page in a playful use of spatial form and extremely compressed lines. Several poems in Chambers’s Journal are printed as a corner of two narrow columns within the page’s regular (for this series) double-columned layout. Nora C. Usher’s “‘Yes’” (27 September 1884) deploys the filler poem’s cataloguing, and an interplay of long and short lines, to condense the narrative 7

 See the Authors’ Ledgers, National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/282–296).

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of a courtship into seven sestets with narrow lines rhyming aabccb with iambic dimeter and, on the “b” rhyming line, an amphibrach. Here are the first two stanzas: A little rain, The sun again,   A shadow; A summer day, Some new-mown hay,   A meadow. A girlish face,   A matchless grace, And beauty; We spend the day   In making hay— Sweet duty.

The forward-driving narrative toward a happy long marriage has humor, in the knowing wink of a conventional courtship plot, exaggerated by the very compressed lines, as if this was a generic shared open secret about “A long, long life / Together,” as the final stanza puts it. The stanzaic rhyming pattern (aabccb) underlines this shared knowledge: the couplets present a specific narrative moment, while the shortest “b” lines propel the narrative onward, yet they offer in the amphibrach meter an abrupt punctuation as well, performing in miniature the stanzaic shape with one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables. Usher’s “Yes” flaunts itself as filler: self-conscious, performative, knowingly humorous, and very compressed. Two later poems in Chambers’s Journal also play with very short lines and an abbreviated courtship narrative, in exactly the same poetic form and also printed in double narrow columns, suggesting a shared community of poetic genre as a serial patterning through the issues of this weekly. J.  R. Scott’s “A Novelette. In Four Chapters” (18 July 1885) has a more comedic and sensational narrative of an elopement eventually made socially acceptable, clearly borrowed from the plot of popular yellowbacks highlighting in its humor the testy relationship between prose and poetry, lyric and narrative. J. B. L.’s “A Retrospect” (13 November 1886) presents another abbreviated conventional courtship and long happy marriage, full of familiar romance tropes with a slight stumbling in the half rhyme that suggests the bride’s hesitation about her marriage vows:

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She looked so nice, Although her voice   Did falter.

This poem points to a wider meaning in the very short lines and swift runthrough of a marriage: Our honeymoon Ran all too soon   Its measure: We roamed at will By vale and hill,   With pleasure.

The first short amphibrach line meta-textually highlights the short foot (“Its measure”): the brief measure of this particular poetic form of filler discloses a shared understanding among the reading community of life’s brevity as well as common pleasures, made meaningful and poignant in the knowledge that the tightly fitting page is the last part of a weekly magazine, referring to the ephemerality of the poem as well as life that cuts through the shared serial rhythms of reading. Another prominent example of the emphasis that filler poetics place on the serial rhythms of page space is the cluster of poems that takes the conventional three-four measure of common and ballad meter, so evident in filler, to an extreme, contrasting line lengths more emphatically with alternating long and short lines, and playfully emphasizing the tight confines of the mise en page. Glasgow poet Helen K. Wilson’s “Treasure-Trove” (Chambers’s Journal 8 June 1878), for example, deploys the alternating long and short line rhyming couplets, with anaphora, to tell how she has found “Something” surprising “Deep in the heart of my Love,” with the generous indents offering a pattern that highlights the common catalogue feature, especially in contrast to the extremely narrow margins of the double-columned prose on the same page.8 Column margins signify lost reading material and implicitly lost profit, yet also transcendent value of a spiritual kind, much like the poem’s

8  The poem is signed “H.  K. W.”; authorship attribution from the National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/371).

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discovery of an interiorized “treasure-trove” of affect. The poem, by implication, is the treasure on the page.9 Poems are self-conscious about the materiality of poetry in other ways than the size and shape. A striking example is “On a Sheet of Blank Paper” (Chambers’s Journal, 6 July 1878) by “T. P.,” the pseudonym of Harriet (“Tiny”) Payn, daughter of the editor James Payn, according to the periodical ledgers.10 This doggerel, in iambic tetrameter sestet stanzas rhyming roughly abcabc, has some amusing rhymes, such as pairing “sonnet” with “bonnet,” “IOU” with “billet-doux,” and “curse” with “verse,” and humorously opines on the potential of a “virgin page,” ending with the confession that, as she was thinking, she wrote this poem: And here, half-conscious, as I mused, I took the paper up again, And scribbled off this idle verse!

Not only does the poem celebrate filler poetry’s humble materiality, a sheet of paper, it also exposes the nonchalant performance of the “idle verse.” Other poems are more serious about the metapoetic value of paper, such as the unsigned “Blank Paper” (Chambers’s Journal, 19 March 1864), which compares a blank paper with a blank heart upon which “Unknown to all, God’s writing there / Indelibly impressed,” and “‘Only Waste-Paper’” (Chambers’s Journal, 4 January 1873), again giving spiritual value to scraps. So many filler poems are self-conscious about the very act of writing poetry, often producing humor from undermining readers’ expectations in encountering the poems’ conventions, like a shared inside joke. Often the humor at poetry’s expense is based on expectations about poetic qualities. A striking example is the unsigned “To My Two-Wheeled Steed” (Chambers’s Journal, 4 June 1870b), where the speaker compares his new bicycle to a horse and, simultaneously, satirizes conventional filler poetry that the poem also represents, questioning humorously whether, like the 9  Other examples of extreme alternations between long and short lines are also poems about non-monetary worth: J.  Williams’s “Love and Fame” (28 July 1883), the Scottish poet Marion Buchanan’s “Donald—A Pony” (1 March 1884; signed “K. T.”), and George Warrington’s “‘My Heroine’” (29 November 1879; signed “G.  W.”) (Williams 1883; Buchanan 1884; Warrington 1879). Authorship attribution of Buchanan’s and Warrington’s poems from the National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/369, 371). 10  See National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/371).

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bicycle, poetic conventions can be adapted for an age of modernity, as the poem strains to fit into the stanzaic constraints of common measure quatrains (see Fig. 3.2). This ode to a bicycle, his “two-wheeled steed,” lists its attributes in comparison to a horse, beginning with how to pronounce and rhyme the word, in inventive lines that only just manage to keep the meter turning: You are not a “Bissikle,” rhyming with “physical,”   Whizzical whirligig queer— O Horse! Without visible legs, which we quizzical   Hear of this year with the ear. Nor, are you “By-siggle,” not though a nice iggle   Girl that I know accents “Bi”— Rhymes it with “icicle.” I in surprise giggle,   Hearing this here with the “i.”

Each stanza plays on the poem as read silently and aloud, wondering how to pronounce and rhyme “bicycle” by sound or sight. The poem, and by implication filler poetry itself, is “Whizzical whirligig queer”: whimsical, quizzical, a mechanical spinning toy, strange and eccentric, giddy, and possibly untrustworthy.11 Like these filler poems, finding the pronunciation of “bicycle” involves “A most inadvisable egotistiz-ical / Liberty (like this) with speech.” This comical and ingenious poem keeps the whirling wheels of the meter spinning, proving that, at a stretch, poetic form inventively and absurdly accommodates inventions, with a knowing joke that this is, in the end, a shared whimsy. Some of the most distinctive filler poems are a cluster constructed around the phrase “long ago.” Self-conscious and highly conventional, these poems have an overwhelming nostalgic pull, held tightly in place by a reiterative and recursive poetic form. These “long ago” poems appear regularly in Victorian periodicals, sharing common generic poetic form, tropes, diction, and themes. While their features are typical of derivative poetry, the “long ago” poems share particular attributes that coalesce around the sharing and re-circulation of the phrase “long ago,” usually highlighted by the title of the poem and embedded into the rhyme scheme as a refrain. The phrase, of course, is perfect for its wistful “o” assonance, its slick embeddedness within iambic rhythm, and it can easily be made to  See “queer, adj.1,” OED.

11

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Fig. 3.2  Unsigned. “To My Two-Wheeled Steed.” Chambers’s Journal, 4 June 1870, 368. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada

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rhyme with many words in English. The phrase “long ago” is a highly charged poetic code word, layered with the nostalgic sound of the rhythmical iambic rise into that second open vowel sound, often further emphasized with an exclamation (“long ago!”). Sometimes the importance of the phrase is signaled with capitals, as if the sentiment of the pull for the long ago has become a more tangible proper noun for a place (“the Long Ago”).12 Within the tight graphic confines of the periodical page, these “long ago” poems signify ephemerality, nostalgia, and the comforting familiar constrictive forms of derivative poetry. The example of “long ago” poems highlights problematic claims to poetic originality within serial print. Victorian periodicals often explicitly advertised their poetry (as well as other contributions) as original, implying that the poems were previously unpublished as well as original in spirit and execution. Periodical poems frequently appeared under the column heading “Original Poetry” and editorials also typically asserted their poetry’s originality. Such claims are based on the market value and cultural capital of newness, in distinction to the plentiful periodical contributions taken from other print material that was often overtly referenced in credit lines. But, while filler poems might be individually read as distinctive and singular, read cumulatively in their print ecology they are derivative and reiterative. For filler poems, the paratextual assertion of originality looks like editorial bad faith, but the claim underlines filler’s doubleness, published in a page layout that highlights its unique separation from surrounding prose, and yet also rhythmically patterned across print as a function of the multiple serial forms of poetics, space, and time. And the dubious assertions of originality also need to be understood in the context of the often hidden collaborations inherent in periodical poetry that undermine the concept of unique authorial identity. Signaling these tensions, editors often appealed to contributors for original submissions only. The Chambers’s editors, in a notice published on 9 November 1850, required contributions to include an author statement on “what degree of originality they claim for” their articles: “Contributors cannot fail to observe that it is imperative on the conductors of this Journal to acknowledge such literary borrowings, in order that they may obtain credit for the 12  See Beck (1895), where the last line capitalizes the refrain as “Long Ago” (attribution from National Library of Scotland, Dep 341/371); in the unsigned “Long Ago” for All the Year Round, 12 October 1878, the last line also capitalizes the phrase as “Long Ago” (Unsigned 1878a).

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mass of really original matter it contains.” The care with which Chambers’s, and particularly the first editors William and Robert Chambers, selected poetry from their abundance of submissions is obvious from the publisher’s ledgers in the National Library of Scotland. Directly above this notice appears another exemplary coded derivative poem, Charles Wilton’s “Long Ago,” hyper conventional yet presented as unique. The poem is diligently familiar in its form: eight-line stanzas of common measure, a catalogue of memories about the speaker’s childhood, a combination of private feeling and the recollection of particular if non-specific episodes that do not really move along a narrative, a refrain that includes the phrase “long ago” in the last line of every stanza, affective keywords (such as “loved,” “mourn,” “haunt,” “charmed”), and a concluding consolation. At the end of the speaker’s formulaic memories of his “native town,” he comments: “And these as freshly haunt me still, / And still their forms I know.” The recollection of childhood memories to soothe and sustain adulthood is typical of Wordsworthian consolation popular in Victorian sentimental poems, but this poem offers memory as a haunting of the “fairy days” of his enchanted childhood, unseen in “manhood” with its “entangled flow” of “cares and years.” Here the poem reveals its cultural work: offering form to recuperate the consolations of distant memory. As Turner notes of poetry’s position at the end of every issue of Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, the reader finds “reassurance and stability within a fundamentally unstable genre” (Turner 2020: 290). The poem’s sentimental content is consolatory, and its regular and relentless poetic form also offers familiar comforts within the mass of miscellaneous periodical material. The sharing of phrases, tropes, refrains, assonance, and other poetical features, and even the very titles of the “long ago” poems, forge seriality based on the temporal rhythms of print, separating and connecting these similar poems within and across issues and titles. While this derivative poem’s position above an editorial notice requiring that submissions expose “literary borrowings” might seem ironic, the tension between original and secondary, unique and generic, is intrinsic to the rhythms of poetry’s periodical seriality. Another “Long Ago” poem, from Dickens’s Household Words (20 November 1858), exposes poetic and graphic conventions with insistent yet familiar repetitiveness. Familiarity was so intrinsic to middle-class periodical print that the origin of the phrase “Household Words” is prominently displayed above the title banner of each issue, “‘Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.’—Shakespeare.” This quotation,

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from Henry V, emphasizes the magazine’s popularity, and that the affective sound of the phrase is familiar. Certainly, by now, the phrase “long ago” was common in serial poems. The poem’s placement was shared by many poems in All the Year Round (Dickens’s new magazine that succeeded Household Words in 1859): the poem is divided between columns and pages, beginning with a smaller filler section on the initial page, which emphasizes the habit of embodied poetry reading that serial print fostered as part of its community of readers, with the reader’s eye having to move between columns and pages and, in the common case of poems requiring a page turn from recto to verso, the reader’s hand. This “Long Ago” poem is extraordinarily formulaic, even by the standards of most Victorian filler. The poem gives the familiar catalogue of aspects of the distant past that are recalled to the speaker’s mind, with each stanza adumbrating a different thing (glens, fields, streams, lanes, woods, hills, clouds, winds, waves, storms, homes, years). Each stanza, except the last, has the same structure, with every final stanza’s line except the penultimate rejoicing in the refrain “long ago” (thirty-nine of them). The first stanza is exemplary:          O, the glens of long ago!          The willowy glens of long ago! The mossy, rushy, fairy-haunted, misty glens of long ago!          O. the fields of long ago          The velvet fields of long ago! The verdant, flowery, rainbow-circled, scented fields of long ago!

Each stanza begins with an exclamatory short iambic line (“O, the glens of long ago!”), then another that introduces an adjective (“The willowy glens of long ago!”), and then a much longer broken exclamatory iambic line that luxuriantly piles on yet more adjectives (“The mossy, rushy, fairyhaunted, misty glens of long ago!”). This poem is so fluidly and persistently formulaic that it reveals and even exceeds elements of “long ago” poems, so much so that it would be hard to see how the poem might have ended except for the final stanza’s abrupt break in the format to introduce a vaguely religious consolation:   And with thoughts of the present and long ago,   Come dreams of the pure souls of long ago, And hopes yet to rest in the land of the blest, Where they pillowed their weary heads long ago!

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According to the magazine’s Office Book, the poet was Elizabeth Addey, an Irish Quaker and the wife of George Addey, a shopkeeper on Grafton Street, the commercial center of Dublin, where he kept a tailor and millinery business (Parrott 2018: 191). There is no record of Addey ever publishing another poem, although it cannot be ruled out. Reading and writing filler poetry was intrinsic to the formation of serial print community, where readers were also very often contributing writers. Indeed, filler poets, often only discoverable through periodical ledgers, were a mix of occasional poets and more prolific and better-known writers, heterogeneously mixed by socio-economic class, gender, and location in a way that often undermines any hard and fast distinction between amateur and professional writer.13 At the peak of its popularity, it makes perfect literary, cultural, and commercial sense that Household Words would publish such a hyper-formulaic filler poem, familiar in many mouths and ears. As a marker of the sub-genre’s familiarity, the filler poems were satirized toward the end of the century, in particular for their gender politics. The Scottish poet Jessie C.  Howden’s pseudonymous poem “Long Ago” (Chambers’s Journal, 2 February 1878) deploys the common hyper-­ regular form but with ironic innovations to undercut the empty nostalgia of filler poetry’s investment in romantic love (Fig. 3.3).14 Howden deploys alternate parenthetical lines to give an ironic alternate narrative to sentimentality, underscored by the repeat rhyme words “clings” and “sings”: He gave me his promise of changeless truth,   (Down in the wood where the ivy clings); And the air breathed rapture, and love, and youth,   (And yon tree was in bud where the throstle sings).

This alternative poem, offered in brackets, paradoxically both displaces and highlights the real narrative of a lover’s abandonment of the speaker. The cumulative effect of the repeated rhyme words suggests increasing power in the expression of disappointment and anger. Another ironic version of this sub-genre, Linda Gardiner’s “Long Ago” (Chambers’s Journal, 27 December 1884), refers to the “easy rhyme” of “Long ago,” which her poem performs through the couplets that regularly interrupt her stanzas and denounce her fickle lover’s romantic platitudes (Fig. 3.3): 13   For more information about periodical poetry’s diverse contributors, see the Personography of Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry: https://dvpp.uvic.ca/persons.html. 14  Poem signed “J.  C. H.”; author attribution from National Library of Scotland (Dep 341/371, 341/294).

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Fig. 3.3  Jessie C. Howden. Long Ago. Chambers’s Journal, 2 February 1878, 80. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Victoria, Canada

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’Twas simple as an easy rhyme— But that was once upon a time          Long ago!

The lyric song of “long ago” is implicitly yet insistently clinging, like the parasitical ivy in the wood where Howden’s speaker cannot any more, in the last stanza, hear the “throstle”: Spring will come with its buds and leaves   (Back to the wood where the ivy clings); But ’tis winter cold for the heart that grieves,   (And I hear not the song that the throstle sings).

Howden’s poem is remarkable, like Gardiner’s, for its conformity to the insistent formula of “Long Ago” poems, while exposing its empty nostalgia and even suggesting, through the trope of the silent poetic throstle, that poetry itself has become debased. Without understanding the patterning of ubiquitous “long ago” poems in serial print, and their relationship to print ephemerality and nostalgia, poems like Howden’s can seem exactly like the sentimental filler they unravel, rather than a critique. Their position on the page—the bottom right corner of the last page of the weekly issue, a common place for periodical poems—indicates their status as a familiar filler. And this status is highlighted by the poem’s proximity to the adjacent short article, the unsigned “Waste Substances. Cigar-Ends,” which recounts how cigar butts in Germany are repurposed into snuff and sold for charity, supporting orphan children by providing clothing and a proposed orphanage, demonstrating what can be achieved if a community of cigar smokers works together to repurpose their scraps (Unsigned 1878b). Collecting “these small ends” has surprising “beneficial results.” The last paragraph, just before Howden’s “Long Ago” poem, asks, “is it not worth while to be careful in small things, and to save up these usually wasted cigar-ends?” Intentional or not, the reader of Chambers’s Journal is directed to regard the immediately following poem as a “small thing,” an insignificant end to the column, page, and issue, that offers its worth collectively. The examples from Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal, as well as Household Words, All the Year Round, and Good Words, represent just a fraction of Victorian filler poems. As butt-ends of weekly issues, and scraps of poetry crammed into tight spaces on the page, filler poems en masse have value. And, certainly, filler poems make their meaning when read as the first readers encountered them, in their serial print environment. Like cigar butts,

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reading filler poetry cumulatively, within its original print ecology, makes valuable waste. Individually trite, generic, and derivative, the poems nonetheless signal a meta-textual awareness of a double parenthetical and emphatic status within their print environment. Patterned widely across periodical print through shared graphic and poetic formations, filler poems offer readers a rhythmic experience based on the mass accumulation of “little words.” Positioned overtly as supremely ephemeral yet also embedded and connected within expansive serial print, filler poems are not designed to be read and understood individually, but rather as a genre that relies on a reading community that consumed poems as a function of serial time.

References Addey, Elizabeth. 1858. Long Ago. Household Words, 20 November, 540–541. Beck, Ellen. 1895. Long Ago. Chambers’s Journal, 15 June, 384. Behlman, Lee. 2018. The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société. Victorian Poetry 56: 477–491. Blair, Kirstie. 2019. Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 1861. Little Mattie. The Cornhill Magazine, June, 736–737. Buchanan, Marion. 1884. Donald—A Pony. Chambers’s Journal, 1 March, 144. Chapman, Alison (ed.). Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project. https://dvpp. uvic.ca/. Accessed 10 March 2021. Daman, R. 1889. Last Words. Chambers’s Journal, 19 October, 672. Easley, Alexis. 2019. Scrapbooks and Women’s Leisure Reading Practices, 1825–1860. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 15. https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue152/easley.html. Accessed 4 July 2020. Gardiner, Linda. 1884. Long Ago. Chambers’s Journal, 27 December, 832. Howden, Jessie C. 1878. Long Ago. Chambers’s Journal, 2 February, 80. Hughes, Linda K. 2007. What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies. Victorian Periodicals Review 40: 91–125. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. 1991. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. J. B. L. 1886. A Retrospect. Chambers’s Journal, 13 November, 736. Matheson, E. 1898. “Verse.” Chambers’s Journal, 8 October, 720. Mazel, Adam. 2017. The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge. Nineteenth-Century Literature 72: 374–401. Moresby, Jane. 1868. Last Words. Chambers’s Journal, 26 December, 832. Parrott, Jeremy. 2018. More Newly Identified Contributors to Household Words. Dickens Quarterly 35: 189–206.

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Payn, Harriet. 1878. On a Sheet of Blank Paper. Chambers’s Journal, 6 July, 432. Perry, Mrs. George. 1873. Only Waste-Paper. Chambers’s Journal, 4 January, 16. Pettitt, Clare. 2020. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossetti, Christina G. 1859. The Round Tower at Jhansi.—June 8, 1857. Once a Week, 13 August, 140. Scott, J.R. 1885. A Novelette. In Four Chapters. Chambers’s Journal, 18 July, 464. Turner, Mark W. 2006. Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies. Victorian Periodicals Review 39: 309–316. ———. 2020. Seriality, Miscellaneity, and Compression in Nineteenth-Century Print. Victorian Studies 62: 283–294. Unsigned. 1850. Stanzas by Shakespeare, and Somebody Else. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 9 March, 160. ———. 1860. Little Things. Good Words, January, 15. ———. 1864. Blank Paper. Chambers’s Journal, 19 March, 192. ———. 1865. Little Things. Chambers’s Journal, 21 October, 672. ———. 1870a. Last Words. All the Year Round, 17 December, 60. ———. 1870b. To My Two-Wheeled Steed. Chambers’s Journal, 4 June, 368. ———. 1878a. Long Ago. All the Year Round, 12 October, 350. ———. 1878b. Waste Substances. Cigar-Ends. Chambers’s Journal, 2 February, 80. ———. 1878c. With a Present. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 21 September, 608. ———. 1892. Last Words. All the Year Round, 26 March, 299–300. Usher, Nora C. 1884. Yes. Chambers’s Journal, 27 September, 624. Warrington, George. 1879. My Heroine. Chambers’s Journal, 29 November, 768. Williams, J. 1883. Love and Fame. Chambers’s Journal, 28 July, 480. Wilson, Helen K. 1878. Treasure-Trove. Chambers’s Journal, 8 June, 368. Wilton, Charles. 1850. Long Ago. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 9 November, 304.

CHAPTER 4

Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker Kirstie Blair

On 17 June 1870, the Border Advertiser reported on the annual summer outing for 300 workers at Mid Mill in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders. A highlight of the event was Peter Morton’s recitation of ‘the following verses he had made for the occasion’: It would be sheer ingratitude Were we all to forget This cheering act of kindness we Have felt since e’er we met. Year after year it is kept up With spirit and good will, May health and happiness cling to The owners of Mid Mill

K. Blair (*) University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_4

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For little less than two years back Our prospects have been bright, Extra demand has kept the wheels In motion day and night. And who will say that it is not The fruit of taste and skill Who has a mind that can discern The progress of Mid Mill? (2)1

The verses then compliment the appearance of the women workers present, admire the beauty of the gardens, thank the management for its organization and conclude by hoping for good trade and ‘more extensions’ for Mid Mill. ‘Mr Morton’s verses were loudly cheered by the large party,’ the Advertiser reports, ‘and after they were recited, Mr Paterson, in the name of the firm, returned thanks to Mr Morton and company for the kind wishes expressed towards the firm’. Song and recitation was, of course, a standard and expected part of the entertainment on group outings and events in the Anglophone Victorian world, irrespective of the regional and class backgrounds of the participants. But what I want to highlight in this chapter is that these ‘songs and recitations’ often included original material, like Morton’s verses, written specifically for such occasions. The presence of original verse compositions in a social culture centred on the new industrial workplaces of this period—compositions that were usually performed in public at group events, then published for wider circulation in the local press—highlights the pervasiveness of verse culture in the period and the uses of poetry. Railway clerks supplying comic verse about their colleagues for handwritten magazines like the Enginorum; mining foremen doodling poems in their ledgers in preparation for literary society meetings; millworkers declaiming their own verse to colleagues on the factory floor: the industrial workplace in the long nineteenth century was a hub for the production and circulation of verse.2 ‘Verses’ as opposed to ‘a poem’ in the Border Advertiser report is a value judgement. As I have examined in more detail in Working Verse in 1  Little is known about Morton, though a short biography identifying him as a Galashiels weaver and poet appeared in The Border Counties Magazine, March 1881, p. 116. 2  My allusions here largely come from the findings of the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ project, which was publicly released in 2022 (see www.pistonpenandpress.org/database, consulted 18 February 2022). The Enginorum magazine is held in the archives of the National Railway Museum.

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Victorian Scotland, occasional verse was represented as casual, ephemeral and resoundingly ‘local’ (a term which in itself has negative literary connotations in this period) to whatever context applied (Blair 2019a). Workplace verse, which I define here as verse which references a specific workplace, and which is usually written by a self-identified employee, was frequently ‘occasional’: that is written for and about a specific event. Its authors would not necessarily or usually have considered themselves ‘poets’, but it is precisely this presence of verse production as just one part of an individual’s working life which renders occasional workplace verse significant. Scholarship on working-class literature has tended to replicate the perception that this verse culture is not of lasting aesthetic or cultural importance. Major studies of working-class literature, from the 1970s to the present, do not discuss workplace verse, though it has received some recent critical attention, for example, in studies of magazines such as the Lowell Offering or in David Finkelstein’s recent study of printer-poets (Cook 2008, Finkelstein 2018).3 Professional identity has been recognized as important in grouping working-class writers as, for instance, ‘factory’ or ‘mining’ poets, yet the verse that well-known working-class writers wrote about the specifics of named workplaces (e.g. Ellen Johnston’s ‘Lines Dedicated to James Kennedy, Esq, of Bedford Street Weaving Factory, Belfast’, ‘Lines to Mr James Dorward, Power-Loom Foreman, Chapelshade Works, Dundee’, ‘Address to the Factory of Messrs J. & W. L. Scott & Co., John Street, Bridgeton’ [1867, pp. 66, 86, 97]) tends to be less discussed and seldom anthologized, compared to their other poems. In this chapter, I focus specifically on workplace verse in the factory. As Patrick Joyce showed, in his influential study on ‘factory culture’ in the mid-Victorian period, the rise of large-scale industrial workplaces resulted in communal occasions, bringing together workers on the factory floor and their employers. These were effectively codified by the mid-late Victorian period and followed established patterns, as part of what Joyce 3  For example highly influential studies and collections such as those by Vicinus, Maidment and Sanders do not discuss workplace verse, though they do consider how working-class writers discussed industrial labour, often in terms of their critiques of this labour, or their more politicized poems on strikes, unionism and other collective workers’ enterprises. There is no discussion of the function of the workplace in literary production in the essays contained in Goodridge and Keegan’s major recent collection. Cohen’s substantial and important study of popular verse cultures in nineteenth-century America also does not address workplace verse.

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describes as the ‘ritual quality’ of factory life (Joyce 2017, pp.  148–9, p. 180). Summer factory excursions, a Victorian invention, are the most notable of these, with Christmas or New Year workplace celebrations as a winter equivalent. Joyce, whose study focuses only on England and on a relatively prescribed geographic area, does not include instances of workers’ writing. In fact, he writes of work celebrations that ‘there are considerable difficulties of documentation, above all in ascertaining the operatives’ definition of these events’ (p. 183). Workplace verse, while far from providing a transparent window into factory workers’ feelings, does at least supply a fairly extensive source of documentation, and one consciously representing an ‘operative’ viewpoint. Both summer excursion poems, like Morton’s, and Christmas/New Year poems, such as J. Burgess’s ‘The Third Annual Poem Addressed to the Angola Winders, of Droylsden, for Christmas 1865’ (1869, pp.  84–6), were seemingly common. The retirement, departure or death of a master or factory owner or a significant event in their life (e.g. marriage) also supplied an occasion for communal celebration or mourning with a strong tendency to feature original verse. William Gray’s ‘On the Death of Jonathan Harris, Sen’ (‘Our kind master, our dear master/ He’s called from us and died’ [1868, p. 4]), eulogizing the seemingly well-liked Quaker owner of Harris Flax Mills in Cockermouth, Cumbria, is one typical instance. Of course, any factory event also featured prose speeches, some of which might contain quotations from established poets (Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’, with its emphasis on the value of work, was especially popular).4 Yet the recitation of a poem ‘made for the occasion’ indicated that a special effort had been taken and a particular kind of work accomplished. All such ‘occasions’ result in a literary culture of verse which is highly positive about work, the workplace, and the relationships between employee and employed. The conceit is that one of the workers, inspired by pride and affection for their working community, has spontaneously produced verse praising his or her workplace or the individuals involved in (and often paying for) the occasion. This sets up a circuit of mutual satisfaction. Employees have demonstrated that at least one among their number is educated and intelligent enough to write decent verse, with an 4  Workplace speeches, as preserved in newspaper columns, did not include entire poems unless the poem was original but would often include brief poetic quotations from a wide variety of sources. Longfellow is the most trenchant example of a writer liable to be cited by both workers and masters. See Blair (2021).

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understanding of formal and linguistic conventions; employers can take the credit for this and bask in their employee’s publicly demonstrated gratitude and affection. When such verse is republished in the local provincial press or in the collections of working-class poets, it further commemorates and disseminates this gratitude. As the dates of the poems featured here suggest, this verse was especially popular from the 1850s to the 1870s, a period which, though marked by the Cotton Famine and then the start of a long depression in the 1870s, was generally perceived as more harmonious in terms of relationships between workers and management than the 1840s, and which preceded the rise of socialism and more intense union activism towards the end of the century. Surviving poems reflect this. This kind of workplace verse is consciously conventional. It is seldom formally or linguistically innovative, and in terms of content, its celebration of the conditions of industrial labour and the relationship between master and worker can seem off-putting to critics and readers hoping to find the kind of damning critique of industrialism that Victorian novelists were sometimes able to provide. Occasional verse in the workplace, however, is more important than it seems because it highlights the strategic use of poetic ability by industrial workers. I want to suggest here that we can read such poems via Michel de Certeau’s analogy between nineteenth-­ century tools of labour and forms of language: Like tools, proverbs (and other discourses) are marked by uses; they offer to analysis the imprints of acts or of processes of enunciation; they signify the operations whose object they have been…more generally, they thus indicate a social historicity in which systems of representation or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but as tools manipulated by users. (De Certeau 1984, p. 21 [italics in original])

If we see workplace verse as a tool, a process, a means of representation, manipulated by workers, marked by its situational contexts and reflecting on the ‘operations’ of factory culture, then even the simplest piece of verse becomes more complex in terms of its function as a form of work. Verse produced with the understanding that an employer will read or hear it is part of an employee’s identity as a worker. This understanding may be explicit (the employer is present in the room) or implicit (the verse is published or circulated locally, in a context likely to be seen by the employer). Workplace verse collapses any distinction between poetry-writing as a private, special leisure pursuit, presumed to be conducted as an escape from

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work—a standard nineteenth-century perception, reproduced in many workers’ autobiographies and biographies—and poetry-writing as what we might now call a transferable skill which enhances employability and long-term career prospects. The fact that workplace verse has these strategic uses, and that it frequently offers a rosy vision of Victorian workplace relationships, does not necessarily mean that the poet is insincere. But these verses must always be read with the awareness that both author and readers understood workplace verse as a careful production designed to meet certain expectations, and produced within a profoundly unequal relationship of power. Of course, Victorian industrial workers with a bent for poetry unquestionably also wrote and performed negative, satirical, rude and scurrilous poems about their employers and fellow-workmates. We can find traces of these in autobiographies, in reports on libel cases and, by the end of century, in the trades union, socialist and Labour press: for example the poetry column of the union-focused Yorkshire Factory Times in the 1890s contains many poems about unjust employers and unfair working practices, though rarely with direct identifications. Such poems were not, however, the ones that tended to find their way into print in collections by named authors or in the popular press, and so they have largely been lost. The verse culture I examine here is drawn from research into Scottish and Northern English industrial workers, and I will focus on two overlapping subgenres: first on poems celebrating employers, then on factory excursion poems. All this verse presents itself as playful, as light entertainment, and so it aligns itself with the cultures of play and sociality featured elsewhere in this collection, where verse appears in middle-class parlours and in meetings and correspondence between canonical and established Victorian poets. But there is a profound difference between what is at stake in these examples. As I explore elsewhere, working-class poets rarely received direct payment for their poems, since their major publication venue, the newspaper poetry columns, did not pay for poems (Blair 2019b). For an industrial worker in this period, however, the ability to produce particular kinds of verse could mean the difference between employment or unemployment, housing or homelessness, comfort and increased salary, or hardship. Poetic ability was, in many cases, laboriously acquired, as part of the skillset of an ambitious man or woman seeking security amidst the precarity and danger of Victorian industrial employment.

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William Heaton’s ‘To John Crossley, Esq’ is a case in point. Heaton was a carpet weaver from Yorkshire, born in 1805, who, like many, was forced to move from handloom weaving onto the factory floor as the home-­ based weaving industry declined. His autobiographical sketch, preceding his second collection, details his efforts to get his poems, which existed in manuscript form on the whitewashed walls of his home, published in the local newspaper press and to seek patrons and subscribers for his collections (1857, pp. xxi–xxiii).5 Though Heaton comments that poetry ‘has not added one comfort to my fireside, nor put one guinea in my pocket’ (p. xxiii), the inclusion of ‘To John Crossley, Esq’ in his 1857 volume (a collection also dedicated to Crossley) is intriguing in this respect, because in 1850, Heaton started working at Crossley’s Carpet Mills in Halifax (p. xxii). Crossley’s was a famous and extensive Halifax enterprise. The Crossley brothers and mill managers (John, Joseph and Francis) were noted benefactors of the town: John and Francis Crossley both became Liberal M.P.s. Heaton’s ‘To John Crossley’ does not specify an occasion and is undated, though this does not mean that it was not originally written for recitation. It was also almost certainly published in the local press, as were most of Heaton’s poems. It opens: May peace, smiling peace, on your footsteps attend! May the Ruler divine be your guardian and friend! May comfort and happiness sit at your board! And tfhe smile of contentment its lustre afford. While health, wealth, and freedom together combine, A bright wreath of gladness around to entwine, To shield you from sickness, from sorrow and woe, While hope points the way through the valley below. (Heaton 1857, p. 202)

This is generic enough to be appropriate at any event or any period of Crossley’s career. Succeeding verses go on to express good wishes towards his wife and children, and the poem concludes with pious hopes for Crossley’s salvation:

 This is confirmed by Abraham Holroyd’s memories of Heaton, reported in ‘Halifax Books and Authors’ LXXIX, Brighouse News, 30 June 1905, p. 7. Holroyd notes that the poems on the walls were ‘almost perfect in rhythm, but the spelling was that of an illiterate person, and there was not the least attempt at punctuation’. 5

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This, this is the prayer of your servant the Bard; Tis breathed from the heart with the kindest regard. (Heaton 1857, p. 203)

If Heaton was already working for Crossley when this poem was written, then ‘servant’ has a literal edge. ‘Your servant the Bard’ goes beyond the standard pose of humility and polite address usually adopted by a working-class writer, to highlight the fact that Heaton is also a ‘Bard’—the capitalization is important—as well as a worker in Crossley’s weaving shed. Being a ‘bard’ is thus both additional to Heaton’s identity as a weaver and part of it. Describing himself as Crossley’s bard brings in nostalgic echoes of the relationship of feudal patronage between lord and minstrel, as famously represented by Walter Scott in the opening of ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’. Scott’s lament for ‘the last of all the Bards’ thrown out in the cold by the ‘bigots’ of the ‘iron time’ is in play here because of the hint that Crossley—Crossley the person, and Crossley’s the company—has a moral and civic duty to support ‘his’ Bard, just as lords supported the minstrels of yore (Scott, Canto 1, l.1–22). Heaton’s poem expresses a variety of entirely conventional Christian and flattering hopes for Crossley’s future. Yet like all such poems, these hopes are also a pointed reflection on what a ‘servant’ might expect from a good master. In its stated desire that Crossley’s children will grow up to imitate Christ in practising ‘wisdom and love’ each day and in its plea to Crossley’s wife, ‘May misfortune and want ever find her a friend!’ (p. 203), ‘To John Crossley, Esq’ emphasizes the importance of virtuous and charitable behaviour in the upper classes. Halifax was a centre for Chartist agitation in the early 1840s, and both ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’ in stanza 1 are terms that are freighted with recent history, given that relationships between Yorkshire’s wealthy liberal millowners and their employees had at times been less than peaceful. The ‘freedom’ that Crossley may enjoy also offers a contrast with Heaton’s description, in his preface, of his working day in Crossley’s mills amid ‘the clatter of machinery’: ‘for nearly four years, I have worked from six in the morning, till six in the evening, and sometimes longer’ (p. xxiii, xxii). While this kind of verse seems entirely adulatory, it does not occlude the differences in wealth, status and quality of life between addressee and author—differences which would of course also be visible in dress and appearance when such poems were performed in mixed company.

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Heaton tells us that his volume was mediated and approved by a ‘gentleman’ before publication—‘Many of the short pieces in this work have been carefully examined by a gentleman, in every way qualified to understand them’ (p. xxii). His negative depiction of industrial labour, perhaps as a consequence, is far more visible in the autobiography than in the poems, which are largely concerned with pastoral themes. Since ‘To John Crossley, Esq’ is undated, it is difficult to tell whether it was written while Heaton worked at Crossley’s mill or before he gained employment there, in which case the poem might have served as an inducement to an employer to hire the poet. In either case, Heaton’s assertion in his autobiography that poetry brought him nothing was proved false in short order. In the same year that this collection was published, the ‘People’s Park’, funded by Francis Crossley and donated to the people of Halifax, opened with great splendour. Two nights before the grand opening, John Crossley hosted a delegation of his workers who wished to welcome Lord Shaftesbury, in town for the event. Not only did Heaton read the workers’ address (‘representing upwards of 3000 persons’) to Shaftesbury—and if he read it, he doubtless at least assisted in composing it—but John Crossley also then invited Heaton to recite one of his own poems, which he did, the Leeds Times reported, ‘in a very pleasing manner’ (15 August 1857, p. 8). This suggests that the assertions of a friendly relationship and ‘regard’ in Heaton’s ‘To John Crossley, Esq’ were not unfounded and that Crossley was one of the many employers who regarded having a poet on the premises as something to advertise. Moreover, at some point not long after the park’s opening, Heaton was appointed its keeper, a post he then held until his death. His perseverance in writing verse in the face of poverty, hard labour and a lack of almost any formal education—and his judicious use of his poems to develop a relationship with powerful industrialists—extracted him from the factory floor and placed him in a comfortable sinecure for his old age. This is not an unusual story. In his model mills and village in nearby Saltaire, for instance, Sir Titus Salt supported at least three poets in his works. John Nichol, the most famous and an alcoholic, was definitely not hired on the basis of his excellence in alpaca weaving. Abraham Wildman, a radical political campaigner and newspaper poet who ended up as a destitute woolsorter, was given a place in the Saltaire almshouses. James Waddington, another member of the lively circle of Bradford poets,

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worked on the Saltaire factory floor, probably as a weaver.6 Moving north to the Scottish Borders, millworker poet Robert Crosbie is another instance of the ways in which verse production and performance may have shaped a worker’s career options. At the end of 1862 Crosbie was working in the Border mill town of Galashiels, almost certainly at Buckholm Mill, since one of his poems is a New Year celebration verse, ‘Respectfully Inscribed to the Operatives of Buckholm Mill, as written for, and sung at, their Old Year Night’s Entertainment’ (Crosbie 1864, pp.  100–101). While an employee in Galashiels, he also produced ‘Verses Recited on the Presentation of a Silver Cup to Mr James Dalziel, by his Employees, on his Leaving Galashiels for Walkerburn, Dec 31, 1862’ (pp. 97–98). The 1864 collection in which these two poems are published, however, is signed not from Galashiels but from the mill village of Walkerburn. Crosbie next appears in the Border Advertiser in 1870, reciting a poem at a works outing for employees from Tweedholm Mills, Walkerburn—a firm run by J. Dalziel. At some point in between 1862 and 1864, then, Crosbie moved jobs to work in the same firm as the employer whose virtues he had praised. His verses to Dalziel, like Heaton’s verses to Crossley or Johnston’s several poems to her employers, are a testimonial to Crosbie’s good qualities as a worker and thus self-advertisement as much as a tribute to the virtues of his employer. As distinct from Heaton’s poem, Crosbie’s verses on Dalziel’s departure from Galashiels are clearly linked to a specific dated event, and they reference the presence of a community of listeners. Stating that it is a pleasure to give honour where honour is due, he continues: And so we feel when met to-night Where happy hearts and faces bright    Are smiling all around us, To give that honour due to one, Before the year its course has run,    As duty’s call hath bound us. No hard taskmaster e’er was he Whom we thus honour, nor will be,    He owns a higher nature; 6  On Nicholson, Wildman and Waddington, see Charles A.  Fedener, ‘John Nicholson’, James Gabb, ‘Abraham Wildman’ and A. H. Rix, ‘James Waddington’, in Forshaw 1893, pp. 144–54, pp. 192–3, pp. 185–6. Wildman’s career is further discussed in Blair 2019 (2).

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Nor needs the boast of noble blood, To make him either wise or good,    Or measure out his stature. And all now present here can tell They ever found in James Dalziel    A kind and generous master. Would some but imitate his plan, They’d find who in their service ran,    To serve them, would run faster. (pp. 97–8)

‘Run faster’ references the running of machinery, the speed of industry, and so might seem to compare the worker to the machine. Crosbie probably uses ‘ran’ simply because it rhymes with ‘plan’, but in doing so he introduces religious allusions, since this imagery chimes with a number of biblical verses that use running or racing as a symbol of faith and service to God—for example 1 Corinthians 9:24, ‘So run, that ye may obtain.’ Again, this poem is designed to remind both this specific employer and any others who might be reading it about how they should behave, in order to keep the loyalty of their workers and, indeed, increase productivity. It deliberately extols the benefit of being a good master in economic terms. Crosbie effectively calls for a group affirmation of his words (‘all now present here can tell’), since workers listening at the entertainment would have reacted to them ‘live’ with cheers or applause. And since he then printed the verses in a local collection, which would have been read by people who knew that James Dalziel had purchased Tweedholm Mills and was engaged in enlarging and extending them, he displays his own continued investment in the success of Dalziel’s enterprise. Crosbie’s later 1870 verses, recited on an outing to the nearby Traquair House, were composed in Scots and in the habbie stanza, choices which were associated with a working-class voice and perspective. The newspaper quoted only two verses: As workers a’ o’ Tweedholm Mill Let us this day a bumper fill, And drink this toast wi’ right guid will—    May Heaven long spare Lady Louisa wi’ us still    To grace Traquair.

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Next for our firm we’ll have a toast, For we’re the boys aye at our post, In competition we’re a boast    As truth can tell; Our labours, be they still the boast    O’ James Dalziel.7

Scots, and a stanzaic form primarily associated with Burns, are appropriate for a ‘raise your glasses’ poem, though Crosbie seems to run out of rhymes for ‘toast’, leaving him with an awkward repetition. These stanzas celebrate Dalziel but do not directly address him (he may not have been physically present); rather, they appeal to shared pride among the workers in their endeavours and a sense of their competitiveness among the many Borders mills. While ‘aye at our post’ may simply signify how hard-­working these operatives are, it might also indicate a loyalty that had been tested during Crosbie’s time at this mill, because in 1865 it burned down and workers were unemployed until the rebuilding was complete, around a year later. Those who had stuck with or returned to Tweedholm Mills, like Crosbie, had indeed demonstrated their ability to overcome adversity and stay with a firm through its troubles. Factory verse often walks a line, one common to working-class poetics in the mid-Victorian period, between seeming conservatism and more radical suggestions. Burgess’s 1865 ‘Labour and Capital’, with the headnote, ‘Composed for the tea party given by Peter Joynson and Co, for the work-people employed at their Mill, Beswick Street, off Bradford Street, Manchester’ (Burgess 1869, p. 99), lectures the workers on their responsibility to the masters: Your generous masters with a liberal hand, Share with you now the wealth at their command: Receive their bounty with a grateful heart, And towards them act a truly honest part; ..... If you are active, steady, earnest, true, The more they gain—the more there is for you. (p. 100)

Since Burgess comments that ‘employers and employed we see tonight’, it is clear that the mill masters were present and listening. (Whether 7

 ‘Walkerburn’, Border Advertiser, 15 July 1870, p. 3.

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Burgess himself worked in this silk mill cannot be confirmed, though he was certainly a factory worker in the Manchester region). His poem is in two parts, however, and when it moves from celebrating ‘Capital’ to celebrating ‘Labour’, the tone changes. After a paean to the works created by Labour, Burgess continues: Let none with pride on Labour then look down, Nor meet the dusty jacket with a frown. The rights of Labour fully recognized, The toiling man will be more highly prized, And he, more honoured, will more honour show, And hence more firmly mutual interests grow. This change effected, we may hope to see Labour exalted—Capital more free. (p. 102)

These verses express similar conclusions to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester fiction in their hope for friendship and sympathy between masters and men, but they differ in suggesting that for this to happen fully, the ‘rights of Labour’ should be met. Exactly what these are remains unspecified. While each worker is advised to ‘secure his master’s true regard’, Burgess also advises the masters to ensure that the workers gain ‘due reward’ for their work. The thirty-six lines emphasizing that industry cannot exist and prosper without Labour make it clear that it would be easier for the employees to do without the employers than vice versa. Most excursion poems, and most factory poems, were written by male workers, though the excursion poems often refer directly to the number of women workers on an outing. In the very small sample of such poems by women that are currently known, poems follow the same conventions as above, though there is perhaps a tendency to represent the event from a more distanced perspective. Jessie Conqueror, from Perthshire, has been identified from the 1851 census as Janet Conqueror (‘Jessie’ is a Scottish nickname for ‘Janet’), ‘linen and yarn bleachfield bleacher’ aged sixteen in that year. Her ‘Lines on the Wallace Factory Excursion’ suggest that she might have been an employee of this linen manufacturer, run by John and Alexander Shields. Like Crosbie, she has left no record other than a locally circulated collection and the occasional newspaper mention; she published several poems, for instance, in the Glasgow Penny Post, a paper which attracted many working-class writers, and knew the work of Ellen Johnston and ‘Edith’ from that paper, since a poem addressing them is included in

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her collection.8 Unlike Crosbie and other excursion poets, Conqueror opens by describing the excursion as an outsider: They come; see how gaily the banners are floating;   Tis no languid party the time to beguile— Their ardent delight and demeanour denoting  That they are the sons and the daughters of toil. (Conqueror 1905, p. 16)

‘Ardent’ as opposed to ‘languid’ signifies that these are workers, because they are determined to make the most of this rare opportunity for leisure rather than taking it for granted. In admiring the excursionists, Conqueror thanks ‘the master who gives both the means and the leisure’ for this outing, and reflects: Would others but draw from the wealth they have hoarded A little the toil-laden’s want to relieve, They would find from the pleasure their gold had afforded, That it was indeed better to give than receive. Our grateful good wishes we give to the donor— May his home be the centre of all earthly bliss; Each true heart must join us in paying him honour, Who gives of his means to a cause such as this. (p. 16)

Conqueror’s switch to ‘we’ still does not firmly identify herself, as poet, with the ‘sons and daughters of toil’, though of course this may be because of the stigma attached to being a working woman. Like the poems discussed above, her praise of the master of Wallace Factory is comparative: other masters, or simply other wealthy men, should behave more like him. The poem once again highlights the informal contract between master and worker, that workers are willing to offer respect and admiration, as long as they feel that the master recognizes and supplies their wants. As all these examples show, excursion verse has a number of understood conventions. These poems almost always involve praise of the employers, who usually contributed financially to the excursion costs and often opened up their homes and gardens to their workers for the day, or  The Penny Post poem is ‘The Agonized Cry of the Heart’, signed ‘J. C., Banks of the Almond’, 19 January 1867. 8

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arranged for them to visit another stately home in the area. It is also standard that they will describe what happens on the day and the workers’ happiness and good humour, and consider the relationship between the firm’s triumphs and good leadership. To conclude, I will consider a poet who leaned towards subverting these conventions, a rare move in the poems uncovered to date. William Wright, of Keighley in Yorkshire, produced three excursion poems, published together in a twopenny pamphlet, Trips to Malsis Hall and Windermere, and probably marketed to his fellow-workers. They are, unusually for this genre though not for Wright, comic and parodic: the third in the collection, ‘The Bold Buchaneers’, for instance, represents an excursion in comic military terms, where workers ‘attack’ the larder and cellar of their Field-Marshal, the millowner (a scenario that again recalls the fears of revolt and rebellion of the early 1840s). Wright’s poems deploy Yorkshire dialect in prose as well as verse, aligning themselves with burlesque and music-hall (among his various professions, Wright had a stint as a stage performer) as well as with the kind of mixed-­format narratives popular in comic dialect almanacs. They devote much attention to mishaps and problems—it pours with rain, the Lake District tearooms are charging outrageous prices and so on. Wright, better known as ‘Bill o’th’Hoylus End’ and a fairly well-known local poet, had a lively and chequered career and liked to court controversy of various kinds. He worked as a warpdresser in between unsuccessful attempts at earning money by other means and at the time of writing these (undated) poems was employed by James Lund, who had built Malsis Hall, subject of ‘Trip to Malsis Hall’, and was the owner of the North Beck worsted mills in Keighley. Wright’s manuscript autobiography notes that ‘they was good times’ when he worked for Lund, who ‘gave us a trip to his hall and provided us with a [splendid?] Tea’, so this was evidently a memorable outing (Wright n.d. ‘MS Autobiography’). ‘Trip to Malsis Hall’ opens the pamphlet Trips to Malsis Hall and Windermere. It was probably composed after the event to commemorate it, rather than recited on the day. The poem does discourse on the beauty of Malsis Hall and the pleasures of the day, but the main focus is on the comedy of bad weather and the organizers’ failure to supply enough food for the hungry excursionists:

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But war ner t’rain, aw mun explain, ‘At caus’d a girt disaster, All but one sort o’breead ran short— It wor no fault o’ t’maister. O, Gormanton! thy breead an’ bun, An’ judgment it wor scanty’ Oh, what a shame, an’ what a name, For not providing plenty. Oh, silly clown! thah might hev knawn, To yet each one wor able; The country air did mak some swear They cud onmost yet a table. The atmosphere, no longer clear, The clouds are black an’ stormy; Then all but one away did run, Like some deserted army. (Wright n.d., p. 5)

Though Wright emphasizes that it is not Lund’s fault that things have gone wrong and that the day ends with the excursionists like ‘drahnded rats’, the poem provides a lively account of the problems likely to beset these mass expeditions. Unlike standard excursion poems, it also thus highlights the fact that Lund is the sponsor, not the planner: organizing these expeditions was, as these verses imply, a tough task usually devolved to a committee of senior people (e.g. foremen, managers) in the works. Wright’s verses could safely be read by Lund but, unlike most poems, read as though they were directed to the workers: they are full of in-jokes, nicknames and specific references to people who would likely have been immediately identifiable to readers. Wright presented himself as a local eccentric and humourist, part of whose identity lay in skirting the borders of the offensive and outrageous. Though he never made a living as a poet, he did make some income from it; the value of these poems for Wright lies not (or not only) in the possible benefit of impressing Lund but in the tangible benefit of selling the poems for twopence to people who might recognize themselves within them. His pamphlet poems, possibly also performed locally, suggest that the genre of excursion verse was well-known and ripe for subversion, since the humour in his poems relies on the ways in which they fail to live up to standard expectations for this genre.

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These poems are a small sample of what would have been a very substantial body of occasional factory verse, much of which doubtless either never made it into print or is now lost. The chances seem high that every large factory in Britain had at least one worker who could have produced verse for such occasions and indeed would have been expected to act as the factory ‘bard’. Though such poems follow conventions of content, there is no set of stylistic conventions in play other than the requirement for this verse to look and sound like the popular verse of the period. They provided an opportunity for workers to highlight different poetic skills— for example regional dialect, the mastery of a particular form, the use of high-flown ‘literary’ language. As I argue above, these skills should not be seen as separate and distinct from the other work-based skills that factory operatives used on a daily basis. Verse, indeed, was composed during working hours, as well as often recited or sung on the factory floor. The division between work and leisure in Victorian factories, or indeed in other industrial settings, was complicated by the tendency of paternalistic Victorian industrialists to supply and regulate leisure pursuits for their workers, for instance by setting up reading rooms or institutes, sponsoring choirs, theatrical groups, sporting clubs and so on. Workplace verse shows us that literary pursuits were not immune to this, and thus complicates an argument about the ‘freedom’ from capitalist domination gained by making time ‘to discuss, write, compose verses’ outside the workplace.9 It shows us, rather, the ways in which poetry is also work. It was a means for individual workers to stand out in the ever-growing crowds of fellow-­ employees, to make themselves known as individuals and to occupy an unofficial position in the factory hierarchy that conferred status and opportunity, especially the opportunity to seek patronage from masters and owners. Rather than simply illustrating the ‘deference’ that Joyce argued was typical of the period, and supporting the ‘fiction of community’ created by millowners (Joyce, p. 92, p. xxii and passim), occasional factory verse is a complex form indicating the agency of the workers in constructing an image of the factory community and in making strategic choices about how to use the literary skills they had acquired. This is a 9  This cites Jacques Rancière’s 2012 preface to Proletarian Nights (1981), p. ix. This study presents complex arguments about the ways in which French artisans deployed time outside work (e.g. pp. 290–1) on ‘dedication’. The different national context and focus on a period largely pre-1850 means that there is no discussion of the kind of strategic, celebratory workers’ literature I discuss here.

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verse culture which is performative and generative, in its public, social representations of factory life. It gives us insight into the choices operating behind every piece of factory verse and the work that verse could do in such contexts.

References Blair, Kirstie. 2019a. Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019b. The Piston and the Pen: Poetry and the Victorian Industrial Worker. Journal of the British Academy 7. https://doi.org/10.5871/ jba/007.123. ———. 2021. Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow. Victorian Poetry 59 (1): 1–21. ———. 1880–1881. The Border Counties Magazine: A Popular Monthly Miscellany. Galashiels: Thomas Litster. Burgess, J. 1869. Pictures of Social Life, Being Select Poems. Manchester: John Heywood. Cohen, Michael C. 2015. The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Conqueror, Jessie. 1905. Poems. Perth: Milne, Tannahill and Methven. Cook, Sylvia J. 2008. Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crosbie, Robert. 1864. Poems and Songs. Edinburgh: John Forsyth. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fedener, Charles A. 1893. John Nicholson. In Forshaw, ed. 144–54. Finkelstein, David J. 2018. Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forshaw, Charles F., ed. 1893. The Poets of Keighley, Bingley, Haworth and District. London: W. W. Morgan. Gabb, James. 1893. Abraham Wildman. In Forshaw, ed. 192–193. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keegan, eds. 2017. A History of British Working-­ Class Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, William. 1868. Miscellaneous Poems. Cockermouth: E. Thwaites. Heaton, William. 1857. The Old Soldier, the Wandering Lover, and Other Poems, with a Sketch of the Author’s Life. London: Simpkin, Marshall. Johnston, Ellen. 1867. Autobiography, Poems and Songs. Glasgow: William Love. Joyce, Patrick. 2017, first published 1980. Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England. Brighton: Edward Everett Root.

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Rancière, Jacques. 2012, first published 1981. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by John Drury. Intro. Donald Reid. London: Verso. Rix, A.H. 1893. James Waddington. In Forshaw, ed.: 185–186. Sanders, Mike. 2009. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Walter. 2013. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Vicinus, Martha. 1974. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature. New York: Barnes & Noble. Wright, William [Bill o’ t’ Hoylus End]. n.d.-a Trips to Malsis Hall and Windermere; Random Rhymes and Sketches. Keighley: John Overend. ——— [Bill o’ t’ Hoylus End]. n.d.-b MS Autobiography ‘Bill o’ th’ Hoylus End’. Keighley Library Local Studies BK135/3/2.

CHAPTER 5

Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems Elizabeth K. Helsinger

In fact, there were two collections by Christina Rossetti entitled Verses: her first, Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother, privately printed by her maternal grandfather in 1847, and her last, Verses (1893), published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). In between these volumes of “verses” Rossetti published three collections of “poems”: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)—and one volume of “nursery

E. K. Helsinger (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_5

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rhymes” (Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, 1872). 1 What’s in a name (or a title)? Quite a bit, as we shall see. The collection in which this essay appears, following the seminal provocations of Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery, argues that Victorians distinguished between verses and poems—and thus that modern critics should exercise a healthy skepticism before assuming that everything that is written in verse (and even some things that are not metered, rhymed, or lineated) can be presumptively printed and read as a lyric poem, carrying with it the characteristics that designation came to imply during the twentieth century.2 Did Christina Rossetti make such distinctions? Is there a difference between her volumes of “poems” and those of “verses” or “rhymes”? Do we—or should we—read these collections of “verses” or “rhymes” differently?3 Both publishers and, in Rossetti’s case, brothers with multiple stakes in poetry as a high cultural form may have influenced her choice of titles. Her brother Dante Gabriel and publisher Alexander Macmillan may each have had some say in the three collections with “poems” in their title, her grandfather Gaetano Polidori in the 1847 Verses, and possibly her brother William in those published in 1893. (The first reference to the latter in her correspondence is in response to a letter from William; possibly the title is one he suggested.)4 But Rossetti was, like her brothers and publishers, certainly aware of the marketing implications of titling. “Verses” modestly withdraws the author from any literary spotlight at opposite ends of her career: first as a very young Victorian girl anxious not to be seen as unacceptably seeking the public eye and at the end because she wished her late 1  Verses (1847) contained 37 short pieces and one longer ballad, “The Dead City.” Verses (1893), her longest collection, contained 333 sonnets, songs, roundels, and other relatively short works. The three volumes of Poems were each anchored by at least one longer poem (“Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and “The Months: A Pageant”) and contained, respectively, 61, 47, and 59 pieces in all (the last volume also included the two sonnet sequences, “Monna Innominata” and “Later Life.”). Sing-Song had 121 very brief “rhymes.” See Verses, Dedicated to Her Mother (London: Privately printed at G.  Polidori’s, 1847) http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ab-wpc/id/11449, and The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. Rebecca W. Crump. 3 vols. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979–90), vols. 1 and 2. 2  On the history of the term and its changing meanings, see Virginia Jackson, “Lyric,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Fourth Edition), ed. Roland Green et  al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 826–34. 3  My thanks to Lee Behlman, Olivia Moy, and Veronica Alfano for their careful readings and comments on this chapter; provocative questions from participants in the NAVSA session in 2019 also contributed to the final version. 4  Christina Rossetti, The Letters of Christina Rossetti, 4 vols., ed. Antony H.  Harrison (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997–2004), 4. 301n.

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verses to be understood as taking second place to the religious truths they were meant to elucidate. (Verses of 1893 consists almost entirely of work previously published in her volumes of devotional prose, also distributed by the SPCK, where the verses are framed by the devotional prose meditations in which they are embedded.5) The volumes entitled “Poems” belong to a period of her life when she and her publisher and family did indeed wish her poetry to be taken seriously as literature—and set apart from the album verses (for example) expected from women. The title of Sing-Song: A Book of Nursery Rhyme is self-explanatory: Rossetti was addressing, in this collection, a particular audience of children and those who would read her “nursery rhymes” aloud to them, usually mothers. When we look at the individual compositions inside these volumes, however, it becomes much harder to make clear distinctions between verse and poetry. It is the volume, not the composition itself, that seems to determine which name Rossetti uses to refer to its contents. The difference between collections presented as poetry and collections presented as verse masks, in Rossetti’s case, more important commonalities that hold true across differences in presentation. The verse-poetry distinction does not help us to understand the event of writing or reading her works—for its author or its readers. For a better understanding of what is unique about her work as a poet, we must approach it differently. Two things are important to keep in mind when reading Rossetti. First, the forms of all her writing might be said to exist conditionally or contingently: they depend on the larger context of the volumes in which they appear. Many also, as we shall see, depend as well on texts by other authors from which they take inspiration. Second, this radical contingency is exactly what allows Rossetti the space for play—sometimes very serious play—with lyric forms and expectations, a play that is at the heart of her importance as a poet. In this chapter I use “lyrics” (in its plural form) for “verses,” “rhymes,” and “poems” that (according to one common nineteenth-­century usage) adapt for print forms once accompanied by music (including songs, ballads, hymns, and odes), written without expectations of musical performance though usually with heightened attention to sound. Rossetti wrote primarily sonnets or short, rhymed and stanzaic pieces in song measures: four strong or implied beats with variable numbers  Verses (1893) collects and rearranges the sonnets, songs, and roundels from Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), and In the Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). The collection includes 12 pieces from Called to Be Saints, 121 from Time Flies, and 195 from The Face of the Deep. See Crump, ed., Complete Poems, volume 2. 5

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of unaccented syllables—what Derek Attridge calls dolnik form.6 Many amateur and professional composers indeed went on to set her lyrics to music (professional “readers” also asked to include her work in formal concert readings). She generally granted requests but did not attend performances; the requests, however, seem to have amused her.7 Thus, “lyrics” includes much of Rossetti’s work—really all of it, if one includes her sonnets (literally “little songs”) among such forms. I use “lyric” or “the lyric poem” to refer to work that has been burdened with additional default expectations since the twentieth century: that the short poem, often taken as equivalent to poetry itself, is an expression of personal feeling, written and meant to be read silently and in privacy by the reader who is—in J.S. Mill’s memorable formulation—eavesdropping on the solitary poet.8 Such expectations are continually frustrated by Rossetti. Rossetti’s lyrics depart subtly from her models, even or especially when her forms and subjects are similar. Her songs and sonnets knowingly co-­ exist both with the literary sonnet tradition and with conventional and popular verses adopting song’s forms, especially those expected from Victorian women. Thus, many individual pieces in her collections of both “poems” and “verses” depend upon other texts; they respond to, meditate upon, imitate, and rewrite (in a form of criticism) quotations from sonnets by Dante and Petrarch (in her sonnet sequence “Monna Innominata”), the Bible, ballads from ballad collections, and poems and verses by other writers. Some gesture toward unspecified situations out of which they would seem to arise, tantalizingly inviting the reader to assume dramatic or personal circumstances while refusing to actually provide them. The situations hinted at in her compositions lack the specificity of contemporary dramatic monologues but are equally hard to read as lyric in the limited sense common in the twentieth century: as autonomous expressive poems, spontaneous overflows of emotion composed in silence and privacy to be overheard by readers. Her works interpret, play with, satirize, or quietly criticize other texts and the situations assumed to have generated such writing. These lyrics are not presented as works of art creating worlds of their own; they present themselves as dependent on something else. But Rossetti’s contingent lyrics take advantage of the license granted to “song” (and to song-like “verses” and “rhymes”) to win greater  Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 147–87. 7  See, for example, her June 1867 letter to her brother Dante Gabriel; Letters, ed. Harrison, 1.294. 8  Jackson, “Lyric,” 831–33. 6

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prosodic and expressive freedoms—freedoms which have much to do with the high standing now accorded to her as a poet. Indeed, one might say, contingency enables Rossetti’s brief compositions to attain the condition of a more generously defined idea of what should count as lyric. Subtitles for lyrics in the 1847 Verses direct the reader to works by Torquato Tasso (“Tasso and Leonora”), Charles Maturin (“Eva: From Maturin’s ‘Woman’” and “Zara: See Maturin’s ‘Women’”), George Crabbe (“Sir Eustace Grey: See Crabbe”), and to one of the ballads collected by Walter Scott (“Fair Margaret,” with an epigraph marked “Old Ballad” from the ballad of the same title), while others are visibly inspired by particular works from poets ranging from Felicia Hemans (“Sappho,” which echoes lines from Hemans’s “The Last Song of Sappho”), Edward William Lane’s The Thousand and One Nights (“The Dead City”), and many others, from George Herbert to William Blake. But Goblin Market and Other Poems is no different. Again, to list only the most obvious, the title poem builds an allegorical fable on a common fruit sellers’ cry (“come buy, come buy”) and asks to be read in light of the gendered economics of buying and consuming thus evoked; “Noble Sisters” rewrites the ballad Scott collected as “The Cruel Sister” to take a closer look at relations between women in a patriarchal society; “Maude Clare” similarly rewrites the ballad Scott knew as “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet” (in its English version known as “Lord Ronald and Fair Eleanor”); while “The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge,” “A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break,” “On Certainty” (“Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith”), and “Consider the Lilies of the Field” use the biblical texts incorporated into their titles or first lines as starting points for expanding meditations. In subsequent volumes both of “Poems” and of “Verses” the practice only proliferates: again and again, Rossetti writes verses under the stimulus of already existing lines and phrases in relation to which her own can be read as complements (sometimes offered in homage) but also as expansions and critiques. Angela Leighton sees this as a phenomenon of sound relations: “Echoes are both the theme and method of much of Rossetti’s writing … .That these are, in part, echoes of other poems, particularly Tennyson’s, suggests the extent to which listening to another becomes the very current of her art.”9 But Dinah Birch comes perhaps closer to Rossetti’s practice: “Rossetti shares Tennyson’s conviction that memory is the root of poetry, but she is less inclined to endorse the utterance which it might, or might 9  Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 81.

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not, create.”10 Rossetti’s procedures, which have parallels in the larger discourse of religious poetry by Victorian women, extend to her private practice of devotional illustration: her careful drawings for the poems in John Keble’s The Christian Year, for those in Isaac Williams’s The Altar, and on occasion for her own poems.11 In each case, Rossetti uses another text as occasion for subtle but knowing departures, a practice that actually increased with her maturation as a poet. Such textual contingency—and the skeptical or critical distance from conventional readerly expectations it offers—is already in evidence in one of Rossetti’s very early works. Maude: a story for girls, published posthumously by William Michael Rossetti in 1897 but dated by him 1850 or a few years earlier, produces another kind of critical complementarity. It is a short work of prose fiction containing fourteen poems—or verses, as they are referred to throughout the story.12 (William, however, goes out of his way to specify in the preface to his edition that they are “poems,” written 10  Birch, “Tennyson’s Retrospective View,” in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50. 11  On the parallels with other women’s religious poetry of the period, see F.  Elizabeth Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2010), especially chapter 2; and on Rossetti’s use of her drawing for hermeneutic purposes, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), 28–38. As Kooistra and others have argued, Rossetti’s drawings typically draw out further spiritual meanings from the texts they illustrate (including her own); Kooistra, Rossetti and Illustration, 31–43. For more on Rossetti and the Tractarian doctrines that encouraged her understanding of the visible pointing to the invisible, see Diane D’Amico, “Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for the ‘weary heart’,” Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1987): 36–42; Mary Arseneau, “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 31 (1993): 79–93; Emma Mason, “Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve,” Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2002): 196–219; and Dinah Roe, “‘Come and See’: Christina Rossetti’s Illustrations for The Christian Year,” in Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, ed., Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 82–107. Veronica Alfano’s essay in this volume offers a finely detailed reading of Rossetti’s use of metrical silences and the connections suggested by rhyme to adumbrate such meanings in Sing-Song and Verses. 12  The London edition contains many fewer poems; the American edition, which was published the same year, includes 14 poems from the original manuscript, 3 of them subsequently published in Goblin Market and Other Poems: “Song: She Sat and Sang Always,” “One Certainty,” and “Symbols”; and one in Verses (1893), “What Is It Jesus Saith Unto the Soul?”. See Maude, ed. W.  Rossetti, https://archive.org/details/maudeproseverse00ross, and Crump, Complete Poems.

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independently of the story about Maude.13) One might read Maude as a critical commentary on Rossetti’s own Verses: Dedicated to My Mother, just as the various volumes of her SPCK devotional books can serve as commentaries on the verses (or poems: principally sonnets, songs, and roundels) that she extracted, rearranged, and published separately as Verses in 1893. In Maude the story makes explicit the imagined situations in which the verses it contains (both sonnets and songs) are to be situated. While three of the sonnets are described as the products of a game of boutrimés (as they were in actuality, according to William), the other verses are given as the teen-aged Maude’s, which she copies into a locked “writing book” and sometimes shares with her closest friend and cousin, Agnes. 14 Maude’s book “was neither common-place book, album, scrap-book, nor diary; it was a compound of all these, and contained original compositions not intended for the public eye, pet extracts, extraordinary little sketches, and occasional tracts of journal.”15 Similar writing books featured in the life of Rossetti herself. Christina’s mother, Frances, had kept a commonplace book since leaving home at sixteen for her first governessing job; she encouraged her children to make their own contributions to it.16 Christina’s earliest poems were copied in another tiny notebook by Frances; from the time she was twelve they were copied into yet another notebook kept for her by her sister, Maria. Are the verses in Maude’s locked “writing book” and those in Frances’s or Maria’s or Christina Rossetti’s apparently open ones, “original compositions”— “poems I rate high,” in William’s words—or merely journal entries and occasional thoughts written out in verse?17 In the final section of the tale, when Agnes goes through Maude’s papers after her death to honor Maude’s request that most of her compositions be destroyed, she sets three aside to save. These last, however, she finds on “scraps of paper … in [Maude’s] desk and portfolio, or lying loose upon the table … Many of these were mere fragments, many half-effaced pencil scrawls, and some

13  Prefatory Note to Maude, ed. W. Rossetti, enlarged ed., 1. Subsequent references are to this (the American) edition. 14  Maude, 8. 15  Ibid., 9. 16  Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (London and New York: Viking Penguin, 1994), 26. 17  William Rossetti, Prefatory Note, Maude, 2.

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written on torn backs of letters, and some full of incomprehensible abbreviations.”18 All three, however, are included in the tale. The status of the verses in Maude, like that of those published in 1847 as Verses, calls into question what counts as a (lyric) poem. In fact, the account of the material form of the three salvaged by Agnes certainly resembles Jackson’s account of the scraps of Dickinson’s writing that she uses to challenge the later printing of all of Dickinson’s work as lyric poems. Is Christina deliberately suggesting her early work is no more than scraps and fragments—both the verses composed for Maude and those published just a few years earlier by her grandfather—to avoid the accusation that troubles Maude, of feeling undue pride in her poetic productions? Or is she playing with the reader’s expectations for work by young women by composing lines that seem to straddle a supposedly clear distinction between verses and poems? Certainly, Maude gently mocks its heroine’s pride in giving undefeatable arguments for why she must refuse Holy Communion on Christmas Day. It is not lost on the narrator that pride is exactly the sin of which Maude accuses herself—pride in her verses. Called on to recite some of them, she refuses, but is it because she is properly humble about her verses or simply because she is contemptuous of the company? The story encourages a probing second look at Maude’s dramatizing and self-display. Her cousin rebukes her when she argues that she cannot take Communion as long as she takes pride in her verses: Maude, how can you talk so? This is not reverence. You cannot mean that for the present you will indulge vanity and display; that you will court admiration and applause; that you will take your fill of pleasure until sickness, or it may be death, strips you of temptation and sin together … yet what else does a deliberate resolution to put off doing right come to?19

As the narrator has already observed: “Deep-rooted indeed was that vanity which made Maude take pleasure, on such an occasion, in proving the force of arguments directed against herself.”20 Is Rossetti castigating herself not only for her vanity as a writer but for displaying the same pride and vanity in obstinately insisting on not repenting her “sin”? Is she mocking Maude and herself and other young girls in love with their own  C. Rossetti, Maude, 116.  Ibid., 56. 20  Ibid., 54. 18 19

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piety no less than with their own verse? Maude and Verses (1847) now stand together, the later narrative both situating and commenting on the earlier verses and the other verses that may have been in Maude’s, as they were in Christina’s, writing books. A few of these—three from Maude and three from Verses (1847)—were later published as “poems.”21 The fact that Rossetti chose only a few to re-present as poems suggests that by the 1860s she considered much of these earlier volumes to be the apprentice work that their modest presentation suggests. The same cannot be said of the work in Sing-Song or the 1893 Verses. In the rest of this chapter I look more closely at the rhymes of Sing-­ Song and at the roundels (and other songs, in the nineteenth-century sense) that make up more than half the Verses in Rossetti’s final volume. On the one hand, as I’ve already indicated, it’s easy to distinguish them from “poems”: the “nursery rhymes” of Rossetti’s subtitle clearly announce their modest origins and audiences, as do “verses” published and distributed to religious readers by the SPCK. None of these rhymes and verses should count as poems. And yet, of course, they do: for most critics and readers, at very least the sonnets, songs, and roundels collected in Verses, and probably some of the rhymes of Sing-Song, belong with Rossetti’s serious literary output. It’s hard to tell them apart from poems published as such. If Rossetti has indeed been written into the canon in the last fifty years, these lyrical productions are part of the case made by critics for doing so. The rhymes of Sing-Song display a pedagogic impulse, but unlike many popular verses intended for children (like Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 1715, frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, or Ann and Jane Taylor’s Original Poems for Infant Minds, 1800, also often reprinted), Rossetti’s rhymes are less about moral instruction than about language and how to take pleasure in it.22 Frequently adopting 21  Three pieces from Maude were included in Goblin Market (see note 12) and three from Verses (1847) in The Prince’s Progress (Part II of “A Portrait,” “Vanity of Vanities [Ah woe is me for pleasure that is pain],” and “Gone For Ever”). William Michael Rossetti, as already mentioned, called all the pieces in Maude “poems”; he also included all the pieces in Verses (1847) in his 1896 collection of his sister’s hitherto unpublished or uncollected work, New Poems. See Crump, Complete Poems, and W. Rossetti, ed., Maude. 22  The best treatment of the formal and linguistic playfulness of Sing-Song remains Constance Hassett’s in Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2005), esp. pp.  117–53. On the pedagogical impulses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry for children, see Catherine Robson, Heart-Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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the child’s perspective, they play on the differences between literal and metaphoric meaning and appeal throughout to the pleasures of verbal wit, aural play, and a freely associating imagination. If there is a difference between these rhymes and Rossetti’s other lyrics (besides the brevity of the nursery rhymes), it is that she allows herself more imaginative, verbal, and even prosodic freedom in the rhymes. She is open to nonsense. Consider the second rhyme in the collection: Love me,--I love you,     Love me, my baby; Sing it high, sing it low,     Sing it as it may be. Mother’s arms under you,     Her eyes above you; Sing it high, sing it low,     Love me,--I love you.23

Baby/may be is an unexpected rhyme, even a little unsettling. But it is surrounded by the perfectly balanced first line, repeated as the last: “Love me,--I love you,” enclosing and embracing the rhyme and the baby just as do the mother’s voice (“Sing it high, sing it low”) and her arms and eyes (“Mother’s arms under you,/Her eyes above you”). The verses imagine the baby’s perspective and respond to its needs for security. “Love me,--I love you” suggests a kind of dialogue, as if the mother is making her song into just that, a response to the baby’s unexpressed desires. This rhyme acts out reassurance, literally offering security by the structuring of its lines and stanzas and by what it says. There is no moral lesson. In light of the many poems about infant death to follow, one might say that from an adult perspective such security is more wish than fact. The sound and word repetitions in these nursery rhymes move the lyrical toward nonsense, away from adult assumptions about logic and causality toward the simultaneity of parataxis and the possibilities for a different way of thinking that parataxis can enable. In the Kookoorookoo rhyme below, there’s play with the way one thing is linked to another (or not linked, without the subordinating conjunctions of a more complex syntax). This rhyme too takes delight in a child’s perspective on language, 23  Rossetti, “Love me,--I love you,” in Complete Poems, ed. Crump, 2.19. Subsequent poems, verses, and rhymes by Rossetti quoted in the text are taken from this edition.

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entertaining the possibility that what is from an adult perspective simply temporal sequence might be an instance of magical causality. “Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!” Crows the cock before the morn; “Kikirikee! kikirikee!” Roses in the east are born. “Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!” Early birds begin their singing; “Kikirikii! kikirikii!” The day, the day, the day is springing.24

Mere sequence tips into causality, demonstrating the abracadabra powers of the sounded call, at least from the perspective of the baby (and perhaps the cock). We are also invited to read metaphors literally. We can recognize the birth of roses as a metaphor for sunrise, but in the world of the nursery rhyme we might be witnessing an explosion of real roses. For the child, roses are born, the sun rises, early birds begin to sing, and the day to “spring” (another metaphor literalized) because the cock crows. What really makes this lyrical rhyme is the triple repetition in the last line, which suddenly fills it with urgent feeling even in the absence of an exclamation point. Is the urgency that of the adult poet’s desire that what the child believes is happening be true? Or simple joy that it is happening, now, in the present space of utterance and reading? Sing-Song offers lessons about language and its pleasures as a magical means of manipulating things, making them appear or disappear in ways that do not conform to adult ideas of common sense. The horses of the sea     Rear a foaming crest, But the horses of the land     Serve us the best. The horses of the land     Munch corn and clover, While the foaming sea-horses     Toss and turn over.25  Rossetti, “Kookoorookoo,” 2.20.  Rossetti, “The horses of the sea,” 2.42.

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The verses invite us to see the crested waves as crested, foaming horses of the sea, tossing and turning over. Such verbal play, however, also activates possibilities buried in language that sometimes move beyond wit and fancy to suggest frankly visionary and potentially spiritual dimensions to be found in the particular and real—as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence might do. “I dreamt I caught a little owl And the bird was blue--” “But you may hunt for ever And not find such an one.” “I dreamt I set a sunflower, And red as blood it grew--” “But such a sunflower never Bloomed beneath the sun.”26

This sounds quite Blakean, reminding us that Rossetti prized Blake’s songs. It’s a dialogue poem where the first voice, the dreamer, relates dreams of a blue owl and a red sunflower. Each time it is answered by the stubborn voice of a realist. But of course the effect of the rhyme is, after all, to plant that blue owl and that red sunflower in the minds of listeners. The power of language, which insists on the pleasure to be had from dreams (and maybe also the fear), also allows these lyrics their own kinds of truth. Verses, Rossetti’s last volume, is of course not intended for children, but it nonetheless makes use of very similar empathic insights and lyric licenses for serious religious purposes. The compositions collected in Verses are, as we shall see, contingent in yet another sense: they depend on an idea of lyric as collective joyful song toward which verses, like poems, can only gesture. Like the rhymes in Sing-Song, the songs and especially the roundels in Verses show us what Susan Stewart sees as the thin line separating nonsense from lyric poetry; nonsense, she writes, exaggerates certain “lyric qualities of the lyric—parataxis, repetition, a fundamental reorganization

 Rossetti, “I dreamt I caught a little owl,” 2.45.

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of the line.”27 Perspicuous atemporality throws our ordinary assumptions about causality into question. Repetition annuls the linear character of the poetic line. By such means Rossetti’s rhymes and verses “flaunt a juxtaposition of incongruous worlds.”28 In Verses such exaggerations of lyric qualities mark not the differences between a child’s understanding and an adult’s, but those between human perception and divine. In a long section of songs (“Christ Our All in All”) that comes near the beginning of Verses, Rossetti adopts both perspectives to create a dialogue between the human and the divine that recalls the silent exchange between baby and mother in Sing-Song’s “Love me,--I love you.” So in the verse commentary taken from Faces of the Deep, “An exceeding bitter cry”: Contempt and pangs and haunting fears-     Too late for hope, too late for ease,        Too late for rising from the dead;      Too late, too late to bend my knees,        Or bow my head, Or weep, or ask for tears. Hark! … One I hear Who calls to me:      “Give Me thy thorn and grief and scorn,         Give Me thy ruin and regret.      Press on thro’ darkness toward the morn:         One loves thee yet: Have I forgotten thee?” Lord, Who art Thou? Lord, is it Thou     My Lord and God Lord Jesus Christ?        How said I that I sat alone     And desolate and unsufficed?        Surely a stone     Would raise Thy praises now!29 27  Susan A.  Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 158. Emphasis mine. Stewart implies what Hugh Haughton states in his introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry: “it might be argued that, far from being a very special case of poetry, nonsense represents what makes poetry itself a special case” (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988) p. 6. Thanks to Lee Behlman for this reference. 28  Stewart, Nonsense, 157. 29  Rossetti, “An exceeding bitter cry,” 2.189–90.

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The first stanza seems to follow from the opening line: “Contempt and pangs and haunting fears--”, a line that hangs, literally, over the rest of the stanza, its three nouns strung out as a paratactic series of conflicting states attributed to no subject and only loosely connected by a dash to the repetitious cries or sobs—“Too late, too late”—that structure the next lines. These repetitions cancel acts rather than performing them (“Too late for rising from the dead; / Too late, too late to bend my knees, / Or bow my head”) as despair destroys both will and temporal progression. It is only when the poet forces herself to articulate that second voice, “One I hear Who calls to me” like a mother reassuring a child (“One loves thee yet”) that raising “Thy praises” can be envisioned as the dialogue’s, and her poetry’s, conclusion. There are many similar dialogues in this section of Verses emphasizing the child-human’s constant need for reassurance and love. A practice of making herself voice God’s answers, rebukes as well as reassurances, comes as preparation for the roundels, her adaptation of the form Swinburne borrowed and developed from the medieval French rondeau. Her roundels are the furthest extension of what she tries to do in both Verses and her several volumes of Poems: to make her gift an offering of praise. The first of these introduced into Verses, coming later in the same section of dialogue songs and still sounding a bit awkward, is also taken from Faces of the Deep: Me and my gift: kind Lord, behold,      Be not extreme to test or sift; Thy Love can turn to fire and gold     Me and my gift.      Myself and mine to Thee I lift: Gather us to Thee from the cold      Dead outer world where dead things drift. If much were mine, then manifold      Should be the offering of my thrift: I am but poor, yet love makes bold     Me and my gift.30  Rossetti, “Me and my gift,” 2.197.

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Her gift is her verse, in the form here of the roundel. It circles back to its opening phrase, “Me and my gift” as it asks for the transformation of that gift through divine Love “to fire and gold” and then returns a second time to the poverty of what she has before offering once again “Me and my gift.” This is an older Maude, who is trying to put aside her misplaced pride in her poetic gift to rest instead upon the redeeming Love of the God to whom she offers it. In the last sections of Verses, the roundels come thick and fast, over fifty in all. This one, again from Face of the Deep, is in the section titled “Divers Worlds, Time and Eternity”: Short is time, and only time is bleak;     Gauge the exceeding height thou hast to climb: Long eternity is nigh to seek:    Short is time.     Time is shortening with the wintry rime: Pray and watch and pray, girt up and meek;     Praying, watching, praying, chime by chime. Pray by silence if thou canst not speak:     Time is shortening; pray on till the prime: Time is shortening; soul, fulfil thy week:    Short is time.31

Here the change from “pray and watch and pray” to “praying, watching, praying, chime by chime” spells out, through the language and the rhyme (chime with climb, rime, prime, and of course time) the activity which is the verse. What that rhyming and chiming fills, the (shortening) time, brings eternity nearer, marking out by “fulfilling” the week (or month, or year). “Short is time” is both the encouragement, the warning, and the effect of this chiming of or with time that is the act of the roundel. And what that act sometimes allows is spiritual vision, best expressed in another roundel from Face of the Deep, from the section “New Jerusalem and Its Citizens”:

 Rossetti, “Short is time, and only time is bleak,” 2.278–79.

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Jerusalem of fire      And gold and pearl and gem, Saints flock to fill thy choir,     Jerusalem.      Lo, thrones thou hast for them; Desirous they desire     Thy harp, thy diadem, Thy bridal white attire,      A palm-branch from thy stem: Thy holiness their hire,     Jerusalem.32

The lines are shortened so that “Jerusalem” is a chiming line in itself, the name for desiring and the object of desire. Everything rhymes, alliterates, assonates, or repeats: Jerusalem/gem/them/diadem/stem; Fire/choir/ desirous/desire/attire/hire; Jerusalem/gem; thrones/thou/them/they/ thy/thy/thy/thy/thy/their; desirous/desire/diadem/bridal/white/ attire and gold/Lo/holiness. Here verse lifts into song, foregrounding the crucial coming together of sound, structure, and meaning that is one feature of lyric poetry as song, lyric in an expanded sense. Rossetti’s roundel remains print on a page, of course. Its lovely spiraling structure, necessarily unfolding in human time, is not, after all, the perfect circle (that ancient symbol of divine perfection) toward which her verses aspire. Rossetti’s roundels even at their most dazzling remain contingent texts, their shapes and sounds dependent on an idea of perfection toward which her verses can only gesture: songs that will one day be sung by a communion of saints in heaven. The lessons taught in Sing-Song, practiced in the intimate and individual dialogue poems of prayer that populate both Poems and Verses, are absorbed and poured into this final lyric form, which in its very circling action gestures toward music, a song whose joyful, communal singing may be possible only in another world. Roundels are not usually set to music, yet they could be, as a round or canon where (as another Rossetti song from  Rossetti, “Jerusalem of fire,” 2.281.

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Verses has it) we “Prepare to sound,-- / Our part is coming round.”33 The waiting is hard, and Rossetti’s Verses testifies to her ongoing struggles with doubt. But sometimes, as in the next to last poem and the last roundel in both “Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims” and Verses, that volume published not long before her death, Rossetti can confidently write: The goal in sight! Look up and sing,      Set faces full against the light, Welcome with rapturous welcoming     The goal in sight.      Let be the left, let be the right: Straight forward make your footsteps ring      A loud alarum thro’ the night. Death hunts you, yea, but reft of sting;      Your bed is green, your shroud is white: Hail! Life and Death and all that bring     The goal in sight.34

Rossetti’s verse and poetry lets us see the close proximity of both the child-like and the divine to lyric in an expanded sense, lyric intimately tied to the thought of song that may be realized in “verses” and “rhymes” no less than in “poems.” Lyric in this expanded sense abrogates ordinary laws of causation and temporal progression, modeling both what we come from—a Blakean child’s delight with the play of language unfettered by  Rossetti, “Then Shall Ye Shout,” 2.328, lines 11–12. Marion Thain plausibly suggests Swinburne’s roundels resemble “the form of the sung ‘round’ in which different voices sing the same words at overlapping intervals in a ‘follow the leader’ pattern. It is a form, then, whose very essence draws attention to the subject as a multi-layered, multi-vocal one.” See Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 198. Rossetti may have been imagining the roundel as a canon, or—as I have argued elsewhere—she may have been thinking of the unison chants sung in her high Anglican church; in either case the model would be one of multi-voiced song. See Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 139–48. 34  Rossetti, “The goal in sight!”, 2.334–35. 33

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adult rules—and where Rossetti hopes someday to arrive, singing together in the company of saints those songs of praise which even the roundel can only approximate. That is the only use of her poetic gifts which Rossetti believes she can make without succumbing to Maude’s pride. Giving them back as songs and rounds of praise suppresses the needy personal for the assured collective lyric voice—though to fully lose the former in the latter, Rossetti suggests, may be a condition of lyric possible only for saints. In the meantime, her poems and verses remain at once modestly and proudly contingent—secondary and dependent on other texts and on the contexts in which we find them and yet nonetheless approximations of a perfected lyric singing yet to be. Rossetti’s contingent lyrics, above all in Sing-Song and in her final collection, Verses, find in the necessarily conditional relations of their presentation an expansive space for experimentation and play that make her one of the major lyric poets of the nineteenth century.

References Arseneau, Mary. 1993. Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and ‘Goblin Market’. Victorian Poetry 31 (1): 79–93. Attridge, Derek. 2013. Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Birch, Dinah. 2009. Tennyson’s Retrospective View. In Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Amico, Diane. 1987. Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for ‘The Weary Heart’. Victorian Newsletter 72: 36–42. Gray, F.  Elizabeth. 2010. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry. New York: Routledge. Hassett, Constance. 2005. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Haughton, Hugh. 1988. Introduction. In The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, ed. Hugh Haughton. London: Chatto & Windus. Helsinger, Elizabeth. 2015. Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Jackson, Virginia. 2005. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. Lyric. In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Fourth Edition), ed. Roland Green et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. 2002. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

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Leighton, Angela. 2018. Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Marsh, Jan. 1994. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. London and New  York: Viking (Penguin). Mason, Emma. 2002. Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve. Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2): 196–219. Robson, Catherine. 2012. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roe, Dinah. 2018. ‘Come and See’: Christina Rossetti’s Illustrations for The Christian Year. In Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, ed. Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rossetti, Christina. 1847. Verses, Dedicated to Her Mother. London: Privately printed at G.  Polidori's. Accessed 1 January 2021. http://digitalcollections. baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ab-­wpc/id/11449 ———. 1897. Maude: A Story for Girls. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. Chicago: Herbert S.  Stone. Accessed 1 January 2021. https://archive.org/details/ maudeproseverse00ross ———. 1979–1990. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. Rebecca W. Crump. 3 vols. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. ———. 1997-2004. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Ed. Antony H. Harrison, 4 vols. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Stewart, Susan. 1980. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thain, Marion. 2016. The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Exile and Elegy: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Colonial Verse Anna Johnston

The Irish emigrant poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop imagined nineteenth-­ century Australia as a distinctly modern society: Hail, star of the south! Australasia advance, With thy soft flowing tresses, thy proud eagle glance, Happy homes and free altars, broad lands and bright skies— All are thine—star of beauty arise!1

Colonial Australia played a leading role in the global south, providing “new homes for the old country,” as one colonial traveller termed it.2 Dunlop’s optimistic vision was characterised by modern forms of 1 2

 Dunlop, “Star of the South.”  Baden-Powell, New Homes for the Old Country.

A. Johnston (*) University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_6

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domesticity and female empowerment (“Happy homes”), the absence of religious sectarianism that blighted Ireland (“free altars”), abundant land for white settlers (“broad lands”), and “bright skies” free of industrial contamination. Dunlop evoked Australia as a feminised, abundant country that also bore an ancient and continuing Indigenous culture, marked by the “proud eagle glance.” Environmental, social, and religious liberties earned the Australian colonies the epithet “Star of the South” in Dunlop’s 1842 anthem of the same name, which she wrote as “an offering to the people of New South Wales.”3 Poetry, politics, and a liberal settler society were issues central to Dunlop’s writing and her mission for colonial literature. Dunlop’s vision for the new settler polity embedded poetry within the nascent nation. Her verse sought to grant the “moral bulwarks of a nation to this young country.”4 Dunlop wrote self-deprecatingly that a bush hut in “the untrodden ways” of Wollombi might not inspire the same “precious stores of rule and precedent” in poetry when compared to a gentleman’s private library, yet her poetic inheritance still bore “the lustre of the original gem.”5 Colonial writers such as Dunlop transported and transformed existing genres and tropes (such as William Wordsworth’s 1798 “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”) to craft new writing that bound people to place. But colonial poetry was not always highly refined, as Elizabeth Webby suggests: “to study the literature written in Australia before 1850 is mainly to study poetry—though that is too grand a title for most of the jingles, impromptus and other ‘poetic effusions’ offered to the public.”6 Verse predominated, and minor contributors jostled alongside the few major poets such as Charles Harpur. Although the literary community was small, debates about aesthetics and an emerging colonial literature were vociferous. Colonial critics like metropolitan ones felt that poetry was a declining form. In recent assessments of early nineteenth-century English poetry, scholars have noted the increased number of women writing poetry and their publication in outlets such as annuals; the role of sentimental literary modes as vehicles for expressing political ideas; and the place of poetry in exploring ideas about Britain’s nineteenth-century  Dunlop, “Star of the South.”  Ibid. 5  Ibid. 6  Webby, Early Australian Poetry, ix. 3 4

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colonies.7 These insights into poetic form, print culture, and literary history open up new ways to evaluate colonial verse. Dunlop’s Australian writing—nearly 100 poems written between 1838 until 1873, seven years before her death—provides a rich literary archive through which to sample Victorian verse on the colonial frontier. Here I focus on the elegiac mode in Dunlop’s Australian oeuvre to draw attention to its exploration of colonial society, emigration and exile, and race.

Colonial Elegies and Vers de société Within the tradition of vers de société—light verse dealing with events in polite society—colonial culture provided distinctive conditions that Eliza Dunlop felt compelled to address. Literature, colonial governmentality, and social standing were interlinked aspects by which Eliza and her police magistrate husband David “became colonial.”8 Civil, military, and literary circles connected the settler elite who presided over the majority convict population and the increasingly displaced Indigenous peoples. Participation in colonial literature to some extent distinguished free colonists from emancipists and ensured that questions of governance and culture were entwined. Scandals regularly rocked colonial society, with gossip and inside knowledge traded across colonies and across Empire.9 What did vers de société look like when the very terms of “society” were being reinvented in an rapidly evolving colony, which nevertheless saw itself as part of a British world of letters and poetics? Dunlop’s treatment of colonial society was more earnest and personal than the ironic parodies and witty observations that typified Euro-­ American vers de société. Instead, Dunlop poetically rendered the lives—or more often the demise—of intriguing figures in colonial society. As David Stewart wryly notes, “[m]any poets in the period were obsessed with death.”10 Angela Leighton describes elegy as an unusual literary form that “takes its name from what it is about, rather than from any conventional structure.”11 It is often “moral and emotional” rather than literary work, although its affective register engages both the elegist and the reader in 7  Stewart, The Form of Poetry; McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility; Rudy, Imagined Homelands. 8  St George, Possible Pasts. 9  McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies. 10  Stewart, The Form of Poetry. 11  Leighton, On Form, 220.

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grieving individual and collective losses.12 In New South Wales, Dunlop used the form to commemorate what she had left behind and to forge literary and emotional bonds with new communities. Dunlop’s use of elegy was in some aspects conventional. The subjects of her writing included notable members of the community and through these a personal sketch of colonial society emerges. The unexpected death of Rosetta Nathan, a young singer who had performed one of Dunlop’s songs, sparked a flurry of poetic tributes from amateur poets. “Poor, luckless girl! there never walk’d, beneath Australia’s sky, / A form of finer symmetry, nor beam’d a brighter eye,” sighed Samuel Hill Prout, before his poem turned to exhorting settler men to “Rise! sons of fair Australia, rise! and show your pure descent / From gallant sires.”13 Settler concerns about racial purity and the convict taint here triumphed over poor Rosetta. Dunlop’s “Rosetta Nathan’s Dirge” linked her friend Isaac Nathan’s paternal bereavement to her own loss of a young daughter buried in Ireland, and she urged that grief should “Shroud not that beauteous form.”14 Dunlop’s poetic tributes to colonial notables included the explorer E. B. Kennedy.15 Her “Elegy” for Lady Mary Fitzroy, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, referenced Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais.”16 While it is easy to dismiss these productions as Victorian mawkishness, in tracing the subjects of Dunlop’s writing, a map of colonial society emerges, stretching from New South Wales to Ireland and the United States, including both individuals and an Anglo-­ Irish diaspora.

Elegy and the Politics of Colonial Verse Dunlop extended the elegiac mode to controversial literary subjects, and this distinguished her colonial verse. Dunlop’s “The Aboriginal Mother” (1838), a poem about the massacre of thirty Indigenous men, women, and children at Myall Creek on the northern colonial frontier, created a

 Ibid., 221.  [Hill], “Stanzas.” 14  Dunlop, “Rosetta Nathan’s Dirge.” Dunlop eulogised her daughter in poems such as “The Dead.” 15  Dunlop, “Inscribed to the Memory.” 16  Dunlop, “Elegy.” 12 13

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literary sensation in the first year of her arrival in the colony.17 It ­commemorated a woman survivor and her baby after her husband and older child were murdered. It graphically depicted colonial violence in an elegiac mode: I saw my firstborn treasure Lie headless at my feet, The goro [opossum cloak] on this hapless breast, In his life-stream is wet! And thou! I snatch’d thee from their sword, It harmless pass’d by thee!18

Dunlop’s sympathetic representation was published in the Australian newspaper only days before seven men were publicly hanged for murder in December 1838. A subsequent musical setting by the composer Isaac Nathan led to a public performance in Sydney in 1842.19 Dunlop’s Aboriginal narrator directly confronted settlers with their violent acts in the poem’s closing lines: “To tell of hands—the cruel hands—that piled the fatal pyre, / To show our blood on Myab’s ridge, our bones on the stockman’s fire.”20 Nathan’s sheet music reprinted the poem and extracts of the court testimony by named witnesses about the massacre, including explicit details of violence. His advertisement claimed: “It ought to be on the pianoforte of every lady in the colony.”21 In this way, “The Aboriginal Mother” posed a challenge to colonial literary culture and, by extension, the British literary world. Elegies to the dead and laments for war and suffering were standard parts of the poetic repertoire. Abolitionist verse had built an appetite for “crying mother” poems, which mobilised transatlantic sympathy for non-white mothers in 17  The Myall Creek massacre was almost the sole occasion on which settlers were punished for mass interracial violence in Australia. See Lydon and Ryan, Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre. 18  Dunlop, “Songs of an Exile No. 4: The Aboriginal Mother” [henceforth Aboriginal Mother]. 19  Nathan himself was no stranger to scandal and had an impresario’s eye for publicity: his setting of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies is well-known, and his life included well-publicised court intrigues before his emigration to the Australian colonies. See Mackerras, The Hebrew Melodist; Legge and Golby, “Nathan, Isaac 1790–1864.” 20  Dunlop, “Aboriginal Mother.” 21  Nathan, “New Music,” Australasian Chronicle. A digitised copy of the score is available at the National Library of Australia: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-179698795.

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poems that lamented suffering, including the loss of children, under conditions of slavery and colonialism.22 But “The Aboriginal Mother” featured a topic that was highly charged because of the proximity of the violence and the contentious local prosecution and hanging of the murderers. Massacres were deemed inappropriate subjects for colonial verse. Critics responded vigorously. “Proh pudor [for shame],” thundered James Rennie after the Sydney performance.23 Dunlop was savaged for her presumption and commentators attacked the poem using a range of racially based slurs against Aboriginal women. Duncan Wu considers the critical attack on Dunlop unprecedented, even within the period’s poor reception of women poets.24 The Australian newspapers vigorously debated the ethics of colonialism and saw literary endeavours as foundational to settler society.25 The critical response to “The Aboriginal Mother” set the tone for the reception to Dunlop’s writing. Dunlop’s verse “Star of the South” was criticised by the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, even though he praised Nathan’s music: “It is not polite of us, but we do wish that the new ‘National Melody’ had been set to better words.”26 Dunlop defended her work in a letter to the paper, accusing the editor of prejudice: “has not the author added to a former offence [her publication of “The Aboriginal Mother”], against a formidable clique, by saying that Australia possesses ‘happy homes and altars free?’”27 Dunlop read the critique in terms of sectarian conflict because the family had been highly active in Northern Irish politics supporting electoral reform and schools for Protestant and Catholic children: David Dunlop wrote to the Governor that “party and sectarian differences exist even more strongly here than in Ireland.”28 But the grounds of debate were also aesthetic. In her letter to the editor, Dunlop justified her choice of poetic devices in “Star of the South” by  O’Leary, “Speaking the Suffering Indigene.”  “Original Correspondence: Thorough-Bass and Nathan” (1841). Rennie is the likely author behind the pseudonym: Skinner, “Eliza Hamilton Dunlop.” Rennie arrived in 1840, working as the editor of the Sydney Herald briefly during this period, then appearing as an erudite if irascible lecturer at the School of Arts: he had been Professor of Natural History at King’s College London 1830–1834, but his colonial career was characterised by his violent temper. See Page, “James Rennie”; Lucas, “James Rennie.” 24  Wu, “‘A vehicle of private malice.’” 25  Wood, “Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend.” 26  “New Music,” Sydney Morning Herald (1842). 27  Dunlop, “Star of the South.” 28  David Dunlop to Gipps. 22 23

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demonstrating similar usage in poems by Alexander Pope, John Leyden, and John Milton. She deemed the editor a “self-constituted judge of poesy” and closed her spirited defence by citing from G. M. Fitzgerald’s “Oh! Promise me to Sing, Dear” (1831): I care not for the praise, love, so sweet to minstrel’s ear, For the laurel or the bays, love, the critic or his sneer; But promise me to sing love, my songs in after years, When the quiet eve shall bring, love, the hour for blissful tears.29

Dunlop was “proud of contributing [her work’s] quota to the original literature of the colony.”30 By invoking Fitzgerald’s popular ballad, she drew attention to the popular reception to her work by readers, certainly in posterity if not in her own time. Dunlop and the newspaper editors were engaging in timely critical debates, including the distinction between verse and poetry, and literary and commercial value. Feminist scholarship has re-evaluated figures such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon who regularly published sentimental verse in literary annuals.31 David Stewart suggests we need to learn how to read this kind of verse anew, including its engagement with questions of literary value and the relationship between poets, critics, and readers.32 During this period, challenges to the role of critics as gatekeepers occurred worldwide. John Stenhouse, a Scot who engaged in various literary enterprises in mid-century colonial Sydney, had railed against the high-handed tone of Edinburgh Review criticism before he emigrated.33 Nineteenth-­ century print culture and mass literacy enabled poets to speak directly to their public in new serial forms. Such changes in literary culture were even more acute in a remote colony where paper was scarce and where the first free press only emerged in the 1820s.34 By the 1850s, literary magazines emerged, but they were short-lived given the exigencies of a small population. Dunlop found outlets for her poetry in newspapers, developing relationships with individual editors who supported her work: she also  Dunlop, “Star of the South.”  Ibid. 31  Lootens, “Hemans and Home”; Armstrong, Victorian Poetry. 32  Stewart, The Form of Poetry. On literary albums, see Harris, Forget Me Not. 33  Stenhouse, “Criticism and Critics”; Jordens, The Stenhouse Circle. 34  Prior to this, a government-sanctioned Gazette was the sole outlet: see Johnston, The Paper War. 29 30

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published three poems in Australia’s first substantial literary magazine, Frank Fowler’s The Month: A Literary and Critical Journal. The reception of Dunlop’s poetry mirrored metropolitan opposition to women’s sentimental verse; in addition, colonial editors could be scathing. The Sydney Morning Herald’s editor irascibly declared: “We admire, as much as Mrs. Dunlop can possibly do, ‘happy homes and free altars,’ but it does not follow that we should admire bad poetry written in their praise.”35 “Bad poetry” was linked with feminine sentimentality, as well as radical politics honed through its association with abolitionist verse. Dunlop’s long colonial residence meant that her knowledge deepened beyond what early critics classed as “cockney … knowledge of the aboriginal natives, … acquired by reading the Last of the Mohicans.”36 “Slashing” reviews of a “middle-class Cockney school” of liberal poets were common in British periodicals such as the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s.37 Yet Dunlop responded to that criticism directly: after 1840, when David was posted to a remote district north of Sydney, Dunlop began to engage with Indigenous people and to record their languages.38 Beyond the obvious practical advantages of learning Indigenous languages (she ran a large household and likely relied on Aboriginal domestic labour), Dunlop used her poetic and linguistic skills to record Indigenous songs for posterity. She also translated them for publication and used them as sources of inspiration for her own original poetry. Dunlop featured Indigenous languages and cultural practices in several published poems, including “The Eagle Chief” (1842), “The Aboriginal Father” (1843), and “Native Poetry: Nung-Ngnun” (1848).39 Dunlop’s paratextual notes on her published poems acknowledged her sources, including named Indigenous people. She attempted what she called a versification of Indigenous songs, despite commenting about the difficulties of translation. “Native Poetry” is best considered an adaptation, and the first verse is:

 Dunlop, “Star of the South.”  “Domestic Intelligence: New Music,” The Sydney Herald. 37  Butler, “Culture’s Medium,” 146. 38  Johnston, “Mrs Milson’s Wordlist.” 39  Dunlop, “The Eagle Chief”; Dunlop and Nathan, “The Aboriginal Father”; Dunlop, “Native Poetry.” 35 36

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Our home, is the gibber-gunyah,   Where hill joins hill, on high; Where the Turruma, and berrambo,   Like twisted serpents lie! And the rushing of wings, as the Wangas pass, Sweeps the Wallaby’s prints, from the glistening grass.40

Here, Indigenous words and ideas (likely a combination of several local languages) are deployed to make sense of the environment and peoples’ place within it: home is “the gibber-gunyah,” which Dunlop glosses as a cave in a rock (a distinctive feature of the Wollombi Valley in which she dwelt). The sounds of Wangas (pigeons) fill the air; Makooroo (fish) and Kanin (eel) glide in deep shady pools visited by wallabies. This is a meaning-­laden, self-sustaining landscape, inhabited solely by Indigenous people because it is one that “an Amygest’s (whiteman’s) track hath never been near.”41 On the one hand, we can read this poem as a settler fantasy: an appropriation of an autochthonous worldview akin to the prelapsarian Garden of Eden and part of what Patrick Brantlinger calls “proleptic elegy,” in which “dying races” are lamented, but new settler nations emerge seemingly naturally and without the accompanying violence of colonialism.42 Yet, on the other hand, it falls within a minority Empire-­ wide tradition that considered Indigenous culture worth preserving and articulating for new audiences, especially settler colonial readers negotiating their own complex allegiances to Empire, place, and race.43

Exile, Emigration, and Elegy Dunlop’s thoughts were often on the country, family, and friends she had left behind in Ireland: “What thoughts within this bosom swell, / What tears an Exile’s eyes are filling.”44 “Songs of an Exile” comprised a series of ten poems published between 1838 and 1840. These included thinly disguised autobiographical verses but also featured poetic personae such as the speakers of the paired poems “The Aboriginal Mother” and “The Irish  Dunlop, “Native Poetry.”  Ibid. 42  Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 2–3. See also Goldie, Fear and Temptation. 43  O’Leary, Savage Songs and Wild Romances; Rudy, “Floating Worlds”; Rudy, Imagined Homelands. 44  Dunlop, “Songs of an Exile No. 1: The Dream.” 40 41

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Mother.” These both used the elegiac mode in the form of a passionate address to a beloved, absent child, though the Irish mother looks back to a child distanced by emigration, rather than colonial massacre: “Oh! green be the fields” of my native shore Where you bloom, like a young rose-tree; Mo VARIA astore—we meet no more!45

Women, family, and affective bonds were key themes in this series that would have resonated with readers from many nineteenth-century emigrant families. “The Irish Mother” was first published in the Australian in 1839. The Irish nationalist and journalist Charles Gavan Duffy included a version in his The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845), a study of “Anglo-Irish ballads; the production of educated men, with English tongues but Irish hearts.”46 His popular anthology, including Dunlop’s verse, remained in print throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1866 edition, Duffy praised the “freshness and grace” of “the touching little ballad.”47 It became more meaningful for him across time because of his extensive travels and long public service in the Australian colonies between 1855 and 1880. Yet he remained unaware of the identity of the author of the poem he had retitled “The Emigrant Mother,” perhaps thinking of Wordsworth’s 1807 poem of the same name. Themes of exile united readers in a dispersed British Empire; verse also travelled in reader’s memories, in this instance, likely without Dunlop’s knowledge of its reprinting. Dunlop’s verse reveals a politicised elegiac mode under the aegis of emigration and empire. Deaths of extended family members or friends provoked Dunlop’s imagination, with a melancholy mood prevailing in many works. She joined together sentiment and social issues, a common feature of women’s poetry of the time, under the influence of Hemans and others in the poetess tradition.48 Jason Rudy argues that close attention to Dunlop’s verse reveals the complex interplay between emigration and readership. Dunlop’s “Songs of an Exile No. 3” eulogises two young brothers from her husband David’s Northern Irish family who died in Mississippi within days of each other:  Dunlop, “Songs of an Exile No. 5: The Irish Mother.”  Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845), xv. 47  Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1866), 74. 48  Lootens, The Political Poetess. 45 46

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“Wept o’er his dead !” oh not for those Whom home and kindred cheers; To taste, or tell the bitter source Of a lone Exile’s tears. Death, barbed his arrows to destroy— To slay—“yet not divide” A young—a fair—a noble boy Sleeps by his brother’s side.49

Rudy shows how this poem—reversing the pattern of “The Irish Mother”—was first published in Belfast in 1837, then revised by Dunlop for its 1838 Australian publication. Small changes in pronouns helped Dunlop associate with a colonial community in exile, “aligning herself and her Sydney readers with the Irish brothers who, living on foreign soil, are thought to lack both a true home and the happiness afforded by friendship.”50 Across the Exile series, Dunlop created imaginative and affective links between diasporic immigrants and dispossessed Indigenous peoples in ways that are universalising and politically radical.51 Dunlop’s elegies were neither laments for individuals, nor were they simply nostalgic. For Dunlop, exile was linked to Ireland’s distinctive colonial history: thus elegy engaged in political as well as social and moral work. In 1814, Dunlop had planned a volume of poetry titled Ultoniana, featuring “historical Poems, principally confined to the authentic History of Ulster in the days of feudal domination.”52 It remained unpublished because antiquarian subjects, which had flourished during a period of Enlightenment interests in national folk cultures, became suspect in the aftermath of the 1798 Irish rebellion, when resistance to British rule resulted in politically complex and violent skirmishes.53 Antiquarian and political themes became unpalatable: in 1834, Maria Edgeworth declared it “impossible to draw Ireland as she is now in a book of fiction—realities are too strong, party passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in the looking-glass.”54 It was not until the 1840s that Irish  Dunlop, “Songs of an Exile No. 3.”  Rudy, “Beyond Universalisms,” 98. 51  Ibid. 52  Notice. Freemans Journal (1814). 53  Leerssen, “Convulsion Recalled.” 54  Edgeworth, Life and Letters, vol. 2. 49 50

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writers began to reimagine the events of 1798 for local literary audiences, using Romantic themes to reconfigure “the moral significance of 1798 and its insurgents, first in a tragic, and subsequently in a heroic, light.”55 Elegies of collectives could also naturalise that revolutionary history. Dunlop’s “The Irish Volunteers” (1843) extolled the virtues of a “150,000 strong, self-constituted, self-supported and effectively disciplined” military body raised in 1780: As the names of Caulfield, Grattan, Flood— Proud pillars of the past—have stood Enshrin’d by Erin’s gratitude. Embalm’d by Erin’s tears: Thus lov’d like their’s, a name we prize, Engirt by fame’s triumphal dyes, A ruling star of southern skies, And Irish Volunteers!56

The Volunteers were involved in resistance to English rule, organising and mobilising a “provincial political culture.”57 David Dunlop’s great-­great-­ grandfather was a Covenanter, a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland that resisted the imposition of the English Book of Common Prayer: his religious and political beliefs strongly influenced family memory. Eliza Dunlop’s own barrister father Solomon Hamilton had a library of republican writing, including by Enlightenment philosophes, that she read voraciously as a child.58 Both families were linked to movements committed to political independence and religious tolerance in Ireland, and these ideologies underpinned Dunlop’s verse. Diasporic geographies were conjoined by Dunlop’s elegies. David Dunlop’s unexpected death in 1863 devastated the poet, but in characteristic fashion she crafted verse both to memorialise her husband and to connect to Ireland. Within three weeks of David’s death, Dunlop published “The Two Graves” in Sydney’s The Empire; by August 1863, the poem was published in their Irish hometown paper the Coleraine Chronicle. She linked David’s death to that of his father, Captain William Dunlop,

 Leerssen, “Convulsion Recalled,” 143.  Dunlop, “The Irish Volunteers.” 57  McBride, Scripture Politics, 161. 58  de Salis, Two Early Colonials. 55 56

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who was hanged as a rebel in the Irish Uprising. Dunlop’s “The Two Graves” recalls “the requiem of red ninety-eight!”, emphasising the “fierce reign of terror” by the English in Ireland and the bloody history of revolution.59 The two men are characterised as Patriots, separated by distance, but joined in death: Tombs parted as wide as the span of the sphere; Yet father and son have had widowhood’s tear! Predestined in life to bend “under the rod,” “Through much tribulation” they passed to their God: And star’s rays fall bright on the homes of their rest. From the “Cross of the South,” and the “Lyre of the West.”60

As in “The Irish Volunteers,” Dunlop used the metaphor of distinctive southern constellations—here, the Southern Cross—to link diasporic experience and advocate for a progressive Australian politics. Dunlop also published “Memorialis” (1863), an individual tribute to David: Death, instant, noiseless, pressed his noble brow, Even whilst the footsteps sounded on the floor! That brave enduring heart is broken now! I listen for the voice that comes no more.61

Even in this more personal verse, Dunlop’s contextual notes recounted the Ulster history of the Dunlop family, pulling against the ostensibly private affective register of elegy. Sentiment and political ideas travel together in Dunlop’s elegies. Recent scholarship about the Victorian poetess tradition has emphasised how these writers expressed public concerns as if they were private ones; in Dunlop’s writing we see private sentiments being shaped for public and political ends. Dunlop certainly shares a number of the key characteristics of the poetess model: “generically female yet also normatively white; private yet performative and often political; lyrical yet highly rhetorical; a vessel of nationalist ideologies yet also … an agent with transnational ‘mobility.’”62 In the settler colonies of Ireland and Australia, “national”  Dunlop, “The Two Graves.”  Ibid. 61  Dunlop, “Memorialis.” 62  Stone, “Politics, Protest, Interventions,” 147. 59 60

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sentiment contained a strong element of anti-imperialism, as colonial societies tested ideas about political and cultural independence. Dunlop was part of a privileged Anglo-Irish family, but her childhood was ­unconventional and she was raised by her grandmother after her mother died and her father moved to India to serve at the Calcutta Bar. With her marriage to David, Eliza secured her respectability but joined a family that defined themselves against dominant political and religious authorities in Ireland.63 Her verse focused on the distinctive nature of Irish and settler Australian culture, including the poetic use of non-English languages. Dunlop’s intellectual and affective network of family, society, and politics linked sites across the British Empire.

Elegy, Empire, and Australia A dual imperial and settler colonial worldview is needed to appreciate both individual poems and Dunlop’s oeuvre, in which her Australian verse predominates. We may also need to consider Dunlop’s use of poetic forms beyond the elegy, and their connection to cognate developments in the literary field, in order to account fully for a body of writing from the colonial frontier that reflected key debates in nineteenth-century poetics and imperial culture. Dunlop’s public persona and writing obviously shared features with her literary peers in the northern hemisphere: aspects of the poetess tradition, women’s contribution to new media forms such as literary annuals, and the Romantic fascination with Indigenous and exotic cultures.64 Yet Dunlop’s personal experience of exile and her exposure to diverse colonial locales were distinctive: many women writers, like Hemans, only imagined foreign landscapes and stories, often derived from travel writing, while some English writers found cultural difference in Europe that inspired their poetic and political activities.65 In contrast, Dunlop wrote within a colonial landscape for all her life: first Northern Ireland, then New South Wales. The “exotic” for her was domestic and familiar, even if Dunlop always imagined the global British world through recurring themes of exile and emigration. 63  Her early first marriage was made without her father’s consent and ended quickly. See Johnston, “The Poetry of the Archive.” 64  Fulford, Romantic Indians. 65  Chapman, Networking the Nation.

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Manu Samriti Chander proposes a cosmopolitan poetic collective of “Brown Romantics,” a set of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators” located in diverse nineteenth-century colonies “whose aesthetic, philosophical, and political commitments were informed by the British Romantics [and who] labored to organize local readers into a collective whole, anticipating the rise of a reading nation that would not be fully realized in these poets’ lifetimes.”66 Chander defines “brown-ness” through cosmopolitanism and poetic marginality rather than race or skin colour: he identifies the late-nineteenth-century Australian poet Henry Lawson as a member of his cadre. Dunlop certainly shared a cosmopolitan vision, and an acutely political sense of the roles played by ethnicity, religion, and language. Dunlop’s poetry can be read within this alternative canon, as well as the feminised tradition of sentimental verse. Both movements capture Dunlop’s determined effort to insert her verse into nascent Australian literature and her enthusiasm for a vernacular literary appreciation by readers. Yet some critics concerned with identity and culture now accuse Dunlop and Lawson of appropriating Indigenous voices, rather than amplifying them. Dunlop was highly privileged, but her whiteness was a complex and mutable category shaped by colonialism and her knowledge of imperial violence and dispossession. Despite her elite Anglo-Irish background, Dunlop countered the pervasiveness of the English language in colonial settings including Ireland and New South Wales. Gaelic and Scottish words and histories provided counter-narratives to Anglophone traditions in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and Dunlop knew that religion and ethnicity could divide communities, with long-term social effects. Gender also influenced Dunlop’s engagement in the colonial public sphere, underpinning her astute deployment of poetic forms and tropes to encode a politicised form of sympathetic engagement with Indigenous suffering. Dunlop’s elegiac verse bore witness to the physical and cultural violence that undergirded the emergence of colonial society in Australia, which distinguished its contribution in the early to mid-century. Elegy was an appropriate mode for the work of mourning although, as the reception to her Indigenous-themed work reveals, colonial critics fought hard to partition literature from frontier conflict. Dunlop’s elegies detailed what Nathan Hensley calls the persistence of violence that accompanied modernity in global liberal society, by linking the familial suffering caused by deaths of loved ones abroad with collective mourning in response to the  Chander, Brown Romantics, 2.

66

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violent repression of Irish dissent, and with the suffering and Indigenous dispossession caused by colonial massacres.67 These connections make Dunlop a stronger (and earlier) candidate for imagining a genuinely radical cosmopolitanism than Lawson, in fact, in its accounting for Indigeneity. Vers de société in New South Wales under Dunlop’s hand encompassed both a celebration of the colony’s literary and political opportunities (embodied in “Star of the South”), and a recognition of colonial struggles and Indigenous dispossession. Dunlop’s verse and correspondence in colonial newspapers reveal her determination to represent complex and entwined Indigenous, colonial, and imperial histories and to place these both on the public record and within the literary sphere. Dunlop extended the literary tradition of elegy to fit her colonial environs and to explore the questionable morality of colonisation, as evidenced in “The Aboriginal Mother.” The form conveyed literary and moral values: both bearing witness to and emotionally mourning the acts of violence against Indigenous people that underpinned settler colonial modernity.68 This contradictory mode is typical of the ambivalence of settler discourse, on the one hand, asserting white liberal values while also acknowledging Indigenous suffering.69 For writers such as Dunlop, however, this was not a settler logic of elimination, but rather an act of memorialisation that allowed readers to inhabit the experiences of suffering others.70 This made for uncomfortable reading at the time and since, but it also provides an antecedent literary history that allows us to consider how verse may help societies to both remember and move forward from violent and contested pasts.

References 1814. Notice. Freemans Journal, October 7. 1841. Original Correspondence: Thorough-Bass and Nathan. Sydney Herald, November 5. 1842. Domestic Intelligence: New Music. The Sydney Herald, April 18. 1842. New Music. Sydney Morning Herald, August 9. Armstrong, Isobel. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics. London: Routledge.  Hensley, Forms of Empire.  Ibid., 2. 69  Lawson and Johnston, “Settler Colonies.” 70  On settler logics of elimination, see Wolfe, Settler Colonialism. 67 68

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Baden-Powell, George S. 1872. New Homes for the Old Country. A Personal Experience of the Political and Domestic Life, the Industries, and the Natural History of Australia and New Zealand. London: Richard Bentley and Son. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2003. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Butler, Marilyn. 2010. Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review. In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. S.  Curran, 127–152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chander, Manu Samriti. 2017. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Chapman, Alison. 2015. Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870. New York: Oxford University Press. de Salis, Margaret. 1967. Two Early Colonials. Sydney: n.p. Duffy, Charles G. 1845. The Ballad Poetry of Ireland. Dublin: J. Duffy. Dunlop, David. 1838a. Dunlop to Gipps. Police—Penrith, September 27. Colonial Secretary’s Office, New South Wales State Archives, CSO 709. Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton. 1838a. Songs of an Exile No. 4: The Aboriginal Mother. The Australian, December 13. ———. 1838b. Songs of an Exile No. 3. The Australian, November 29. ———. 1838c. Songs of an Exile No. 1: The Dream. The Australian, November 8. ———. 1838d. Songs of an Exile No. 4: The Aboriginal Mother. The Australian. ———. 1839. Songs of an Exile No. 5: The Irish Mother. The Australian, January 12. ———. 1842a. The Eagle Chief. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, April 21. ———. 1842b. The Star of the South. The Sydney Morning Herald, August 30. ———. 1843a. The Irish Volunteers. The Australasian Chronicle, April 13. ———. 1843b. Rosetta Nathan’s Dirge. The Sydney Morning Herald, April 25. ———. 1847. Elegy. The Sydney Morning Herald, December 21. ———. 1848. Native Poetry: Nung-Ngnun. The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October. ———. 1849. Inscribed to the Memory of E.B.  Kennedy: Who Lost His Life While on an Exploring Expedition in Tropical Australia. The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, August 8. ———. 1863. Memorialis. The Empire, June 24. ———. 1865. The Two Graves. The Empire, April 15. ———. n.d. The Dead. In The Vase, unpublished mss. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, B1541. Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton, and Isaac Nathan. 1843. The Aboriginal Father: A Native Song of the Maneroo Tribe. Sydney: I. Nathan. Edgeworth, Maria. 1894/2005. Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth. Vol. 2. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9095.

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Fulford, Tim. 2006. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldie, Terry. 1989. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures. Kingston: McGill University Press. Harris, Katherine D. 2015. Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Hensley, Nathan K. 2016. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Samuel Prout. 1843. Stanzas Suggested by the Recent Death of a Beautiful Girl. Sydney Morning Herald, April 4. Johnston, Anna. 2011. The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. ———. 2018. Mrs Milson’s Wordlist: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Intimacy of Linguistic Work. In Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck, 225–247. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. The Poetry of the Archive: Locating Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. In Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier, ed. Anna Johnston and Elizabeth Webby, 25–49. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Jordens, Ann-Mari. 1979. The Stenhouse Circle: Literary Life in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sydney. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Lawson, Alan, and Anna Johnston. 2000. Settler Colonies. In A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, 360–376. Massachusetts: Blackwell. Leerssen, Joep. 2015. Convulsion Recalled: Aftermath and Cultural Memory Post-1798 Ireland. In Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, ed. M. Tamm, 134–153. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Legge, R.H., and David J.  Golby. 2004/2011. Nathan, Isaac 1790–1864. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. B. Harrison and D. Cannadine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leighton, Angela. 2008. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lootens, Tricia. 1994. Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine ‘Internal Enemies,’ and the Domestication of National Identity. PMLA 109: 238–253. ———. 2016. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lucas, Arthur M. 2013. James Rennie 1786–1867  in Australia, 1840–1867. Archives of Natural History 40: 320–323. Lydon, Jane, and Lyndall Ryan, eds. 2018. Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre. Kensington, NSW: NewSouth Publishing. Mackerras, Catherine. 1963. The Hebrew Melodist: A Life of Isaac Nathan. Sydney: Currawong.

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McBride, Ian. 1998. Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press. McGann, Jerome J. 1996. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press. McKenzie, Kristen. 2004. Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Nathan, Isaac. 1842. New Music. Australasian Chronicle, January 22. O’Leary, John. 2009. Speaking the Suffering Indigene: ‘Native’ Songs and Laments. Kunapipi 31: 47–60. ———. 2011. Savage Songs and Wild Romances: Settler Poetry and the Indigene, 1830–1880. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Page, Frederick G. 2008. James Rennie 1787–1867, Author, Naturalist and Lecturer. Archives of Natural History 35: 128–142. Rudy, Jason R. 2014. Floating Worlds: Émigré Poetry and British Culture. ELH 81: 325–350. ———. 2017. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. ———. 2021. Beyond Universalisms: Individuation, Race, and Sentiment in Colonial New South Wales. In Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier, ed. Anna Johnston and Elizabeth Webby, 93–104. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Skinner, Graeme. 2021. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Irish and Colonial Melodist. In Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier, ed. Anna Johnston and Elizabeth Webby, 121–159. Sydney: Sydney University Press. St George, Robert Blair, ed. 2000. Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stenhouse, Nicol D. 1832. Criticism and Critics. Border Magazine 1: 293–300. Stewart, David. 2018. The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, Marjorie. 2019. Politics, Protest, Interventions: Beyond a Poetess Tradition. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry, ed. L.K. Hughes, 145–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webby, Elizabeth. 1982. Early Australian Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography of Original Poems Published in Australian Newspapers, Magazines & Almanacks before 1850. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell. Wood, Rebecca. 2009. Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend: The Sydney Herald’s Response to the Myall Creek Massacre Trials and the Creation of Colonial Identity. History Australia 63: 67.61–67.19. Wu, Duncan. 2014. ‘A vehicle of private malice’: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Sydney Herald. The Review of English Studies 65: 888–903.

CHAPTER 7

William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling Annmarie Drury

William Barnes (1801–1886) wrote widely celebrated poetry in dialect during the British nineteenth century, and his poems often concern themselves with feeling. Frequently, Barnes’s poems in Dorset English offer vignettes in which emotional transformations are the event. “The Wind Up the Stream,” for example, enacts through imagery the trial of having one’s emotional expectations betrayed by reality, closing with an insight into the dissonance between one’s perceived and actual circumstance, how “hope do zometimes meake us think / Our life do rise, the while do zink.”1 The opening line of Barnes’s most anthologized poem, “The 1  Text from MS Book no. 7, p.  51, lines 9–10  in the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, where it is noted that the poem was published in a local journal, The Hawk, in 1864. A standard English version appears in Poems of Rural Life in Common English (London: Macmillan, 1868, 82).

A. Drury (*) City University of New York, Queens College, Queens, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_7

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Turnstile,” with its disclosure of emotional condition—“Ah! sad wer we as we did peäce”—signals that feeling is the primary subject.2 How, Barnes’s poems ask repeatedly, does one negotiate emotional vicissitudes and withstand painful feelings, particularly of loss and aloneness? Scholars have examined Barnes’s preoccupation with emotion from various angles—in terms of his relation to farm work and to Victorian ideas about dialect communities, for example.3 Yet absent from this discussion is careful consideration of his work as a minister—work that occupied him significantly from the time of his ordination in 1848—in relation to it. When an idea of vocational duality enters into critical work on Barnes’s poetry, it typically concerns his investigations into linguistics.4 In one sense, the absence of Barnes’s ministerial vocation from considerations of his poems is understandable. It can be difficult to account for a poet’s “other” work in interpreting poems, and scholarship on Barnes, in comparison with that on other Victorian poets, is not abundant. Yet, the absence is also strange, given the importance of pastoral work in Barnes’s life, not to mention how much reading, writing, and textual interpretation his ministerial vocation entailed. The poems themselves gesture toward Barnes’s work as a minister by weaving scenes and sounds of churches into their explorations of emotional experience: as in “The Turnstile,” which is set in a churchyard amidst the ringing of bells, and in “The Two Churches,” where the negotiation of emotion becomes a communal undertaking expressed through church bells: “Vor our high jaÿs all vive bells rung,/ Our losses had woone iron tongue.”5 In this way, the poems invite us to think about Barnes’s identity as a clergyman—as pastor-poet as well as pastoral poet. That contemplation, in turn, illuminates instability in the conventional binary between “verse” and “poetry,” as this discussion will show. I refer to Barnes’s poetry-writing and his pastoral work as his dual vocation—two sides of a complex endeavor centered in communicating, 2  William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, third collection (London: John Russell Smith, 1862), 124. 3  See Waithe (2013) and Drury (2018). 4  Chris Wrigley discusses how “Barnes’s craftmanship in poetry was intimately linked with his remarkable linguistic learning” (Wrigley 1984: 13). Stuart Gillespie gestures toward a conjunction between Barnes’s pastoral work, his translating, and his writing of poetry when he explores “metrical experimentation” in Barnes’s translations of the psalms (Gillespie 2008: 70), but the line of thought is not pursued. 5  Barnes, Poems of Rural Life, 9, lines 29–30.

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and communicating about, emotional experience. As a minister, particularly as an author of sermons, Barnes meditated upon and sought to guide the feelings of his parishioners, a task which closely resembles the tasks of his poem-making. His speaking before a congregation had in common with his poetry-writing a focus upon the emotional life—including shades and changes of feeling, desirable and undesirable feelings—of his community. Reading Barnes’s poems alongside his sermons reveals the interest these texts share in strategies for communicating about and managing the feeling of the Dorset community to which Barnes belonged. By “managing,” I mean not baldly controlling, but rather querying, seeking to relate to, and offering counsel to address the emotional experiences of the people with whose care Barnes’s vocation entrusted him—as well as inquiring into his own. Poems and sermons both offer a phenomenology of feelings, exploring turnings of emotion and their meaning for one’s position in the world and relation to others—including to God, represented in the sermons as a particularly mysterious other. As they do so, both poems and sermons are animated by what I will call a pastoral consciousness, characterized by a language of place and an exploration of how feelings link individuals into a community: how emotions, as Sara Ahmed writes, “mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.”6 The double meaning of “pastoral,” as a noun for a verse genre and as an adjective for “pertaining to spiritual guidance,” is important here. As I will argue, it illuminates how deeply interrelated were the two parts of Barnes’s dual vocation and gestures as well toward the processes by which his poems arrived at their non-­canonical position.

A Poetic Phenomenology of Feelings: Dynamism and Multitudinousness It is helpful at the start to familiarize, or re-familiarize, ourselves with the role of emotion in Barnes’s poems. I have chosen two poems, “Clouds” and “Air An’ Light,” that convey a sense of his approach to emotional life. “How shall we study conscious experience?” asks David Woodruff Smith in writing about phenomenology, and the procedures he describes have affinities with Barnes’s poetic practices: 6

 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22.2: 119.

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We reflect on various types of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear, for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather, we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump a hurdle.7

A foundation in lived experience and the act of “look[ing]to our familiarity” with it are key for Barnes’s poetic explorations of emotion. “Clouds” and “Air An’ Light” manifest approaches to emotional experience that are distinctive of his poetics: in “Clouds,” a dilation on the dynamism of emotion and in “Air An’ Light,” a preoccupation with the multitudinousness of emotional states across the human community at any given moment. “Clouds,” which Barnes’s notebooks indicate was first published in the Dorset County Chronicle, starts with several lines rendering the sight of clouds in slow motion (“A-riden slow”) before shifting toward more pointed description that emphasizes incessant changeability: A-riden slow, at lofty height, Wer clouds, a-blown along the sky, O’purple-blue, an’ pink, an’ white, In pack an’ pile, a reachen high, A-shiften off, as they did goo, Their sheapes vrom new ageän to new.8

Preparation for comparison comes at the close of this stanza: after four lines describing clouds in terms of visual appearance, the speaker remarks on their changeability, how they were “A-shiften off … / Their sheapes vrom new ageän to new.” Barnes’s second stanza compares the clouds to elements of a country landscape before reiterating their inherently changeable nature; they come “In sheäpes a-meäde to be unmeäde”:

7  David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N.  Zalta, accessed 10 January 2021, https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/. 8  William Barnes, William Barnes: The Dorset Poet, ed. Chris Wrigley (Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote, 1984), 214, lines 1–6. The autograph copy of “Clouds” is in MS Book 7 (poem four) of Barnes’s poems in his archive at the Dorchester County Museum.

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An’ zome like rocks an’ tow’rs o’stwone, Or hills or woods, a-reachen wide; An’ zome like roads, wi’ doust a-blown, A-glittren white up off their zide, A-comen bright, ageän to feäde In sheäpes a-meäde to be unmeäde.9

The pivot to explicit comparison occurs at the opening of the final stanza, with “Zoo”: Zoo things do come, but never stand, In life. It mid be smiles or tears, A jäy in hope, an’ one in hand, Zome grounds o’ grief, an’ zome o’ fears; It mid be good, or mid be ill, But never long a-standen still.10

As “Clouds” manifests Barnes’s interest in emotional dynamism, how “things do come, but never stand,” it displays one of his poetic habits of mind, the gaze toward the natural world as a source of analogy for human emotional experience. A distinctive feature of the poem lies in its oblique layering of similes: the cloudscape of stanza two is like a landscape (with clouds “like rocks,” “like roads,” and so forth), even as the ever-dissolving quality of the clouds is like—turning on Barnes’s “Zoo”—the incessant changeability of human emotional weather. The operation of dialect is significant as the last stanza delves into this idea: “It mid be smiles or tears … It mid be good, or mid be ill.” An overlapping of the Dorset “mid” (for “may”) with standard English “mid” (for “amid”) enhances a sense of fluidity—of a person’s being fully in any particular state even as it proceeds to inevitable change. (The autograph manuscript shows that Barnes was attentive to the role of dialect here, originally writing “may” instead of the first “mid,” then correcting to the dialect form.)11 “Clouds” suggests the centrality of the natural world to Barnes’s poetic phenomenology of feelings, how his poems think about emotional experience using

 Ibid., lines 7–12.  Ibid., lines 13–18. 11  Here is reason to question Baxter’s view (1887: 244) that for “Clouds,” Barnes’s standard English translation is as good as the dialect version. 9

10

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a language of nature. His pondering of emotion and his crafting of images of nature have an intense interdependency. Such interdependency fills “Air An’ Light,” a poem that arrives at personal revelation through its meditation on the array of emotional states within human community. Here, Barnes generates a bird’s-eye view of human experience by attending to the relatively immaterial phenomena of his title. The first stanza emphasizes expansiveness and interconnectedness in a gently deictic instruction: Ah! look an’ zee how widely free To all the land the win’ do goo; If here a tree do swaÿ, a tree On yon’er hill’s a-swaÿen too. How wide the light do bring to zight The pleäce an’ liven feäce o’ man; How vur the stream do run vor lip To drink, or hand to sink and dip!12

Of special interest are the fifth and sixth lines, which with the phrase “How wide” link a rendering of territorial expanse with one of human existence: “How wide the light do bring to zight / The pleäce an’ liven feäce o’ man.” The second stanza develops a sense of emotional scope by evoking a variety of simultaneously occurring feelings: But oone mid be a-smote wi’ woe That midden pass, in wider flight, To other souls, a-droopen low, An’ hush’d like birds at vall o’night. But zome be sad wi’ others glad; In turn we all mid murn our lot, An’ many a day that have a-broke Oone heart is jaÿ to other vo’k.13

The first two lines identify a non-transferability in human emotion—how “oone mid be a-smote wi’ woe / That midden [might not] pass … / To other souls”—that contrasts with the opening stanza’s vision of trees at some distance from one another “a-swaÿen” in the same wind. Here, the  Barnes, The Dorset Poet, 212, lines 1–8.  Ibid., lines 9–16.

12 13

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array of emotional states in the human world (“But zome be sad wi’ others glad”) is underpinned by a flux that is rather negative in character, in the sense that grief is promised (“In turn we all mid murn our lot”), though the speaker again insists on an inescapable variation, how “many a day” bringing heartbreak to someone has brought joy to others. The poem offers a closing twist in its late move toward personal disclosure: The mornen zun do cast abroad His light on drops o’ dewy wet, An’ down below his noontide road The streams do gleäre below his het; His evenen light do sparkle bright Across the quiv’ren gossamer; But I, though fair he still mid glow, Do miss a zight he cannot show.14

This closing stanza pivots from the broad view of variety in emotional circumstances to the speaker’s own condition. It prepares for this turn by revisiting landscape, meditating on the light of morning, afternoon, and evening. Now, though, the human experience evoked—with “But I”—is not empathetically general but personally revelatory of the speaker’s loss and longing. Consideration of communal emotional experience has enabled revelation of the personal. In keeping with their aerial qualities, “Clouds” and “Air An’ Light” offer us an overview of Barnes’s interest in emotion. A poetic engine lies in their movement from contemplating an image in nature to elucidating emotional experience. Their phenomenology of feelings has a communal aspect that resonates with the position of a country clergyman; and in “Air an’ Light,” particularly, we see a dependence of personal revelation upon apprehension of communal experience. In such features of these poems as their search for analogy, their expression of communal affiliations, and their deictic quality lies their pastoral consciousness—their channeling of Barnes’s vocational concern as a minister for the well-being of his community and their sharing in the pastoral poetic genre, which Owen Schur characterizes as “social but also solitary” and centering in the “trope” of the “locus amoenus, or ‘lovely place.’” Poetic pastoral is concerned with negotiation of the social world, for in it, as Schur writes, “norms and  Ibid., lines 17–24.

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expectations of the social group—household, community, state—are never far away. Yet the pastoral world is itself a device if not to escape at least to humanize these expectations.”15 The sort of humanizing project that Schur highlights operates also in Barnes’s sermons, where we find facets of the phenomenology of feelings that animates his poetry. Moreover, while Barnes does not use Dorset English in his sermons, he does seek there a language of place to share with his audience, creating a locus amoenus in common with them. The next sections explore two specific features shared by Barnes’s sermons and poems: the trope of the token of love and the rhetorical gesture of “but no,” with the recalibration it signifies.

Tokens of Love in Sermon and Poem Barnes’s adult life revolved around poetry-writing, ministerial work, and teaching, and the contours of his career were such that each activity constituted a vocation, none an avocation. It makes sense, however, to think of poetry-writing as coming first—at least chronologically—for Barnes. His first published poems appeared in 1833 in the Dorset County Chronicle. Two years later, he moved with his family from the small town of Mere, in Wiltshire, where he had been running a school with his wife Julia, to Dorchester, the county seat of Dorset, where he opened a successful school in the family home. In 1838, he began divinity study at St. John’s College, Cambridge, enrolling for part-time study as a “ten years’ man.” Ordained in 1848 and receiving his bachelor’s of divinity in 1850, he secured a permanent position as rector of Winterborne Came, a mile from Dorchester, in 1862.16 By the time he began routinely writing and delivering sermons, then, Barnes had been publishing poems for years. Barnes’s practice in writing sermons, as evidenced by his archives, was to paste the printed biblical text on which he would focus into a notebook where he then made annotations in ink, often marking as well (such as with underlining or asterisks) key portions of the printed text. He wrote his sermons after these pastings, sometimes inserting further biblical references by pasting in additional printed passages. The texts he thus created, 15  Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 7, 9–10, 7. 16  Chris Wrigley, “Introduction,” in Barnes (1984), 3–4; and “Barnes, William,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1015–1018.

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substantial but not necessarily finalized, suggest that the sermons admitted extemporaneous elements in delivery, and the prose of some sermons is more fully elaborated than others. At the head of each sermon, he noted the dates and locations of its delivery; penciled changes suggest he may have adjusted the texts over time.17 One would not have to reach far to find analogues with processes of poetic composition, although Barnes’s papers perhaps reveal less about his methods in composing poems. Vocabulary and habits of thought shared by Barnes’s sermons and poems, as well as lineation in his sermons, invite us to read these creations as continuous or of a piece. A complication here is that the sermon is not generally understood as a literary genre and is often omitted from discussion of literary texts by authors who were ministers. In his study of the sermons of the fantasy writer George MacDonald (1824–1905), Martin Dubois remarks on the failure of scholarship to connect MacDonald’s sermons and his fiction. He identifies “a crucial point of contact between … [MacDonald’s] sermons and his stories” in “a commitment to lecturing and laboring in cause of the unknown and unfamiliar” shared by both.18 Dubois’s phrasing as he characterizes the investments of MacDonald’s sermons in “the unknown” is apt for Barnes. While, on the one hand, Barnes’s sermons deal in familiar reality, they consistently urge recognition of the presence of mystery—of aspects of emotional experience, in particular, that escape straightforward understanding or elude ordinary methods of interpretation. We find such urging in a sermon on Jeremiah 14 first delivered in 1868. Barnes focuses on verse 8, which is asterisked in the printed text pasted into his notebook: O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble, why shouldest thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night? 17  There is not space here to consider his likely methods of delivery—how they compared with styles of sermonizing in his time; how they may have been shaped by his experiences as a churchgoer and his study at Cambridge, where delivery of sermons in Latin and English was important for his degree; how they were influenced by knowledge of his parishioners’ lives and interests; or how the liminal quality of the sermon as a written text for oral delivery that was to some extent formed in delivery may have related to a similarly liminal quality of dialect poetry. These would be good questions for investigation. 18  Martin Dubois, “Sermon and Story in George MacDonald,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 578.

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Barnes has also marked verses 10 and 18, which read, respectively: Thus saith the Lord unto this people, Thus have they loved to wander, they have not refrained their feet, therefore the Lord doth not accept them; he will now remember their iniquity, and visit their sins. If I go forth into the field, then behold the slain with the sword! and if I enter into the city, then behold them that are sick with famine! yea, both the prophet and the priest go about into a land that they know not.19

A central subject of Barnes’s sermon on this chapter is alienation from God—the perception and experience of it—and how a person undergoing it might re-approach God. The sermon starts with a litany of troubles experienced by the Jews; Barnes writes of the chapter from Jeremiah: Written at the time of the latter days of the kingdom of Juda + not long before the tak[in]g of the land by the Babylonians. Afflictions were gathering on the Jews. Fewer tokens of God’s love Fewer blessings. Less might ag[ains]t foes. Less welfare, Less good, more evil Drought v. 1–6 War & famine v 18 From foes [here Barnes pastes in Jeremiah 5: 15–17] C 8. We looked to peace but no good came & for time of health & behold trouble[.] The prophet foresaw greater afflictions. The fall of Jerusalem the suffering of the people & the outlead[in]g of the people to Babylon[.]

This sermon, recorded in a more note-like form than some, contains elements of verse in its line breaks and its use of litany and anaphora, as in “Less … Less … Less”; Barnes’s use of capital letters at the start of lines

19  From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473. I have retained the italics with which the King James translators mark their interpolations; to Barnes, a scriptural translator, they would have had meaning. Barnes’s sermons are handwritten and present challenges in transcription and interpretation. Where possible, my transcription preserves his choices in orthography, spacing, and indentation.

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suggests he understood the lineation as a verse-like formal property.20 Having enumerated problems faced by the Jews, Barnes highlights Jeremiah’s assignment of voice and emotion to the bereft temple: He makes the temple speak touchingly [here Barnes pastes Jeremiah 10:20, which reads]: My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains. We see then the state of the Jews, the sinful & fallen people of God Evils & fears many Bless[in]gs & hopes few The words of love rare Of threatening manifold The light of God’s countenance It may well be asked “Where is the flock that was given thee[”] & c.

Barnes then turns his line of thought toward human culpability in alienation from God: If we slight the gifts of grace they will be withdrawn. If we cast away the gifts of which we feel or rate not the worth we may lose many which we would fain keep. In Gen[esis] 27 Esau’s bless[in]g was taken from him for Jacob. He tho[ugh]t it hard to lose it. He wept. He was angry. But he lost not the bless[in]g till he had sold his birthright. The bless[in]g was tied to the birthright.

20  Barnes’s handwriting is large, and it can be hard to determine where lines end through formal choice, as in verse, and where through the necessity of the margin, as in prose. Punctuation is sometimes irregular or hard to distinguish. Yet, sometimes, Barnes seems clearly to arrange lines through formal choice.

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So we often forsake Christ & slight his ordinances & soul gifts of grace & then fall into evil for the want of them & then on miss[in]g the tokens of divine love may cry on the {text}21 Has He been our hope? Have we held Him as our Savior before we came to trouble? The whole drift of the discourse is as you will have seen is [sic] that we should not forsake the Lord but in the words of the Catechism [here Barnes pastes in a passage from the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer beginning “Answer. My duty towards God, is to believe in him”] *So that when the church may be asked Where is the flock that was given the[e], the beautiful flock She may answer Here with me of them wh[ich] thou has given me have I lost none

At this late moment, Barnes raises the possibility that the story may not be as simple as thus far proposed. He introduces an element of mystery, suggesting that the human sense of God’s absence may itself be erroneous, founded upon misinterpretation: We may however be mistaken abt our Lord’s keeping aloof from us. He may be giving us tokens of love that we overlook or misunderstand + we want patience for the ends[.]

Perhaps an apparent dearth of “tokens of love” stems not from God’s distance but from human confusion, Barnes suggests, and with this move toward re-interpretation, his sermon ends. Here the work of re-­ approaching God is internal, emotional; the sermon concerns the interior life and liberally assigns such life, as when Barnes highlights how Jeremiah makes the temple talk “touchingly” of its emptiness. It ends on a note of mystery, the suggestion that an apparently absent God may be present in ways unanticipated and still unrecognized, a suggestion that casts a thrill of re-interpretation back across Barnes’s sermon, for now the notion of God’s being distant becomes available for reconsideration. 21  “{Text}” is Barnes’s note; it is not clear to which text it refers. Below, the asterisk is Barnes’s.

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A key word as Barnes raises the possibility of re-interpretation is “token,” and in it lies a lexical intersection between the sermon and one of Barnes’s better-known poems, “The Wind at the Door,” which notes on the autograph manuscript indicate was published in the Dorset County Chronicle in 1864, four years before the likely date of the sermon’s composition. Alienation from God, Barnes writes in his sermon, entails there being “[f]ewer tokens of God’s love.” It is this understanding for which he posits a more complex alternative in his closing: “He may be giving us tokens of love that we overlook or misunderstand.” The “token ov love” has a pivotal role in “The Wind at the Door,” which depicts a speaker’s longing for the presence of a beloved woman who has died. In its vignette, the speaker steps outside and stands in a shower of flowers blown down from the trees. For a moment it is “[a]s if” these flowers are showered upon him as “a token” by his departed love: I went to door; an’ out vrom trees above My head, upon the blast by me, Sweet blossoms wer a-cast by me, As if my Love, a-past by me, Did fling em down—a token ov her love.22

Dwelling in this “as if” is short-lived, though Barnes suspends it across a stanza break. The final stanza begins with self-correction: “But no: too soon I vound my charm a-broke.” The flowers were not sent by his love, and the speaker finds himself again alone, in a state of sorrow: “all my keenest grief awoke.” The “token of love” shared by Barnes’s sermon and poem suggests the phenomenology of feeling and pastoral consciousness animating both spheres of his work. “Token” has an etymological relationship to “teach,” being cognate with Old English tǽcean, to show, from which “teach” comes. This etymology and the lexical conjunction with Barnes’s sermon invite us to read “The Wind at the Door” as offering guidance for negotiating feelings of loss and aloneness: not as a “how-to” but as a “how-it-­ might-be” poem. Alan Hertz likens “The Wind at the Door” to the poetry of Robert Frost in the way it “gains its power by acknowledging man’s need for a sympathetic environment while bravely refusing to believe in 22  My text is from MS Book no. 7, p.  71, in the William Barnes Archive, Dorchester, lines 11–15.

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one.”23 The comparison is apt, and yet, familiarity with Barnes’s sermons inspires a conclusion distinct from any we might make about Frost: for Barnes, the search for a “sympathetic environment,” a natural world responsive to human emotional need, revolves around a confidence in divine mystery. Barnes’s writings suggest an underlying certainty not that the world will yield responsiveness to one’s emotions, but that the quest for such responsiveness is properly part of the human condition—that it is part of divine intention. In this interpretation, the act of imagination of which the speaker tells us (in his briefly supposing that his beloved rained flowers upon him) becomes less a record of error than one of the interior, emotional work of negotiating loss, and of imagination’s role in that task. Both sermon and poem trace the experience of longing, in loneliness, for a sign from elsewhere and posit ways of understanding that experience.

“But no” and the Beauty of Recalibration The “But no” of “The Wind at the Door” that corrects an already developed line of thought echoes elsewhere in Barnes’s writing. This “no,” with the re-thinking that follows, is a distinctive feature of Barnes’s sermons and poems both. It appears in another of Barnes’s sermons, one in which he discusses the idea of divine providence and the nature of God’s will, basing his text on Isaiah 27:5: Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and he shall make peace with me.

In it, Barnes wants to show human fallibility in interpretation. We may understand God’s actions and nature one way, Barnes writes, but no—the right understanding is in fact another. This passage revolves around the positing of interpretations (“Then we may think”) that require recalibration introduced by “No.” In his manuscript, Barnes consistently places that “No” at the end of a line, as if borrowing from poetic form. His text reads: He meets [sic] out change by and way of treatment Then we may think O  Alan Hertz, “The Hallowed Pleäces of William Barnes,” Victorian Poetry 23.2: 120.

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God is unstable of mind changes His purpose. No not His purpose but His plan Balaam might have sd. of the angel O the angel keeps not his road. Shifts. No The angel’s road was his. His purpose unchanged Again. Take a river flow[in]g to the sea whence stream may be agn. drawn up for rain The sea the aim But you build a bay a bank. It stays a while or flows round and [a]way If you have set a dam ag[ain]st a valley it will in time rise & fall over it. Or wear out a new channel. But at last reach the sea. Its course or behavior changed not its end not fickle but true to the same law of flowing down to the deep So with Divine Providence The great aim of the Lord has always been the call[in]g of men mankind again into His household in Christ To begin & widen & fill his visible church To uphold His truth & righteousness.24 24  From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473; dated 19 April 1868.

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The “no” of correction is important to this passage. Barnes seems to have chosen to create line breaks at “No”; in lineation, this is one of the more poem-like passages in Barnes’s sermons. We find here the look to nature for analogy that is familiar from his poems. After two instances of “no,” correcting what “we may think” and what the Old Testament prophet Balaam “might have said of the angel” he met on the road, the sermon opens into a more detailed analogy centered in water flowing to the sea to urge listeners to distinguish underlying “law” from a more superficial “course or behavior.” The paths of waterways flowing to the sea would have been familiar to parishioners at Whitcombe, located less than ten miles from the English Channel, and in this sense Barnes articulates the sermon’s culminating nudge toward re-interpretation in communally shared imagery: the river, the dam, the “law of flowing down to the deep” that must be understood as inexorable. The “no” is dynamic, and the recalibrations across this passage become more than simple corrections, because they culminate in an extended analogy via language invoking shared experience in the place inhabited by Barnes and his parishioners. This culminating analogy describes transformation. Apprehending the gestures of recalibration which culminate in metamorphosis in Barnes’s sermon on divine providence prepares us to examine a final poem, one similarly animated by recalibration staged across a series of stanzas. “The Wife A-Lost” offers a series of physical and emotional re-positionings through which its speaker negotiates grief, culminating in a restatement of the problem in new terms. The “but no” is implicit, structuring the poem’s thought without receiving direct expression. The poem opens by articulating a problem, with the speaker addressing an absent, beloved “you.” To manage sorrow and longing, the speaker must escape from a house they formerly shared: Since I noo mwore do see your feäce, Up steäirs or down below, I’ll zit me in the lwonesome plëace, Where flat-bough’d beech do grow; Below the beeches’ bough, my love, Where you did never come, An’ I don’t look to meet ye now, As I do look at hwome.25  Barnes, The Dorset Poet, 168–69, lines 1–8.

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The speaker negotiates the pain of absence by going to a spot the beloved never visited. What sense of company or plurality is there in this “lwonesome plëace” comes from the trees. Each of the next two stanzas, which concern walking and eating outside, respectively, offers a re-positioning parallel to that of the first stanza— parallel, but not identical. Because its sensory investment in these scenes intensifies, the poem is not static or simply iterative. Rather, the speaker increasingly inhabits scenes the stanzas depict. This lends the poem a paradoxical quality, for as the poem tells of efforts to ameliorate grief, a sense develops of the speaker freshly experiencing it through his intensity of presence in lonely places. The second stanza is key to this process of re-­ inhabiting, with its visions of “riding mist” and “trees a-drippen wet”: Since you noo mwore be at my zide, In walks in zummer het, I’ll goo alwone where mist do ride, Drough trees a-drippen wet; Below the raïn-wet bough, my love, Where you did never come, An’ I don’t grieve to miss ye now, As I do grieve at hwome.26

The sensory action in “riding mist,” which lends a kinesthetic quality to an image more typically visual, and in the auditory, potentially tactile quality of “trees a-drippen wet” nurtures an impression of the speaker’s bodily presence in these scenes. The third stanza dwells on the silence that drives the speaker outside to eat in a shadowy spot “[b]elow the darksome bough” (l. 21) instead of in the silence of the table where the beloved’s “vaïce do never sound” (l. 18). In the closing stanza, the speaker’s terrestrial re-positionings culminate in a profound re-orientation. Instead of avoiding places where she once was, the speaker will now seek the beloved in her new immateriality. This entails a sacrificing of the terrestrial world itself; the speaker embraces hope of encountering her in an otherworldly space “[a]bove the tree an’ bough”: Since I do miss your vaïce and feäce In prayer at eventide, I’ll pray wi’ woone sad vaïce vor greäce  Ibid., 169, lines 9–16.

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  To goo where you do bide; Above the tree an’ bough, my love,   Where you be gone avore, An’ be a-waïten vor me now,   To come vor evermwore.27

Hertz characterizes this sacrifice as “Christian heroism” and reads the poem as formed by “stark, obsessive parallelism” in which “each entire stanza echoes like a refrain.”28 Certainly, stanza-sized parallelisms operate in this poem, but the sensory investments of the second and third stanzas as they intimate the speaker’s somatic presence grant the poem dynamism. Its vignette of negotiating sorrow turns on recalibration and a promise of metamorphosis, much as Barnes’s sermon on divine providence does. Poems and sermons alike seek such recalibration and value it.

Pastoral Consciousness and Poetic Canon “Suffer[in]g is work,” Barnes scribbled in connection with the passion of Christ in one of his sermon notebooks.29 Work, too, was investigating the experience of emotion in himself and others. This labor became central to Barnes’s dual vocation, and it led to his re-invention of poetic pastoral to accommodate his identity as a minister. Those accommodations may have contributed to his tenuous place in the poetic canon. Thomas Hardy’s revisions to Barnes’s poems in the selected edition he edited (1908) suggest this. As W. J. Keith has shown, Hardy’s “cuts often involved passages of religious or moral commentary” and made poems “more impersonal and objective by the exclusion of specific references.”30 A friend and admirer of Barnes, Hardy saw him as a modern pastoral poet and a figure of endangerment; Hardy lamented “the fragility of the pastoral world and pastoral poetry.”31 Yet, he did not entirely approve of the turns toward community and the offerings of counsel that were integral to Barnes’s pastoral, and his rejection predicted a dominant sensibility in Anglophone poetry across the twentieth century.  Ibid., lines 25–32.  Hertz, “Hallowed Pleäces,” 120, 121. 29  From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473. 30  W.J. Keith, “Thomas Hardy’s Edition of William Barnes,” Victorian Poetry 15.2: 126. 31  Schur, Victorian Pastoral, 167. 27 28

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Barnes himself, across his career, recalibrated his thinking about the relationship between the church and artistic creation, as a visit to his early prose suggests, and perhaps we best understand his poems and sermons when we read them as engaged in a continual process of re-envisioning the connection between pastoral and poetic vocations. In an early essay in the Dorset County Chronicle, “The Church and Culture” (1834), Barnes writes woodenly, if approvingly, about the centrality of the church to artistic and cultural life. The church’s sponsorship of artistic practice has far exceeded any support that individual communities could offer, he remarks, and he presents a catalogue of its influences. In music, for example, creation of the organ, “that noble, though complicated instrument,” led to the development of counterpoint and the writing of “fine anthems” for choral singing (Barnes 1984: 230). We see here that the relationship which Barnes proposes to explore, between the church and artistic creation, has not yet assumed the personal, idiosyncratic form it will come to have within his own life. Comparing the broad strokes and textbook tone of this “Dilettante Letter” with the poems and sermons of Barnes’s maturity reveals a striking transformation in thought—one which intimates that over time, Barnes heard the texts of his dual vocation speaking to one another. Learning from that dialogue, I would argue, he came to practice his dual vocation as poet and minister knowingly, so that both poems and sermons resonate with his conception of experiencing emotion as the crucial human undertaking. Barnes’s work invites us to engage in our own recalibration. Study of his poems and sermons together points to an instability in the binary division between “verse” and “poetry” that has become something of a critical commonplace. Unifying Barnes’s vocation as a pastor with his vocation as a poet and acknowledging the poetic traditions thus invoked—especially, in the genre of pastoral—helps us understand Barnes’s poetic work as poetry and to think in a more holistic way about what the work of poetry may be. Acknowledgments  I am grateful to the William Barnes Society and to the Dorset Museum, Dorchester, for granting me access to Barnes’s papers and permission to publish from them here. Research for this chapter was supported by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. I dedicate this work to the memory of Marion Tait, who in her role as secretary to the William Barnes Society before her death in 2021 assisted and welcomed me with greatest generosity.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Affective Economies. Social Text 22 (2): 117–139. Barnes, William. 1862. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. 3rd Collection. London: John Russell Smith. ———. 1984a. William Barnes: The Dorset Poet. Ed. Chris Wrigley. Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote. ———. 1984b. The Church and Culture. In William Barnes: The Dorset Poet. Baxter, Lucy. 1887. The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist. London: Macmillan. Chedzoy, Alan. 2010. The People’s Poet: William Barnes of Dorset. Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press. Drury, Annmarie. 2018. Aural Community and William Barnes as Earwitness. Victorian Poetry 56 (4): 433–453. Dubois, Martin. 2015. Sermon and Story in George MacDonald. Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 577–587. Gillespie, Stuart. 2008. William Barnes’s Rhythmical Versions of the Psalms. Translation and Literature 17 (1): 70–84. Hertz, Alan. 1985. The Hallowed Pleäces of William Barnes. Victorian Poetry 23 (2): 109–124. Keith, W.J. 1977. Thomas Hardy’s Edition of William Barnes. Victorian Poetry 15 (2): 121–131. Schur, Owen. 1989. Victorian Pastoral. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Smith, David Woodruff. 2018. Phenomenology. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta, Summer 2018 ed. https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/. Waithe, Marcus. 2013. William Barnes: Views of Field Labour in Poems of Rural Life. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 460–474. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wrigley, Chris. 1984. Introduction. In William Barnes: The Dorset Poet, 1–19. Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote. ———. 2004. Barnes, William. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G.  Matthew and Brian Harrison, vol. 3, 1015–1018. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 8

“Of China That’s Ancient and Blue”: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form Justin A. Sider

But this lone, chipped vessel, if it fills, Fills for you with something warm and clear. —James Merrill, “Willowware Cup”

The English Parnassians, as Ford Madox Ford wrote, were “blow[n] … to the moon” by modernism.1 And they’ve remained there. In an essay on A.  C. Swinburne, Ezra Pound dismissed them as writers who, “coming My thanks to the editors for their feedback and for shepherding this essay into print. I’m grateful to Samuel Fallon and Nan Z. Da for their conversation on this topic, and to the organizers and attendees of the Historical Poetics Symposium at Connecticut College in 2017 for their generous engagement. Poems are cited in the text by line number. 1  Qtd. in Marion Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016), 90.

J. A. Sider (*) University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_8

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after the more or less drunken and more or less obstreperous real Victorians, acquired only the cant and the fustiness.”2 Edmund Gosse, William Ernest Henley, Andrew Lang, and Austin Dobson produced large quantities of ornate poems, often in medieval French forms, and they generally look to us (as they looked to Ford, Pound, and others) like the pale attenuation of whatever had once been vital in Victorian poetry. Comprising a “neglected phase of the aesthetic movement,”3 these late-Victorian fashioners of delicate poetic lacework have mostly disappeared from our histories of nineteenth-century poetry. These were the poets—more so than, say, Swinburne or Alfred Tennyson—whose failures underwrote modernism’s case for aesthetic revision. The Parnassians were obsessed with the decorative and the archaic, but they lacked the subversive excitement of either the Pre-Raphaelites or their more radical fin-de-siècle successors. The machine-tooled intricacies of their verse implied for many readers the reduction of poetry to formula—and of the poem, as Marion Thain suggests, to mass-produced commodity. Known today primarily for his fairy tale collections, Andrew Lang was the senior member of the Parnassians and a central figure in the late Victorian culture industry—a scholar of folklore, anthropology, religion, and classics, a theorist of romance and of plagiarism, a poet and translator, critic and editor, author of hundreds of volumes.4 As Julia Reid notes, “In the century since Lang’s late-Victorian heyday, [Henry] James’s judgment that his writing was damagingly superficial and anti-intellectual became the standard critical view.”5 If Lang remains a somewhat obscure figure, recent work by Nathan Hensley, Letitia Henville, Sebastian Lecourt, Kathy Psomiades, and Jonah Siegel, among others, has somewhat remedied the situation, discovering in Lang an important Victorian theorist of culture, literary and otherwise. Lang’s poems, however, remain largely unstudied. Like his fellow Parnassians, he wrote his most notable poetry in the ballade form, one of the major fixed forms of medieval French verse. Composed of three octaves, 2  Ezra Pound, “Swinburne Versus His Biographers,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1954), [290–294] 290. 3   James K.  Robinson, “A Neglected Phase of the Aesthetic Movement: English Parnassianism,” PMLA 68, no. 4 (September 1953): 733–754. 4  For a useful overview of Lang’s role as a node in late Victorian cultural “networks,” see Nathan K. Hensley, “What Is a Network (And Who Is Andrew Lang)?” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (October 2013) as well as the other excellent essays in RaVoN’s 2013 issue, “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method.” 5  Julia Reid, “‘King Romance’ in Longman’s Magazine: Andrew Lang and Literary Populism,” Victorian Periodicals Review 44, no 4: [354–376] 354.

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each ending with a refrain, and closing with a brief envoy, the ballade returned to nineteenth-century English poetry through the translations and imitations of the Pre-Raphaelites, though the English Parnassians also reached across the channel for inspiration in the work of Théodore de Banville, Théophile Gautier, and other contemporary French poets. Lang’s ballades provide one of the more remarkable entries in the non-canon of Parnassian poetry. His 1881 volume XXXII Ballades in Blue China (first published a year earlier as XXII Ballades in Blue China) offers a series of poems that meditate on their own anachronism—the distance between their archaic forms and themes and the aesthetic contemplation of the modern reader. The anachronism of these poems is written all over their imitative surfaces, a mode of pastiche that “hover[s],” as Jonah Siegel writes of Lang himself, “somewhere between antiquity and the present, between archaeology and literature.”6 It is this aesthetic “somewhere” that interests me here. Another name we might give this somewhere is form. In their allegiance to the decorative, superficial, and formulaic, the Parnassians offer an unlikely but compelling picture of poetic form’s nineteenth-century idealization under the sign of the lyric. They can also teach us something about form more generally. That is, form can be understood not only as structure, pattern, or shape, but also as a species of figure. By calling form a figure, I mean to pick out one way it becomes perceptible to us: as the compacted image of a poem’s relations, both internal and external; as an abstraction from the sensuous particulars of the poem—an abstraction that becomes, in the work of the Parnassians, an object of desire. Form is the figure the poem makes.7 Of course, poems often involve moments of self-characterization, producing ekphrastic images (like John Keats’s 6  Jonah Siegel, “Lang’s Survivals,” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (October 2013). 7  On the abstractness of aesthetic form, see Nicholas Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context,” New Literary History 47, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 505–524. In a striking essay on the New Criticism and aesthetic form, Nicholas Gaskill offers one way to understand form’s figurativeness. Aesthetic form is a particular kind of abstraction, in which “the material constitution of the artwork is suppressed in favor of the ‘virtual space’ produced by the ‘elements’ of art: an abstract space (because separated from everything but appearance) that consists in its form (the mode of relation among its parts)” (518). Aesthetic form, as Gaskill explains, is distinct from logical form (like, say, the sonnet’s fourteen lines and characteristic rhyme and meter), in that the former produces abstraction without generalization; the figure aesthetic form makes is a symbol that “gives a shareable name to a particular ‘feeling’ (to use [Susanne] Langer’s word) or ‘attitude’ ([Cleanth] Brooks) that is nonetheless inarticulate apart from the poem” (517). Genre performances of Lang’s sort in XXXII Ballades complicate this distinction, as logical form is superimposed on (or incorporated within) aesthetic form.

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Grecian urn or Robert Browning’s ring) that stand for the poem’s own shape and finish. (As we’ll see, Lang himself delights in producing clever instances of this sort.) In ekphrasis, as Murray Krieger explains, the representation of another medium reveals poetry’s own spatial patterning: a “stilled world of plastic relationships … must be imposed upon literature’s turning world to ‘still’ it.”8 For my purposes, treating form as a figure involves seeing how poetic discourse stills into an image of itself. Abstraction has been central to recent thinking on poetry and poetics, particularly with regard to the lyric. Work in historical poetics encourages us to see “lyric” not as genre but instead as the critical or interpretive abstraction that lyricizes the poem, a way of reading that produces lyric. “The history of lyric reading,” as Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins explain, “is the history of thinking about poetry as more and more abstract and ineffable.” In this context, it seems an important and perhaps under-­ remarked point that the long nineteenth century, the period in which “various verse genres were collapsed into a large lyricized idea of poetry as such,” was also a time in which a broadly antiquarian spirit excavated countless generic forms from the past.9 From the ballad collections of the late eighteenth century to the medievalist recreations of the Pre-Raphaelites to the early troubadour posturing of Ezra Pound, anachronistic genre performance comprised a significant yet underappreciated part of how poets theorized poetic form in the long nineteenth century. What might the revivalism of the Parnassians—in particular, their infatuation with the wind-up machinery of certain archaic verse genres—contribute to this history? The Parnassians’ idée fixe was the value of fixed forms, and they made their defense of this project in thoroughly lyrical terms. Introducing the 1887 anthology and Parnassian showcase, Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c., Gleeson White quotes James Russell Lowell on the Provençal origins of this modern-antique new poetry: “This poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of

8  Murray Krieger, “Appendix: Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967),” in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), [263–288] 266. 9  Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), [1–8] 2, 5.

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personal and momentary moods.”10 Likewise, in his essay of the same year, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” Edmund Gosse writes: “To make immortal art out of transient feeling, to chisel material beauty out of passing thoughts and emotions,—this is the labor of the poet.”11 The lyric ideal—a formal condensate of inwardness and expressivity in verse, a moment’s monument—is presumed by these writers. The question before them is whether their antique forms have the tensile strength to bear the stresses of this modern abstraction. The Parnassians, then, were at pains to defend a relationship between ostensibly spontaneous, lyrical feeling and their strikingly artificial verse forms. Austin Dobson contributed “A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse” to another anthology, Latter-Day Lyrics (1878), a large collection of English poems in fixed forms. In his “Note,” one of Dobson’s goals is to convince readers “that genuine inspiration and emotion” do indeed “express or exhibit themselves in stereotyped shapes and set refrains.”12 (One can see him chafing against the emerging sense that putatively “free” poetic forms were more likely to convey authentic feeling.) He resists any implication that pattern and rule might stand at odds with feeling; convention, he suggests, may in fact be just the place to discover it. At the same time, he also presses his case for fixed forms’ value in making poetry new, an impulse the Parnassians shared with the modernists who rejected them. “What is modestly advanced for [these forms],” he writes, “is that they may add a new charm of buoyancy,—a lyric freshness,—to amatory and familiar verse already too much condemned to faded measures and 10  Gleeson White, Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected, with Chapter on the Various Forms (London: Walter Scott, 1887), xxvi. 11  Edmund Gosse, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” The Cornhill Magazine 36 (1877): [53–71] 53. 12  Austin Dobson, “A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse,” in Latter-day Lyrics: Being Poems of Sentiment and Reflection by Living Writers, ed. William Davenport Adams (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), [331–349] 333. The Parnassians are confronting a problem that Paul de Man limns with characteristic intensity (see “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia UP, 1984], 263–290). De Man teases out some irresolvable tensions in the ideology of the aesthetic: for Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, the aesthetic is a source of human freedom, yet the formalization that produces the aesthetic, as with Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater, would seem to be nothing more than mechanism—an evacuation of selfhood, individuality, freedom. The formalization that enables aesthetic education would, paradoxically, reduce that education to the dance of a marionette. “Formalization inevitably produces aesthetic effects” (272), de Man suggests, but at what cost?

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out-worn cadences.” Older forms provide sources of estrangement in Viktor Shklovsky’s sense; the historical past of verse, exoticized, becomes a way of reviving aesthetic perception. Dobson’s point is not simply that a return to medieval verse genres might estrange us from, and thereby revitalize, “out-worn” sentiments (though, as he argues, they do just that). Rather, Dobson and the other Parnassians saw that repetition and revival could also, pursued in this single-­minded way, serve to draw out form and make it vividly present. When Gosse published his own defense of exotic forms, he enclosed a copy of his essay in a letter to Swinburne (composed, he wrote melodramatically, “half in despair”), in which he fuses an Arnoldian cultural conservativism with Swinburne’s radical aestheticism: “In all this battle for form and for pure literature we fight as a mere handful against the whole army of Philistia.”13 Though Gosse hedges in the essay (“Form itself is of no use whatever if there be no matter for the form to enclose”14), form appears here as the mark of “pure” literature, an end unto itself. The “performance of ingenuity,” in other words, at the heart of Victorian verse-­making (Parnassian and otherwise), is enchanted with the figures form makes.15 In the poetry of Andrew Lang and the Parnassians, form is a figure of a peculiar kind, emerging out of and realized through an historicist poetics of pastiche and revival—a poetics that Lang, like so many late-nineteenth-­ century poets, inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites. The imitative compulsion of the Pre-Raphaelites amplified and focused a tradition of genre pastiche that stretches back to the eighteenth-century ballad revival, antiquarianism, and the historicization of literary genres.16 What they added to this history, according to Walter Pater, was a sweetness born of loss. The medievalizing and Hellenizing poems of the Pre-Raphaelites locate 13  Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters Of Sir Edmund Gosse (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1931), 100. 14  Gosse, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” 71. 15  Adam Mazel, “The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 72, no. 3 (December 2017): [374–401] 379. 16  See David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), for a useful discussion of “genre memory, both invented and actual” as part of literary culture’s “self-consciousness” in the Romantic era and after (158). On the role of genre in the invention of national and literary pasts in the nineteenth century, see Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 345–363.

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their modernity in an unrealizable aspiration toward the past. The modern “aesthetic” poem is a record of failure, “aspiring to but never actually reaching” the past it attempts to revive.17 Pater’s formulation for the poetics of revival in Morris and Rossetti, an endless aspiration toward the forms of the past, makes aestheticism into a romance of genre, with pastiche its primary rhetorical vehicle. As Carolyn Williams explains, this formal or “aesthetic historicism” locates the “aesthetic” in “the secondary, the intensified, and the refined,” projecting the past as a figure of its failed aspiration crystallized in generic form.18 Like parody, this verse practice depends upon a “rhetoric of temporality” and a “powerfully modernizing one” at that.19 The pastiche ballades and rondeaus of the Parnassians inhabit their genres allusively, and in this way, they produce figures of form. Such figures are virtual in the sense that Michael Clune discusses in Writing Against Time, his study of how writers in the Romantic literary tradition fashion ideal images, or, more precisely, images of images— imaginary music, permanent novelties—that cannot be realized within the poem itself. The works Clune describes locate their most profound aesthetic aspirations outside of themselves. Like these poems and novels, the genre pastiche of Lang and others is principally ekphrastic, or as Herbert F.  Tucker has written, “autoekphrastic”: “In autoekphrasis a poem’s description of structures in the referential world doubles as description of its own structures. These are thereby reinforced as ad hoc imaginative common places, where readers however diverse and faceless may convene and, at least for the spacetime of a reading, dwell.”20 Autoekphrasis presents a special instance of the “reflexive function by which language contemplates and expresses itself.”21 Tucker’s more straightforward examples are representational (usually architectural or physiological)—John Donne’s “pretty roomes,” Rossetti’s “moment’s monument,” Thomas Hardy’s throbbing heart, and John Keats’s “strenuous” tongue. Genre pastiche, 17  Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia UP, 1974), 196. 18  Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 59. 19  Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 9. 20   Herbert F.  Tucker, “Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Victorian Poetry 46, no. 1 (Spring 2008): [69–85] 78. 21  Herbert F. Tucker, “Of Monuments and Moments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 1997): [269–297] 275.

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though, does not necessarily demand some conspicuous image of an artifact to ground its self-reference (though it often indulges in such figures, too). Rather, it involves a commitment to the conventional; the act of imitation draws attention to the poem’s formal patterning. Genre performances like Lang’s ballades are autoekphrastic in how they pick out and represent their own medium through imitation and thereby render brushstroke, frame, and canvas, so to speak, into the subject of the picture. Pastiche thus abstracts a genre that it holds and presents. Brilliant modern antiques—ballads like Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Romaunt of the Page,” or Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” or, as this essay suggests, the French confections of the English Parnassians—are thus, among other things, experiments in making generic form tangible. In this respect, the aestheticism of late Victorian poetry is inseparable from the aestheticization of genre itself, and the perception of form is one of its primary aesthetic effects. When Rossetti writes that he has borrowed, for his ballad “Stratton Water,” “an unimportant phrase here and there from the old things,”22 his comment suggests what Susan Stewart calls the “metaphor of texture” in antiqued or “distressed” objects: “The acute sensation of the object—its perception by hand taking precedence over its perception by eye—promises, and yet does not keep the promise of, reunion.”23 Poems like these aim to capture the feeling of historical and aesthetic distance in such a way that inauthenticity becomes a kind of aesthetic success. In the proliferating antique genres of the nineteenth century, poets invest their ingenuity and virtuosity in the pleasures of imitation and repetition. The modernists scorned the Parnassians for seeming to produce poetry by rote, yet the Parnassians’ historically alert investment in convention yielded a striking theory of genre and form.24 “Distressed forms show 22  William F.  Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 1: 389. 23  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 139. Letitia Henville observes in Lang’s writing “a slippage between abstract idea and physical object” (“Andrew Lang’s ‘Literary Plagiarism’: Reading Material and the Material of Literature,” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 [October 2013]), which nicely limns the strange status of the ballade form—an abstraction granted a kind of texture, in Stewart’s terms, through imitation. 24  For a useful discussion of the problem of modernist aesthetics, genre recognition, and the “badness” of much nineteenth-century poetry, see Naomi Levine, “Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics,” Literature Compass 17, no. 7 (July 2020).

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us the gap between past and present as a structure of desire,”25 and for Lang and the Parnassians that structure becomes visible in poems which are allusive of their own genres, holding them at a distance so that they’re realizable as aesthetic effects. To represent or aspire to form is another way for a poem to have it, and having anything in poetry, as this discussion of revival suggests, works best if that thing is already gone. *** Later in his career, Lang poked gentle fun at his youthful aestheticism—a life of “old French, and old oak, and old china”—but in the 1860s and 1870s he moved in the same circles as Pater and Swinburne (corresponding extensively with the former) and devoted himself to Pre-Raphaelite art, French literature, and Oxford Hellenism.26 The poetry of Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris shaped Lang’s early efforts as a poet; his first book of poetry, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems (1872), joined translations of medieval and modern French poetry to ballad imitations, ekphrastic sonnets, Greek songs, and more. (As Sebastian Lecourt writes, Lang “transformed many-sidedness into a middlebrow eclecticism of picking and choosing.”)27 Lang’s affinity with Pater’s aesthetic historicism shows clearly enough in his remarks on Rossetti, whose poetry, he writes, “unites the fervour of the eternal passion with the refinement and reflection of later days—of the love that has thought on itself, and found its own image, with a difference, in the light desires of Greek antiquity, and in the ecstasy of mystic mediaeval longings.”28 Historical belatedness—the “refinement and reflection of later days”—goes hand in hand with aesthetic formalization. The blue china that gives Lang’s volume its title at once exemplifies and troubles this relationship. The British desire for genuine oriental china in 25  Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 74. 26  Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 36. For a thorough exploration of Lang’s relationship with aestheticism generally and with Pater in particular, see Robert Crawford, “Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism,” ELH 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 849–79. 27  Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 166. 28  Andrew Lang, “Review of Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” North British Review 53 (1870): [309–311] 310.

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the nineteenth century was satisfied in large part through the manufacture of domestic imitations by Wedgewood, Spode, and Mintons. The famous “willow pattern” was itself just British chinoiserie, a pastiche of Chinese decorative craft. The pattern generated an explanatory tale told and retold across the nineteenth century: the daughter of a wealthy mandarin elopes with her penniless lover rather than marry an older nobleman; after their capture and execution, the young lovers are transformed into the doves that feature on the willow-pattern plate. One standard version of the tale was drafted as a marketing gimmick, “The Story of the Common Willow Pattern Plate,” published in 1849  in the Family Friend to promote the sale of Thomas Minton’s mass-produced ceramics. This ubiquitous pattern spawned a small, strange tradition of writing—short fiction, parodies, poems, and even light opera.29 Elizabeth Hope Chang explains how this mass-produced china troubled the aesthetic pretensions of connoisseurs: “pre-Impressionist artists attempt to rescue antique porcelain from its conflation with ubiquitous domestically produced earthenware, and use the porcelain’s rarity to mark their own aesthetic difference from the more middle-brow artistic taste that surrounds them.”30 Blue china might serve as the exquisite object of aesthetic contemplation; or it might be simply a mass-produced commodity (see Fig. 8.1). Lang’s work plays with just such contradictions. If he was a promoter of popular romance and middlebrow entertainments, he also published later editions of XXXII Ballades in Blue China with a delicate blue image of a woman superimposed on a vase or fan: a perfect emblem of aestheticist verse. The poem “Ballade in Blue China” describes, by dint of its title, the aesthetic aims of the book as a whole. Here’s the poem entire: There’s a joy without canker or cark, There’s a pleasure eternally new, ’Tis to gloat on the glaze and the mark Of china that’s ancient and blue; Unchipp’d all the centuries through 29  For a comprehensive overview of willow pattern writing, see Patricia O’Hara, “‘The Willow Pattern That We Knew’: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 421–442. As O’Hara explains, “The uncertainty surrounding the origin of the legend that was as familiar as Romeo and Juliet and as exotic as teahouses and orange blossoms made it highly adaptable to a wide variety of literary renditions” (423). 30  Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 74.

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Fig. 8.1  Title page for XXXII Ballades in Blue China (1883)

It has pass’d, since the chime of it rang, And they fashion’d it, figure and hue, In the reign of the Emperor Hwang. These dragons (their tails, you remark, Into bunches of gillyflowers grew),— When Noah came out of the ark, Did these lie in wait for his crew? They snorted, they snapp’d, and they slew, They were mighty of fin and of fang, And their portraits Celestials drew In the reign of the Emperor Hwang. Here’s a pot with a cot in a park, In a park where the peach-blossoms blew, Where the lovers eloped in the dark, Lived, died, and were changed into two Bright birds that eternally flew

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Through the boughs of the may, as they sang: ’Tis a tale was undoubtedly true In the reign of the Emperor Hwang. Come, snarl at my ecstasies, do, Kind critic, your “tongue has a tang” But—a sage never heeded a shrew In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.

Lang himself was a collector of real oriental vases, but the poem makes it clear we are looking not at the genuine article but at the mass-produced imitation. The lovers who “eloped in the dark” and changed into birds at their deaths are drawn from the widely circulated legend. The aesthetic contemplation of the reader, the pleasure to be had in “gloat[ing] on the glaze and the mark,” is redirected from the ostensible historical object to the performance itself—flagrantly inauthentic, formal more than historical. The poem turns our attention to its surface, to “the glaze and the mark,” and refuses the consolations of authenticity and depth. What does the object’s provenance matter so long as it provides pleasure? The aesthete’s hunger for sensation could, in a sense, occlude the artwork itself, and in this regard, aestheticism came uncomfortably close to the commodity culture from which it would otherwise dissent. Privileging the viewer’s experience “as an end in itself” would seem, as Jonathan Freedman explains, to deny “the value of art for anything but satisfying the eager, appropriative gaze of the spectator.”31 Lang’s nimble performance shows a consciousness of his poetry’s place in this modern world of commodification; a ballade “in” blue china, after all, acknowledges its affinity with this mass-produced commodity.32 Calling his pleasures 31  Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992), 59. Freedman offers a sophisticated acknowledgement of (and rebuke to) the elision of aestheticism and commodity culture. The disappearance of the aesthetic object into the beholder’s appreciation presents a characteristic tension within aestheticism. As Elizabeth Hope Chang observes, “For [James Abbott McNeill] Whistler, the [china] plate itself is at once utterly inconsequential as a tangible possession and yet at the same time thoroughly indispensable as a site charting an aesthetic style of vision—and the paradox of this position is perhaps in itself the point” (Britain’s Chinese Eye, 105). 32  In Parnassian poetry, as Marion Thain suggests, “we find a form of aestheticism that … demonstrates awareness of its own resonance with the commodity” (The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism, 100).

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“ecstasies,” Lang captures the bathos in fetishizing willowware china yet generously accedes to such pleasures all the same. If Lang cannot redeem this fallen world of indifferent appetites, he also will not retreat from it. The poet’s ironic pose sets limits on fantasies of aesthetic autonomy and the rejection of consumer culture, even as the poem finds in the contemplation of the blue china a wedge between itself and the world. The poem is parodic, then, though not unserious. The blue china is “unchipp’d all the centuries through,” of course, since its particular mode of time travel is virtual rather than historical. Like Lang’s own ballades, bred on the formalities of medieval French verse, the blue china has been thrown back in time rather than recovered, a modern object made to emerge from the reign of a legendary Chinese emperor. Lang’s aestheticist formalism is indifferent to the authenticity of blue china and modern ballade alike. Or perhaps we might say that his formalism depends on their inauthenticity. Virtuosity of craft takes precedence, and the failure of blue china and modern ballade to be the past they index enables a delight in something like mere form. Freedman has observed “the spirited critique of identity thinking … performed almost ritualistically in work after work of the aesthetic movement”—an endless deferral of synthesis, resolution, or consummation.33 Aestheticism doubles down on the Romantic intuition that loss pays dividends to desire. In terms of the ambitions of these poems, failure gives you generic form as an image of aesthetic consummation precisely by not giving it to you. Like the unheard music on Keats’s Grecian urn, the failed aspiration of these poems puts genre out of reach but authorizes it as the object of desire. Throughout XXXII Ballades in Blue China, anachronism characterizes the experience Lang’s poetry seeks to create—not the revival of the past in any naïve sense, but the self-conscious mediation or even invention of the past. The volume opens with a frank declaration of its aesthetic intentions. The first poem, “Ballade to Theocritus, in Winter,” begins with an imperative address disguising a suppressed subjunctive wish: Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London, and the bustling street, For still, by the Sicilian shore, The murmur of the Muse is sweet. Still, still, the suns of summer greet  Freedman, Professions of Taste, 29.

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The mountain-grave of Helikê, And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea. (1–8)

If only we could leave. Lang borrows John Keats’s trembling word “still” from “Bright Star,” picking up its sense of thwarted optative desire: let us try to remain here for as long as we are permitted. The repetition of “still, still” in the fifth line recalls a similar moment just before Keats’s own impossible desire collapses: “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death” (13–14). For Lang the stakes are not existential so much as generic, formal. Can one retreat into the pastoral pleasures of Theocritus, here, in late Victorian modernity? Juxtaposing the fallen modern city with an ancient pastoral retreat, Lang’s opening lines also echo the prologue to William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870): FORGET six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. (“Prologue,” 1–6)

Morris shaped Lang’s thinking on romance and literary history, though the latter’s poetry has little of either the former’s political bite or his robust historicism. As Marion Thain suggests, the past in Parnassian poetry is “more of an affect than a memory.”34 Lang’s retreat is not so much an historical or even romantic past as it is the pleasurable world of verse itself—verse, in this case, from the idylls of Theocritus. Translated from that poet’s eighth idyll, the ballade’s refrain—“Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea”—does not merely describe but, rather, becomes the place the poem plaintively longs for. We may “rest” or pause there, but, as Lang writes, “We may not linger” (20, 23, italics mine). The modern reader dwells here only for the length of a reading. In this way, Lang’s poems represent their own formal medium. The final ballade in the volume, “Ballade of His Choice of a Sepulchre,” requests that the poet be laid to rest “Where the wide-winged hawk doth  Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism, 108.

34

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hover.” That line is once again the poem’s refrain, a line that circles in the holding pattern of the ballade form much as the wide-winged hawk wheels in the air above: Bring me here, Life’s tired-out guest   To the blest Bed that waits the weary rover, Here should failure be confessed;   Ends my quest Where the wide-winged hawk doth hover. (13–18)

The imaginative place toward which the poet aspires in poem after poem slips away, and the failure to which Lang confesses here is nothing more than his desire to inhabit this antique form. Throughout the volume, Lang’s poems recommend retreats into fairy forests, sea voyages, book stalls, old French tales, and the haunts of ancient gods, imaginative distances that are caught and held within the artifice of the ballade. In his essay “Literary Plagiarism,” Lang jokes (albeit rather seriously) that “the ‘Aeneid’ was a pastiche, a string of plagiarisms.”35 As with the willow pattern, what matters is not the authenticity of the raw materials, but their abstraction and aestheticization within the poet’s formal crucible. In her insightful essay on Lang’s defense of “Literary Plagiarism,” Letitia Henville explains that for Lang, form and style, rather than matter or theme, make for novelty and success in artistic creation; a proper defense of plagiarism depends on the formal ingenuity of the plagiarist.36 There’s a similarity here to the secondariness inherent in acts of poetic translation. Like Walter Benjamin’s ideal translator, Lang treated the production of poetry as “derivative, ultimate, ideational,” the creation of a “pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything” but itself.37 Equating his ballade imitations with mass-produced chinoiserie, Lang ironically exposes the reliance of this idealized form on historical material. The critical mediation so important to the post-Romantic consolidation and privileging of lyric form emerges here as an aspect of both interpretation and composition in the fundamentally critical art of pastiche. 35   Andrew Lang, “Literary Plagiarism,” Contemporary Review 51 (June 1887): [831–840] 832. 36  Henville, “Andrew Lang’s ‘Literary Plagiarism.’” 37  Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt., trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), [69–82] 76–77, 80.

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Seen this way, lyric looks rather like a kind of emergent property, produced by a historically sophisticated and self-reflexive verse practice. Where compositional practices and lyric reading meet is in the process of abstraction itself. In this sense, modern poetry’s most persistent abstractions—lyric, form—appear not only through the accretion of readings over time, an evolving horizon of expectations, but also through countless local instances of historically self-conscious experimentation. In Lang’s Ballades in Blue China, the figure of form emerges as an ongoing project of abstraction from historical materials. Lang’s ballade foregrounds this process and does so by the way it incorporates and also distances itself from those materials. Like other works within the broad ambit of nineteenth-century aesthetic historicism, the ballades of Lang and the Parnassians give us critical purchase on a mode of abstraction that is not ours, as critics and readers—that belongs, in effect, to the poems themselves. In the gap between present and past, these works discover the pleasure of their own form, and thus what we find in Lang’s pastiche is not a particular model of lyric (as voice or song, musicality or subjectivity) but lyric as a process, or even an aesthetic effect. This essay, then, has not so much argued that we reclaim lyric per se from deflationary critique, as it has offered an opportunity to consider how lyric’s tendency toward idealization and abstraction, so persistent, so critically enticing, emerges out of particular relationships to the pasts of literary form.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The Task of the Translator. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 69–82. New York: Schocken. Chang, Elizabeth Hope. 2010. Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Charteris, Evan. 1931. The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. London: William Heinemann, Ltd. Clune, Michael. 2013. Writing Against Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Crawford, Robert. 1986. Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism. ELH 53: 849–879. De Man, Paul. 1984. Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater. In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 263–290. New York: Columbia University Press. Dobson, Austin. 1878. A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse. In Latter-day Lyrics: Being Poems of Sentiment and Reflection by Living Writers, ed. William Davenport Adams, 331–349. London: Chatto and Windus.

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Duff, David. 2009. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fredeman, William E., ed. 2002–2015. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 10 Vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Freedman, Jonathan. 1990. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gaskill, Nicholas. 2016. The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context. New Literary History 47: 505–524. Gosse, Edmund. 1887. A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse. The Cornhill Magazine 36: 53–71. Hensley, Nathan K. 2013. What Is a Network (And Who Is Andrew Lang)? RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64. https://doi. org/10.7202/1025668ar. Accessed 27 September 2017. Henville, Letitia. 2013. Andrew Lang’s “Literary Plagiarism”: Reading Material and the Material of Literature. RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025671ar. Accessed 27 September 2017. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. 2014. General Introduction. In The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, 1–8. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Keats, John. 1991. Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Appendix: Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967). In Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, 263–288. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lang, Andrew. 1870. Review of Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. North British Review 53: 309–311. ———. 1881. XXXII Ballades in Blue China. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. ———. 1887. Literary Plagiarism. Contemporary Review 51: 831–840. ———. 1905. Adventures Among Books. London: Longmans, Green. Lecourt, Sebastian. 2018. Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Naomi. 2020. Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics. Literature Compass 17. https://doi.org/10.1111/ lic3.12575. Martin, Meredith. 2015. “Imperfectly Civilized”: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form. ELH 82: 345–363. Mazel, Adam. 2017. The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge. Nineteenth-Century Literature 72: 374–401. Morris, William. 1870. The Earthly Paradise. London: F.S. Ellis. O’Hara, Patricia. 1993. “The Willow Pattern That We Knew”: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow. Victorian Studies 36: 421–442.

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Pater, Walter. 1974. Aesthetic Poetry. In Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom, 190–198. New York: Columbia University Press. Pound, Ezra. 1954. Swinburne Versus His Biographers. In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 290–294. New York: New Directions. Reid, Julia. 2011. “King Romance” in Longman’s Magazine: Andrew Lang and Literary Populism. Victorian Periodicals Review 44: 354–376. Robinson, J. 1953. A Neglected Phase of the Aesthetic Movement: English Parnassianism. PMLA 68: 733–754. Shklovsky, Viktor. 2017. “Resurrecting the Word” (1914). In Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. and trans. Alexandra Berlin, 63–72. New York: Bloomsbury. Siegel, Jonah. 2013. Lang’s Survivals. RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025673ar. Accessed 27 September 2017. Stewart, Susan. 1991. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Thain, Marion. 2016. The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tucker, Herbert F. 1997. Of Monuments and Moments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-­ Century Poetry. Modern Language Quarterly 58: 269–297. ———. 2008. Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Victorian Poetry 46 (1): 69–85. White, Gleeson. 1887. Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected, with Chapter on the Various Forms. London: Walter Scott. Williams, Carolyn. 1989. Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2001. Walter Pater’s Impressionism and the Form of Historical Revival. In Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger, 77–99. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2011. Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse: Comic Ballades, Rondeaus &c. in Punch and Fun Linda K. Hughes

From 1878–1887, a transatlantic vogue of French fixed-form verse flourished in books and periodicals, verse forms often associated with erudition and finesse. Yet this vogue also generated its carnivalesque inversion in the comic magazines Fun and Punch, fixed-form ripostes that exemplified the carnivalesque in overturning distinctions between high and low. In the anonymous verses this essay examines, the humor depended in part on demonstrating that poetic nobodies could master intricate forms as competently as, if less elegantly than, the Andrew Langs and Austin Dobsons known to the literary world. But of course the process of mocking elite verse forms with déclassé exempla required more effort than spinning off mere comic quatrains. Why bother?

I thank Dana Shaaban and Sofia Prado Huggins, Addie Levy Research Associates, for research assistance respectively with fixed-form poems in Fun and in Punch. L. K. Hughes (*) Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_9

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Tom Hood ventured an answer in 1869 when, in essence, he argued for the serious skills of comic verse in The Rules of Rhyme: It will be as well for the reader to divest himself at once of the notion that verse of this class is the lowest and easiest form he can essay, or that the rules which govern it are more lax than those which sway serious composition. The exact contrary is the case. Comic or burlesque verse is ordinary verse plus something. Ordinary verse may pass muster if its manner be finished, but comic verse must have some matter as well. Yet it does not on that account claim any license in rhyme, for it lacks the gravity and importance of theme which may at times, in serious poetry, be pleaded as outweighing a faulty rhyme. The style of writing needs skill in devising novel and startling turns of rhyme, rhythm, or construction, and can hardly be employed by those who do not possess some articulate wit or humor—that is to say, the power of expressing, not merely of appreciating, those qualities.1

The poems I discuss always had a pretext of “matter” as they mocked or challenged anything from fashions to a political stance, but it was above all in practicing fixed-forms that these jeux d’esprit exploded elite pretensions of verse and class distinctions alike. As I argue elsewhere, the fixed-form verse vogue emerged from D.  G. Rossetti’s experimentation with the ballade inspired by François Villon’s medieval verses, Andrew Lang’s Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), fatigue with the dominance of blank verse epic poems by Tennyson and Browning in the late 1860s, and transatlantic periodicals that, in rapid transits between Britain and America, acted as a motor to circulate and advertise fixed verse.2 If fixed forms subjected apparently spontaneous poetic expression to rigid form and rules, the movement celebrated the very discipline that rhyme and metric patterns imposed on poets and prided itself on the connoisseurship needed to appreciate such verse. On the other hand, this English-language movement required no prior classical training from poets or readers, which opened doors to men and women poets of diverse class backgrounds.

 Thomas Hood, The Rules of Rhyme (London: James Hogg, 1869), 54.  “Enclosing Forms, Opening Spaces: the 1880s Fixed-Verse Revival,” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s, ed. Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 34–52. 1 2

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The fixed-form comic verse I survey in this chapter—including ballades, triolets, and even villanelles—appeared in Punch (1841–2002) and Fun (1861–1901), both middle-class weekly papers. Class and its attendant anxieties were central to Punch and Fun, in which over 40 fixed-form verses appeared from 1878–1890. This period happened also to be a heyday of aestheticism and its commitment to art and beauty as ends unto themselves—a cultural development that created the conditions for the fixed-form revival.3 If sympathetic to more radical political views in its earliest years and never univocal in outlook, Punch was famous in the century’s last decades for lampooning aesthetes. These jibes were deliberately philistine, suggesting that to staunchly middle-class conservative readers, finical niceties of verse and connoisseurship were laughable rather than edifying. The cheaper Fun magazine was at least equally focused on class, but its emphasis tended to be oriented toward distinguishing even the lower rungs of the middle class from the workers below them on the social scale.4 Thus a key feature of Fun in the 1870s, according to Brian Maidment, was James Frank Sullivan’s series “The British Workman—By One Who Doesn’t Believe in Him.”5 Ignorance and incomprehension of middle-class politeness or aesthetics were key themes of these satirical cartoons. Particularly illuminating is James Sullivan’s 24 October 1877 cartoon “The Partiality of Fortune,” with its captions given in irregularly rhymed verse (see Fig.  9.1). This featured a window cleaner who, on seeing the fellow in the opposite window who only smokes, gazes, and scratches his head yet has the wherewithal to eat, decides that he too will earn his living doing the same. But “He knew not, in his want of guile, / The Scratching Smoker was a Bard; / He little thought that all the while / He gazed, he was a-thinkin’ hard.” While the Bard publishes his verses and grows rich, the former window cleaner ends in debtors’ prison, solaced only by the thought that his daily bread is supported in part by taxes levied 3  No one would have accused the prolific bookmen Lang and Dobson (who worked at London’s Board of Trade) of being aesthetes. But their attention to literary form chimed with aestheticism’s greater interest in surface and decorative qualities as opposed to mid-­ Victorian moral messaging. 4  Issues of Fun cost only a penny, whereas Punch issues cost three pence; see Jane W.  Stedman, “Fun,” British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 135. 5  Brian Maidment, “Fun (1861–1901),” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 2009), 237–38.

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Fig. 9.1  “The Partiality of Fortune,” Fun, 24 October 1877

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on the poet’s profits. If Punch ridicules aesthetes as precious would-be poets, in this cartoon Fun elevates the poet, whose high intellectual gifts are used as a class weapon against the ignorant, unlovely worker. Class, according to Adam Mazel and to Lee Behlman, is also central to Victorian verse culture, including Cambridge verse and vers de société. Mastering elegant light verse contributed to one educational mission of Cambridge, Mazel notes: the formation of English gentlemen.6 Behlman cites Andrew Lang, who argued that vers de société required equality among individuals in social settings; and social mobility and the leisure to write elegant light verse, as well as approved principles of taste, detachment, and moderation in its execution, presupposed gentlemanly status and attainments.7 Maintaining the boundaries of elite formations, whether educated gentlemen or aesthetic elites composed of poets and connoisseurs, generated a corollary anxiety among fixed-form advocates in particular, namely, that verse light in content but sporting complex rhyme schemes and stanzaic patterns could descend into mere aesthetic commodities that, when money was paid for their publication, veered away from elegant gentlemanly practice toward vulgar marketplace commodification. This anxiety was not lost upon the anonymous versifiers of Punch and Fun, who pounced on it as well as on other targets while adopting fixed forms for their own ends. Fun and Punch fixed-form comic verses thus served several important functions. First, they paid tribute to the fixed-form vogue insofar as contributors desired to adopt such forms. Yet the verses’ appearance in comic magazines simultaneously—and more forcefully—could explode the pretensions of aesthetic elitism by demonstrating how readily jobbing comic writers could pen such work when they could much more easily have turned out verses in ballad meter or tetrameter or dactylic quatrains.8 The appearance 6  Adam Mazel, “The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 72.3 (2017), 378–9. 7  Lee Behlman, “The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société,” Victorian Poetry 56.4 (Winter 2018), 485. 8  To locate the forty-one fixed-form poems on which I base this chapter, I searched the ProQuest British Periodicals I-IV database using the terms “ballade,” “sonnet,” “rondeau,” “triolet,” “villanelle,” and “rondel” and the document “poem.” Punch is less easily searchable with these terms in its Gale database. I used the same date range and specific journal title, plus the term “poem” (on a “fuzzy” setting of “high”). Altogether my search returned only 138 hits, in contrast to the 4839 hits using “poem” alone in Fun. Neither periodical featured massive numbers of fixed-form poems; the surprise that any at all were published remains.

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of such verse in these inexpensive comic weeklies implied as well that the artistic elites who also authored it were by association similarly enmeshed in the literary marketplace. Additionally, fixed-form comic verses obliquely complimented the journals’ middle-class readers, since editors thereby projected the assumption that readers had the discernment to appreciate the verses’ craft as well as content, a means of buttressing readers’ class status and suggesting the gulf between the magazines’ “correct” language practices and the vulgar discourse of those below. The contexts of contributors’ fixedform verses ranged from voyeuristic fun with women’s fashion spiced by Swinburnian naughtiness to nationalist verse, exposure of suggested fraud, and, ultimately, metapoetic commentary that used fixed forms to puff, expose, and finally dismantle the pretensions of fixed-form verse. Fashions in dress and verse were satiric targets in the “elongated rondeau” mocking Swinburne and current fashion in the 29 March 1882 Fun—though only the initiated would know that the four seven-line stanzas and shifting rhymes of “The Detached Train” were wildly different from the ten- to fifteen-line rondeau of three stanzas and two rhymes. The Swinburnian subtitle most likely resulted from Swinburne’s salute to Theophile Gautier and translations of Villon’s ballades in Poems and Ballads of 1878 as well as his reputation for daring erotic verse (a cover, perhaps, for the discreet eroticism of the comic poem). The “rondeau” opened with a headnote to clarify its context: The Detached Train. An Elongated Rondeau—after Swinburne. The masterpiece of dressmaking genius which the new year has brought to light is a detached train which the wearer can raise or drop at pleasure by a contrivance which I will not attempt to describe. Dropping her train, she freed her captive feet, Unbound, unwound it, cleared the encumbered street; Unfastened some vague bands, some hooks and eyes, Whose dark position we won’t scrutinize;     Turned out short-kirtled, sane,     Neat and compact again,      Dropping her train. (lines 1–7)9

The male speaker who squires the woman complains in the second stanza that her “frilling” engulfs his limbs as they walk, “spoiling my spats” 9

 “The Detached Train,” Fun, 29 March 1882, 136.

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(lines 9–10), though she herself remains a true goddess (Patuit dea, line 12). He then relates the voyeuristic pleasures that the newfangled fashion brings to him—“What novel joys a lover perchance gleans / Watching these novel transformation scenes!” (lines 15–16)—as he again sees her “Dropping her train” (line 21). He next seems about to venture into forbidden images of disrobing in the final stanza before retreating to conventional moral platitudes about women’s dress: But, lovely woman, why at this point stop? Aren’t there some other things ’twere wise to drop? Drop four-inch heels at loss, if cost, of twinges, Drop those twelve buttons, drop those idiot fringes,— Lovers’ warm thanks will pay you for your pain, And you will find their train increase amain,     Dropping your train. (lines 22–28)

Since the verse writer beckons to an educated male in using a Latin phrase (Patuit dea), the subtitle’s “rondeau” may slyly mock those Fun readers who did or could not catch on to the subtitle’s formal misprision, a different kind of daring that may have slipped past Fun’s editor.10 A more informed and interesting exploitation of French fixed forms occurred in nationalist verses. An 1882 political ballade in Punch, for example, stresses the ballade’s status as a foreign French import and, in violating the ballade’s norms, may also assert resistant Englishness. Whereas a ballade customarily features three eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbcbc and a four-line envoy rhyming bcbc, “Ballade de l’Anglophobie” adopts a five-line envoy rhyming cbcbc and purports to rhyme “Thames” and “shames.” Thanks to the work of Clare Horrocks, Valerie Stevenson, and others at Liverpool John Moores University who worked on the Punch contributor ledgers and shared their data with the open-access Curran Index, it is now possible to identify the authors of numerous Punch poems, though they remained “nobodies” to the reading public.11 The author of this ballade was Evelyn Douglas Jerrold (1854–1885), grandson of journalist Douglas Jerrold, himself a staff writer for Punch until his death in 1857. The younger Jerrold, likewise a journalist, had a  Possibly Charles Davison Dalziel (1857–1938); see Stedman, “Fun,” 138.  My thanks to Patrick Leary for pointing me toward the updated Curran Index, currently edited by Lars Atkin and Emily Bell. The Punch data were uploaded to the Index by former editor Gary Simons. No contributor’s ledger has been located for Fun. 10 11

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fine grasp of both the French and Punch contexts, since he lived in Paris and worked as a London correspondent for the press. His ballade responded to the aftermath of the 1879 meeting of the International Congress of Geographical Sciences in Paris, which voted to support building a Panama Canal. Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had managed the fundraising and organizing of the Suez Canal in 1859–1869, stepped forward to oversee the challenging new project. As the bracketed epigraph to “Ballade de l’Anglophobie” indicates, however, “Contemporaneously with the Lesseps Banquet project, parties of Tourists were hissed at the Louvre and at the Bourse.” The French ballade is aptly suited to express Englandhatred (“Anglophobie”), which is presumed to issue from a collective French national voice that asserts dominance while actually exposing French braggadocio that rests on hypocrisy and cowardice. The English tacitly stand in moral and national contrast to their old enemy France: Here is the one link the Grand Nation needs      To join its slightly varying views and aims; Here’s a fine focus for its fighting deeds,      A time to call others than Frenchmen names;     Perhaps au fond the pure logician blames A new crusade, preached more with hook than crook;      But this revenge true patriotism acclaims— Feedons Lesseps, et hissons Messieurs Cook. Not the coarse means by which Albion succeeds      Be ours, who hate war’s wicked brands and flames; Europe, you know’s exhausted when France bleeds;      Prudence and peace are sometimes paying games.… (lines 1–12)12

Fighting now with bankbooks rather than under banners, and having successfully “tricked Tunis” (line 17), which France had invaded in 1881 in ostensible response to a Tunisian incursion into Algeria,13 the French address their envoy not to a noble Prince but to “Princes of Finance” (line 25). And the “patriot soul” concludes with its new credo: “Let’s jeer from some secure and cosy nook, / If chestnuts are to be pulled from the flames” (lines 27–8). Englishness, of course, as befits the John Bullness of Punch, is present  [Evelyn Douglas Jerrold], “Ballade de l’Anglophobie,” Punch,16 September 1882, 125.  Britain had agreed to the takeover at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, so was complicit in the trickery, as the poem acknowledges: “And who tricked Tunis may try virtuous screeds / Before the Egyptian trickery of Saint James” (lines 17–18). 12 13

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throughout, not least because of the ballade’s bilingual pun on Feedons and especially hissons (French for we raise up—or raise ourselves up). English punning overtakes French in the third stanza’s refrain: “To feed Lesseps and hiss ces Messieurs Cook,” this last a reference to the epigraph’s inciting event. The ballade, then, is intrinsic to political satire in this instance; it is itself a French form, and the very violations of regular meter in line 1 may suggest English resistance through English speech rhythms. But this is also a verse explicitly lambasting elite pretensions—French pretensions of course—underscored visually by the elegantly attired finical Frenchman, nose in air, to the side of the text (see Fig. 9.2).14 Another Punch ballade straddled colonialist social commentary and violence, since it referenced the recent bomb explosion at the Gower Street Underground Station on 2 January 1885.15 The police refused to identify the culprit in the immediate aftermath, but the Punch author clearly blamed the Fenians in his 17 January verse “BY UNDERGROUND! / (Quite a new sort of Ballade—Our Own Invention.),” in which the intrepid Londoner willing to try underground travel happens to be in a tunnel when        lo! the air was rent      By dynamite; the Irish clan Had wrecked the Metropolitan!      So forth into the dark I bound: I’m taken for a Fenian        By Underground!     L’Envoi—several days after. Beak, to thy court, with oath and ban,      They dragged me; guiltless was I found;             But never more I’ll lead the van                  By Underground! (lines 19–28)16

14  The image may also indicate one of the Envoy’s “Princes of Finance.” A sequel and highly imitative ballade appeared in the 21 March 1883 issue of Fun, “Lesseps and Cook. A Ballade,” which borrowed the presumption of French speakers, the pun on hissons and “Princes of Finance,” substituting Puffons for Feedons in the refrain, and the five-line envoy. It was less sly in its political references and less hostile to France. See Fun, 21 March 1883, 128. 15  “Recent London Explosion,” New York Times, 5 January 1885, 1–2. 16  “BY UNDERGROUND! / (Quite a new sort of Ballade—Our Own Invention.),” Punch, 17 Jan 1885, 34. “Beak” was a slang term for justice of the peace or magistrate, cited in Oliver Twist and Thomas Hood’s Tale of a Trumpet in the OED.

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Fig. 9.2  The French “patriot soul,” Punch, 16 September 1882

The verse was directed as much at the daunting challenge of newfangled underground travel and its inconveniences as at the Fenians. It was placed next to a quarter-page illustration entitled “METROPOLITAN IMPROVEMENTS.  No. 3.,” which shows a middle-aged, middle-class Londoner walking the gauntlet of “penny hawkers” while a bobby watches from a stair in the background. In “BY UNDERGROUND!” the speaker packs a flashlight, potted shrimps, tobacco, brandy, and pistol to brave the rigors of this new travel technology, only to spend three hours going between two stations, followed by the explosion and his arrest. The French play no direct role in this verse, though “foreign elements” abroad in London—the Fenians—certainly do. Ultimately the highly irregular ballade in tetrameter (Punch’s “invention” indeed) seems chosen for the sake of the refrain, which by the poem’s end has become a gentle expletive akin to “By gum!”

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There was a sly further joke for those who knew the author of this sprig of verse—and for the author himself, who wrote it, as it were, against himself. For “BY UNDERGROUND!” was by none other than Andrew Lang himself. Lang is rarely identified as a Punch writer; yet between 1885 and 1892 he contributed fifty-eight anonymous contributions to Punch at the same time he was writing “At the Sign of the Ship” for Longman’s Magazine, a column that often adjudicated the merits of contemporary and earlier writers, and penning numerous poems.17 Lang, publicly celebrated as an exemplar of elegant ballade form, had chastised A.  Mary F. Robinson in a review of A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878) for the solecism of four- rather than three-stanza ballades.18 Another poetic convention of the ballade is consistent meter throughout, though the choice of meter is flexible. Lang’s subtitle of “(Quite a new sort of Ballade—Our Own Invention.)” adverts to his flagrant violation of form in “BY UNDERGROUND!” as his tetrameters collapse into dimeter rhyme in each stanza’s last line—though this pattern is humorously suited to the speaker’s journey truncated by bomb and arrest. Lang’s formal solecism helps explain his choice of anonymous publication, though he had nothing against humorous ballades, and he published several under signature. Anonymity was particularly called for here because two weeks earlier a Punch ballade (which I discuss below) puffed Lang’s most recent book, Rhymes à la Mode. And in the very same issue as “BY UNDERGROUND!” Lang anonymously contributed the second of two humorous prose pieces entitled “The Manhood of Great Boys.”19 Signature would not have enhanced his literary reputation in the Punch pieces. “A Ballade of Biceps” in the 13 November 1889 Fun offers a different and very pointed critique aimed at the commodification and potentially fraudulent marketing of boxing. Though memories of a 75-round championship fight between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain in July 1889 still lingered in November, the immediate context seems to have been a prize fight between the English champion Jem Smith and the boxer of color Peter Jackson, who was born in the West Indies before moving to Australia, where he trained. As the 12 November 1889 York Herald reported,

17  See the Curran Index, which can be searched by author and date as well as title of periodical. 18  See Hughes, “Enclosing Forms,” 38. 19  [Andrew Lang], “The Manhood of Great Boys,” Punch, 17 January 1885, 25.

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The great glove fight between Jem Smith (England) and Peter Jackson (Australia), for £1000, took place at the Pelican Club, London, at an early hour yesterday morning, and resulted in an easy victory for the coloured champion. Time was when boxers and pugilists … were only too ready to exhibit their talents for the modest “fiver,” but while the plodding toiler has to delve or struggle for the wherewithal in these later days, we find champions of the Prize Ring being matched for fabulous sums.20

The target of the satirical ballade was less this particular fight than the larger system and cupidity of sports advertising and profit-taking, exemplified by the Daily Telegraph: Advertisement, maybe, was sought     In this startling encounter so real; Anyhow, a good “ad.” they have caught,     And their light they don’t yearn to conceal;    To the D. T. both athletes should kneel, For its puffing produced them a haul.21

Here an imported French form associated with poetic elegance may be part of the satire, given the contrast it forms with rough English sport and London slang. In the ballade itself the refrain shifts with each stanza, from “And the Strongest has gone to the wall” (line 8) to “From the Strongest, who went to the wall” (line 16), to “Both the Strongest will go on the wall” (line 24), to its final variant in the “Envoi” as the speaker contemplates the prospect that, given the good “gate” (tickets sold) for the earlier fight, the boxers can stage more rounds and take turns winning: Fun! “gate” is the ointment to heal,    Whate’er disappointments befall; And fortune will load well the wheel For these Strongests who’re stuck on the wall. (lines 25–8)

This ballade in predominant dactylic trimeter turns on alternate slang references: from the first stanza’s sense of losing the fight to the third stanza’s and Envoi’s sense of being posted on a street hoarding, the usual site of 20  “Great Glove Fight,” The York Herald, 12 November 1889, 8. Jackson won in only six minutes and, as the York newspaper reported, was loudly cheered by the London audience. 21  “A Ballade of Biceps,” Fun, 13 November 1889, 215.

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urban advertisements. Here the ballade’s repetitions are precisely suited to meaningless repetition of fights except in their commercial value; and the commodification of sport may obliquely reflect on accusations of commodity verse that were lodged against fixed-form verse in earlier reviews. The comic magazines’ metacritical ballades and related fixed-form verses offer the most revealing insight into the presence and ultimately the declining fortunes of the fixed-form revival. Triangulated among the functions of puff, critique, and social commentary, “A Ballade of Blue Pill. / By the Author of ‘Ballades of Blue Cochin Chinas’” in Fun on 5 January 1881 played upon the title of Andrew Lang’s XXII Ballades of Blue China published some six months earlier (29 May 1880). On one hand the Fun ballade advertised Lang’s volume and imitated the ballade form Lang adopted throughout his book, including Lang’s dactylic trimeter in his title poem. Yet through the periodical’s characteristic reliance on punning for humor, the Fun ballade also took Lang’s elegance down a peg and hinted at Lang’s embroilment in systems of commodification by equating poetry with livestock sales. For Blue Cochin Chinas were a breed of poultry (originating in Vietnam, or Cochinchina during French colonial rule). Possibly the mention of poultry was also meant to summon up the clucking not just of fowl but of repetitive words in refrains signifying little but holding a ballade together structurally. If so, the verse-writer certainly responded to Lang’s own dare in the “ENVOY” of his 1880 title poem: “Come, snarl at my ecstasies, do, / Kind critic, your ‘tongue has a tang’ / But—a sage never heeded a shrew” (“Ballade of Blue China,” lines 25–7).22 The metacriticism in this Fun poem resides principally in the title. For, perhaps impelled by the stereotypical association of China with opium, this ballade is actually a drug poem, celebrating escape from troubles or boredom in a “blue pill” (very different from the one known to prescribing physicians and men today): When Life’s turning night into day      And day into night with dream fancies— When work leaves no moment for play—      And laurels are prized above pansies—      Hope revels in wildest romances, The brain won’t consent to be still; 22  Andrew Lang, XXII Ballades of Blue China (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), 50. Whether Lang was presupposing a female critic or preemptively calling a critic effeminate is unclear in his adoption of “shrew.”

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     And turns in its feverish dances To Life’s great restorer—Blue Pill! We’ve fallen in love with a May—      Or flirted with Pollies and Nancies— Penn’d many a rapturous lay,      And lived in elysian trances!      Love flies the world’s desert expanses And roosts on the gold in a “till”!      Yet sighs, amid amorous glances, For Life’s great restorer—Blue Pill! Misfortunes in horrid array      Transfix us with poisonous lances! For Love without cash will not pay!      And, bankers declining advances,      You fly to Boulogne (which in France is) Quite bilious at thought of a Bill!     The one thing in this circumstance is Our Life’s great restorer—Blue Pill! L’Envoy. The pleasures of life it enhances—      The liver without it were “nil”! And hearts conquer changes and chances      By Life’s great restorer—Blue Pill!23

Though the references to a “till” and the absence of “Love without cash” suggest the pressures of materialist capitalism for the lower middle class, the refrain registers the speaker’s complicity in the commodity system, since successive references to “Blue Pill” serve to advertise its efficacy (as well as, in the title, Lang’s recent book). “Blue Pill” was a specific compound well known to Victorian pharmacy and prescribing doctors, specifically prescribed as a purgative, and—frightening thought—was composed of mercury, “confection of roses,” and powdered licorice root and given even to children.24 As a recent doctors’ magazine article observes, “The 23  “Ballade of Blue Pill. / By the Author of “Ballades of Blue Cochin Chinas,’” Fun, 5 January 1881, 3. 24  William Frazer, Elements of Materia Medica, containing the Chemistry and Natural History of Drugs (Dublin: William Frazer, 1851), 173–4. A poem about a purgative could risk scatological associations, but the common use of the pill among Victorians may have distanced them from contemplating its results.

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Blue Pill, a.k.a pilula hydrargyri, was a ubiquitous cure-all during the 19th century. First popularized among the sailors of the Royal Navy, it was taken as a remedy for constipation…. By land or by sea, Old World or New, everyone took the Blue Pill to cure what ailed them from the mildest toothache to the pains of childbirth and even depression.”25 Insofar as mercury was also a well-known treatment for venereal disease, the pleasures and the drug this ballade celebrates anticipate the era of decadence to come. In metacritical terms, recourse to the ballade may obliquely imply a writer on the drug who, having gained the leisure and relief afforded by the pill, can now polish rhymes that are “just fooling around,” to borrow the memorable phrase for one of rhyme’s ends identified by Hugh Kenner.26 I return to Punch for the concluding verses I consider. The prolific writer Joseph Ashby-Sterry, who contributed fifty-four “PAPER-KNIFE POEMS. / By Our Special Book-Marker” to Punch from December 1884– November 1886, deployed fixed-form verse as both the vehicle and object of scrutiny in his poetic review of 3 January 1885.27 The series title summoned the notion of a fresh, untried perusal of a text with as-yet uncut pages; this specific review featured four different fixed forms offering four concise reviews of current books, the humor partly residing in the exaggerated self-referentiality of literature and the verses’ effect of levelling the playing field between those under review and the reviewer who in offering opinions was simultaneously creating original verse in intricate form. Ashby-Sterry’s formal choices here (since he did not regularly use fixed forms) were likely inspired by the third book under review, Andrew Lang’s Rhymes à la Mode, published in 1885. The section from which the title of Lang’s book is taken includes five self-referential ballades about literature and criticism: “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise,” “Ballade of Neglected Merit,” “Ballade of Railway Novels,” “Ballade of Literary Fame,” and “A very woful Ballade of the Art Critic”—decidedly Langian in the act of “just fooling around.”28

25   Jackie Rosenhek, “Popping Pills,” Doctor’s Review, October 2012, http://www. doctorsreview.com/history/popping-pills/ 26  Hugh Kenner, “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” Common Knowledge 10.3 (Fall 2004), 414. 27  [Joseph Ashby-Sterry], “PAPER-KNIFE POEMS. / By Our Special Book-Marker,” Punch, 3 January 1885, 2. 28  Andrew Lang, Rhymes à la Mode (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885).

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“PAPER-KNIFE POEMS” begins, unexpectedly, with a villanelle, an even more intricate form than the ballade.29 The villanelle is composed of five tercets and a concluding quatrain and features only two rhymes throughout, with the first and third lines in the opening tercet appearing alternately at the end of successive tercets and reiterated in the concluding quatrain, as in the best-known Anglophone examples, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas and “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. The Punch villanelle is a deliberately simple book review, its message easily boiled down to one of its refrains, “You ought to read The Poison Tree.” This title handily rhymes with the name of the author, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose Bengali domestic novel of love, desire, and marriage was translated and published in 1884 with a preface by Edwin Arnold, which marked this as very much a colonial commodity in the metropole. The villanelle conveyed all the relevant details of a conventional brief review in its first three stanzas: You ought to read The Poison Tree—    ’Tis Fisher Unwin’s copyright— By Bankim Chandra Chatterjee! ’Tis taken from the Bengali,     Translated well by Mrs. Knight— You ought to read The Poison Tree. ’Tis published in one vol.—not three—     A story quaint and apposite; By Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

Some rhymes are blatantly forced, including “apposite” and “Knight,” but this adds to the verse’s self-aware comic performance and show of trifling ingeniousness. And it was a full-throated endorsement for the distant Bengali author, now enveloped in Englishness, whose name was bound to remain in the minds of readers who took time to peruse his repeated name. The next poem-review is of the 1885 edition of Whitaker’s Almanack, extolled for its additional statistics in its new iteration. This judgment is given in a triolet, conforming to this fixed form’s customary eight lines 29  Lang’s Rhymes à la Mode also included a villanelle addressed to “M. Joseph Boulmier, Author of ‘Les Villanelles.’” It alternately asks “Villanelle, why art thou mute” and “Hath the Master lost his lute?” (55–56).

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rhyming abaaabab. It was followed by “RHYMES À LA MODE,” an actual rondeau (versus “The Detached Train”) consisting of 15 lines in which the first half of line one in the verse’s quintain becomes the refrain for the succeeding quatrain and sestet, the whole rhyming aabba aabR aabbaR. The rondeau pays tribute to Lang by marking out what makes verses from his pen elite forms indeed: Rhymes à la Mode, you’ll find we know, ’Tis polished, piquant, comme il faut:   The Poet makes no long harangue,   But strikes his harp with merry twang, With melody ’tis all a-glow! While fitful fancies come and go, In rondel, ballade, or rondeau,   He guiltless quite of Cockney slang—        Rhymes à la Mode! Of all who sing such songs and show, How rhythmic rhyme should rightly flow;   A brighter, lighter, seldom sang,   Than laughing, lilting Andrew Lang! So get from Kegan Paul & Co.—        Rhymes à la Mode!

Lang’s light touch, gentle laughter, pure diction eschewing vulgar slang, and elegant rhymes collectively make for a successful volume of verse and simultaneously mark the Oxonian gentleman who creates them.30 The reviewer’s command of run-on lines and the artful shift from Rhymes as noun to verb and back again in this Punch rondeau suggest not only a friendly Lang reviewer but also a practiced versifier more than a mere paidby-the-line contributor. Here a fixed form is used honorifically to praise one of the form’s best practitioners. Two years after “PAPER-KNIFE POEMS” in Punch, Gleeson White’s Ballades and Rondeaus appeared and was reviewed in several prominent weekly journals—unfavorably. In the Academy, Cosmo Monkhouse treated the fixed-form revival as a poetic experiment undertaken by leaders like Dobson and Lang to “amuse themselves.” True, Dobson had, in 30  These, too, are practices from which Lang knowingly departs in the anonymous “BY UNDERGROUND!”

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adopting those forms, produced some “poems,” not just verse, and Monkhouse praised Lang as an accomplished versifier in terms consistent with elegant, gentlemanly leisure, since his verses had “a happy grace and flexibility, a spontaneous audacity, a freshness of flow as though straight from the source.” But the experiment they had initiated was exhausted and had no future, Monkhouse concluded.31 The Saturday Review agreed that White’s collection represented only a “fleeting fashion” that had ­perhaps produced some pleasant work but also many “sterile exercises” driven by mere “emulation.”32 Theodore Watts, writing anonymously in the Athenaeum, clung to the high Victorian poetic standard of sincerity in marked contrast to verses devoted more to performing difficulties overcome, as in the volume under review, and Watts registered the weariness they induced by complaining at the outset that such verses threatened to “rhyme a critic to death.”33 Whether merely detecting which way the wind blew or revealing his firm conviction, Lang himself wrote what amounted to a recantation of the “fleeting fashion” in his monthly column “At the Sign of the Ship” in Longman’s Magazine around the same time; and he did so precisely by upholding the distinction between poetry and verse and firmly aligning fixed forms with verse and humor: A great deal of labour and thought has been given to [White’s] anthology, but a good many of the flowers are made of wax, or coloured paper…. On the whole, these ancient French forms seem decidedly most serviceable for light and humorous verse. There is very little poetry that can be cast in these quaint moulds, and genuine poets have used them very seldom. If a poet has his heart in what he is saying, he will seldom find the ballade or villanelle serves his turn.34

Before Lang could further distance himself from the movement, Punch issued another verse book review, this time of White’s Ballades and

 Cosmo Monkhouse, rev. of Ballades and Rondeaus, Academy, 15 October 1887, 246–7.  Rev. of Ballades and Rondeaus, Saturday Review, 3 December 1887, 769–70. 33  [Theodore Watts], rev. of Victorian Poets, by E. C. Stedman, and Ballades and Rondeaus, Athenaeum, 7 January 1888, 12–15. 34   Andrew Lang, “At the Sign of the Ship,” Longman’s Magazine 11 (December 1887), 238. 31 32

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Rondeaus.35 The notice, which ran beyond a full column, adopted an ironic stance: on the surface it pretended that White’s volume inspired envy among poetic aspirants. Yet the review is entitled “THE MUSE IN MANACLES” and the verses aggressively mock the pretensions of fixed-­ form verse and the erudite authors (“my betters”) who produce them. The resulting work is a volte-face from the “PAPER-KNIFE POEMS” that in 1885 had paid such respectful attention to Lang and his Rhymes à la Mode. This time the muse is chained down by fixed forms, beginning with the ballade, the very banality of which exemplifies the dangers the Saturday Review had deplored: THE MUSE IN MANCLES. (By an Envious and Irritable Bard, after reading   “Ballades and Rondeaus,” just published,   and wishing he could do anything like any   of them.)     Bored by the Ballade, vexed by Villanelle,     Of Rondeau tired, and Triolet as well! THE BALLADE. (In Bad Weather.)  Oh! I’m in a terrible plight—   For how can I rhyme in the rain? ’Tis pouring from morn until night: So bad is the weather again,   My language is almost profane! Though shod with the useful galosh,   I’m racked with rheumatical pain— I think that a Ballade is bosh! I know I am looking a fright;   That knowledge, I know, is in vain; My “brolly” is not water-tight,   But hopelessly rended in twain   And spoilt by the rude hurricane! Though clad in a stout mackintosh,   My temper I scarce can restrain— I think that a Ballade is bosh!

35  Though this contribution is noted in the Punch contributors’ ledger, the author is not identified.

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Oh, I’m an unfortunate wight!   The damp is affecting my brain; My woes I would gladly recite,   In phrases emphatic and plain,   Your sympathy could I obtain. I don’t think my verses will wash,   They’re somewhat effete and inane— I think that a Ballade is bosh! Envoy. I fancy I’m getting insane,   I’m over my ankles in slosh; But let me repeat the refrain—   I think that a Ballade is bosh!

The next form targeted for attack is the villanelle and its even more insistent repeated rhymes; here the versifying reviewer makes the charge that such incessant rhyming is nothing more substantive than what its third line below stated: THE VILLANELLE. (With Vexation.) I do not like the Villanelle,   I think it somewhat of a bore— This tinkle of a Muffin-bell!

The succeeding triolet recurs to the idea of manacles or, here, the “fetters” encasing lyric impulse and obstructing spontaneous song: THE TRIOLET. (In a Temper.) A Triolet’s scarcely the thing—   Unless you would carol in fetters! If lark-like you freely would sing, A Triolet’s scarcely the thing:   I miss the poetical ring, I’m told that it has, by my betters!

By now enraged, the poet-reviewer continues in the same vein but modulates into a rondeau to conclude:

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THE RONDEAU. (In a Rage.) Pray tell me why we can’t agree To bid the merry Muse run free?   Pray tell me why we should incline   To see her in a Rondeau pine, Or sigh in shackled minstrelsy? Why can’t she sing with lark-like glee, And revel in bright jeux d’esprit?   Where form can’t fetter or confine—     Pray tell me why? (lines 1–9)36

Writing “Manacles” in fixed verse had a quite clear purpose. Demonstrating that even a mild temper tantrum could be dashed off in a set of rule-bound verses suggested just how easy they were to produce, undoing any claims to admiration for difficulties overcome. The poet-­ reviewer also confirmed additional charges in other reviews of Ballades and Rondeaus by performatively illustrating how empty of content and significance fixedform verse writing could be. As self-consuming artifacts, the constituent parts of “Manacles” undermined fixed forms by adopting them—threatening in the process to rhyme not just the critic but also the reader “to death.” Punch and Fun fixed verse forms might be likened to funhouse mirrors relative to the larger fixed-form vogue of the 1870s and 1880s. They moved in step with the larger movement and ideologies underlying their brief efflorescence yet bent the forms to humorous critiques of politics, social practices, and litterateurs. Ironically, just as fixed forms loosened their purchase on good taste and connoisseurship, it was the more widely circulating comic magazines that carried them to readers in a fresh guise—perhaps proving Lang’s tenet that fixed forms were best suited to humor after all.

References [Ashby-Sterry, Joseph]. 3 January 1885. PAPER-KNIFE POEMS. / By Our Special Book-Marker. Punch: 2. Behlman, Lee. 2018. The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société. Victorian Poetry 56: 477–491. Frazer, William. 1851. Elements of Materia Medica, Containing the Chemistry and Natural History of Drugs. Dublin: William Frazer.  “THE MUSE IN MANACLES,” Punch, 22 October 1887, 192.

36

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Hood, Thomas. 1869. The Rules of Rhyme. London: James Hogg. Hughes, Linda K. 2020. Enclosing Forms, Opening Spaces: The 1880s Fixed-­ Verse Revival. In Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s, ed. Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor, 34–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Jerrold, Evelyn Douglas]. 16 September 1882. Ballade de l’Anglophobie. Punch: 125. Kenner, Hugh. 2004. RHYME: AN UNFINISHED MONOGRAPH. Common Knowledge 10: 377–425. Lang, Andrew. 1880. XXII Ballades of Blue China. London: Kegan Paul & Co. ———. 1885a. Rhymes à la Mode. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. [Lang, Andrew]. 17 January 1885b. BY UNDERGROUND! / (Quite a New Sort of Ballade—Our Own Invention.) Punch: 34. ———. 1887. At the Sign of the Ship. Longman’s Magazine 11: 234–240. Maidment, Brian. Fun (1861–1901). 2009. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, 237–238. Gent and London: Academia Press and the British Library. Mazel, Adam. 2017. The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge. Nineteenth-Century Literature 72: 374–401. Monkhouse, Cosmo. 15 October 1887. Review of Ballades and Rondeaus. Academy: 246–247. Rosenhek, Jackie. 2012. Popping Pills. Doctor’s Review. Accessed 6 December 2019. http://www.doctorsreview.com/history/popping-­pills/ Stedman, Jane W. 1984. Fun. In British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan, 135–138. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Unsigned. 21 March 1833. Lesseps and Cook. A ballade. Fun: 128. ———. 5 January 1881. Ballade of Blue Pill. / By the Author of “Ballades of Blue Cochin Chinas. Fun: 3. ———. 29 March 1882. The Detached Train. Fun: 136. ———. 5 January 1885. Recent London Explosion. New York Times: 1–2. ———. 22 October 1887a. The Muse in Manacles. Punch: 192. ———. 3 December 1887b. Review of Ballades and Rondeaus. Saturday Review: 769–770. ———. 12 November 1889a. Great Glove Fight. The York Herald: 8. ———. 13 November 1889b. A Ballade of Biceps. Fun: 215. [Watts, Theodore.] 7 January 1888. Review of Victorian Poets, by E. C. Stedman, and Ballades and Rondeaus. Athenaeum: 12–15.

CHAPTER 10

“Visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses…”: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle Kiera Allison

The problem with Thomas Carlyle’s verse is that it is so unlike poetry. That irony runs as a through-line across approximately 150 years of critical reckoning with the sixty or so poems, mostly unpublished, which a youngish Carlyle produced throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, against the prose writings into which he eventually channeled his energies—a prose which, his critics often observe, is every bit as poetic as his verse was not. The poems suffer from a range of technical difficulties that have been

K. Allison (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_10

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ascribed to Carlyle’s lack of an “ear,” his insufficient prosodic tact,1 and a fundamental incommensurability between Carlyle’s massiveness of vision and the relative limits of what he could do in verse. Against the flatness and rigidity of his poems, James Anthony Froude contrasts the supreme tact of the early letters: sentences that are “perfectly shaped, and are pregnant with meaning,” passages that “flow in rhythmical cadence like the sweetest music of an organ.”2 Emerson, though he deemed Carlyle “a poet altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre,” discerned something remarkably like meter in the author’s historical prose. [H]e is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music.3

Among twentieth-century critics, John Holloway, G.  B. Tennyson, and George Levine helped bring into focus the micro- and macro-scale formal structures that do so much of the persuasive legwork in Carlyle’s philosophical and historical writing. Holloway observes that “the more discursive parts of his work must be read not as logical argument, but as sequences of verbal marches and counter-marches”4; likewise, Tennyson notes that “[t]he feeling of pulsating, onrushing life conveyed by Carlyle’s prose enlists the reader’s support for Carlyle’s beliefs in a way that no amount of discursive reasoning can do.”5 For Tennyson, the comparison to Carlyle’s verse proper is once more unavoidable. “For a man whose prose can so justly be called poetic, it is surprising to find his poetry so 1  Carlyle “had no correct metrical ear,” according to his biographer J. Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner), 205. William Allingham writes that he “remains entirely insensible to the structure of verse, to the indispensable rules derived from the nature of the human mind and ear” (qtd. in Rodger L. Tarr and Fleming McClelland, The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle [Greenwood: The Penkevill Publishing Company], xxi; italics original). Likewise, James Russell Lowell finds that he lacked both the “shaping faculty” and the “plastic imagination” that “would have made him a poet in the highest sense” (qtd. in Mark Cumming, A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle’s French Revolution [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988], 11). 2  Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 206. 3  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Past and Present,” in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. 12, ed. James Elliott Cabot (Cambridge: Riverside, 1883), 248. 4  John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (Hamden: Archon, 1962), 57. 5  G.B.  Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 285.

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prosaic.”6 And again: “Carlyle ultimately channels his [energies] into that extraordinary prose that is poetry even though it is not verse.”7 At issue here is a technical point and also an aesthetic one. On one level, there is Carlyle wrestling in different media with the competing exigencies of form and content, intellectual substance and aesthetic design—trying his footing in meter and line and finding it, eventually, in the more flexible units of sentence and paragraph. On another level, there is a strand of literary criticism that has learned to prefer the poetry it hears outside the conventions of metrical verse—part and parcel of a general re-keying of relations in the postclassical era between literature and form, history and poetry, classical tradition and the nineteenth-century talent. The association of poetry with revolution, the infinite, and the formless—and of form itself, with process and re-form, both in the sense of historical transformation and of organic evolution and becoming—is the major theme of the German Romantic school for whom Carlyle was among the chief English interpreters.8 For Carlyle this translates into a sustained penchant for discovering poetry in irregular shapes: a verse, such as that of Burns, which is not “poetry” but rather “rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense”9; a poetry that is not meter (Tennyson and both Brownings, he thought, would do far better in prose10); and a meter that is “form” only in that elevated, volatilized sense in which the Romantics understood the term: not the dead-letter metrics of the classical poets but the living,

 Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, 60.  Tennyson, “Foreword,” in The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Roget L.  Tarr and Fleming McClelland (Greenwood: Penkevill Publishing Company, 1986), xix. 8  For a swift but compendious treatment of German Romantic aesthetics and the radicalization of form, see Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 20. 9  Carlyle, “Burns,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished: Goethe— Goethe’s Helena—Burns (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, & Company, [1828] 1890), 147. 10  See, e.g., Carlyle’s letters to Robert Browning (21 June 1841) and Emerson (30 Dec. 1847) in Carlyle Letters Online, ed. Brent E. Kinser (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18410621-TC-RB-01, and https://doi.org/10.1215/ lt-­18471230-TC-RWE-01. For additional discussion of Carlyle’s relationship to contemporary poets, see Charles Richard Sanders, “Carlyle, Browning, and the Nature of the Poet,” Emory University Quarterly 16 (1960), 198–200, and “Carlyle and Tennyson,” PMLA, 76 (1961), 87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/460317.pdf. 6 7

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moving measures of body and breath, the “beating” and “thrashing” of the poetic heart and brain.11 There is a fourth part to this equation, which is Carlyle’s quiet repurposing of verse for the historical and narrative work of his essays and novels. This is slightly but pivotally different from the mutation his critics describe: not so much a sublimation of verse into poetic prose as its preservation, more or less intact, within the incidental rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, and anagrams that reappear throughout Carlyle’s post-poetry oeuvre. Inevitably, this brings out different valences within the narrative of what form, and meter especially, are doing in the radicalized environs of nineteenth-century literature. It means, for starters, acknowledging the fractures of post-Enlightenment knowledge and discourse—its proverbial partings of signs from signifieds, words from things, and objective from subjective knowledge—at the same time finding in those disruptions an increased rather than a diminished role for the organizations of rhythm and rhyme. It asks us to pay attention to ways that the classical forms are not only preserved, but, in Donald Wesling’s phrase, “reinvented, as it were, from within” the very genres that seemed to abandon them in postclassical literature—not just in prose but in nineteenth-century avant-­ garde poetry and twentieth-century free verse.12 It also requires the sort of close reading that has not been tried yet on Carlyle: one that follows meter’s transformation from his verse into his prose; and then traces that prose, The French Revolution primarily, back to the formal calculations of his verse; limning out, along the way, a critical discourse that accommodates for meter’s contributions to the hermeneutic groundwork of Carlyle’s historical prose. * * * We might further scope out the grounds of that verse-to-prose transition by looking into the manner of Carlyle’s early blunders on the side of poetry—a blundering underwritten in part by another transition that was afoot for Carlyle through the 1820s and early 1830s, namely, from a mathematical to a literary career. Carlyle was by no means an inept metrist, as Froude supposed. But he was an interfering one, with, I would argue, a  Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: New York University Press), 133.  Donald Wesling, The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 109. 11 12

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mathematician’s tendency either to overplay meter’s hand against basic considerations of grammar, clarity, and meaning (as is his wont in his comic and polemical verses), or to overcorrect metrically for insecurities that reside deeper within the poem (as in his translations of German verse). In the first category we find short poems such as the two following, both unpublished, from 1831 and 1841, respectively: Priest-ridden, wife-ridden, plague-ridden,     Who escapes his lot? Bearing, forbearing, paying, obeying,     Will ye, will ye not. Child-ridden, tremble at my Doll’s pouting:     Fortune, spare me that!13 Cock-a-doodle-doo, cuck, cuck,     What an ass in Carlyle, Stood not, on our guide-post stuck,    The invaluable Sterling! Cock-a-doodle-doo, this, this,    This the road, ye dolts you! Road to Nowhere not amiss,     Road to Somewhere jolts so!14

Both poems are prosodically impressive and also extremely hard to parse. The second was intended as a riposte to John Sterling, author of a lithograph satirizing Carlyle and his teachings. (Whatever bone he had to pick with Sterling, Carlyle saved for an accompanying letter in which he expounds in somewhat plainer language on Sterling’s presumptuousness and holier-than-thou posturing: “Infinitely obliged by your Lithograph; which pours a flood of light for me on the error of my ways!”15) The first is anybody’s guess: Tarr and McLelland suggest a “general Carlylean note” of existential wandering, domestic infelicity, economic hardship, and possible concerns about pregnancy and child-rearing.16 Whatever they are  Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 45.  Ibid., 62. 15  Letter to Sterling, 27 Sep. 1841, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi.org/10.1215/ lt-18410927-TC-JOST-01. 16  Jane Carlyle’s “maternal hopes” were a subject of their letters around this period (Tarr and McLelland, Poems, 167). 13 14

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about, the verses seem almost designed to forbid exposition between their tightfisted ballad-style meters, and (in the first poem) the strange economy of long and short lines, giving ample room to the piling of adverbs in the odd lines, and almost none to the subjects and verbs in the even ones. Meter and syntax find no flexible middle ground here; indeed, a singular break in the pattern in the first poem, which cuts the adverbial chain to make room for a predicate (“child-ridden, tremble at my doll’s pouting”), is also the one place where Carlyle’s dactylic/trochaic footing breaks down. On the other side we have a poetry that is both less sure in its formal identity and more determined to figure it out. This includes works like “Peter Nimmo” (1831), a narrative poem in seven parts and six different stanzaic patterns ranging from the heroic (rhyming hexameters in the mock-epic vein) to the mundane (folksy verse-and-choruses in ballad meter); and, of primary interest here, his translations of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land,” which Carlyle ran through six versions, and at least three different metrical configurations, over the course of five decades.17 Compare these two manuscript versions of the opening stanza (the stresses are marked as I hear them). MS1: Dost’ know the land where fresh the citrons bloom,    Where glows the orange ’mid the thicket’s gloom,    When winds are soft that from the blue hea’vn blow,    Where myrtles close and laurels stately grow? MS2: Knowst thou the land where the fresh citrons bloom,     And the gold-orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom;     When a wind ever soft from the blue hea’vn blows,     And the groves are of myrtle and laurel and rose?

Several things are notable here, the first being how much stricter Carlyle’s meter attempts to be than Goethe’s—the latter a flexible iambic pentameter with plenty of room for variation: Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunklen Laub die Goldorangen glühn18

17  These include four published editions, from 1824, 1839, 1842, and 1874, respectively, as well as the two undated manuscripts (Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 205). 18  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Halle: Hendel, 1910), 122.

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The second thing to note here is the poetic costs endured in retrofitting Goethe’s text to Carlyle’s own rhythmic patterns. In MS1, the trochaic inversions of “Kennst du” and “O mein Geliebter” get systematically reversed into iambs—“Dost know,” “With thee”—that lack both the emotional urgency and the vocalic resonance of the original. (In later editions Carlyle opted, wisely, for trochees: “Know’st thou,” “O my belov’d.”) In MS2, the need to plump out a trisyllabic foot engenders a verbal effusiveness—including a lot of paratactically piled on descriptors (“myrtle and laurel and rose,” “dearest and kindest”)—that seems fundamentally at odds with Goethe’s paired-down pathos. Carlyle, going by his scribbled comments on the drafts, was himself unconvinced: “stiff and laboured” (1824); “Another of the same” (MS2); “which is worse?” (MS1).19 For Carlyle the work of poetic translation, a trial-and-error process of multiplications and approximations, of guesses and misses at the sound and sense of the original, is fundamentally inseparable from his determination to find out the measure of things. He was a mathematician and geometer before he was a poet. This fact seems to me unavoidable in the context of the verse experiments of the 1820s and early 1830s: the period of Carlyle’s transition from math to letters, and also the cementing in verse of the author’s known penchant for reacting to uncertainty by hardening his grip on the numbers. Attempting to “solve” Goethe’s poem, like so many syllabic multiples of x, is one way of dealing with the ambiguity of language as well as—at this moment—the insecurity of his own literary future.20 Then again, we might also see in Carlyle’s unhappy efforts at metrical capture his first stirrings toward prose: a trying and discarding of meters that is ultimately continuous with the refitting of form for the more open-­ ended medium of the essays and novels. When form is no longer a given, then it can be one with his writing’s processes of perception and discovery: rather revealed than prescribed, less planned than unearthed and stumbled upon. Those twinned developments in Carlyle’s writing—the shift into prose, and the molding of thought to form within a medium informed by,  Quoted in Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 205.  On Carlyle’s mathematical career and how it influenced his literary works, see Moore, “Carlyle: Mathematics and ‘Mathesis,’” in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K.J. Fielding and Roger L. Tarr (Plymouth: Clarke, Doble and Brendon, 1976), 61–95. I will go further next section into the intersections of Carlyle’s mathematizing and his metrical tendencies: specifically in The French Revolution, his most painstakingly enumerative and also most exuberantly rhythmical prose work. 19 20

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without being beholden to, the parameters of verse—visibly converge in one more poem, also unpublished, whose intellectual trajectory I will be pursuing into Carlyle’s letters and first published novel. This satirical “jingle,” as he described it, recorded in his journal in 1835, was Carlyle’s answer to F. D. Maurice’s campaign for the Thirty-Nine Articles and the admission of religious dissenters to Oxford. (Carlyle’s objections to Maurice include, among other things, his general distaste for the forms and materialisms he associated with most organized religion, as well as his misgivings toward the received truths of doctrines and priests.21) Thirty-Nine English Articles Ye wondrous little particles, Did God shape his universe really by you? In that case, I swear it, And solemnly declare it, This logic of M[aurice]s’s is true.22

The poem, to my ear, is both underdeveloped and overwrought. One senses it begins and ends in Carlyle’s mind with the ingenuity of its opening rhymes: “Articles” and “particles” swiftly deal the blow against Maurice; the remaining four lines are left filling up metrical time without any sustaining dramatic tension. “Did God shape his universe…?” is no longer a question; the redoubled asseverations (“swear it,” “declare it”) have no serious claim to contend against. Compare what Carlyle wrote in a letter to Sterling: “Fear no seeing man, therefore; know that he is of Heaven, whoever else be not; that the Arch-Enemy, as I say, is the Arch-stupid; I call this my Fortieth Church Article—which absorbs into it, and covers up in silence, all the other Thirty-nine!”23 Carlyle’s argument, and its undergirding distaste for false oppositions and straw-man “enemies,” here comes to life through a loosened syntax that still echoes the structure of the poem: three main clauses formed around the couplings of “Arch-Enemy” and the “Arch-stupid,” the “Fortieth” article against the other “Thirty-nine,” and the paired 21  Other reasons include Carlyle’s contempt for religious theater (“particles” are another name for the communion Host), and for the sectarianism of the Thirty-Nine Articles. See Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 177–78. 22  Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 58. 23  Thomas Carlyle to John Sterling, 25 Dec. 1837, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi. org/10.1215/lt-18371225-TC-JOST-01 (italics original).

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negatives of “no seeing man” and “whoever else be not.” In prose, though, the effect is expansive and intellectually probing where the poem was terse and abrupt. The couplings have the feeling not of phonetic determination but of semantic readjustment and revision, an active rewriting and sustaining of Church language and doctrine through Carlyle’s more open and tolerant terms. The “Arch-Enemy” is neutralized into the “Arch-stupid”; the Thirty-Nine articles are corrected by, and “absorb[ed] into,” the Fortieth. The sentence writes small the existential and discursive ruminations and recalibrations that the essays and novels carry out at large. Here, to close out the comparison, is a passage from Teufelsdröckh’s moral crisis and pilgrimage in Sartor Resartus. “A nameless Unrest,” says he, “urged me forward; to which the outward motion was some momentary lying solace. Whither should I go? My Loadstars were blotted out; in that canopy of grim fire shone no star. Yet forward must I; the ground burnt under me; there was no rest for the sole of my foot. I was alone! alone! Ever too the strong inward longing shaped Fantasms for itself: towards these, one after the other, must I fruitlessly wander. A feeling I had that, for my fever-thirst, there was and must be somewhere a healing Fountain. To many fondly imagined Fountains, the Saints’ Wells of these days, did I pilgrim; to great Men, to great Cities, to great Events: but found there no healing. In strange countries, as in the well-­ known; in savage deserts as in the press of corrupt civilisation, it was ever the same: how could your Wanderer escape from—his own Shadow? Nevertheless still Forward! I felt as if in great haste; to do I saw not what. From the depths of my own heart, it called to me, Forwards! The winds and the streams, and all Nature sounded to me, Forwards! Ach Gott! I was even, once for all, a Son of Time.”24

Through its long-range binary rhythm of whithers and forwards, the antiphonal call and counter-call of Teufelsdröck’s doubts against Nature’s summons (to which I draw attention in the underlined passages), the kinetic suspension-and-release of verbs delayed behind prepositions and infinitives behind main verbs (“towards these…must I …wander”; “To many…did I pilgrim”; “I felt as if in great haste; to do I knew not what”; 24  Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 120. Author’s italics on “his own Shadow” and “Ach Gott!”; the other emphases (italics, bold, and underlining) are mine.

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“From the depths…it called”), Carlyle walks us through the spiritual wandering and the psychological forward- and back-pedaling of his protagonist. Rhyming surfaces opportunistically: chiefly around the phonic suggestions of “feeling,” “healing,” and “Fountain,” from which Carlyle spins out a tight assonantal chain of spiritual frustration and yearning: of feeling amplified to fever-pitch, and “fondly imagined Fountains” caught up anagrammatically in “Saints’ Wells,” then re-echoed but also withheld in a “healing [fountain]” that is (with some phonetic irony) not “found.” And finally, there is the emergence—like a memory—of something approaching meter in this paragraph’s coda. Ach Gott! I was even, once for all, a Son of Time.

My ear catches a faint iambic pentameter that, with the German expression, sounds a return both in thought and in footing to this journey’s start in the previous chapter—when a failed romance catalyzed Teufelsdröck’s spiritual crisis and his pilgrimage: “Ach Gott! His whole heart and soul and life were hers, but never had he named it Love.”25 * * * What Carlyle’s style offers is effectively two kinds of limit case: on the one hand, of a poetics extended across ever-growing reaches of sense, syntax, and style in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and prose; and, on the other, of a prose that draws increasing leverage from the fine-print organizations of verse. That Carlyle studies has traditionally had more to say about the former than the latter—about poetry’s abandoning verse, not verse’s being conquered for and preserved in prose—speaks to the self-­ imposed limits of a criticism that prefers not to focus on what G.B. Tennyson calls the “ignes fatui of cadence” and “prose rhythm”;26 it also supports the relative strength of association between Romanticism and formal mutation and fracture. The trajectory of Carlyle’s poetic improvements lends well to the critical vision that has been built around this early stage of his career: of a mind and a literary moment big with  Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 112.  Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, 258–59. In a similar vein, Levine declares that he “greatly distrust[s] analysis of sound patterns as a guide to meaning” in Carlyle—before venturing to observe the accumulation of e’s, n’s, and th’s, which, he concedes, seem to add direction and force to a key passage in Past and Present (George Levine, “The Use and Abuse of Carlylese,” in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden [New York: Oxford, 1968], 108). 25 26

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changes that were pressing the old forms out of joint. Echoing Emerson, G.B. Tennyson finds that Carlyle in the 1820s was already “forging a literary vision that ­amalgamated prophecy, religion, social commentary, and history, and that he did so under the generous rubric of poetry. Such a conception,” he stays to speculate, “hardly lends itself to the technical constraints of stanza and meter.”27 Tennyson registers the sense of straining between history and form, of a poetry wrought by revolutions both aesthetic and political into shapes no longer containable by the classical devices. A change in poetics “went hand in hand” with “the change in politics,” William Hazlitt declared in his 1818 lecture on the Romantic poets. With satirical exuberance, he explains how “[n]othing that was established was to be tolerated”: “poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications... were instantly discarded”; “rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular government.”28 It fell to another critical school to demonstrate how postclassical literature and history, far from eradicating form, galvanized it into new permanence. Donald Wesling names 1795 as the “watershed” year of poetic conventions not abolished but shifted, democratized, opened to the influence of a public which, in “larger numbers…than ever before saw themselves, for the first time, as in history and making history.”29 Rhyming becomes relativized; meter bends to the volatile rhythms of stress-meter and “emphatic accent,” both of which come “to modify strict syllable counting” in poetry.30 “Innovative work” takes place, too, in what Wesling calls the “border country” between poetry, ordinary language, and art prose.31 The clocks, trains, and pulses that advertise acoustically what Victorian realism was inexorably about in writers like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot coincide with a broader and quieter encroachment of verse into the structures of nineteenth-century narrative and nonfiction prose. “Verse-like” structures of language and imagery mold otherwise-unwieldy Victorian novels into aesthetic and dramatic unity. Narrative plots meet discursive counterplots of rhythm and rhyme, anagrammar and punning: these stealth organizations of sound, Garrett  Tennyson, “Foreword,” xvi.  William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 5 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), 161–2. 29  Wesling, Chances, 9. 30  Ibid., 50. 31  Ibid, 124. 27 28

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Stewart finds, index narrative realism’s traversals into heretofore uncharted regions of death, the unconscious, and Victorian doubt.32 In historiography, I submit, the opening to form came through the innovations of the German Romantic school—particularly the work of Leopold Ranke in the 1820s—to which Carlyle has at least a cousin connection. Ranke’s methods are illuminative not only of Carlyle’s historical style but also of the way that form and rhythm show up on the side of nineteenth-century epistemology and hermeneutics. Ranke’s blending of the hermeneutic and “poetic,” as he describes it, is a way of dealing structurally with the semiotic distances that historians have now to traverse: a repurposing for history of the metrical logic of periodicity and recurrence, of the binary relations between sign and signified, surface and “ground.”33 Philipp Müller explains: [T]he historian would decipher the historical truth hidden within sources only when he recognized that facts which appeared to be disconnected were in reality harmoniously connected elements of general spiritual tendencies. [Ranke] conceived the general content of the past as the work of spiritual forces which could be discovered indirectly by inferring from singular elements of historical reality to their common deeper ground.34

Ranke’s method copes, by inferences and increments, with the increased distance between textual signifier and historical signified, between manifest and latent truths, facts and essences, subjective and objective

32  In addition to Wesling, see Garrett Stewart’s Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), on the sentence-level phonetic and grammatical organizations of Victorian and early twentieth-century prose fiction. Joseph P. Jordan’s Dickens Novels as Verse (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012)—a seminal influence on both the concept and the title of the present essay—offers a meticulous demonstration of the “verse-­ like” structures governing Dickens’ major prose works. 33  Philipp Müller, “Understanding history: Hermeneutic scholarship and source-criticism in historical scholarship,” in Reading Primary Sources: The interpretation of texts from nineteenth- and twentieth-Century history, ed. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (London: Routledge, 2009), 25. 34  Ibid., 24–25 (italics mine).

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knowledge (the “knowing subject” and “the object to be known”).35 It offers what a later scholarship might describe as a hermeneutics of rhythm36 against history and nature’s withdrawal from the field of knowledge.37 There is a more than casual connection between this strategy and Carlyle’s, speaking in the voice of the anonymous editor in Sartor Resartus: “At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of [Teufelsdröckh’s] Doctrine.”38 And Carlyle again, on reading Goethe’s poetry: the piecing together of “hints and half glances,” the slow penetration from the poem’s “outward meaning” to the “cunning manifold meaning which lies hidden under it.”39 How all this manifests in Carlyle’s historicism begins to reveal itself in a letter he wrote to J. S. Mill describing his forthcoming French Revolution. The letter is notable on several counts—including its early articulation of the history as “Poem,” à la Ranke. Understand me all those sectionary tumults, convention-harangues, guillotine-­holocausts, Brunswick discomfitures; exhaust me the meaning of it! You cannot; for it is a flaming Reality; the depths of Eternity look through the chinks of that so convulsed section of Time; as through all sections of Time, only to dull eyes not so visibly. To me, it often seems, as if the right History (that impossible thing I mean by History) of the French Revolution were the grand Poem of our Time.… The attempt can be made; cannot, by the highest talent and effort, be succeeded in, except in more or less feeble  Ibid, 25.  The phrase, which is mine, borrows closely from the themes of Roland Barthes’ “Listening,” in which he projects a postlapsarian world where “the gods speak” sporadically, and in “a language of which only a few enigmatic fragments reach men, though it is vital— cruelly enough—for them to understand this language”; and where mastery of rhythm, and the oscillation between sign and signified, is the thing “without which no language is possible” (in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Art, Music, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, [Oxford: Blackwell, 1985], 249). 37  I paraphrase George Levine on the paradigm shift that takes place in late-eighteenth-­ century science and epistemology, where, in his words, “God withdraws from the field of natural knowledge” (“By Knowledge Possessed: Darwin, Nature, and Victorian Narrative,” New Literary History 24 (1993), 365, http://www.jstor.org/stable/469411. 38  Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 42 (italics mine). 39  Carlyle, “Goethe’s Helena,” 7, 10. 35 36

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approximation. But indeed is not all our success approximate only?… That Thiers, these Mémoires of yours have done more for me than almost all else I have read; you can hardly conceive with what a tumult of feelings, visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses they wholly envelop me.40

The sense of “approximation” is palpable, both in this passage’s semantic wrestling between facts and rumors, historical truths and subjective interpretations, and in its larger structural motions of thesis and antithesis, provocation and qualification (“Understand me…You cannot”; “it is a flaming Reality…only to dull eyes not so visibly”; “the right History (that impossible thing I mean by History)”; “The attempt can be made; cannot…be succeeded in”). Carlyle’s frequent italics underscore the discursive and historical distances he seeks to traverse either by mental reach or by vocal strain. “Understand me” might be taken as the great impossible imperative of a writing that is, at bottom, so fully aware of the hermeneutic distances not only between the past and its documents but also, since this is a letter, between the subjectivity that writes and the other (Mill’s) that reads and interprets. Notable, too, is the measuring instinct that kicks in as Carlyle approaches these limits of historical epistemology. My bold emphases mark the beat, in the first and last sentences, of a latent dactylic dimeter that rolls off Carlyle’s Homeric catalogue of events (best captured if we insert line breaks where the commas are)— sectionary tumults, convention-harangues, guillotine-holocausts, Brunswick discomfitures

—and then recovers itself at the close, as the writing locks step, so to speak, with the force and flux of revolution: what a tumult of feelings, visions, [X] half-visions, guesses and darknesses they wholly envelop me.

40  Thomas Carlyle to J.S.  Mill, 24 Sep. 1833, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi. org/10.1215/lt-18330924-TC-JSM-01.

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History is, in effect, being reduced to its knowable syllabic quantities. From Carlyle’s letter we might run a tangent through those other metric conversions the Revolution works on its historic material: for instance, the deaths of the Girondins, counted off to the beat of a ballad-style 4/3 dactylic or paeonic meter, which Carlyle sustains intermittently across six paragraphs. Again, this is best captured by rendering the sentences in lines: Louvet went with Guadet, with Salles and Valadi;    Barbaroux with Buzot and Pétion.41 Poor Guadet and Salles were both taken, ere long;    they died by the Guillotine in Bordeaux;42 …Buzot and Pétion were found in a Cornfield,43    their bodies half-eaten by dogs.44 They arose to regenerate France, these men;    and have accomplished this.45

The punch this meter delivers is in the suppressed fourth beat of the shorter lines: an audible caesura to mark the end of the sentence and also the lives of these seven martyrs of the Revolution. Carlyle has a knack for this discursive embedding of silence and death: for instance, with the first appearance of the Guillotine: “Mais vous, Gualches, what have you invented? This?—” The dash delivers the answer and also the end.46 Our ear is trained by association to hear the silence—or the audible thud—of a word or a measure withheld. Thus, when we come to the last Girondins on the scaffold (also scannable as a 4/3 dactylic meter) “Te-Deum Fauchet [X] has become silent; Valazé’s dead head is lopped [X]”—clunk.47

 Carlyle, French Revolution, II.328.  Ibid., II.329. 43  I acknowledge the inconsistency in my scansion of “Pétion” between this and the first quotation. Here, I heed the accent on the first syllable, preserving what strikes my ear as an unmistakable dactylic beat. But the second syllable could also elongate to fill a final paeonic foot in the first quotation. 44  Ibid. 45  Ibid., italics original. 46  Ibid., II.131 (italics original). 47  Ibid., II.328. 41 42

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Not so incidentally, “metrification”—the standardization of weights and measures, and the adoption of a decimal time and currency—also starts here, in the overlapping years of the new French Republic and the Reign of Terror. The process is exquisitely close, in Carlyle’s view, to that other kind of “decimation” the Republic exacts on its citizens: “A Convention decimated by the Guillotine; above the tenth man has bowed his neck to the axe”; “Assassinated, decimated; stabbed at, shot at, in baths, on streets and staircases.”48 Life, time, and value are all measured and fractioned by guillotine: Systole, diastole, swift and ever swifter goes the Axe of Samson49 …one head per minute, or little less50 The Guillotine, by its speed of going, will give index of the general velocity of the Republic.51

The mechanical ictus of clocks and guillotines works like a tuning fork to bring out those other, undergirding measures and immeasures that course through Carlyle’s history. Human pulses sound an intermittent counterpoint to the persistence of the guillotine (the latter “there set up again” while “pulse after pulse still count[s] itself out in the old man’s weary heart”52). Clock time and decimal time are gently disrupted by the “rhythm[s] of millennial change,” to borrow a phrase from Charles Rosen.53 Behind the guillotine runs the silent epochal chronometer Carlyle established at this book’s beginning, when a millennial axe-stroke first set the Revolutionary clocks in motion: “The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years; only in the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is there heard an echoing through the solitudes; and the oak announces itself when, with far-sounding crash, it falls.”54 The split-­second of action straddles the overlapping vectors of past determination and future consequence, the “Eternity behind” and the other Eternity  Ibid., II.435–36.  Ibid., II.390. 50  Ibid., II.328. 51  Ibid., II.321. 52  Ibid., II.341. 53  Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 155, https://hdl-handle-net.proxy01.its.virginia.edu/2027/heb.05562.epub. 54  Ibid., I.29 (italics original). The falling of oak and axe reemerges some 12 books and 600 words later in the shape of that greater “Cyclopean axe” of “Oak and Iron” that “falls in its grooves like the ram of the Pile-engine” (II.131, italics mine). 48 49

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“before”55—a vision mundanely reflected in the simultaneous running of the old Gregorian and the new Republican calendars, whose date-­ conversions Carlyle runs with almost gleeful consistency: “It has become Sunday, the second day of June, year 1793, by the old style; by the new style, year One of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”56 History, on a purely rhythmic level, begins to resemble that more complex poetry critics divined in Carlyle’s prose. Seeing how this polyrhythmic, contrapuntal historicism bears out as verse is the next and last stop in this investigation: one I will be approaching with a wide-angle view toward the larger temporal, moral, and epistemological parameters within which Carlyle’s measures ask to be understood. That investigation begins where we left off, with the doubleness of time itself in Carlyle’s history: a history structured on latencies and periodicities; keyed on one side to the longue durée of ecological and structural change, and on the other, to the heavy rotations of revolution and the guillotine. Rhythm, within this paradigm, has the feeling of coming from elsewhere: an intrusion of one time into another, of deep memory into an unheeding present—a recalcitrant pulse or guillotine thud into the regular prose of things.57 See how this next passage emerges, like a series of metrical overlays, into Carlyle’s chapter on the deaths of the Girondins. Here, he focuses on the first twenty-two who died on the scaffold. Bareheaded, hands bound… so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the shouts of Vive la République, some of them keep answering with counter-shouts of Vive la République. Others, as Brissot, sit sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike up, with appropriate variations, the Hymn of the Marseillese. Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet Living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson’s axe is rapid; one head per minute, or little less. The chorus is wearing weak; the chorus is worn out;—farewell for evermore, ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valazé’s dead head is lopped: the sickle of the Guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away.58 55  Ibid., II.9. Variations of the phrase “conflux” or “middle of Eternities” appear in vol. 1: 11, 36, 141, and vol. 2: 10, 165. 56  Ibid., II.285. 57  Other deep-historical rhythms include the millennial recurrences of “Sansculottism” (II.441), of silent suffering that erupts every few centuries into “loud-speaking” complaint (II.443), as well as the many folk rhythms, ballads, marches, and hymns that weave into this book’s rhythmic and sonic textures (see, e.g., the genesis of the Marseillaise: II.84). 58  Ibid., II.328.

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A Carlylean antiphon of “shouts” and “counter-shouts” from the crowd sets this passage up for another kind of polyphony, as the Girondins “strike up, with appropriate variations, the Hymn of the Marseillese…” Here is a strong suggestion of ampibrachs or dactyls—especially if you roll out a good French “r” for the “Marseillese”: “The Hymn of the Ma[r]seillese…” The yet living 59 chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak…The chorus is wearing weak… Te-Deum Fauchet [X] has become silent; Valazé’s dead head is lopped

And also of iambs: the chorus is worn out; farewell for evermore, ye Girondins. (italics original)

And between those two meters, a kind of limping trisyllable as Carlyle starts dropping beats, and plumping out an ampibrach means adding in phantom syllables that one’s ear (mine at least) is ready enough to supply. the chorus so rapidly wear[X]ing weak! The chorus is wear[X]ing weak…

It is in these small hitches of metrical transition that the uncertainty of measure begins to emerge in the shape of prosodic opportunity. Carlyle’s beat has the feel of a march, a pulse, a guillotine (note the trochaic punctuality of “Samson’s axe is rapid”) and a question all at once. His prosody compounds the emotional gravitas of the death-march—“This revolutionary Te-Deum,” which “has in itself something mournful and bodeful, however briskly played”60—with the extra hermeneutic weight of syllables being shuffled between competing systems of measure. It records the dropped beats of dying voices and the metrical special pleading of martyrs marching to their reluctant end. “Wear[X]ing… wear[X]ing…worn [XX] out.” Morally, the passage aligns with Carlyle’s equivocating over the one-­ size-­fits-all expediency of the Revolutionary order. Piling measures upon measures, and estimates upon counter-estimates,61 is one way of mooting  I take liberty here to imagine a slight subordination of the stress on “li-ving” to “yet.”  Ibid., II.307. 61  See especially Carlyle’s tallying of body counts in ibid., I.501, II.164. 59 60

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Revolutionary aspirations toward a singular, standardized system of units and values—a rebuttal of no less than existential import in a Republic where not-measuring-up amounts to a death warrant, and where “equalization of weights and measures” translates as equal opportunity of execution. And daily...passes the Revolution Cart; writing on the walls its Mene, Mene, Thou art weighed, and found wanting!”62 ‘Danton arrested!’ Who then is safe? Legendre, mounting the Tribune, utters, at his own peril, a feeble word for him…but Robespierre frowns him down: ‘… Would you have two weights and measures?’ Legendre cowers low; Danton, like the others, must take his doom.63

The frictions of non-equivalence, the pivots of recalculation, the flex and drag of units against the inexorable onwardness of total sums, extend like a moral and prosodic axiom across those many passages whose measures call themselves to attention. They give force, too, to a larger question that seems to be quietly working itself out in this book, regarding the very idea of the unit as a countable, knowable thing—chiming with what Fredric Jameson characterizes as a broader crisis-of-measurement in the postclassical disciplines.64 The implications of this are wide-ranging and complex—well beyond the scope of this essay—encompassing contemporaneous developments in post-­ Newtonian physics (where new particle and wave theories serve to destabilize the concept of the atom), mathematics and geometry (which in Carlyle’s lifetime sees the end of the pristine Euclidean order of natural numbers anchored in empirical data), and also in nineteenth- and early-­ twentieth-­century history and linguistics (“In history,” Saussure ponders, “what is the basic unit? The individual, the period, the nation?”65). What interests me here, unsurprisingly, is how this zeitgeist seems to up the ante even further on Carlyle’s meters: the pulses, minutes, and beats that function as so many knowable quantities within an increasingly unknowable

 Ibid., II.375.  Ibid., II.385 (italics mine). 64  Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 13–15. 65  Quoted in Jameson, Prison House, 15. 62 63

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force field.66 Measure’s urgency is, in part, a factor of its fundamental instability in Carlyle: this is another way of approaching the metrical double-consciousness that Carlyle exhibits in the Girondins march—that he was (I’ll go you one better) already manifesting in his very earliest verse experiments. This, as I hope to reveal, is where Carlyle’s history bears out the formative influence of his work on Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land.” Recall how Carlyle dealt with the first line of Goethe’s text: Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn… Im dunklen Laub die Goldorangen glühn,

In MS1 this becomes: Dost’ know the land where fresh the citrons bloom, Where glows the orange ’mid the thicket’s gloom

And in MS2: Knowst thou the land where the fresh citrons bloom, And the gold-orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom

Both versions are metrically viable. Both, as we saw in the first section, end up pushing the pattern to abnormal extremes, stretching and contorting Goethe’s text within a too-determined metrical frame. Both manuscripts— and the four published versions that followed them—pursued one meter with the knowledge of another and possibly better meter. The rolling monologue of Carlyle’s own doubts about these translations (“stiff and laboured,” “which is worse?”, etc.) tells me he rather overrode than overlooked the growing pressure of alternatives: Dost’ know the land where fresh the citrons bloom… (MS1) Know’st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom? (1824)

Behind Carlyle’s iambs, there is that shadow of a dactylic or ampibrachic doubt which shall come to its crisis in the march of the Girondins. 66  Carlyle’s Revolution has its fair share of visions of math at the limits, and of calculuses imploding around the ungraspable or disappearing unit. See esp. I.223, II.192–93.

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The yet Living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wear[X]ing weak… The chorus is wear[X]ing weak… the chorus is worn [X X] out… —or— the chorus is worn out; farewell for evermore, ye Girondins.

Carlyle’s crisis of verse-translation is now his prose advantage. Through the mechanisms of mathematical doubt, Carlyle here keeps alive the possibility of other voices and measures—catching us in the mental act of recalculation where a march dies into a pulse and a singer into silence. The difference prose makes, finally, is to offer the conditions in which Carlyle’s metrics become historically, morally, and epistemologically urgent. What looked in poetry like a theoretical exercise—a kind of numeric hunch that works itself out through, sometimes in spite of, the aesthetic interests of Goethe’s text—here tallies with the book’s sustained wrestling with Revolutionary numbers, its mathematical and also moral contemplations about the valuation of labor and life, its equivocations on the “plus and minus” and the “more or less” of human losses and revolutionary death tolls,67 and the slow integer-subtraction, in this case, of twenty-two Girondin souls into none.

References Barthes, Roland. 1985. Listening. In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Art, Music, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, 245–260. Oxford: Blackwell. Carlyle, Thomas. (1828) 1890a. Burns. In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished: Goethe—Goethe’s Helena—Burns, 123–180. Chicago: Belford, Clarke, & Company. ———. (1828) 1890b. Goethe’s Helena. In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished: Goethe—Goethe’s Helena—Burns, 5–55. Chicago. ———. 1965. Past and Present. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1974. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. The French Revolution: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 For further examples of the tabulation of human suffering and death, see vol.1: 219 and vol. 2: 130, 165–66, 390, 429, and 441. Examples of plus-or-minus (“more or less,” “better or worse”) rhetoric in the Revolution are too many to enumerate, but a representative sampling includes: vol. 1: 341, 362, 366, 451, and vol. 2: 28, 39, 164, and 268. 67

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Carlyle, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. 2019. The Carlyle Letters Online [CLO], ed. Brent E.  Kinser. Durham: Duke University Press. Accessed 8 November 2021. www.carlyleletters.org. Cumming, Mark. 1988. A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle’s French Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1883. Past and Present. In Emerson’s Complete Works, ed. James Elliott Cabot, vol. 12, 237–248. Cambridge: Riverside Press. Froude, James Anthony. 1906. Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years. Vol. 1. New York: Scribner. Goethe. 1910. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Halle: Hendel. Hazlitt, William. (1818) 1930. On the Living Poets. In The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, vol. 5, 143–168. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Holloway, John. 1962. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. Hamden: Archon. Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jordan, Joseph P. 2012. Dickens Novels as Verse. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Levine, George. 1968. The Use and Abuse of Carlylese. In The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden, 101–126. New York: Oxford. ———. 1993. By Knowledge Possessed: Darwin, Nature, and Victorian Narrative. New Literary History 24: 363–391. JSTOR.  Accessed 10 December 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/469411. Moore, Carlisle. 1976. Carlyle: Mathematics and ‘Mathesis’. In Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K.J. Fielding and Roger L. Tarr, 61–95. Plymouth: Clarke, Doble and Brendon. Müller, Philipp. 2009. Understanding History: Hermeneutic Scholarship and Source-Criticism in Historical Scholarship. In Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History, ed. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann, 21–36. London: Routledge. Rosen, Charles. 1995. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ACLS HEB. Accessed 29 June 2021. https://hdl-­handle-­net.proxy01. its.virginia.edu/2027/heb.05562. Sanders, Charles Richard. 1960. Carlyle, Browning, and the Nature of the Poet. Emory University Quarterly. 16: 197–209. ———. 1961. Carlyle and Tennyson. PMLA. 76: 82–97. JSTOR.  Accessed 10 July 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/460317. Stewart, Garrett. 1984. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2009. Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Tarr, Roger L., and Fleming McClelland, eds. 1986. The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Greenwood: The Penkevill Publishing Company. Tennyson, G.B. 1965. Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986. Foreword. In The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Roget L.  Tarr and Fleming McClelland, xiii–xx. Greenwood: Penkevill Publishing Company. Wesling, Donald. 1980. The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfson, Susan J. 1997. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Silence, Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song Veronica Alfano

“All tongues fall silent”: Reading Metrical Pauses Germaine Greer has pointed out the gendered nature of distinctions drawn between what she calls “poetry (the real thing) and mere verse.”1 Given the common Victorian association of poetesses with humble unobtrusiveness and conventionality, it is unsurprising that on the level of form, another factor that separates verse from poetry—the apparently minor and trivial from the apparently prestigious and profound—is verse’s tendency to be brief and rhymed. One might think, for instance, of nursery songs, limericks, or nonsense lines. Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) is no exception. The Nation, perhaps slightly condescendingly, promises that children will enjoy Rossetti’s “jingle of rhyme”; Sidney Colvin asserts that the volume “answers literally to its title, and consists of nothing but short rhymes as simple in sound as those immemorially sung in nurseries.” Indeed, Sing-Song brings to mind the 1

 Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, xiv.

V. Alfano (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_11

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poet’s own self-effacing remark that “the nearest approach to a ‘method’ I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness.” Although Mary Arseneau called for closer examination of this book over twenty years ago, it remains understudied—in part because its formal features, as well as its subject matter, female author, and intended audience, mark it so clearly as “mere verse.”2 I will focus on brevity and rhyme, connecting them to gender as I argue that they shed new light on the modes of attention that Sing-Song elicits, on its mnemonic and didactic qualities, and ultimately on its treatment of the relationship between mother and child. Concerning brevity, I am particularly interested in one kind of formal reduction that Rossetti employs in her nursery rhymes: truncating a stanza’s final line. Without violating the modest littleness considered a desideratum of women’s writing, this strategy undercuts the expectations of extreme metrical orthodoxy and regularity set up by the title Sing-Song.3 In “If hope grew on a bush,” trimeter expands into tetrameter, which then gives way to dimeter. But oh! in windy autumn, When frail flowers wither, What should we do for hope and joy, Fading together?4

“Is the moon tired? She looks so pale” features a similar pattern. Before the coming of the night The moon shows papery white; Before the dawning of the day She fades away. (CP 256)

2  Unsigned review of Sing-Song, 294; Colvin, review of Sing-Song, 23; Rossetti, Poems and Prose, 400; Arseneau, “Introduction,” xx. On Rossettian smallness, see Tricia Lootens, Antony H. Harrison, and Veronica Alfano. This essay, however, will refer to the contents of Sing-Song as “poems.” 3  Lila Hanft reads this title as ironic (“Maternal Ambivalence,” 226). In general, my concern is with rhythmic drop-offs more precipitous than those found in the mix of threeand four-beat lines usually associated with nursery rhymes. 4  Rossetti, Complete Poems, 243. Subsequent citations to this edition (hereafter CP) are given parenthetically.

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And the first stanza of another tiny Sing-Song poem also shrinks down to dimeter. Why did baby die, Making Father sigh, Mother cry? (CP 232)

Shortened lines impose silence on us. In his 1857 “Essay on English Metrical Law,” Coventry Patmore says of such lines that “we must reckon the missing syllables as substituted by an equivalent pause: and indeed, in reading catalectic verse, this is what a good reader does by instinct.”5 These Sing-Song stanzas create a sudden drop-off in the number of syllables per line; even when this phenomenon comes as no surprise, as when it is repeated over several consecutive stanzas, a reader’s urge to let silence stand in for the absent foot or feet remains. Here I am indebted to Yopie Prins, who uses Patmore to explore Alice Meynell’s “poetics of pauses.” Prins observes that Meynell’s intrapoetic self-silencing, her “harmonious alternation between what is heard and not heard,” necessitates “a mental apprehension of meter in the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear.” I am also building on the work of Elizabeth K. Helsinger, who discusses Rossetti’s use of “abruptly foreshortened” lines to engender “virtual space or silence, actualized by the reader or listener at the level of semantic meaning no less than of somatic experience.”6 What sorts of meaning and experience, then, does this tactic give rise to? What sorts of mental apprehension or attention does it demand? In the three examples above, the cutting short of the last line signals exhaustion or lack or baffled unspeakability. It mirrors the wilting of flowers, the disappearance of hope and joy, the vanishing of the moon, the impossibility of explaining why an infant has died. The silences that it produces invite mournful meditation about what has passed away; such loss becomes palpable not only in the audible pauses at the ends of the abridged lines but also in the visible gaps they leave on the page. Rossetti, whose collection frequently features catechistic exchanges (“What is pink? a rose is pink” 5  Patmore, “English Metrical Law,” 23. Patmore is describing the silences generated within (say) catalectic pentameter, but I focus on the pauses that result when (for instance) pentameter suddenly becomes dimeter or trimeter. See also George Saintsbury on Patmore’s “pause-foot or ‘silence-foot’” (English Prosody, 440) and Derek Attridge on “virtual beats” (Moving Words, 106). 6  Prins, “Patmore’s Law,” 264, 265, 275; Helsinger, Thought of Song, 68–69.

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[CP 239]), here leaves her speakers’ questions pointedly unanswered. These poems, to quote the second stanza of “Why did baby die,” opt to “Make no reply.” Rather than finding a consolatory context for the baby’s death or emphasizing that the moon and the flowers will reappear, they ask readers to acknowledge and wistfully contemplate the fact of absence. Sing-Song, in fact, is preoccupied with the many forms that bereavement takes. It depicts orphaned children, separated sweethearts, dead animals. On finding a frozen thrush, one should “Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow, / Raise him a tombstone of snow” (CP 229), and use the brief hush after the trimeter line to pay one’s silent respects to him. And the volume is especially concerned with child mortality—with the way that “Three merry sisters” become “Two mournful sisters,” with what a young person makes of a sibling who “may not wake again,” and with the fate of a “babyless mother” (CP 244, 228, 258). Yet the silence generated by an abbreviated line does not always indicate depletion or weariness or tongue-tied sorrow in Sing-Song. Wrens and robins in the hedge, Wrens and robins here and there; Building, perching, pecking, fluttering, Everywhere! (CP 231–232)

As Constance W. Hassett puts it, here a “happily manic accumulation of verbs […] culminates in the jubilant plenitude of a single exclamation.”7 The pause after this concluding word is awestruck rather than despondent or resigned. Those third-line verbs create the impression that the speaker is rapidly glancing from bird to bird, almost overwhelmed by her efforts to catalog what each is doing; in contrast, “Everywhere” allows for a refreshing moment of visual and mental relaxation, in which she can simply recognize and enjoy the ubiquity of these busy animals rather than struggle to parse their actions. Fittingly, the three punchily emphatic trochees of “Building, perching, pecking” give way to “fluttering,” which can be read as a gentler and more deliberate dactyl. And the isolation of “Everywhere” as the only word in its line encourages readers to articulate each of its syllables with care. Rhythmically, Rossetti’s final two lines 7  Hassett, Patience of Style, 129. Yet Hassett also sees the darker side of Rossetti’s metrical reductions. Noting that “Why did baby die?” reflects adult silence, she adds that the poem “admits its own muteness as well, tapering down to a single foot […] and showing how little it has to say” (142).

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decelerate, winding down to a suspended calm in which enchanted gazing may be imagined to fill the gap left by the omitted feet. In “There is but one May in the year,” the shortened final line has a comparable effect. There is but one May in the year, And sometimes May is wet and cold; There is but one May in the year Before the year grows old.

Yet though it be the chilliest May, With least of sun and most of showers, Its wind and dew, its night and day, Bring up the flowers. (CP 235)

Here the closing drop to dimeter is particularly precipitous, since readers have been prompted by Rossetti’s first stanza to expect a switch from four beats to three beats—not to two beats—in the final line.8 In the silence after that last word, before the energy of the underlying meter expires, we envision the promised flowers. It is our mental energy, our compensatory ability to conceptualize both absent metrical feet and absent natural beauty, that ushers these blooms into being. Such formal and thematic lack was worryingly unresolved in the first three poems (an unease echoed by the imperfect rhyme of “wither / together”). Here, however, it sanctions imaginative freedom in both adult readers and young listeners. Similarly, in a poem aptly fixated on fluctuating duration, a curtailed final line provides a silent space where birdsong can sound in the mind: The summer days are short Where southern nights are long: Yet short the night when nightingales Trill out their song. (CP 235)

Another concluding Sing-Song pause—“And where pale blossom used to hang / Ripe fruit to follow” (CP 233)—lets us admire that future fruit 8  Hassett believes that one “performs the last line by stretching ‘bring’ into a disyllable,” creating a trimeter line (Patience of Style, 152). To my ear, though, the tick-tock regularity of “Its wind and dew, its night and day” cues a brisk two-syllable “Bring up.”

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with an inner eye; “So I would fly, if only I / Were light of limb” (CP 253) reserves a brief moment in which to fantasize flight. Aural, visual, and kinesthetic experience can be conjured up in the stillness at the end of a poem. Such imaginative license has devotional significance as well. A poem about the death of an infant, one of Sing-Song’s central themes, can use the silence after a shortened final line not only for mute and devastated acknowledgment of absence but also for expectation of the life to come—a more hopeful or prayerful mode of attention. A baby’s cradle with no baby in it, A baby’s grave where autumn leaves drop sere; The sweet soul gathered home to Paradise, The body waiting here. (CP 230)

This four-line poem is entirely nominative. Just as its nouns must wait for a verb to convert them from a list to a declaration, so the child’s static remains must wait for the resurrection of the dead. In switching abruptly from pentameter to trimeter and thus producing a pause at the end of the poem, Rossetti creates a memorial space; the memory of the dead child and the expectations set up by its birth manifest themselves in the memory of the missing beats and the expectations set up by the original meter. But this is also a space in which readers enact the virtue of faithful patience. Inhabiting the silence after the poem’s final word in order to imagine the eventual reunion of soul and body, both anticipating and actually feeling absent metrical pulses, one transcends the constrained frame of the quatrain and of the mortal world. Thus, a truncated line that seems to emblematize transience also makes it possible to escape the realm of the earthly and ephemeral.9 Elsewhere, Rossetti uses metrical reduction to say more explicitly what fills this postmortem silence for Christian listeners: “Grief hears a funeral knell: hope hears the ringing / Of birthday bells on high” (CP 586).

9  For Helsinger, Rossetti’s metrical foreshortenings mean that “we are prodded, suspended, to think of the not-said” (Thought of Song, 137). Although Helsinger sees the truncated final line of “A baby’s cradle” as a symptom of the “impoverished world,” she makes a point related to my own when she notes that this poem uses “lyric minimalism” to “condense the agonizing tedium of subjectively experienced time bounded by mortality, while imaginatively reaching beyond it” (138). And Virginia Sickbert contrasts “Why did baby die” (in which “No comforting divine purpose […] fills the absence”) with “A baby’s cradle” (in which hope emerges despite a palpable absence) (“Maternal Challenge,” 396).

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Indeed, Rossetti’s devotional writing offers a useful context for her formal self-silencing in Sing-Song. A poem from Time Flies tapers down to a trimeter line and generates a brief pause as it asserts that when describing Christ, “All tongues fall silent, while pure hearts alone / Complete their orison”; another from The Face of the Deep urges the reader to “Pray by silence if thou canst not speak,” ending with a plunge from pentameter to the tellingly abbreviated declaration “Short is time.” Still another in this latter book entreats God to “hear my heart speak in its speechlessness.”10 Silence both signals the failure of speech and comprises a purer form of devotion. Rossetti can therefore use intrapoetic silences to teach spiritual lessons, cuing readers to react to death by filling those quiet moments with steadfast and prayerful hope instead of traumatized sorrow. Her piety and the strategic slightness of her sing-songs keep her within the modest bounds of female versifying, while also allowing her to summon a subtle and artful version of didactic authority. These little poems, in fact, drive their lessons home not only because terminal pauses permit them to retain their grip on a reader or hearer even after they have ended, but also because their iterative brevity renders them highly memorable. As I argue elsewhere, this memorability is especially potent in works featuring “conventional forms and familiar themes” (such as balladic quatrains, albeit with occasional metrical alterations, and depictions of natural beauty or domestic love) “that are easy to recognize, categorize, and so internalize.”11 Since shortness and sonic repetitiveness lend themselves to memorization, small stanzas that appear humble and unassuming are actually well-equipped to persist in individual minds and in the consciousness of a culture.

Rhyme’s Heavenly Meanings Thus far, this essay has focused on meter, showing how strategic brevity interacts with the expectations established by reiterative rhythmic structures. In Sing-Song, mnemonic repetition also takes the related form of rhyme, another feature that ostensibly consigns the volume to the feminized realm of “mere verse”—but that Rossetti enlists in the service of sophisticated moral and spiritual instruction.12

 Rossetti, Time Flies, 112; The Face of the Deep, 505, 36.  Alfano, The Lyric in Victorian Memory, 2. 12  Gillian Beer considers rhyme’s connections to both memory and puerility (“Rhyming as Resurrection,” 191). 10 11

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Rhyme can be understood from both sensory and semantic points of view. In 1895, Edmund Noble notes the instinct to “look for likeness in meaning where there is likeness in sound.” Echoing Noble and W.  K. Wimsatt, J.  Paul Hunter discusses “the meaning statements that rhyme sometimes seems to make through its insistent linking or binding of words” (for instance, “dust” and “must”). And Hassett remarks that Rossetti in particular “delights in placing words that seem to have only the affinity of their sound in conjunctions that disclose a deep connection in sense.” Generally speaking, as a 1901 Academy essay warns, such rhyme-­ connections can be trite or misleading.13 But by using rhyme to link the right words and thus the right concepts, Rossetti encourages readers to remember not only formal patterns and sonic concords but also a series of crucial associations. More specifically, as she explains in Seek and Find, “natural perception” must be paired with “spiritual perception”: “Objects of sight may and should quicken us to apprehend objects of faith, things temporal suggesting things eternal.” In other words, mundane visible phenomena serve as “earthly pictures with heavenly meanings,” always “conveying to us an image of that which is above themselves.” Consider Revelation 6:13: “And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.” This passage, says Rossetti, shows that God is “connecting indissolubly in our memories the wind, the fig tree, and the end of all things […] Thus common things continually at hand […] acquire a sacred association, and cross our path under aspects at once familiar and transfigured.”14 The fig tree, 13  Noble, “Philosophy of Rhyme,” 586; Hunter, “Seven Reasons,” 186 (Hugh Kenner provides the “dust / must” example [“Unfinished Monograph,” 380]); Hassett, Patience of Style, 127; “Does Rhyme Connect Ideas?”, 390. According to Susan Stewart, however, “rhyming show[s] that proximity in sound has little consequence for proximity of semantics,” and thus it highlights “the arbitrary nature of the sign” (“Rhyme and Freedom,” 42). Henry Lanz, too, maintains that the sound of rhyming words “acquires an independent artistic value which is largely indifferent to the meaning or the sense” (Physical Basis, 172). On rhyme and semantics, see also Roman Jakobson, Simon Jarvis, Donald Wesling, Andrew Welsh, and Matthew Campbell. 14  Rossetti, Seek and Find, 180, 24, 203. “Heavenly meanings” reflect the Tractarian concept of analogy, according to which “everything visible is a symbol of some attribute of God” (Maria Keaton, “Analogical Theodicy,” 148). Likewise, the doctrine of reserve elucidates Rossetti’s formal and thematic interest in silence. For Anglo-Catholic perspectives on Sing-Song, see, for example, Sharon Smulders (Christina Rossetti Revisited), Serena Trowbridge, and Kirstie Blair. Blair mentions that “clear end-rhymes tend to be the norm” in “didactic religious poetry” (“Religion and Reserve,” 139); perhaps this indicates rhyme’s capacity for moral instruction.

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now aligned or “rhymed” with the end of days, is forever changed. And this is true of objects as we navigate the world partly because words and ideas are imbued by rhyme with vital resonances as we navigate a poem. Sing-Song takes advantage of rhyme’s ability to inscribe certain relations “indissolubly in our memories” by offering both lighthearted mnemonic aids and weightier instruction. One poem enlivens a multiplication table with droll feminine rhymes: “9 and 9 are 18 / Passengers kept waiting” (CP 237). But when the speaker of “There’s snow on the fields” contrasts the comfort of her warm clothes (“Fold upon fold”) with the plight of those who are stranded “Out in the cold” (CP 229), she uses rhyme to turn a garment into a tangible reminder of our duties toward the most vulnerable. Another brief Sing-Song poem takes a similar tack: The rose that blushes rosy red, She must hang her head; The lily that blows spotless white, She may stand upright. (CP 255)

Here the sonic design allows these flowers to encode moral content, as rhyme couples conspicuous display with shame and chaste purity with self-­ respect (“red / hang her head”; “white / stand upright”)—although the concealed “rose / blows” rhyme and the association of blushing with maidenly modesty complicate this binary contrast.15 Moreover, the odd tautology of characterizing a rose’s color as “rosy” creates a tension in the poem. On the one hand, this flower is best understood in terms of itself (after all, “there’s nothing like the rose / When she blows” [CP 245]). It resists figurative description, and its rosiness seems natural rather than blameworthy. On the other hand, its hue transforms it into an emblem of ostentation and thus of chagrin. Rossetti, then, deepens the significance of the physical details she presents without wholly negating their material reality. Her memorable rhymes do not withdraw or cancel out mortal beauty, but they curb over-investment in such beauty for its own sake.  Indeed, such symbols are not always stable for Rossetti. Elsewhere in Sing-Song, the rose signifies not shame but love, beauty, and delight. 15

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They ask that it be half-forgotten, half-overruled, even as it is recalled; they cue a kind of attention that features both intense concentration and deliberate overlooking, seeing past or through or beyond an object to a more profound truth. Using rhyme to find higher meanings may entail revising an object by aligning it with a symbolic value, as in the Sing-Song pairings “thorn / forlorn,” “heliotrope / hope,” and “berry / merry” (CP 243, 248, 256). It may also involve two abstractions or two concrete phenomena. The couplet “What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow: / What are brief? today and tomorrow” (CP 234) has a rhetorical function beyond teaching children about weight and transience. In this context, turning “sorrow” into “tomorrow” affords an understatedly optimistic perspective on earthly unhappiness. And when “There is but one May in the year” ties “showers” to “flowers,” its shortened final line permits those hoped-for blooms to arrive more quickly than expected, prompting readers to fill the poem’s closing silence with both floral imaginings and the realization that patient endurance is often rewarded.16 By contrast, the monorhyme of “Why did baby die?”—in which the titular question is met with conspicuous silence— comes across as stalled, thwarted, providing exaggerated sonic orderliness without revelatory semantic connections. To repeat the rhyme-word “die” three times in a seven-line poem, linking it to words that recapitulate its somberness (“sigh,” “cry”), is to demonstrate the anti-closural impact of withholding rhyme’s fulfilling or transcendent effects.17 Here the abbreviated lines at the ends of stanzas exacerbate this lack of resolution. Their pauses extend the lyrical present into an unchanging space of meditation or mourning; their rhymed, echoing silences generate what Angela Leighton calls “perpetual delay, a continuing after-resonance which never quite comes to an end.”18 16  Adela Pinch, discussing rhyme and poetic temporality, notes that varying line-lengths “exploit the conjunction of metrical brevity with reverberating sound to heighten our subjective experience of duration” (“Rhyme’s End,” 485–486). And considering the pleasures of rhyme, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra remarks that “In the short lines of nursery songs, fulfillment follows expectation so rapidly that the possibility of loss or negation is immediately foreclosed” (“Poetry of Sensation,” 116). 17  On this monorhyme, see Hassett: “euphony’s coherence softly acknowledges a profound incoherence” (Patience of Style, 142). Peter McDonald, however, maintains that the insistent monorhyme of “Passing away, saith the World, passing away” (CP 83) uses sonic sameness to reward patience with transcendent change (Sound Intentions, 238). 18  Leighton, Hearing Things, 79.

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As when the couplet “Spin and die, / To live again a butterfly” (CP 236) lets an insect evoke rebirth, the spiritual import of transformative rhymes often remains implicit in Sing-Song. But it comes to the fore in Rossetti’s more overtly devotional work. Redemptively aligning “grave” with Jesus’s promise to “save” (CP 401), for instance, ensures that the idea of death points to eternal life; the “withered root” of earthly experience is only the first part of a memorable rhyme that will be completed and begin “bearing fruit” in God’s realm (CP 709).19

“True mothers” and Speechless Children Rossetti’s truncated meters and strategic rhymes reveal the kinds of attention and memory that her poems solicit—and that they strive to reward with moral and spiritual guidance. The final section of this essay links these formal tactics to one of Sing-Song’s most prominent themes: the bond between mothers and children. A good deal of criticism, including Hassett’s excellent chapter, analyzes the sensitive ways in which this volume addresses young people. However, I am more interested in Sing-­Song’s significance for the female caregivers who, as Virginia Sickbert points out, would frequently have been the ones to read it to or with children.20 What does the book have to say about women’s domestic duties, and in particular about the meaning of motherhood in the face of child death? Formal brevity, and specifically sudden metrical diminishment, illuminates these topics. Full of miniature poems and scaled-down lines, Rossetti’s collection also dwells on the tininess of the children it portrays. It speaks of “Our little baby,” “little Willie wee,” “My least little one,” and so on (CP 228, 255, 230). Poems and infants, then, are drawn into parallel. And this parallel clarifies the double-edged nature of silence in 19  However, “How many ages in time? / No one knows the rhyme” (CP 238) highlights the disjunction between pleasant chiming and a more substantial form of fulfillment. Smulders says of this Sing-Song couplet that “Rossetti achieves closure through a rhyme that calls attention to the inability to complete endless time except through a poetic contrivance” (“Sound, Sense, and Structure,” 7–8). Roderick McGillis, too, explains that these linked words “remind us that neither completes anything […] paradoxically, time and rhyme perform this coupling which the poem says is impossible” (“Simple Surfaces,” 224). And Hassett writes that Rossetti here plays the “arbitrariness” of rhyme against “the assumption that rhyme provides access to deep semantic linkages” (Patience of Style, 149). 20  Sickbert, “Maternal Challenge,” 386.

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Sing-Song. Just as the speechlessness imposed by short lines as they expire can signal both heartbroken deprivation and fullness of possibility, so the non-responses of small pre-verbal children—who themselves simultaneously encapsulate rich potential and the threat of tragic loss—disclose the ways in which motherhood can both deplete and ennoble women.21 Infantile silence can underscore maternal isolation, despair, anxiety, resentment, and even rage. A poem that begins “Love me,—I love you, / Love me, my baby” (CP 227) is a monologue rendered pleading and hesitant by endstops and caesurae—for the babe in arms cannot reply in kind—rather than a record of contented exchange, despite the neat formal balance it achieves by starting and ending with the same line. It offers a telling contrast to the seventh sonnet of Rossetti’s 1881 cycle Monna Innominata, which opens with near-identical phrasing and continues with an explicit demand for reciprocation: “‘Love me, for I love you’—and answer me, / ‘Love me, for I love you’” (CP 297).22 Another Sing-Song stanza puts words into the infant’s mouth: “‘Cuddle and love me, cuddle and love me,’ / Crows the mouth of coral pink” (CP 258). But though a parent might imagine it, a baby will not plead for affection in so many words. The phrase “baby kiss me” (CP 243) registers more as an appeal than as a happy description. Lila Hanft connects the maternal fear that love will not be returned to a fundamental “confusion about how to read the baby,” whom she characterizes as “an unknown quantity, a cypher, inscrutable because not articulate.” She goes so far as to propose that the desire to preserve this unspeaking child as a “mute screen for its mother’s projections” shades into “infanticidal wishes” in Sing-Song, undermining idealized Victorian conceptions of motherhood.23 21  While infants do communicate via cries and coos and facial expressions, I describe them as silent or unresponsive because they cannot speak. In fact, the word “infant” derives from Latin for “one unable to speak.” 22  I am inclined to disagree with Sickbert, who speaks of the “intimate, egalitarian relation between mother and child” and the suggestions of dialogic exchange in “Love me,—I love you” (“Maternal Challenge,” 389–390). Smulders, however, concludes that this poem “articulates an unrealized ideal” of mutual love (Christina Rossetti Revisited, 106). Both critics notice the Monna Innominata echo. 23  Hanft, “Maternal Ambivalence,” 216–218. Hanft, who shares my interest in “the maternal voice” rather than “the infantine ear” in Sing-Song (217), is of course not the first to notice undertones of aggression in lullabies. Lucy Rollin, for instance, draws on the work of Adrienne Rich and Nicholas Tucker as she points out that a lullaby can become “an exercise in controlled hatred” (Cradle and All, 84). See also Lee O’Brien on the subversive conflation of sleep and death (Romance of the Lyric, 66), Barbara Johnson and Susan Rubin Suleiman on maternal rage, and Anna Jane Barton on the “incomprehensible infant cry” as a “threat to Victorian optimism” (“Nursery Poetics,” 493).

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Hanft’s position may seem extreme. But wished-for infant slumber can be hard to distinguish from infant death in Sing-Song (“Baby lies so fast asleep / That we cannot wake her”; “Our little baby fell asleep, / And may not wake again” [CP 258, 228]). Even if one is not wholly convinced that lines like “Shut up eyes […] Never wake” (CP 259) detach from their soothing lullaby context and take on ominous implications, or that there is a hopeful undertone to “Will the angels clad in white / Fly from heaven to take her?” (CP 258), one senses a mother’s frustration in speaking to a baby—her “trouble and treasure” (CP 231)—who does not speak back.24 What’s more, this child’s silence will traumatize her deeply if it turns out to be permanent, despite her conviction that the child’s soul is safe. Leighton has argued that the volume infantilizes women, hearing in it “sing-song obviousness” and “pretty babbling” that “was unfortunately thought all too appropriate an expression of woman’s own sweet and simple nature.”25 In her eyes, the smallness of these poems confirms their minor status. Smallness stemming from metrical diminishment, though, can point not to clichéd maternal bliss but to maternal angst. The momentary pauses that appear after the shortened lines in “Love me,—I love you,” for instance, represent the disheartening non-responses of an infant; perhaps they are also spaces in which a mother’s dark thoughts and ineffable urges are briefly and silently indulged.26 Within an unthreatening feminized aesthetic that features domestic themes and decorous formal restraint, such pauses can subtly confound expectations related not only to women’s traditional status as hearthside angels but also (when they are produced by particularly abrupt changes in rhythm) to the metrical conventionality that associates Rossetti’s work with verse rather than poetry. When a mother sings understatedly unhappy or hostile lullabies, says Lucy Rollin, she initiates the harrowing but “essential process of separation” that helps her child become an individual. For Hanft, in fact,  See R. Loring Taylor (“Preface,” xi) and Hanft (“Maternal Ambivalence,” 224).  Leighton, Writing Against the Heart, 258–259. Dante Gabriel Rossetti associates SingSong with “the merest babyism”—but also with “Blakish wisdom and tenderness” (Letters, 2.797). 26  As Janzen Kooistra suggests, Rossetti’s sonic patterns “open an imaginative space for the ineffable” (“Poetry of Sensation,” 117). Here my analysis intersects with that of many critics who detect stubborn defiance in Rossetti’s seemingly self-abnegating silences: see, for instance, Harrison, Lootens, Dolores Rosenblum, and Emily Harrington. 24 25

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Sing-Song demonstrates that “total identification between mother and baby is only an illusion.” And Alison Chapman adds that a maturing infant exhibits “both difference from and sameness to the maternal.”27 Crucially, Sing-Song uses rhyme to explore this tension between mother–child union and dissociation. Rhyme has a paradoxically dual linear function because it serves “to define or isolate the individual line of verse, and also to link different lines of verse together.”28 It both divides and connects. Furthermore, since rhyming words are sonically similar but (at least in English) seldom exactly the same, the simultaneous correspondence between and non-­ identity of such words is a central theoretical concept. Debra Fried writes that a rhyme “promises similarity but delivers dissimilarity”; Hugh Kenner notes of rhyme that we are “pleased by difference felt in the midst of likeness”; Jacques Derrida calls rhyme “the folding-together of an identity and a difference”; Garrett Stewart asserts that rhyme operates “across a distance defined by difference even when processed under the sign of similarity”; Hunter locates the “principle of simultaneous similarity and difference” at the heart of rhyme.29 And Peter McDonald applies this principle to Rossetti’s work in particular. Just as she seeks to reconcile “Christ and the individual soul,” suggests McDonald, “so the apparently discordant and unfixed sounds of meaning in poetic language have to move always closer towards a state of perfect similarity.” Yet because rhymed words are not identical, “likeness remains shadowed by unlikeness, and language sets up a resistance to any desired condition of absolute sameness.”30 Slant rhyming brings such resistance to the fore; when Rossetti pairs “summer even” with “heaven is heaven” (CP 249), the lack of flawless sonic affinity emphasizes that earthly beauty may symbolize divine beauty but cannot match it. This linguistic pattern, which McDonald reads through Rossetti’s religious beliefs, also illuminates domestic dynamics in Sing-Song.31 Like rhyming words, mothers and infants balance similitude and 27  Rollin, Cradle and All, 83–84; Hanft, “Maternal Ambivalence,” 219; Chapman, Afterlife, 112. 28  G. S. Fraser, Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse, 60. 29   Fried, “Rhyme Puns,” 87; Kenner, “Unfinished Monograph,” 399; Derrida, Dissemination, 277; Stewart, Reading Voices, 98; Hunter, “Seven Reasons,” 186. 30  McDonald, Sound Intentions, 230. 31  Chapman combines these devotional and domestic perspectives, identifying paradise itself as a “utopian and feminine space of union […] that recalls the primary and pre-oedipal relationship of the child with the mother” (Afterlife, 117–118). For likeness and contrast in rhyme, see also John Hollander (Vision and Resonance, 120–121) and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Ventures into Childland, 343).

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dissimilitude—which means that rhyme, like a baby’s silence, can signal or cue a discontented parent’s sense of alienation from a charge who does not adequately mirror her expressions of love as it begins to grow into a separate self. As the child in “Love me,—I love you” will not echo its mother’s tender words, so neither the iterated “you / low” slant rhyme nor the perfect feminine “love you / above you” rhyme in this poem can demonstrate precise equivalence. Sonic similitude reveals not satisfying unity but the inevitable asymmetry that threatens to embitter women in the nursery. Helsinger observes that Rossetti’s aesthetic of pauses amplifies this distancing effect: by “rhyming across absence,” the poet uses “silence […] to articulate relationships of non-identity.”32 This is illustrated by the metrically generated stillnesses in “Love me,—I love you,” which hint at both the baby’s exasperating muteness and the mother’s unspoken resentment at its failure to imitate her. But Rossetti’s treatment of both rhyme and silence can be read more positively. Rhyme can associate children with abundant potential, while infantile wordlessness can indicate the purity and potency of the mother– child bond. Indeed, in the poet’s devotional writings, silence plays an important role in her claim that everyday phenomena take on divine significance. In Time Flies, she describes the infant Saint Ambrose, whose “lips for the moment speechless” were nonetheless able to “deliver an intelligible message” via augury. In the same way, “All creation would teach us spiritual lessons and gladden us by heavenly meanings.” Proposing in Seek and Find that “common things […] acquire a sacred association,” Rossetti explains that each earthly object “without speech or language makes its voice heard.” And Called to be Saints includes a section on the harebell subtitled “Silence that speaks”: this flower’s “humbly-bowing silence” evokes serene “holiness.” Similarly, a beautiful iris can “without speech or language, declare to us the glory of God.”33 The wordlessness of infants, then, may be best understood through the silence of everyday objects that accrue heavenly meanings. Partly because they do not speak, small children can themselves be assigned symbolic weight, can be conceptually “rhymed,” as when in Seek and Find they bring to mind “the Divine Infancy.” For Rossetti, the fact that the Holy  Helsinger, Thought of Song, 117.  Rossetti, Time Flies, 65; Seek and Find, 203–204; Called to be Saints, 376, 335.

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Innocents were “speechless” in life shows the vast potential of “these whose sanctity was latent.”34 In Sing-Song, the word “baby” is only ever rhymed with itself or with the phrase “may be.” An infant, like a rosy rose, is distinctively itself—but it is also an emblem of boundless possibility (“may be”) that will unfold according to the will of a loving God. Sharon Smulders posits that Sing-Song’s apparently morbid focus on child death is counteracted by traces of “the solace and reassurance of providential design”; infants point to this design, just as lines from a poem can remind us of its larger structure.35 In life and in death, Rossettian children confirm that like the first half of a couplet, a mortal existence is proleptic. It awaits a promised future consummation. Rhyme, from this perspective, signifies not the vexingly imperfect correspondence between mother and child but the vital and well-ordered transformation that turns a baby into a symbol of divine providence or ushers it from life to afterlife. And the infantile silence that allows for such symbolic transformation becomes a mode of expression that (like unspoken prayer) can outdo human utterance. A Called to be Saints poem devoted to deceased children proclaims that “From Heaven the speechless Infants speak”; blissfully happy with God, they comfort their grieving mothers with the knowledge that “Wisdom we have who wanted words.” Time Flies adds that like such infants, or like celestial bodies that “discourse without speech,” Christians must “utter their silent voice to all lands and their speechless words to the ends of the world.”36 A Sing-Song mother may therefore feel ennobled rather than thwarted or alienated by her charge’s muteness—which can be understood as an eloquent silence ripe with heaven-guided potential, which can inspire her own wordless devotions, and which (like the stillness after “The body waiting here”) can elicit faithful imagination and hope. If an infant resembles the first half of a rhyme, a parent anticipates its completion on earth or in paradise with steadfast trust. Thus, the disjunction between affectionate mother and inarticulate child need not breed distress. “I’ll nurse you on my knee […] I’ll rock you, rock you, in my arms,” declares one Sing-Song speaker after asking what she can give her baby son, whose older  Rossetti, Seek and Find, 304; Time Flies, 251.  Smulders, “Sound, Sense, and Structure,” 18. For McGillis, Sing-Song depicts “death as one point in a larger pattern” (“Simple Surfaces,” 222); Carolyn Steedman comments on the “immanence of death in growth” that children embody (Strange Dislocations, x). 36  Rossetti, Called to be Saints, 109; Time Flies, 172, 2. 34 35

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siblings already have a falcon and a flower (CP 229–230). The newborn is an inchoate but discrete self with a future known only to God; she cannot predict whether he will be gentle or adventurous, flowerlike or falconlike. He does not answer the question she poses (“what is left for mannikin”) because he remains unspeaking, incomplete, unresolved. But by loving him, she helps to fulfill a divinely ordained promise. When the second stanza of this poem alternates between tetrameter and trimeter, leaving gaps on the page and producing brief pauses, the fact that the short lines name “My own little son” and “My least little one” links the infant to silences that seem replete with possibility. Sing-Song is more concerned with the speechlessness of babies than of their mothers. Elsewhere, however, Rossetti calls on women to model silence which, like that of children, turns passivity into strength. Seek and Find simultaneously emphasizes the potency inherent in stillness (“silence and peace” are appropriate for followers of Jesus because God often displays “quiet blended with power”) and associates that stillness with femininity (“most of all must the self-restraint of a reverential silence […] befit one of that sex whom St. Paul suffers not to teach”).37 Even as it encodes their subordinate status, silence connects women to the divine. So in Sing-Song, it is apt that a seemingly humble and restricted domestic position lends mothers powerful authority. Caring for vulnerable and wordless babies permits them to perform what Lorraine Janzen Kooistra calls “divine service for the kingdom, for the needy child stands in the position of Christ.” As Rossetti writes to Augusta Webster, “if anything ever does sweep away the barrier of sex […] it is that mighty maternal love which makes […] little women matches for very big adversaries.”38 And like little women, or like the diminutive children whose significance is hinted at in the ambiguous phrase “least little one,” tiny Sing-Song poems render unassuming simplicity compelling. “Motherless baby and babyless mother, / Bring them together to love one another” (CP 258): this chiastic couplet-poem uses its condensed form to echo the orderly balance of a providential plan and contain the chaos of bereavement. Here rhyme’s alignment indicates not a disquieting lack of perfect equivalence between mother and baby but the harmonious nature of their mutually transfigurative bond.

 Rossetti, Seek and Find, 281, 268.  Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration, 108; Rossetti, Letters, 2.158.

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Even when Rossetti appears to embrace traditional feminine roles, it is worth remembering that she often stresses the lowliness of women’s earthly lot in order to imply that their heavenly rewards will be great. Their lives, too, will be transformatively “rhymed” in the fullness of time. Moreover, she argues in The Face of the Deep that “the childless who make themselves nursing mothers of Christ’s little ones are true mothers in Israel”; women need not adhere to conventional domesticity, or accept childbearing as their highest calling, to partake of the spiritual authority that motherhood can furnish.39 Because nursery rhymes represent an apparently decorous and unpresuming literary mode while also channeling the dynamic “mother tongue” that provides children with language and animates their world, Sing-Song reconciles an unmarried female writer’s artistic ambitions with a properly feminine (and Christian) nurturing instinct.40 Indeed, it is this book’s formal display and thematic treatment of brevity and rhyme—the very qualities that may seem to associate it with modest triviality, with marginalized verse instead of prestigious poetry— that lend it subtle didactic force and memorable richness. Acknowledgments  In addition to Lee Behlman and Olivia Moy, I would like to thank the colleagues who responded to this paper when I presented it at the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association conference: Erik Gray, Meredith Martin, Monique Morgan, Joseph Bristow, Kirstie Blair, Elizabeth Helsinger, Matthew Rowlinson, Sarah Weaver, and Elizabeth Macaluso all offered insightful comments. Alexis Harley, Claire Knowles, and Tom Ford also provided helpful feedback after a talk I gave in 2019 at La Trobe University.

39  Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 312. Dinah Roe confirms that in Rossetti’s eyes, “motherhood has nothing to do with biology” (Faithful Imagination, 103). Lootens argues that assigning the childless Rossetti a “sacred maternal” position undercuts her artistic aspirations (Lost Saints, 174); given the spiritual influence that Rossetti associates with mothers, however, this may also be empowering. Indeed, Sickbert—who notes the satisfying balance of the “Motherless baby” couplet—believes that “the social sanction of motherhood compelled women to seize power with cultural and religious approval” (“Maternal Challenge,” 396, 398). See also Arseneau on Rossetti’s devout version of feminism (Recovering Christina Rossetti, 1), Emma Mason on motherhood in Sing-Song (Poetry, Ecology, Faith, 107), Diane D’Amico and Elizabeth Ludlow on Rossetti and the “maternal divine” (D’Amico, Faith, Gender, and Time, 142), and Smulders on “literary maternalism” and Christ’s motherliness (Christina Rossetti Revisited, 103). 40  See Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues, 66.

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References Alfano, Veronica. 2017. The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Arseneau, Mary. 1999. Introduction. In The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, xiii–xxii. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2004. Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Attridge, Derek. 2013. Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barton, Anna Jane. 2007. Nursery Poetics: An Examination of Lyric Representations of the Child in Tennyson’s The Princess. Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2): 489–500. Beer, Gillian. 2000. Rhyming as Resurrection. In Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe, and Sally Shuttleworth, 189–207. London: Routledge. Blair, Kirstie. 2018. ‘We May Not Know, We Cannot Tell’: Religion and Reserve in Victorian Children’s Poetics. In The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English, ed. Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy, 127–144. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Matthew. 2013. Rhyme. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 74–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapman, Alison. 2000. The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Colvin, Sidney. 15 January 1872. Review of Sing-Song by Christina Rossetti, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, and More Nonsense by Edward Lear. The Academy 3: 23–24. D’Amico, Diane. 1999. Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Does Rhyme Connect Ideas?” 26 October 1901. The Academy 1538: 389–390. Fraser, G.S. 1970. Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse. London: Methuen. Fried, Debra. 1988. Rhyme Puns. In On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler, 83–99. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Greer, Germaine. 1995. Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet. London: Viking. Hanft, Lila. 1991. The Politics of Maternal Ambivalence in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song. Victorian Literature and Culture 19: 213–232. Harrington, Emily. 2014. Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Harrison, Antony H. 1988. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hassett, Constance W. 2005. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Helsinger, Elizabeth K. 2015. Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hollander, John. 1975. Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, J. Paul. 2006. Seven Reasons for Rhyme. In Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures, ed. Lorna Clymer, 172–198. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jarvis, Simon. 2011. Why Rhyme Pleases. Thinking Verse 1: 17–43. Johnson, Barbara. 2003. Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keaton, Maria. 2004. Mystic, Madwoman or Metaphysician?: The Analogical Theodicy of Christina Rossetti. In Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, ed. David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon, 145–154. London: Anthem Press. Kenner, Hugh. 2004. Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph. Common Knowledge 10 (3): 377–425. Knoepflmacher, U.C. 1998. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. 2002. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2011. A Modern Poetry of Sensation: Three Christmas Gift Books and the Legacy of Victorian Material Culture. In Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, 107–136. Burlington: Ashgate. Lanz, Henry. 1931. The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leighton, Angela. 1992. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 2018. Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lootens, Tricia. 1996. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ludlow, Elizabeth. 2014. Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints. London: Bloomsbury. Mason, Emma. 2018. Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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McDonald, Peter. 2012. Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-­ Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGillis, Roderick. 1987. Simple Surfaces: Christina Rossetti’s Work for Children. In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent, 208–230. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Noble, Edmund. 1895. A Philosophy of Rhyme. Poet-Lore 7: 585–600. O’Brien, Lee Christine. 2013. The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Patmore, Coventry. 1961. In Coventry Patmore’s “Essay on English Metrical Law”: A Critical Edition with a Commentary, ed. Sister Mary Augustine Roth. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Pinch, Adela. 2011. Rhyme’s End. Victorian Studies 53 (3): 485–494. Prins, Yopie. 2005. Patmore’s Law, Meynell’s Rhythm. In The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow, 261–284. Athens: Ohio University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. Roe, Dinah. 2006. Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rollin, Lucy. 1992. Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Reading of Nursery Rhymes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rosenblum, Dolores. 1986. Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Rossetti, Christina. 1879. Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1881. Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1885. Time Flies: A Reading Diary. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1892. The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1997–2005. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Edited by Antony H. Harrison, 4 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 2001. Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Edited by R.W.  Crump, with notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2008. Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose. Edited by Simon Humphries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. 1965–1967. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, vol. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saintsbury, George. 1910. A History of English Prosody: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day. Vol. 3. London: Macmillan.

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Sickbert, Virginia. 1993. Christina Rossetti and Victorian Children’s Poetry: A Maternal Challenge to the Patriarchal Family. Victorian Poetry 31 (4): 385–410. Smulders, Sharon. 1994. Sound, Sense, and Structure in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-­ Song. Children’s Literature 22: 3–26. ———. 1996. Christina Rossetti Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers. Steedman, Carolyn. 1995. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stewart, Garrett. 1990. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, Susan. 2009. Rhyme and Freedom. In The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, 29–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1985. Writing and Motherhood. In The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, 352–377. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Taylor, R. Loring. 1974. Preface. In Sing-Song, Speaking Likenesses, Goblin Market, ed. Christina Rossetti. New York: Garland. Trowbridge, Serena. 2017. ‘Truth to Nature’: The Pleasures and Dangers of the Environment in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry. In Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. Laurence W.  Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 63–78. London: Routledge. Tucker, Nicholas. 1985. Lullabies and Child Care: A Historical Perspective. In Opening Texts: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of the Child, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 17–27. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Unsigned review of Sing-Song. 2 May 1872. The Nation 357: 294–295. Welsh, Andrew. 1978. The Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wesling, Donald. 1980. The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wimsatt, W.K. 1954. One Relation of Rhyme to Reason. In The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 153–166. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

CHAPTER 12

Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: “Leafiness” and Bits of Rhyme Olivia Loksing Moy

In 1819, “Z” of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ridiculed Leigh Hunt’s sonnet contests as a “fashion…among the bardlings…of firing off sonnets at each other.”1 Among those “bardlings” were John Keats, Percy Shelley, Charles Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Ollier. On the first line of “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” Hunt praised, “Such a prosperous opening!” On lines 10–11, he exclaimed, “Ah! that’s perfect! Bravo Keats!”2 These in-time responses capture the immediacy of composition My thanks to Simon Reader and Lee Behlman for their comments and suggested revisions.  John Gibson Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. VI.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Oct. 1819), 76. 2  These reactions were recorded by Charles Cowden Clarke in “Recollections of Keats by an Old School-Fellow” Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 39 (January 1861), 88. 1

O. L. Moy (*) City University of New York, Lehman College, Bronx, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_12

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and excitement of spectatorship inherent in poetry contests—formal, agonistic exchanges of verse among simultaneously present competitors, featuring a time limit, fixed formal constraints, and thematic prompts for the poems produced. By the Victorian era, parlor games featuring riddles, pantomime, and versification had become popular forms of recreation for young adults and children. Word games such as bouts-rimés produced poems in the French tradition of vers de société, mainly resulting in spontaneous, dispensable verse rather than publishable poetry. While verses born of such competitions brought but momentary pleasure to those present at the scene, some were eventually published, appearing in magazines or embedded in prose fiction. Verses could also be copied over into letters or commonplace books, which preserve select lines for us to study today. Some Romantic-­ era contest poems by the Hunt circle later appeared in print, whether in periodicals like The Examiner or in Hunt’s 1818 collection, Foliage; or Poems Original and Translated. William Michael Rossetti’s sonnets for bouts-rimés made their way into the inaugural issue of the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ. And Christina Rossetti immortalized her similarly “spontaneous” lines in fiction, capturing scenes of bouts-rimés being played in a Victorian parlor in her novella Maude. This essay highlights poems composed for nineteenth-century sonnet contests and parlor games, exploring how such forms of social activity produced both ephemeral effusions and lines that lasted, both light verse and dark poetry. It explores verse produced in two contexts: the sonnet contests of the Hunt-Keats circle and the bouts-rimés games played by the Rossetti family. Whether written in the spirit of club sports or sibling rivalry, as collaborative or solo compositions, whether spontaneous or staged, leisurely or combative, both examples provide a counterpoint to the idea of the nineteenth-century sonnet as a lofty, private form showcasing poetic talents through grand structural complexity and architectural ingenuity—as upheld by the archetype of the Romantic and Victorian sonnet sequence. Contest sonnets were written primarily as a pastime, not in professional contexts, providing opportunity for play rather than work. The competitions were occasions for both rivalry and collaboration. Moreover, they produced poems in multiples, through sets and rounds. Far different from the nineteenth-century sonnets typically studied, the verse produced under these conditions raises key questions of distinction: in cases of competition, might winning entries be considered true poems, with losing

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attempts regarded as mere verse? Could drawing-room activities only produce vers de societé, valued for their light subject matter and rhetorical flourishes? How, whether through recitations or circulation, did select poems transcend private group composition and reach a wider, public audience? From the sparring male coterie of the Hunt-Keats circle to the fictional domestic sphere of young girls competing in Rossetti’s Maude, each example of nineteenth-century contest sonnets encompasses elements of the ludic by playing with and “playing at” the craft of sonnet-making. Memorialized through a range of speech or print, these verses ran the full spectrum of public circulation. Some saw only spontaneous recitation, others informal circulation. Some were subjected to critique and mockery in print periodicals, others anthologized for generations. This rich textual history reveals a complex, layered ranking of winners and losers: “winning” sonnets that emerged in more permanent forms to endure over time, versus those relegated to serve as a fleeting pastime that have since disappeared, “lost” from historical view. Devoting attention to such verses—those produced under a ticking clock’s countdown or evaluated under reflexive “snap” judgments—illuminates a new rubric of winning features that challenge the sometimes nebulous poetic traits that have traditionally dictated the contest of canonization. * * * In his essay on Leigh Hunt’s Foliage collection, Jeffrey Cox describes sonnet games within the Hunt-Keats circle as lively contests that “sprang out of conversations, when the poets would agree to write to the topic in a given period of time[,] usually fifteen minutes; the poems would then be read aloud to the group …. Sometimes appearing in print together, such poems immediately announced the group’s collective efforts.”3 This emphasis on collaborative authorship under the attribution of a collective already departs from common notions of Romantic poetic authorship and the idea of sonnet writing as a solitary effort. Among the poems that resulted from these contests are Keats’s “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket” and Hunt’s “To the Grasshopper and the Cricket” from December 1816, as well as Hunt’s, Keats’s, and Shelley’s poems on the 3  Jeffrey N.  Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: A Cockney Manifesto,” in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Routledge, 2003), 62.

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Nile.4 According to Jack Stillinger, Keats’s “Written in Disgust at Vulgar Superstition” and Hunt’s “To Percy Shelley, on the Degrading Notions of Deity” were also likely products of a sonnet contest.5 A still grander sonnet contest took place on the subject of the sun: participants included Horace Smith, Charles Cowden Clark, and Charles Ollier.6 Perhaps most famous is the competition between Horace Smith and Percy Shelley that yielded “Ozymandias.”7 These games often culminated with some type of laudatory performance: participants staged awards, ceremoniously crowning the victors, as memorialized in Keats’s “On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt” and Hunt’s “On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from the Same.” Beyond these informal gatherings, Keats’s friends sought out formalized clubs to warrant more regular occasions for indulging in such literary challenges. James Rice, John Hamilton Reynolds, and Benjamin Bailey were members of the Zetosophian Society, “a literary, cultural, and social club composed of fourteen young men, most of them ‘of very considerable genius.’”8 Byron and Hobhouse proposed forming a “Couplet Club,” while John Hamilton Reynolds had joined the Breidden Society in Shropshire. The latter held an annual festival on Breidden Hill where a poet ferneat was crowned after a festival of feasting, poetry, singing, and dancing. (In this endearing variation, ferns were used, because no laurels were available.) These clubs were simultaneously sites of competition and cultural production.9

4  Hunt’s “On the Nile” is included in Foliage. All three poems, Hunt’s “On the Nile,” Shelley’s “To the Nile,” and Keats’s “The Nile” are included in The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Volume 2, 254, 644. 5  Stillinger, Jack. “Keats’s Extempore Effusions and the Question of Intentionality.” In Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 309–10. Cited in Jeffrey N.  Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 66. 6  Joan Coldwell, “Charles Cowden Clarke’s Commonplace Book and Its Relationship to Keats,” Keats Shelley Journal 10 (Winter 1961), 90. Cited in Cox, 66. 7  Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), 103, cited in Cox, Poetry and Politics, 66. Reynolds also wrote a sonnet, “Sweet Poets of the gentile antique line” dated “8 February 1818,” which is followed by Keats’s sonnet, “Blue! – ‘Tis the Life of Heaven,” marked as an “answer” to the previous one. Ibid., 76. 8  Cox, Poetry and Politics, 4. The Zetosophian Society (meaning “I seek wisdom”) was comprised of fourteen men who sought wisdom by workshopping one another’s written work. They were committed to reading and writing one essay per month and providing literary feedback to other members. 9  Ibid.

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The products of such gatherings could last far beyond a few hours of competitive composition. Tracing the life of a poem—from its creation during a contest, to its succeeding afterlives in transmission—reveals both the editorial paths of an individual poem and the busy interchanges of a full circle of poets. They leave a constellation of scribal tracks that map out movements and exchanges we might reconstruct today. The sonnets on the grasshopper and cricket and sonnets on the Nile were copied into notebooks or letters, then later published in Leigh Hunt’s Foliage, a collection whose poems capture with immediacy this coterie life. As Cox notes, “even when published apart, they draw the reader from…Hunt’s Foliage to the linked poem in Keats’s Poems, weaving the group back together, inviting the reader to recreate at the level of the texts the artistic exchanges these writers had lived.”10 The personalities legible from the titles alone produce a dynamic bibliography of walking footnotes. One poem in the collection, titled “To Henry Robertson, John Gattie, and Vincent Novello, Not Keeping Their Appointed Hour,” simply chastises tardy participants of the group. Even if the lines of poetry themselves are not so memorable, the front and back matter of the verses, with subtitles and notes, offer a sketch of the dramatis personae involved, enumerating key players at the scene of the drama, documenting who crowned whom or who defeated whom—offering up an indirect record of “meeting minutes” informally set down for posterity. Aside from their lively, informative paratexts, the afterlives of fleeting sonnet contests alter our understanding of other textual forms, including commonplace books. Hunt’s and Keats’s poems were copied into women’s albums and commonplace books, including those of Thomasine Leigh and Charles Cowden Clarke, as well as the so-called Reynolds-Hood commonplace books. The spontaneous “extempore effusion” poems written in the margins of other books became further sites for recording collective work among the Hunt circle.11 For  even those that did not see publication in The Examiner or in Leigh Hunt’s Foliage enjoyed what Harold Love calls “scribal publication,” the circulation of poems in manuscript among members of the circle.12 Drawing on Margaret Ezell’s ideas of “coterie circles” and “communal creativity,” Love maintains that  Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage,” 62.  Ibid., 74–75. 12  Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10 11

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contest poems of the Hunt group were written “in ‘companionship’ rather than competition.”13 A greater recognition of the role of sonnet contests and their literary culture more broadly have long helped to decenter the myth of Romantic genius, debunking the ideal of poetry produced in isolation. As Cox attests, the scholarship of Jerome McGann, Donald Reiman, Jack Stillinger, Marjorie Levinson, and Susan Wolfson have liberated us to “no longer view the romantic poet as the solitary singer declaiming alone on the mountaintop or sitting in isolation, pondering a bird’s song.”14 Instead, it allows for an understanding of second-generation Romantic poetry “as a social product in a quite mundane—ordinary and worldly—way… arising from the social interchange of a particular group of men and women.”15 The inclusion of “contest poems” described above indicates commonplace books as collaborative texts that emerged from the “coterie practices” that were central to the mode of literary production in the Hunt-Keats circle. For several poems, Hunt’s Foliage served as a final stop after the stepping stone of scribal publication.16 While two thirds of this collection draw more seriously from translation and classical Greek inspiration, the dedicated “Sonnet” section draws mostly from recent contests, those poems emphasizing the playfulness and immediacy of occasional verse. Again, the titles in the Table of Contents tell a story of their own. Early on in the collection, “To Percy Shelley, on the degrading notions of deity” is followed by another sonnet to Shelley, titled simply “To the same.” Two 13   Margaret J.  M. Ezell, “The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices,” Modern Philology 89 (1992): 323–40. “While such contests, striking the modern reader as dilettantish, can be seen to reduce poetry to a parlor game, I think they suggest instead the deep connection between the verse of the Hunt circle and lived life…” Cox, Poetry and Politics, 65–66. 14  Ibid., 6. 15  Ibid., 7. 16  Compare such poems to, for instance, Keats’ “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” composed as part of a fifteen-minute sonnet contest, which was published as a part of Poems. Hunt republished this six months later in the September 21,1817 Examiner, appending his own sonnet afterwards, and presenting the two sonnets together as “I. From Poems by John Keats” and “II. By Leigh Hunt; Never Before Published.” Here, the paratextual labeling of Keats’ poem serves as an embedded advertisement for the 1817 Poems. Such a juxtaposition has invited scholars such as Duncan Wu to analyze the two poems comparatively and in conjunction. Hunt’s sonnet alone was later printed in Foliage (1818). See Susan Wolfson, John Keats (Longman Pearson, 2007) and Duncan Wu, “Keats and ‘The Cockney School,’” The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP: 2001), 46.

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poems later, “To John Keats” is followed by a sonnet “On receiving a crown ivy, to the same,” which is then followed by another sonnet, “On the same.” This occurs yet again after “To — —, M.D. on his giving me a lock of Milton’s Hair,” which is followed by a sonnet “To the same, on the same subject” and yet another sonnet “To the same, on the same occasion.” Foliage inevitably highlights elements of repetition and similitude that perhaps sharpen the verse-poetry divide discussed in the introduction to this volume and by Herbert Tucker in Chap. 2. At the same time, Hunt’s tolerance for redundancy in this collection shows his capacity less as an editor and more as a collector of verses. With its loose curation, Foliage feels like a compendium of unabridged verses, lending a sense of draftiness or experimentation to these “selected poems.” By sequencing the sonnets in this way, Hunt establishes a sense of gathering and rehearsing—a practice that prioritizes the process of sonnet composition over the outcome. The poems, though not singularly excellent, are apt examples of versification, decent sonnets in shape and in sense. Printed in succession, they mark a coming together, manifesting that “sociality” Hunt features so prominently in his preface. As his artisans throw their clay pots on the potter’s wheel, Hunt, as head of the workshop, displays verses on his shelf if they pass muster and make it to the kiln for firing—if they hold water, if their sense and structure hold up. Surely no “Ozymandias,” these poems are not perfect Grecian urns by any means, but rather verses that garnered ferns and not laurels. Just good enough to be memorable (and perhaps not worthy of being memorized), they are placed on display among many others. Clearly, Hunt’s juxtaposition of three sonnets “on the same” subject in the collection do not demand serious comparative analysis, nor are they meant to be analyzed as triptychs, as with the case of Christina Rossetti’s The Thread of Life. Instead, Hunt provides us with a new model of sonnet writing: sonnets written in multiplicity, some in mediocrity, and presented as a group of similar objects. They are a far cry from the regaled or holy sonnet sequences of Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Lisle Bowles, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rather, these are middling sonnets that still found their way to print publication. They approach something like varioria, or table talk in verse; and they conscript the idea of the sequence for social rather than formal purposes. Such versification disrupts our sense of sonnet writing from the archetype of the Romantic or Victorian sonnet sequence—methodically planned, architecturally sound, and grand in scheme.

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What new light might Hunt’s Foliage collection shed on our ideas of poetry and verse? His Preface, subtitled “including cursory observations on poetry and cheerfulness,” shares a theory prioritizing verses that produce enjoyment and enact sociality. Such cheerful spirit and easy enjoyment are showcased in the collection’s sixth sonnet, one presented “To Miss K,” which actively plays with the idea of nature, leaves, and what I call “leafiness”—especially in the material composition of the poem, which reused scraps of paper. In “To Miss K: written on a piece of paper which happened to be headed with a long list of trees,” the poet addresses Bess as “your Leafyship” (l. 10) rather than “your Ladyship.” He honors Miss K: “You’re a rural queen, finished and fanned…And now what sylvan homage would it please / Your Leafyship to have?” Not nature’s jewels, in the tradition of Christopher Marlowe or Sir Walter Raleigh, “but two things richer far, / A verse, and a staunch friend;—and here they are.” Hunt also proclaims that “real poetry” is defined by the accessible and the attainable, drawing on elements of country enjoyment and luxuries in everyday lived life.17 As the Preface affirms, the pages or leaves (and “leafiness”) of occasional verses in Foliage are less elevated, less city-like, and thus more democratic than high poetry. Of course, the private jokes from Hunt’s sonnet contests, boasting a boyish exclusivity, were sorely attacked by conservatives, who saw in them petty immaturity. The contests became fodder for John Gibson Lockhart or “Z,” who took great pleasure in lambasting “the Cockney School.” In the same 1818 review of Foliage cited at the opening of this essay, he blasts the Hunt group for thinking these “poets belong to a higher order of beings, and the Rafael of the Cockneys need not to have blushed to paint the divine countenance of their Milton.”18 The review harps repeatedly on “Mr Hunt’s notions of sociality”19 and disparages the thunderous and prolific sonnet contests for the “firing off” of sonnets that “was even more annoying than the detonating balls”: We have heard them cracking off in the lobbies of the Theatres, and several exploded close to our ear one morning in Sir John Leicester’s gallery. Like other nuisances of the kind, they are now laughed down; and, indeed, after 17  For Hunt, the subject of “real poetry” is “a delight in rural luxury.” He insists that such luxury is “much more in the reach of every one, and much more beautiful in reality, than people’s fondness for considering all poetry as fiction would imply.” Preface to Foliage, p. 18. 18  “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” 70. 19  Z also criticizes “Mr. Hunt’s Sociality” and his “Love of Sociality.”

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Leigh Hunt’s death, who was at the top of the fashion, it dwindled away, though sometimes even yet a stray sonneteer is to be found cantering along on his velocipede.20 But one sonnet—two sonnets to John Keats, do not suffice—and we have a third ‘on the same.” [Quotes from “On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from the Same.”] There is a pair of blockheads for you! John Keats had no more right to dress up Leigh Hunt in this absurd fashion, than he had to tar and feather him—and we do not doubt, that if Leigh Hunt had ever had the misfortune to have been tarred and feathered, he would have written a sonnet on his plumification, and described himself as a Bird of Paradise.21

Z critiques their versification as noisy and proliferating. He objects to sonnet writing for sport (or for battle), with Hunt returning Reynolds “sonnet for sonnet.” Not only did the Cockneys battle on the playing field, they flaunted their self-celebration with absurd rankings and prizes: “No doubt, he rung the bell for the ladies, and the children, and the servants, and probably sent out for his favourite ‘washerwoman.’ When he dressed for dinner, did the ivy wreath still continue to deck his regal temples? Did he sip tea in it? Play a rubber at whist? And finally, did he go to bed in it?”22 Lockhart’s emphasis here is on the preening, overdressing of “Cockney poets” who claimed laurels when they merited none, mistaking their own low victories for high ones through occasional verse. But as distasteful as he found these multitudinous  sonnet sparrings, Lockhart actively brought these rounds of games to life, unwittingly preserving them for posterity through his own published critiques. Just as readers of today might follow one sonnet to another from Hunt’s clues in Foliage, gaining intimate acquaintance with the daily motions of that circle, so too does Z trace the humming activity of sonnet contest rebuttals even as he registers his disenchantment. In his meticulous criticisms of their dynamic collaborations, Z becomes subsumed in tracing the movements of the Hunt circle and their sonnet contests, in his own way becoming an eager witness and audience to the games, an unwitting participant in this system of scribal publication and condemnatory afterlives. Lockhart,  Ibid., 76.  Z continues: “From John Keats the transition is not difficult to John Hamilton Reynolds—for he too had written lines on the story of Rimini—though by nature fit for far other occupation—and accordingly Mr Hunt returns him sonnet for sonnet…” Ibid., 75. 22  Ibid. 20 21

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their greatest detractor, in some ways proves to be the closest reader of the Hunt circle’s written tracks, attuned to their sonnets’ subtitles and dedications, and even requoting sonnets in The Examiner in full. Lockhart effectively provides a “roll call” with each name he includes to gleefully eviscerate. Like readers of today, he is an honorary spectator: though we cannot join the competitors in real time, we can capture their spontaneity at a remove, from a distance of time and space. Z’s rude amplification has helped these poems to last beyond their moment, expanding the reach from Hunt’s spectators to the audience of Blackwood’s circulation and even those of us in present day. The antagonistic periodical culture of the early nineteenth century extended the “shelf life” and print life of many contest poems written in spontaneous camaraderie. More than two hundred years later, when looking back at sonnets produced out of competition, it is tempting to center on the textual “winners”—those published verses that have lasted generations, boasting survival and longevity. But along the trajectory from sonnet contest to commonplace book entry to print, three distinct ranks of versification emerge. At the very least, sonnets that were orally shared at contests but not copied down might merit a crown of ferns for effort. Remarkable verses worthy of recording in commonplace books or recapitulated in letters and albums were winners in their own right—deserving perhaps a laurel wreath. Those then selected for inclusion in collections like Hunt’s Foliage and reprinted in Romantic anthologies today might meet the gold standard. “Ozymandias,” for instance, has survived far beyond its initial compositional context. The poem’s very conceit, though faded in its glory, seems to declare the winning verses over the losers: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” It is the “leafiness” of most verse composition—its ease of spontaneous creation, coupled with its potentially limited shelf life—that perhaps demarcates it from poetry. That leafiness also increases its circulation and community consumption, elucidating yet another marker of verse—its intrinsic sociality. The footprints and manuscript tracks are often more interesting than the verses themselves, introducing a mode of poetry and (non)-material culture in which its circulated, lived life is more important than its immortality. Leafy verses can be saved from becoming ephemera through scribal publications and print publication. From the regal verses of “Ozymandias,” to the “middling nature” of the sonnets on Milton’s hair or the grasshopper and the cricket, to mere throwaway verses that

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have not even survived for us to consider today, only a partial imprint of past sonnet contests endures through its own differential history—making those “leafy” verses that survived all the more interesting to encounter. * * * While communal compositional practices signal a move away from the cliché of solitary Romantic poets declaiming outdoors, high on mountaintops, versification through parlor games situates poetry production as an indoor activity. I turn next to poetry games in the context of the Victorian household, where sitting rooms in the middle-class home became the preeminent domestic space. Family and friends played parlor games within the intimate parlor or the more formal drawing room, the most public spaces in the Victorian household which held the family’s best furniture, works of art, books, and games.23 Within the space of the drawing room, creating the illusion of social status was a game in itself; lush furnishings signaled a family’s class, wealth, and respectability.24 Popular entertainment included dramatic games such as charades and tableaux vivante, as well as logic or word play games, including “The Minister’s Cat,” “Questions and Answers,” and “The Endless Story,” each effectively a game of communal composition.25 Losers often had to play “forfeits” or penalties after each round. These could be anything from stunts and dares, to puzzles, to a kiss. Bouts-rimés fit this setting of light entertainment. Bouts-rimés were invented as a verse-making game in seventeenth-­ century Paris, in which participants were meant to incorporate given rhyme words to create a witty poem that should seem as uncontrived as possible. In some iterations, the given rhyme words, often presented on cards, were made as bizarre and incongruous as possible. Meaning “rhymed ends,” bouts-rimés refers to both the game itself and the resulting poems they produced. The word “bouts” also connotes bits, pieces, or scraps from which a poem in its entirety must be formulated, aligning the process of weaving together words with other feminized parlor activities such as sewing. If “light verse” could be comically low, verging on nonsense, as Lee Behlman explains it, then bouts-rimés struck the middle ground and was valued as vers de société, “defined by balance and  See Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home, 176.  Ilona Dénes, “Parlor Games,” in Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, 2009, 470. 25  Ibid., 471–472. 23 24

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detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical.”26 Emphasis was placed on the idea of polish, or more specifically, creating palatable verse within a given time frame: nonsense made presentable before the clock winds down. The origin story of bouts-rimés sounds like a light joke in itself. As the tale went, in 1648 the poet François Dulot claimed he had been robbed of many precious documents, including nearly three hundred sonnets. When his friends expressed shock at the sheer size of his output, he then admitted they were only blank skeletons: he had jotted down the end rhymes but hadn’t completed the poems in their entirety. Though at first regarded as a joke by all who heard it, the model was soon taken up as a fashionable game. In 1654, Jean François Sarasin composed Dulot vaincu (“Dulot Defeated”) and La Défaite des bouts-rimés (“The defeat of rhymed-ends”), satires of Dulot and the game’s origin story. Since its playful and mocking inception, bouts-rimés continued to be enjoyed well into the nineteenth century, to the extent that by 1864, Alexandre Dumas pére, a strong proponent of the game, invited all French poets to show off their skills by composing poems to set rhymes. He published all 350 of the responses he received in a volume the following year.27 The practice of bouts-rimés spread from France to Great Britain but only gained popularity there during the nineteenth century. Early eighteenth-century British mentions of bouts-rimés were unsurprisingly steeped in anti-French sentiment. In 1711, Joseph Addison wrote harshly about “Boutz Rimez” in The Spectator 60, declaring French attempts to restore its practice as the greatest “Instance of the Decay of Wit and Learning among the French.” He mocks a French poet who professedly took three to four months to fill the rhymes he collected to meet the monthly November challenge posed to the public: - - - - - - - - - - - - Lauriers - - - - - - - - - - - - Guerriers - - - - - - - - - - - - Musette - - - - - - - - - - - - Lisette - - - - - - - - - - - - Cesars - - - - - - - - - - - - Etendars 26  Lee Behlman, “The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société,” Victorian Poetry 56, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 477–491. 27  Alexandre Dumas, Bouts-rimés, publiés par Alexandre Dumas (Paris: Librairie du Petit Journal, 1865).

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- - - - - - - - - - - - Houlette - - - - - - - - - - - - Folette28

Ever the Francophobe, Addison suspects foul play at hand: “Would not one be apt to believe that the Author played booty, and did not make his List of Rhymes till he had finished his Poem?”29 Yet while he wholly disapproved of the French popularizing this “foolish kind of Wit” across the Channel, bouts-rimés would come to be adapted into English among Victorian families, resulting in a range of compositions—from poems on trivial themes meant to amuse through nonsense and wordplay, to verses that found new life and functions in other genres, such as fiction. Perhaps the most recognized practitioners of English bouts-rimés are the Rossetti siblings: Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgiana. Growing up in a family of talented London artists, they encouraged one another creatively through household games even before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Toward the end of 1847, Gabriel urged his siblings try their hand at bouts-rimés as practical training, “competing against each other and the clock.”30 Due to oppressively rainy weather at Brighton, Christina and William “bombarded Gabriel daily with rhymes and sonnets.”31 As William reported, Christina was so skilled that she once composed twenty verses in under ten minutes. As for the more difficult sonnets, she purportedly composed the first of a series in nine minutes, then completed another in five. As ­biographer Jan Marsh reports, “all were scribbled on small sheets of ruled paper where the rhyme words were already penciled and showing few visible fumblings or second thoughts. At the end of each poem she noted the time taken, which was half the point of the game. Seven of the twenty sonnets were deemed good enough to be copied, with minor alterations,  Joseph Addison, The Spectator 60 (May 9, 1711), 226.  Ibid. 30  Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 82. W.M.  Rossetti writes, “Our brother Dante Gabriel and myself were, towards 1848, greatly addicted to writing sonnets together to bouts-rimés; most of my verses published in The Germ—and this remark applies not to sonnets alone—were thus composed. Christina did not do much in the like way; but, being in my company at Brighton in the summer of 1848, she consented to try her hand….After the Brighton days she renewed this exercise hardly at all.” W.M.  Rossetti, The Complete Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), 490. 31  Marsh, 84. 28 29

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into the notebook; the remainder were rejected but not destroyed.”32 One sonnet set includes subjects as diverse as a thrush, ennui, a gnashing madman, and English summers. With plans for The Germ underway, William and Christina were exchanging bouts-rimés at the same time that William was composing a long blank verse narrative for the magazine.33 Christina was at Charlotte Street, William at the seaside resort of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. As evidenced in William’s letters, the game was often played remotely, by post, with a delay of several weeks’ time between rounds: “To your rhymes I have a rather intense sonnet, which cannot miss your approbation … On the back are some rhymes for you to fill up; they belong to one of my old things.”34 Compared to the face-to-face contests of the Hunt-Keats circle, these competitions were intimate but conducted at a remove, though they likewise leave an epistolary trail of “meeting minutes” and other records of contest details. While most later critics have considered Christina’s “sonnets written to bouts-rimés” to be inferior verses, I suggest reading the siblings’ sonnet games as verse-in-training for their later works, which developed into far grander schemes.35 With D.G. Rossetti, we see this in The House of Life, his compilation built from smaller grouped units, including the sixteen sonnets “Of Life, Love, and Death,” the four “Willowwood” sonnets, as well as the “Kelmscott Love Sonnets” to Jane Morris. Christina Rossetti’s Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets expands upon the construction of 14x14 sonnets from her earlier sequence Monna Innominata to include twenty-eight consecutive poems. From this perspective, the practice of playing successive rounds of bouts-rimés served as an important antecedent to the elaborate Victorian sonnet cycles and sequences we know today. We see evidence of Christina Rossetti using these verses as building blocks in intentional and expansive ways even in her early prose writings. Of particular interest for understanding this modeling process is her semi-­ autobiographical novella Maude, which features three young girls, the story’s main characters, playing bouts-rimés. Maude, the poet-protagonist, must confront problems of female sociability when she attempts to define herself as a true poet, not just a casual versifier. In Rossetti’s world, these  Ibid.  Ibid., 103 34  W.M.  Rossetti, The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti. With some Supplementary Letters and Appendices (London: Brown, Langham & Co., 1908), 8. 35  Rebecca Crump, 211. 32 33

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questions of authorial command and agency were certainly gendered. Many of the bouts-rimés verses that survived in print did so due to the positions of Leigh Hunt and William Michael Rossetti, well-connected men with the means and public stature to publish. But the relative ease with which these poems could be transformed from their original, private occasional context to enjoy public consumption poses a pointed contrast to the norms of public presentation typically  afforded to women, especially young girls. Christina Rossetti grapples with these themes in Maude in complex, even tortured ways. Maude was written in 1850 when Rossetti was nineteen years old, but it would not be published until a posthumous version appeared in 1897, with an introductory note by W.  M. Rossetti. Drawing on Christina’s childhood experiences, it showcases bouts-rimés in the context of female domesticity. She hated needlework, writing to William that she wished that they could “write bouts-rimés and sonnets and be subdued together.”36 Effectively playing a round of bouts-rimés alone and composing three sonnets to include in Maude, Christina Rossetti enacts what Mélody Enjoubault calls the “re-poétisation” of these sonnets in her prose work, embedding them within a scene of staged parlor games played among three girls: Agnes, Magdalen, and Maude.37 In an opening scene of the novella, a competition of bouts-rimés foreshadows the fates of the three girls at a birthday party.38 The reluctant Agnes writes a simple poem in the conditional about what she would rather be doing than writing a poem for this game: “Would that I were a turnip white, / Or raven black, / Or miserable hack…Or weary donkey with a laden back...Rather than writing.”39 Maude, the expert poet in the room, offers a single critique of this poem, stating that it is lacking in steady iambic pentameter: “Might I however venture to hint that my sympathy with your sorrows would have been greater, had they been expressed

36  Kathleen Jones, Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), 28. 37  Mélody Enjoubault, “‘If You Will Write About it in Rhyme’: Christina Rossetti et L’Exercice du Bout-rimé” Études anglaises 64–3 (2011): 297. 38  Parts of these close readings of Maude have been previously published in The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022). For a full discussion of the Gothic valences of Rossetti’s Maude, see Chapter 2, “The Gothic Poetess: Self-Confinement in the Sonnet Cell.” 39  Rossetti, Maude, 271.

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in metre?”40 Agnes’ sonnet, which often dips into dimeter and tetrameter, is not formally close enough to standard sonnet form to elicit true sympathy. Maude’s judgment prioritizes form over content, representing her as a cold, unfeeling girl, the caricature of a strict poetess driven by numbers and meter. As William attested in a prefatory note to the collected poems, “The sonnet a (it will at once be observed) is not a true sonnet at all, having lines of unequal strength. This was, of course, inaptitute of the young lady who is supposed to have indited a. None the less I give the three sonnets together, as showing how readily Christina could utilize the same rhymes for three entirely distinct lines of thought or subject.”41 Next, a girl named Magdalen offers a poem that imagines the dutiful work of “good fairies dressed in white,” busy wits menial tasks to keep all right with nature and the world.42 These whimsical creatures sweep away faded leaves, bind back stray tendrils, teach water-lily heads to “swim,” and dye pale roses a warmer shade of pink. Magdalen’s sonnet celebrates religious and formal order, where feminine figures keep things where they belong, maintaining a life that is measured, tilled, and  pruned. When asked her opinion (“Well, Maude?”), Maude offers no technical appraisal of the poem, declining any comment except to say that hearing Magdalen’s verses “make me tremble for my own.” This is because Magdalen’s poem is generative, offering a rustic vision of gardening, hard work, and devotion to maintaining God’s creations. Maude’s sonnet, meanwhile, offers visions of destruction, presenting the punitive side of God where form is not sustained but critiqued. Even under directions to compose light-hearted verse, Maude’s sonnet betrays an underlying darkness and cynicism. Some ladies dress in muslin full and white Some gentlemen in cloth succinct and black; Some patronize a dog-cart, some a hack, Some think a painted Clarence only right. Youth is not always such a pleasing sight, Witness a man with tassels on his back; Or woman in a great-coat like a sack Towering above her sex with horrid height. If all the world were water fit to drown  Ibid., 270.  W.M. Rossetti, The Complete Poetical Works, 490. 42  Ibid. 40 41

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There are some whom you would not teach to swim, Rather enjoying if you saw them sink; Certain old ladies dressed in girlish pink, With roses and geraniums on their gown: — Go to the Bason, poke them o’er the rim.’ —43

The opening octave of Maude’s final sonnet samples the broad diversity of life in society, but the sestet is smugly satirical, with a touch of violence. The noticeable anaphora in the first four lines reflects the dogged insistence that drives Maude’s cataloging of the world, cast in perfect iambic pentameter. This transition from the generally harmless octave to the punitive sestet reveals an aversion to poor fashion tastes, or whenever one’s dress does not suit the person inside: men should not wear tassels; women should not be too tall nor wear masculine coats; old ladies should not wear flowery dresses meant for young girls. As a poet criticizing her society, playing both contestant and judge, Maude cannot accept when form does not fit content. Her bouts-rimés sonnet argues that every person should submit to the decorum of proper form, dressing appropriately to one’s age, height, complexion, and beauty, without masking one’s true nature behind costume. The difficulty of creating a decorous pairing between dress and personality, form and content, is at its heart the very challenge of bouts-rimés; and Maude’s sonnet promotes a certain determinism that resists the flexibility of appearance or dress. Fittingly, in this poetic game, the form is already provided: the skeleton of fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, and the end rhymes are pre-established. While each character pens a poem, it becomes evident that the real contestant is Rossetti, the single author behind it all, who must create three distinct poems that match the characters of Agnes, Magdalen, and Maude. Using the same tools, she displays her technical skill in matching formal appearances with the personality of each girl while using the same words of “white,” “black,” “hack,” “right,” “sight,” “back,” “sack,” “height,” “drown,” “swim,” “sink,” “pink,” “gown,” and “rim.” The three bouts-rimés poems in Maude predict the work in Rossetti’s better-known “The Thread of Life,” three sonnets interwoven with repeated words and sounds that produce meaning through their interconnectedness. But set in a fictional context, the three rounds of bouts-rimés (all written by Rossetti) are most successful for their  Ibid., 271.

43

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differences, marking the personality of each individual character, whether Agnes, Magdalen, or and Maude, as distinct and narratively convincing. Maude demonstrates how, when framed in the context of fiction, the poetic building blocks of bouts-rimés can produce a formidable new method of depicting narrative character through lyric variations. Here, Rossetti reveals character in the way that she variably frames the word “drown” in these three sonnets, refracting it through her characterizations of the three women elsewhere in her novella. Agnes uses it figuratively and in the subjunctive: “Or would I were straw catching as I drown / (A wretched landsman I who cannot swim).” Magdalen negates the potential for drowning: “fishing for a fly lest it should drown.” Only Maude creates a picture of death through her dry wit—and an apocalyptic version of death at that: “If all the world were water fit to drown / There are some whom you would not teach to swim, / Rather enjoying if you saw them sink.” Bouts-rimés verses and their end rhymes, imported into Rossetti’s fiction, thus perform an important role in both novelistic and characterological work. These three sonnets have another important function: as verse in multiples, they contribute to a poetics of relationality that finds value in similarity yet difference. Through the use of repetition and sequence, these multiple verses articulate individual variations within small groups, showing movement and variation while remaining within the limitations the sonnet form imposes. As the sometimes dark or gloomy content portends, this is not light verse—not something humorous like a limerick or comic newspaper poem—but rather a kind of mass-version of the sonnet, where templates and formulas allow characters to leave compositional imprints or biographical tracks that play a bigger narrative role in the novella at large, outside of the poem itself and within the fiction’s social circle of characters. For Ronjaunee Chatterjee, reading for Rossetti’s “mode of minimal difference” is a key strategy for attending to the necessarily gendered (and racialized) work of lyric individuation among women and girls. In Feminine Singularity, Chatterjee explores the politics of gathering feminine subjectivity around likeness, rather than simply distinctions of sameness or difference—a mechanism  equally employed in Rossetti’s poetry as her prose. She focuses on instances of sisterhood and envy in which likeness produces, rather than destroys, feminine individuality, showcasing  the “lure of similarity” in the poems “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude” from Goblin Market, as well as the “preoccupation with different forms of

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likeness” in short stories from Speaking Likenesses. Both examples are important companions to Maude and the sonnets discussed here.44 Maude’s bouts-rimés sonnets require formal restriction and predetermination on multiple levels. First, the typical strictures of the sonnet are intensified by the dictated end rhymes to each line of bouts-rimés. Second, the competition among three fictional contestants demands that each player create original works unlike the others. But overriding all this is the unavoidable character revealed in the poems of each young poetess—the fact that while they cannot choose their own line endings, their lot in personality, a sort of literary fate, will choose them instead. Ultimately, each fictional sonnet writer in Maude cannot help but imprint a damning biographical impulse upon her poem. And here we return to the opening scene of the birthday in Maude: among the three girls who agree to play bouts-rimés, one remains unmarried, one becomes a nun, and Maude continues writing verses until she dies young of a mysterious wound. Mary, a fourth girl who declines to participate and only watches the others play, is by the story’s end the one who marries and enjoys a colorful life of travel and family. Writing poetry or even verse does not bode well for these characters. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar support this pessimistic reading by emphasizing the predeterminism behind myths of the woman artist: Maude Foster, “the ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed and self-­ assertive poet—must die, and be replaced by either the wife, the nun, or most likely, the kindly, useful spinster.”45 The verses composed at the parties in Maude thus provide an example of parlor game verses that are not just “light” verse, in theme or in tone. For Daniel Karlin, light verse “occupies that sweet spot between insignificance and portentuousness, between oversignification and no coherent signification at all…The trigger for such poetry is often a skepticism about the conventional triggers of poetic feeling.”46 The dark often overshadows the light in Maude, and we see this especially in the novella’s conflicting experience of a young girl’s melancholy and illness. Illuminating the mingling of light and dark in Rossetti’s bouts-rimés, Gilbert and Gubar note that the scene of writing is always a source of anxiety to Maude: “Plainly, 44  Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-­ Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 7, 23, 102. 45  Sandra M.  Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 552. 46  Ibid.

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the very act of poetic assertion, and its challenge to attempt self-definition or at least self-confrontation, elicits evasions, anxieties, hostilities, in brief ‘painful preoccupation,’ from all competitors, so that the jolly poetry game paradoxically contains the germ of just the gloom it seems to dispel.”47 While the girls are comfortable playing the part of poetess in private—even entwining bay leaves in Maude’s hair as they get dressed for their party—any more public instance of display, such as a drawing room recitation, leaves Maude recoiling and enervated. Particularly in the context of female poetic expression, Maude focalizes incompatibilities between light and dark, high and low, poetry and verse, professional and pastime, through the unexpectedly capacious exercise of parlor games. Toward the end of the novella, Maude suffers a serious accident when her carriage is “overturned” and she can no longer attend Mary’s wedding. She sends a strange epithalamium to Mary, a gloomy poem about three nuns. The carriage accident coincides with a blow to Maude’s poetic confidence; the over-“turning,” like a deadly volta, marks an abrupt end to her prolific output. Never making the final career move from octave to sestet, she soon dies in bed. In Maude, a light-hearted game becomes dreary and dangerous. After Maude’s death, Agnes burns most of her friend’s verses but preserves a remarkable few, surprised to discover such a variety of compositions in her oeuvre. Just as William Michael Rossetti regularized the punctuation and syntax of Christina’s poems before publishing them posthumously and Rebecca Crump served as Rossetti’s editor, so Agnes acts as Maude’s literary executor. Through Maude, Rossetti consciously subvert readers’ expectations of light comic entertainment, not only by highlighting serious elements of poetry and plot, but by reframing vers de société as a useful tool for prose fiction. The bouts-rimés poems—both the verses themselves and the framed staging of rounds of these games—help develop the novella’s plot and system of characterology by affording them a triptych model for comparative character development. Unlike the celebratory fern and laurel crownings of Hunt’s circle, for Maude and her friends, bouts-rimés culminate in conveying idiosyncrasy and even trauma. The immediacy of poetic production invites the poets to channel repressed, dark thoughts, unconsciously suggested by those static end rhymes. Since the sonnets cannot be extensively edited after the few minutes of composition due to the time constraints set by the game, they appear in what Enjoubault describes as  Gilbert and Gubar, 550, quoted in Showalter, xvi.

47

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“blocks of raw text” (“blocs de texte bruts, non sculptées”).48 There is a possible precedent for this: on September 24, 1849, Rossetti herself composed a startling and disturbing bouts-rimés poem that Marsh reads as a possible sign of suppressed trauma.49 The poem marks the sudden appearance of a monster that touches her with its fins, “clammily,” jarringly reminiscent of the rapacious goblin men in Goblin Market.50 So I grew half delirious and quite sick, And through the darkness saw strange faces grin Of monsters at me. One put forth a fin, And touched me clammily. I could not pick A quarrel with it: it began to lick My hand, making meanwhile a piteous din, And shedding human tears: it would begin To near me, then retreat. I heard the quick Pulsation of my heart, I marked the fight Of life and death within me. Then sleep threw Her veil around me; but this thing is true: When I awoke, the sun was at his height, And I wept, sadly, knowing that one new. Creature had love for me, and others spite.51

Published as “A Bouts-Rimés Sonnet” in the 1908 edition of her poems edited by William, these lines could invite interpretation that tends toward oversignification (via Marsh) or no coherent signification at all (if deemed throwaway lines from a round of verse). They might be said to rest comfortably in Karlin’s middle ground, that “sweet spot between insignificance and portentousness.”52 As we saw in Maude, the game of bouts-rimés yields poems that, alone, can each stand as light verse, but when arranged within a larger system of fiction or biography take on functions and uses that do not leave meaning to chance end-rhymes. Moreover, the proliferation of verse, similar though not identical, allows for articulation of  Enjoubault, 291.  Marsh suggests this may possibly be sexual violence or advances from her father. Marsh, 258–259. 50  Marsh, 104–5. 51  Christina Georgiana Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti, with memoir and notes &c by William Michael Rossetti (Macmillan and Co.: London, 1908), 423. 52  See Lee Behlman’s discussion of Karlin on light verse in “The Case of Light Verse, of Vers de Société,” p. 488. 48 49

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characterological difference that puts poetic techniques to narrative, fictional use. For Rossetti, bouts-rimés offered her a tool to build a fascinating system of characterology that she found useful in her early experiments in fiction. Nuances of the sonnet, multiplied manifold and arranged in sequence, become essential to the development of the novella’s plot. Maude: A Story for Girls suggests that bouts-rimés are not so offhand or casual, but deeply rooted in the subconscious of the poet-competitor: her personality, her potential, her imprint. Hunt’s circle of poet “bardlings” and Rossetti’s fictional world of aspiring poetesses present sonnets written for contests that, in daily practice, were composed in community, not in solitude. They produced multiple sonnets in succession far different from the lofty, landmark sonnet sequences and sonnet cycles of nineteenth-century literature typically studied with great attention. And though seemingly mere occasional verses, these contest poems had both a sense of play and usefulness to them, even when written for entertainment and not for professional output. Such poems, enjoyed for the process, the challenge, and sociality— rather than outcome or immortality—showcase some of the advantages of verse over poetry: they do not prioritize winners over losers in print history, but underscore instead the value of the practice of sonnet writing. Rather than an end in themselves, the poems produced in these sonnet contests, at times becoming ephemera or near-ephemera, played a role in larger systems and communities, whether for poets and novelists in training, or members of gentlemen’s clubs and literary societies. The ludic values of practice and play become integral to the virtue of “leafiness” in verse, marked by the common, dispensable, and easy nature of lines which sometimes led to dark verses, not just lighthearted enjoyment. Bouts-rimés cards or Foliage-inspired leaves, the material touchstones of such verse, replace the stone-like gravitas of sonnets like “Ozymandias,” exchanging bay laurels for ferns. Despite the fact that many nineteenth-century verses from sonnet contests and parlor games have been lost to us, those that have survived—in letters, commonplace books, magazines, anthologies, and fiction—help us reconsider the full range of possibilities in a poem’s scribal histories, even as a “moment’s monument.”

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References Addison, Joseph. The Spectator 60 (May 9, 1711): 223–227. Behlman, Lee. 2018. The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société. Victorian Poetry 56 (4): 477–491. Chatterjee, Ronjaunee. 2022. Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Clarke, Charles Cowden. 1861. Recollections of Keats by an Old School-Fellow. Atlantic Monthly 7 (39): 86–100. Cox, Jeffrey N. 1998. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: A Cockney Manifesto. In Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe, 58–77. London: Routledge. Crump, Rebecca W. 1972. Eighteen Moments’ Monuments: Christina Rossetti’s Bouts-Rimes Sonnets in the Troxell Collectino. PULC 33: 210–229. Dénes, Ilona. 2009. Parlor Games. Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society: 470–472. Enjoubault, Mélody. 2011. ‘If You Will Write About it in Rhyme’: Christina Rossetti et L’Exercice du Bout-rimé. Études anglaises 64–3: 288–303. Ezell, Margaret J.M. 1992. The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices. Modern Philology 89: 323–340. Flanders, Judith. 2004. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: Norton. Hunt, Leigh. 1818. Foliage; or Poems Original and Translated. London: C. and J. Ollier. Jones, Kathleen. 1992. Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti, 28. New York: St Martin’s Press. Karlin, Daniel. 1998. Introduction to The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. New York: Penguin. Keats, John. 1895. The Poetical Works of John Keats, Volume 2. Edited with notes and appendix by H. Buxton Forman. New York: Crowell & Company. Leighton, Angela. 1990. ‘When I am dead, my dearest’: The Secret of Christina Rossetti. Modern Philology 87 (4): 373–388. Love, Harold. 1993. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margetson, Stella. 1983. Playing by the Rules: Victorian Parlour Games. Country Life (December 1, 1983). Marsh, Jan. 1994. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Moy, Olivia Loksing. 2022. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reiman, Donald, and Sharon Powers, eds. 1977. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton.

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Rossetti, Christina. 1897. Maude: A Story for Girls; With an Introduction by William Michael Rossetti. London: J. Bowden. Rossetti, William Michael, ed. 1904. The Complete Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti. London: Macmillan. ———, ed. 1908. The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti. With some Supplementary Letters and Appendices. London: Brown, Langham & Co. Sarasin, Jean François. 1663. Les Oeuvres de Monsieur Sarasin. Paris: Thomas Jolly. Showalter, Elaine, ed. 1993. Christina Rossetti and Dinah Mulock Craik, Maude, On Sisterhoods, and A Woman’s Thoughts About Women. New York: New York University Press. Stillinger, Jack. 1992. Keats’s Extempore Effusions and the Question of Intentionality. In Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, 309–310. Cambridge University Press. Waldman, Suzanne Maureen. 2008. The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Athens: Ohio University Press. Wu, Duncan. 2001. Keats and ‘The Cockney School. In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, 46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 13

“Hymns That Have Helped”: Hymnody as Lived Verse for the Victorian Public Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

The songs of the English-speaking people are for the most part hymns. For the immense majority of our people to-day the only minstrelsy is that of the Hymn-book.1

In 1912, famed journalist W. T. Stead’s Hymns That Have Helped was published posthumously for, tragically, Stead had died aboard the Titanic earlier that year.2 Stead’s words above, taken from the preface (written c. 1  W. T. Stead, W. T., ed. Hymns that have helped, being a collection of those hymns, whether Jewish, Christian, or pagan, which have been found most useful to the children of men. (London: Stead’s Publishing, 1912), vi. 2  Stead was aboard the Titanic en route to a convention in New York for the Men and Religion Forward Movement, where he was to give an address on world peace. In 1886 he had written an article urging more lifeboats on steamers. Hymns That Have Helped (1912) contains an afterword describing Stead’s last moments—including receiving a life vest which he reportedly gave away—from several eyewitnesses aboard the Titanic, ending: “Two miles deep lies the Titanic, and there, too, midway between the two great sections of the English-speaking race he did so much to unite, lies William T. Stead, whom friends and foes have united to honor” (122).

A. Clapp-Itnyre (*) Indiana University East, Richmond, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_13

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1895), argue for the central place of hymns in Victorian culture. Working on this project for almost a decade, Stead’s plan was to create a hymn book of the public’s favorites, not according to “the fine or finicky ear of the critic” or “exalted judgment of the recluse” but as “the recorded experience of mankind.”3 Stead further spelled out exactly how crucial hymnody was for generations of Victorians, not as an extraneous, elite aesthetic, but as popular, lived verse: The hymn may be doggerel poetry, it may contain heretical theology, its grammar may be faulty and its metaphors atrocious, but if that hymn proved itself a staff and a stay to some heroic soul in the darkest hours of his life’s pilgrimage, then that hymn has won its right to a place among the sacred songs through which God has spoken to the soul of man.4

Stead relies on the results of an 1887 survey by the editors of The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading, a journal of the Religious Tract Society that listed the public’s 100 favorite hymns, as well as personal testaments from a number of preeminent cultural figures from Thomas Hardy to the Prince of Wales. Including these as appendices to his book, Stead confirms the immense impact of hymns on generations of Victorians. Hymns that Have Helped and other similar “favorite” collections of the era thus suggest that the genre of hymnody, like other critically marginalized verse genres, held a crucial social function for the Victorians. This essay will test this claim by exploring the multifaceted genre of hymnody as it “helped” many Victorians. In the case of the hymn, all classes appreciated many of the same ones, and for most of the long nineteenth century. Likewise, whereas many Victorians read popular verse, many were also creating hymn texts and tunes to inspire their peers. This sets the Victorian hymn apart from much of Victorian poetry in its expansive appeal and even authorship. Victorians rarely sought out hymns for their elaborate theology or poetics, but rather for their spiritual, emotive vigor, especially if accompanied by an appealing melody. Thus, a second  Stead, vi.  Stead, vi.

3 4

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formal element, music, aided in hymnody’s wide appeal. Neither was this appeal transitory; hymns were repeated throughout the year, as a part of the Christian calendar, and aided by the power of the music, which kept the hymn ringing in one’s ears during the day. Hymns were also “a popular recreational activity” outside of the context of church services, for they were often sung at “public meetings, political gatherings and trade union rallies.”5 The Victorians’ communal love of hymns is demonstrated in a number of late-century tallies of the most favorite hymns of the era, often compiled by survey as with Stead’s example above, creating a virtual “top 100” left to us from the actual participants. More than most lyric poetry, hymn poetry reached a working-class audience as much as it did elite churchgoers, and it appealed to the very young as well as the very old, in part because, as sound as well as sense, it appealed so well to capacities apart from the intellect. It is imperative to recognize the genre of the hymn as a surprisingly popular form of poetic production in this period. I hope to begin that work in this chapter. To begin, I will consider when hymns played a part in Victorian lives— on a daily basis and certainly to accentuate the Christian year—paying close attention to the genre of the Christmas carol. Second, I will explore who was impacted by hymns—those from various economic backgrounds, both genders, past and present, and certainly of all age groups—placing special focus on children’s hymns. Finally, I will explore how hymns had an impact, less in their sometimes “doggerel” poetics than their musical power, with a special focus on hymn tunes. Whenever relevant, I will explicate some of the most popular hymns from Stead’s and others’ top lists, reading closely for exactly what “proved itself a staff and a stay” to so many disparate Victorians, spiritually, poetically, and musically.

5  Ian Bradley, Abide with me: The world of Victorian hymns (Chicago: GIA and London: SCM, 1997), 195.

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Hymns for Daily Living W. T. Stead emphasizes the power of hymns as a life-long, lived experience, meaning that people might engage with hymns on a daily basis, either in a public setting or even simply by humming or singing them privately at home. In his preface, he speaks to the earliest days of life, when “we were hushed to sleep on our mother’s lap” by hymns.6 Next reflecting on hymns’ life-long significance, he writes: In our pilgrimage through life we discover the hymns which help. We came out of trials and temptations with hymns clinging to our memory like burrs. Some of us could almost use the hymn-book as the key to our autobiography.7

Hymns become embedded in one’s personal “pilgrimage through life,” punctuating the rhythms of every Christian’s growth, maturity, and decline. Quoting Henry Ward Beecher, Stead adds a further layer to this chronology by describing the intertwining of generations through hymns: “Our early lives and the lives of our parents hang in the atmosphere of sacred song.”8 Hymns are passed down through families, uniting generations in their spiritual pilgrimage. Hymns played such an important part in Victorian lived experience that many felt the need to codify their cumulative effect. The popularity of the 1897 The Sunday at Home survey, above, appears to have surprised even the editors: “the invitation….has met with a response so general and eager as to show how strong a hold this form of sacred literature has upon the minds and hearts of thoughtful Christians.”9 The publication of their ranked list in the May 1897 issue reveals some interesting results (see part of the list as my Table 13.1). Many represent the arc of daily living, with Morning and Evening hymns appearing frequently: for example John Keble’s Christian Year verse-turned-hymn, “Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear” (#8 on the list), and Bishop Thomas Ken’s “Evening Hymn” (#17) and “Morning Hymn” (#28). In fact, it is surprising to see Ken’s hymns appearing so frequently, given their much earlier publication date; Ken  Stead, vii.  Stead, vii. 8  Qtd. in Stead, xii. 9  Religious Tract Society, “Our English hymns: A hundred favourite hymns selected by our readers” in The Sunday at Home: Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (May 28, 1887), 345. 6 7

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Table 13.1  25 top-ranked hymns by over 3400 people in an 1887 survey conducted by Sunday at Home No. Votes Title

Author

Year

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

3215 3204 3126 3093 2972 2956 2912 2889 2858 2620

Rock of ages, cleft for me Abide with me, fast falls the eventide Jesu, Lover of my soul Just as I am, without one plea How sweet the name of Jesus sounds My God, my Father, while I stray Nearer, my God, to Thee Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear I heard the voice of Jesus dear Art thou weary, art thou languid?

1776 1847 1740 1835 1779 1834 1841 1820 1846 1862

11 12 13 14 15

2597 2581 2881 2569 2513

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

2494 2492 2462 2435 2388 2367 2339 2318 2170 2156

For ever with the Lord God moves in a mysterious way From Greenland’s icy mountains When I survey the wondrous cross Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Hark! the herald-angels sing Glory to Thee, my God, this night A few more years shall roll O God, our help in ages past Our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed All hail the power of Jesus’ name Eternal Father, strong to save Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah There is a fountain filled with blood

Augustus Toplady Henry Francis Lyte Charles Wesley Charlotte Elliott John Newton Charlotte Elliott Sarah Flowers Adams John Keble Horatious Bonar John Mason Neale (transl) James Montgomery William Cowper Reginald Heber Isaac Watts John Henry Newman Charles Wesley Thomas Ken Horace Bonar Isaac Watts Harriet Auber Edward Perronet William Whiting Reginald Heber William Williams William Cowper

1739 1709 1844 1719 1829 1780 1860 1826 1745 1772

1835 1774 1819 1707 1833

Listed in the May 28, 1887 issue, pp. 345–9; dates from Hymnary.org

wrote his famous hymns for Morning, Evening, and Midnight for the schoolboys at Winchester College in 1674.10 Others represent the yearly arc of seasons and church holy-days (Watts’ Lenten “When I survey the wondrous cross” coming in at 14th).

10  The final verse in each of these became the “Doxology” still sung in churches of today: “Praise God above from who all blessings flow / Praise God …. Below / Praise God Praise God above ye heavenly host / Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

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Likewise, early in the twentieth century,11 the Rev. John Cullen compiled The Hundred Best Hymns in the English Language. In it, Cullen highlights the immense value of hymns for their “consolation and comfort [given] to all who read or sing them” while noting times of “Family or Social Worship” when hymns would be integrated into regular routines with families or fellow worshippers. Cullen also suggests the lived value of hymns through the basic categories given in his Table of Contents: hymns for Morning, for Evening, and for the Lord’s Day; and, likewise, for traditional seasons like Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, and Easter (e.g., Charles Wesley’s perennial “Christ the Lord is risen today”). His categories even reflect events of personal importance: one’s confirmation (“Lord, shall the children come to thee?” #68) or for those going to sea (“Eternal Father! Strong to save” #75). The rhythm of life—daily, annual, generational—thus created by hymn-­ singing demonstrates a richness and reliance on sacred song that may seem unfamiliar from the perspective of our own increasingly secular contemporary culture. Yet one hymn type remains broadly popular: the Christmas carol. Admittedly, Cullen’s list contains a mere six hymns for Advent and Christmas. Christmas carols, as I demonstrate in another study, were slow in developing in the early nineteenth century, but just as Christmas as a focal holiday blossomed in the mid-to-late 1800s, so did the emergence of the distinct Christmas carol.12 Standard hymn books printed full sections of carols, while books solely of carols were compiled. One example of the former, Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), included Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany sections, 28 hymns total, including the well-known “O come all ye faithful” (#42). Three carols in particular (identified by both Cullen and Stead) had an immense impact throughout the nineteenth century: Nahum Tate’s “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” from the 1700 supplement to his and Nicholas Brady’s New Version of the Psalms of David (1696), Charles Wesley’s famous “Hark! the herald angels sing” (1739), and the haunting epiphany hymn “Brightest and best of the sons of the morning” (1811) by Anglican Bishop Reginald Heber. In “While shepherds watched,” Tate takes an approach characteristic of his other psalms, adopting a fairly strict poetic transcription of the biblical 11  Cullen’s book has no publication date, but the British Library suggests 1908, and it was reviewed by The Living Church (Volume 40) in 1908 and The Independent (Volume 67) in 1909. 12  See Flanders (2017), Clapp-Itnyre (2017a), Pimlott (1978), and Routley (1958).

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accounts of Jesus’ birth, including a near-verbatim transcription of the angel chorus, as from Luke 2:14, “All glory be to God on high / And in the earth be peace” (H A & M #43). Wesley, however, also invokes Pauline doctrines such as original sin and the incarnation in verses that in later editions have not always been printed: “Adam’s likeness now efface, / Stamp Thine image in its place; / Second Adam from above, / Reinstate us in Thy love” (v. 4 #120 in The Methodist Sunday-School Hymn and Tune-Book (1879)). But Mendelsohn’s engaging tune (“Mendelsohn”) has kept the dark hymn fresh through today. In contrast, modern-day hymnals rarely include Heber’s hymn of the coming of the Wise Men despite its light tone and infectious 11.10.11.10 meter, perhaps because the Epiphany has taken a back seat to Christmas church celebrations. If Victorians wove hymns into the daily and annual patterns of their lives, they certainly absorbed them into their “life pilgrimages” as well. Sometimes hymns acted metaphorically, as with the hymn with which I end this section: “Abide with Me,” which appeared second in the Sunday at Home survey, clearly meaningful to many. Written by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847, based on the dying words of a friend, it was published posthumously later that year. Selecting it for Hymns Ancient and Modern, Monk then composed the tune “Eventide” himself when, explains his wife, “together we watched, as we did daily, the glories of the setting sun.”13 Monk placed it in the Evening category of the hymn book, the hymn opening thus: Abide with me; fast falls the even-tide;    The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide; When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,    Help of the helpless, O abide with me. (v. 1)14

Describing the end of day, the verse could even convey the evening tide, as J.  R. Watson (2002) even relates it to the evening tide, relevant to people who live by the sea like Lyte did.15 The blurring of day’s end and life’s end speaks to the vital placement of this hymn in people’s intimate lives. The text includes constant, alliterative 13  Qtd. in Robert Guy McCutchan, Our Hymnody: A Manual of the Methodist Hymnal. 2nd ed. New York: Abingdon, 1937), 503. 14  From William Henry Monk, Hymns Ancient and Modern (London: Novello, 1861), #14. 15  J.  R. Watson, An Annotated Anthology of Hymns. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 274.

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reminders of the duality of night and death—“the darkness deepens” (v. 1), “life’s little day” (v. 2)—and one is not sure whether the earthly close is for one night or forever: Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;     Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; Change and decay in all around I see;     O Thou Who changest not, abide with me. (v. 2)

Lyte focuses on daily and earthly life: “Earth’s joys grow dim” and “glories pass away” (v. 2); “every passing hour” (v. 3); “cloud and sunshine” (v. 3)—but clearly earth’s glories are transient in this life, “dimming,” “ebbing,” “passing,” and, ultimately, “Change and decay…[are] all around” (v. 2). Eventually the speaker seeks the Divine to “abide with me,” appealing to God as “Thou Who changest not” (v. 2) and “Help of the helpless” (v. 1). It is the daily presence of God which the speaker seeks in “every passing hour” (v. 3), and this hope persists to the close of life: “I triumph still, if Thou abide with me” (v. 4). Lyte concludes with a soaring stanza and final poetic epistrophe: Hold Thou Thy Cross before my closing eyes;     Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies; Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;     In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me. (v. 5)

Now the “morning” is of heaven, and the earthly life is replaced by a “shining” divine one. It is a powerful, poetic finality. However, as the choice to toll only bells of the hymn for Taft’s funeral suggests, the tune itself made up a great part of the spiritual potency and endurance of this hymn; a somber tune in E-flat major, Monk’s harmonies and cadence create a beseeching appeal for the Creator to “abide with me.”16 Speaking of many such hymns in this vein, a self-described “sexagenarian” wrote to the editors of The Sunday at Home, “Many of them are to me almost sacred, as having cheered the last days of loved ones before.”17 Lived experience indeed. 16  To hear young children singing this hymn, please visit my website with the Sounding Victorian project: www.soundingchildhood.org. This hymn was one of these contemporary children’s favorites. 17  Qtd. in Sunday at Home, 345.

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Hymns for All People As the comments from the sexagenarian and Stead make clear, hymns shaped a dynamic bond connecting the earliest Christians to those of later eras. This historical continuity was certainly not lost upon hymn enthusiasts. Dolores Bacon, compiling another hymn-list, Hymns that Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the Best Hymns of all Nations for Young People (1907), speaks to this link when writing, “hymns that have endured longest and meant most in Christian religious history have been included” (vi). It is no surprise that one such hymn, nineteenth in The Sunday at Home survey, was Isaac Watts’s “O God, our help in ages past / our hope for years to come” (1719), the connectivity of peoples past and present implied in the hymn’s first lines. Both early psalmody of the Calvinists and medieval tunes and texts unearthed by Tractarians18 were alike valued by many Victorians; Hymns Ancient and Modern was not named by chance. Classic hymns especially favored by Victorians were written by the eighteenth-­century hymn-writing notables Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and Charles Wesley (1708–1788). The editors of The Sunday at Home are, in fact, quick to point out that of the 55 different authors represented, “Dr. Watts and Charles Wesley stand at the head, each contributing seven to the aggregate.”19 Rhapsodizing on other hymns, even by unknown authors, the editors clearly indicate a preference for past works: “Many of these utterances come to us from the past; lovely stars of poesy, like the Adeste fideles, or Jerusalem, my happy home, telling of some sudden light breaking here and there upon souls that had else passed away unknown.”20 If hymns appealed to diverse generations, they also appealed across divisions of class, gender, even religion. In fact, Stead’s subtitle to his book suggests a much broader approach to hymnody than simply an Anglican or even Christian one: “Being a Collection of Those Hymns, Whether Jewish, Christian, or Pagan, Which Have Been Found Most Useful to the Children of Men.” Stead later registers this attempt for religious inclusivity when writing in his introduction, “Here at least Roman, Greek, Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist, Unitarian and Jew are recognizable only by the common accents of a common faith in the One Father in Whose 18  For complete histories of hymnody, see Routley (1977), Temperley (1979), Bradley (1997), and Watson (1997). 19  Religious Tract Society, 346; italics in original. 20  Religious Tract Society, 346; italics in original.

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family all we are brethren.”21 Stead further expands the power of hymnody beyond national or cultural borders, imagining that “[at] this moment, on the slope of the Rockies, or in the sweltering jungles of India, in [a] crowded Australian city, or secluded English hamlet, the sound of some simple hymn tune” is being sung.22 Certainly missionary organizations like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701) took hymns to all parts of the globe, from India to Africa.23 Stead emphasizes the connective potential behind hymn-singing, not the goal of converting non-­ Christians, with this statement. In his view, both pagan and Jew, American and Australian, could gather around the comforting texts and especially the tunes which overrode cultural and language barriers. Clearly, hymns could be appreciated and sung by any person of any class, their music not even requiring instruments for dissemination but simply an ear to hear and a voice to sing. Stead enjoys sharing stories and lists of favorites he has gathered of individuals inspired by hymns, including not just notable middle-class clergy, writers, and politicians in abundance (e.g., from Dean Farrar, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sir H. H. Fowler, M.P), but the story of an Oldham mechanic who was inspired by Cowper’s hymn “Sometimes a light surprises” when worried about dismissal from his job: “Many a time that verse has cheered him and given him good heart to face the worst in the gloomiest of bad times,” Stead notes.24 Indeed, not only were members of the working classes absorbing hymns, they were writing them—texts and tunes—a number going on to great popularity, such as the still-popular tune “Diadem” used for Edward Perronet’s “All hail the power of Jesus’ name” but written by an eighteen-­ year-­old, working-class hatter and amateur composer James Ellor.25 Stead also has an inclusive view of women’s roles as author and audience of hymns, writing of the men and women most influenced by hymns, and including many women’s comments in his commentary. Indeed, hymn-singing and hymn-writing were open fields to which anyone who experiences “some moment of intense feeling, or of vivid insight, or of rapture in the contemplation of Divine truth,” as described in The Sunday  Stead, xiv.  Stead, vii. 23  For more about missions, see Brian Stanley (1990) and for music sung in the mission field, see McGuire (2009), ch. 4. 24  Stead, 112. 25  McCutchan, 208. 21 22

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at Home.26 Women avidly compiled, edited, and wrote hymns throughout the century, it being within their socially sanctioned roles of spiritual nurturers. Dolores Bacon was only one in a long line of women-editors of hymn compilations: consider Mrs. Carey Brock of The Children’s Hymn Book (c. 1878), the companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern as bequeathed to her by its then editor W.  Pulling in 1877 (“we cannot resign this work into better hands” he wrote27); H.P.H., who edited, with musical editor Edwin Moss, The Home Hymn Book (1885); or M. A. Woods, who compiled Hymns for School Worship (1890). Of course, one will notice that work is often bequeathed or co-edited by men while women are hidden behind initials or husbands’ names while doing the same vital work as men.28 Women were prolific hymn writers; Mrs. E. R. Pitman pays homage to a century’s worth of women’s contributions in her Lady Hymn Writers (1892) where she reflects on over 100 women writing and translating hymns in England, America, and Europe. In fact, eight of the 100 top hymns of the Sunday at Home survey are written by women: three by Charlotte Elliott, two by C. F. Alexander (#70, “There is a green hill far away,” and #95, “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult”), and one each by Harriet Auber (#20, “Our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed”), Katherine Hankey (#98, “Tell me the old, old story”), and Elizabeth Codner (#99, “Lord, I hear of showers of blessing”). Charlotte Elliott’s being represented by three hymns on the list is especially significant; this was equal to the number by well-known hymn-writer James Montgomery, and one more than famed hymn-writers John Keble and Thomas Ken. Furthermore, two of her hymns were in the top six: “Just as I am, without one plea” (#4) and “My God and Father, while I stray” (#6).29 Interestingly, many of the above favorite hymns could be found in children’s hymn books of the era, for children were clearly a vital hymn-­ singing audience. In fact, another reader, clearly a parent, writes to The Sunday at Home that “This is a subject in which our little ones have taken great interest; they would like to have had many of their own children’s included” in the survey.30 I have written at great length about the pervasive impact of hymns on Victorian children’s lives beginning in the home,  Religious Tract Society, 346.  Brock, vii. 28  I more thoroughly discuss women-editors’ and -writers’ vital work of writing and editing hymns for children within a patriarchal culture (Clapp-Itnyre 2012). 29  Her third hymn on the list is “My Christian, seek not yet repose” (#60). 30  Qtd. in Sunday at home, 345. 26 27

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continued in private, public, and Sunday schools, and sung in church on Sundays. Following the child up through his or her own death, early or later in life, hymns were an integral medium of Christian dogma, certainly, but also intellectual expansion, emotional solace, even humorous parody.31 Children carried their favorite hymns into adulthood, the staying power of the verse evident in their testimonies. W. T. Stead recounts his mother singing a hymn by Newton, “Begone, Unbelief,” when he was a small child “barely able to see over the book-ledge in the minister’s pew; and to this day, whenever I am in doleful dumps, and the stars in their courses appear to be fighting against me, that one doggerel verse comes back clear as a blackbird’s note.”32 He yet suggests that “it is not often that the hymn of our youth is the hymn of our old age. Experience of life is the natural selector of the truly human hymnal.”33 Tastes may change based on experience, of course, but my research reveals that there were fewer strictly “children’s hymns” than was commonly supposed. Examining 100 children’s hymn books of the nineteenth century, I found many of the adult hymns already discussed in the top 20 of most frequently anthologized hymns in children’s hymn books: Ken’s morning hymn “Awake, my soul,” Keble’s “Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,” and Wesley’s “Hark! the herald angels sing” being second, third, and fifth, respectively (see Table 13.2). Adult editors desired children to love the same hymns as they did, never mind the difficulty of syntax or denseness of theology. Conversely, the “cross-over hymn” could exist in reverse: adults might retain or even gravitate to hymns deemed to be children’s. For instance, one of Canon Barker’s five favorite hymns submitted to Stead was “I think when I read that sweet story of old.”34 This hymn, written by Jemima Thompson Luke in 1841, was the most frequently appearing in children’s hymn books according to my calculations, and this is not surprising, as it focused on children, using their encounter with Jesus from Matthew 19:13: I think, when I read that sweet story of old      When Jesus was here among men How He called little children as lambs to His fold,      I should like to have been with Him then.

 See British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (2016). In it, I investigate the contexts, texts, tunes, illustrations, social power, and child play of children’s hymnody. 32  Stead, ix. 33  Stead vii. 34  Stead 116. 31

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Table 13.2  25 most frequently appearing hymns in nineteenth-century children’s hymn books No. % of 100 hymns books

Title

Author

Year

1

46% 43% 42% 41% 40% 38% 36% 33% 33%

Jemima Thompson Luke Thomas Ken John Keble Reginald Heber Charles Wesley A. Young John Milton Augustus Toplady Reginald Heber

1841

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

31% 31% 31% 29%

Edward Perronet Thomas Ken Isaac Watts Henry Francis Lyte

1779 1695 1719 1847

14 15

29% 28%

Isaac Watts Harriet Auber

1715 1829

16 17 18 19 20

28% 26% 26% 25% 25%

Isaac Watts Horatius Bonar Sarah Flower Adams William Kethe Anne Shepherd

1707 1846 1841 1561 1830s

21

25%

Anne & Jane Taylor

1810

22 23

25% 25%

Charlotte Elliott Charles Weslely

1834 1758

24 25

25% 25%

I think, when I read that sweet story of old Awake, my soul, and with the sun Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear From Greenland’s icy mountains Hark! The herald angels sing There is a happy land Let us with a gladsome mind Rock of Ages, cleft for me Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty All hail the power of Jesus’ name Glory to Thee, my God, this night Jesus shall reign wher’er the sun Abide with me, fast falls the eventide I sing the almighty power of God Our blest Redeemer, Here breathed When I survey the wond’rous cross I heard the voice of Jesus say Nearer, my God, to thee All people that on earth do dwell Around the throne of God in heaven Great God, and will Thou condescend Just as I am, without one plea Lo! He comes with clouds descending Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing There’s a Friend for little children

John Fawcett Albert Midlane

1774 1859

Compiled by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, 2006–2016

1674 1827 1823 1739 1843 1623 1776 1826

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As the verse continues, Luke appeals directly to children in personal, uplifting ways: I wish that His hands had been placed on my head,      That His arm had been thrown around me, And that I might have seen His kind look when He said,      “Let the little ones come unto Me.” (v. 1)35

From Christ’s physical touch to His direct invitation to the lowliest of citizens, Luke creates an appealing message for Victorian children. That this hymn continued to comfort Canon Barker thus suggests that the division between “children’s” and “adult” hymns was less rigid than we might assume today.36 And while there is no doubt that not all children embraced the hymns that were introduced to them at home and at school, many of them did, and they often looked back on them as essential, formative texts, as with this statement made by Lucy Larcom in A New England Girlhood Outlined from Memory (1889)37: Almost the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns. Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing…. I think more gratefully now of the verses I learned from the Bible and the Hymn-Book than almost anything that came to me in that time of beginnings.38

Clearly, hymns formed the fabric of children’s lives, woven into daily and weekly events; from school to play, from learning to experiencing dying, hymns helped. 35  From Mrs. Carey Brock, The Children’s Hymn Book, London: Rivingtons, Waterloo, c. 1878. #172. 36  Note that Dolores Bacon’s Hymns That Every Child Should Know does not even contain this hymn, nor any other that specifically addresses children; its list is much like the Sunday at Home top list. As I write in British Hymn Books, “We may speak of the ‘child-centered hymn,’ reflecting all the characteristics specified above [as in the Luke example], but the ‘child’s hymn’—reflecting the variety actually found in children’s hymn books—is a different matter” (Clapp-Itnyre 94). Nineteenth-century hymn editors included “adult” hymns throughout children’s hymnbooks. 37  See my close examination of more than 25 Victorian children’s diaries, almost all of which discuss learning and singing hymns (Clapp-Itnyre, British Hymn Books for Children, ch. 6). 38  Lucy Larcum, Lucy, A New England Childhood Outlined from Memory. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), 58, 66.

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As I conclude this section, Elliott’s “Just as I am” #4 from the Sunday at Home survey deserves a brief comparison with the #1 choice, Augustus Toplady’s “Rock of Ages” (also #33 and #8, respectively, in children’s hymn books; see Table  13.2), as both hymns register the iniquity of humanity and need for the atonement of Christ but from different gendered perspectives. Elliott’s hymn, published in 1836  in her self-edited The Invalids’ Hymn Book,39 evokes a sense of personal depravity, which was perhaps driven by Elliott’s own worsening health: “Just as I am, without one plea” (v. 1), a soul with “one dark blot” (v. 2) with “many a conflict, many a doubt / Fightings and fears, within, without” (v. 3). The speaker’s sense of impotency builds to the fourth verse: Just as I am—poor, wretched, blind—     Sight, riches, healing of the mind, Yea, all I need, in Thee to find,     O Lamb of God, I come! (v. 4; see Fig. 13.1)40

As J. R. Watson notes, “Its power lies in the repetition of the initial phrase, and the simplicity of those words, ‘Just as I am,’ with their craving for acceptance, followed by the fulfillment, ‘O Lamb of God, I come.’”41 It is only the “Lamb of God” who can save, “whose blood can cleanse” (v. 2), to whom the speaker’s final petition in each verse is given and acted upon: “I come!” The charged antonyms—blind/sight, poor/riches, wretched/ healing—epitomize the struggles in Elliott’s personal journey, and any Christian’s journey, healed by the Lamb. They also suggest the concurrent themes of both human humility and Christian confidence, a not untypical stance especially for Victorian women writers. This lack of self-confidence, as well as its apparently simple formal structure, could also speak to children, making it an unsurprisingly frequent placement in Victorian children’s hymn books (25%). At first glance, the poem appears to use simple iambic tetrameter, which allows it to mesh with a type of Long Meter, 88.86, as with William Bradbury’s tune “Woodworth” in 3/4 (most commonly sung in America), yet Bradbury utilizes melismas (multiple notes sung to one word or syllable) in order to put the emphasis back onto the important words (e.g., on  McCutchan, 245.  From Golden Bells (London: Children’s Special Service Mission, 1890), #227. 41  J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 428. 39 40

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Fig. 13.1  “Just as I Am”: text by Charlotte Elliott, tune by W.  Blow. From Golden Bells (1899); 1925 edition, from the author’s collection

“just” and “am”). Alternately, one can find anapestic meter when stressing the opening word (e.g., “JUST as I AM…poor, WRE-etch-ed, BLIND”), which comes out more distinctly when sung to a British tune by W. Blow, “Agnus dei” (see Fig. 13.1): his tune in 3/2 relies on compartments of three, which emphasizes the anapestic potential of the lines. The two ways of reading the poetry and singing the verse suggest the double themes inherent in the poem: the strands of both humility and confidence suggested by the humbler iambic and more confident reading-against-the-­ grain of the anapest. “Rock of Ages” is the older of the two hymns, written in 1776 by Calvinist cleric Augustus Toplady. Human sin is made personal through Toplady’s use of the first person, with a focus on blood like Elliott’s but made even more intense through images of penetration.

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Rock of Ages, cleft for me,     Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood,     From Thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure—     Cleanse me from its guilt and power. (v. 1)42

The power of the hymn instead lies in the double nature of sin, both “its guilt and power” (line 6), especially the power of pride. Note the clear confidence of the speaker (e.g., “cleft for me”; my emphasis) which contrasts with the many expressions of Elliott’s self-doubt (“Fightings and fears, within, without”). Toplady then juxtaposes man’s earthly power— “labour of my hands” and “my zeal”—with the humility to acknowledge that “Thou must save, and Thou alone” (v. 2). This confidence can be felt, too, in the solid, unswerving trochaic tetrameter (“LET the WA-ter”) which is yet clipped—cut down—by the catalepses at the end of each line (i.e., missing the last syllable that would complete the final foot). The third verse clearly strips away human, even manly, pride, both physically and emotionally: Nothing in my hand I bring,      Simply to Thy cross I cling: Naked, come to Thee for dress;      Helpless, look to Thee for grace; Foul, I to the fountain fly:      Wash me, Saviour, or I die! (v. 3)43

In a series of commanding contrasts, the speaker’s lack is granted divine completion. To empty hands are bestowed the cross; nakedness, dress; helplessness, grace; and foulness, cleansing wash—all in riveting imagery. The potency of divine care promised in Toplady’s hymn clearly inspired a great number of Victorians, as it stands as #1 in the Sunday at Home survey. Anecdotal evidence reinforces this claim: Prince Albert repeated its words on his deathbed and it was used at Gladstone’s funeral in Westminster

42  From Golden Bells, #252. Allusions are to Exodus 33:22, the cleft of the rock where Moses hides as God passes by; and John 19:34, of Jesus’s crucifixion where his side is pierced, drawing both blood and water. 43  Golden Bells, #252.

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Fig. 13.2  1880s American Needlepoint of Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” verse 3. Stitched by Agnes Hea Courtis (1847–1930), owned by Annie Elizabeth Courtis Baird, her daughter, and then Karen Baird Clapp, her great-granddaughter and mother of the author. Used with her permission

Abbey.44 No doubt its staying power was abetted by not one but at least two prominent musical arrangements.45 Its influence also transcended geography: its second line is highlighted in a needlepoint stitched by my own great-great-grandmother in the 1880s in America (see Fig.  13.2). Note the cross itself is stitched alongside “I,” alongside larger words “simply” and “cling”—the personal pronoun is only enlarged to show the “simple” instructions for any individual’s life: cling to the cross. Given that children were very often singers of “Rock of Ages,” it is interesting to note their sometimes less-than-reverent attitude. Within a  McCutchan, 251.  Richard Redhead’s tune with its rich harmonies in F major is best known to British singers (known as “Redhead”). You can hear a child singing this haunting tune on my website. Americans are more accustomed to the tune “Toplady” by American Thomas Hastings, whose plodding melody emphasizes the trochaic meter. 44 45

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copy of The Hymn-Book for the Use of Uppingham and Sherbourne Schools (1874),46 at the British Library, is what may be a school-boy’s response back to some of the stringent images found in Toplady’s original fourth verse printed there: “When my eyestrings break in death, / When I soar through tracks unknown.”47 The boy-reader underlined “eyestrings” and put an “X” mark on the right margin, as if to cross it out—or gleefully call attention to the macabre word-choice. It is no wonder the line was updated in the 1925 edition of Golden Bells to “When mine eyelids close in death” (v. 4). The double-meaning of “Rock of Ages” should therefore not be missed when one realizes that both adults and children reacted to this hymn across the ages.

Hymns of Melody, Poetry, and Power The inspirational quality of “Rock of Ages” cannot be denied; certainly it was acknowledged by hymnologist Robert Guy McCutchan in Our Hymnody (1937), yet he was also compelled to admit that “[i]t has been criticized as a ‘medley of confused images,’ and ‘accumulated, if not misplaced metaphors.’”48 It is perhaps to such comments that Stead writes when stating, “It is a fashion in some quarters to sneer at the poetical value of hymns.”49 To such poetic unevenness he acknowledges the “doggerel poetry…and [atrocious] metaphors”50 and that “some hymns may fall far below the standard of first-class poetry.”51 Yet he justifies their ultimate value, that “if that hymn proved itself a staff and a stay to some heroic soul in the darkest hours of his life’s pilgrimage, then that hymn has won its right to a place among the sacred songs through which God has spoken to the soul of man.”52 He quotes Alice Meynell, who said: “I think—against

46  In a close study of seven hymn books of Victorian boys public schools (Clapp-Itnyre 2016), I found “Rock of Ages” a mainstay in all of them, its focus on pride perhaps felt by editors to be a relevant theme to these upper-class boys (52). 47  Watson (2002) reminds us that at the time, the eye-strings, or tendons in the eyes, were “supposed to break or crack at the moment of death” (213). 48  McCutchan, 251. 49  Stead xiii. 50  Stead vi. 51  Stead xiv. 52  Stead vi.

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the usual literary opinion—that many popular hymns are very beautiful, and that their authors made literature without knowing it.”53 Bacon, too, appeals to emotive, rather than literary, standards in her compilation, validating their higher, “sacred” purpose: Time and the Hour can make sacred even that which may have no element of individuality to commend it, and those old hymns are by no means lacking in sincerity, sublimity, and the promise of hope—those elements which compose great hymns.54

Bypassing standards of poetic integrity, Bacon re-focuses her foreword to address how hymns, like psalms, evoke the emotive element common to music, which is “the one supremely emotional art…chosen by David as the enduring expression of a religion which is the unfailing emotional resort of the human temperament.”55 Bacon honors first the earliest plain-­ song tunes as “great hymn-writing,” then holds up melodies by Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven as “swell[ing] the list with Heavenly sounds,” but suggests that the music of “modern composers, such as Sir Arthur Sullivan and Gounod,” is not for hymns.56 Stead, too, underscores the importance of tunes, citing Luther, who “was one of the first to mark the great truth that the tune is more important than the words.”57 Indeed, a final point to be made about the power of hymns on the Victorian public was not only the spiritual potential of the words but the emotional power wrought by the tunes. Classic tunes may have been valued by many like Bacon but the era also saw the talents of new composers, some already named, writing majestic, popular music still being sung today. One of the foremost was John Bacchus Dykes. He was commissioned by the committee of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) to write tunes for it, many of which became famous, including “Lux Benigna” for John Henry Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light,” that hymn ranking 15th on the Sunday at Home chart. The hymn also appears frequently in Victorians’ list of favorites compiled by Stead: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, William Gladstone, Justin McCarthy, M.P.; Elizabeth Lynn Linton, Max Műller, Richard Le Gallienne, Sir Evelyn Wood, and Thomas Hardy all included it  Qtd. in Stead, xiv.  Bacon, viii. 55  Bacon, v. 56  Stead, vii. 57  Stead, xiii. 53 54

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in their top five hymns. Thomas Hardy claimed it as his very favorite, weaving it into his novel Far from the Madding Crowd.58 But many would profess the hymn to be so moving in large part due to its tune; Newman himself even confessed that “you see it is not the Hymn, but the Tune that has gained the popularity!”59 A final close reading of Charles Wesley’s hymn “Jesus, Lover of my soul” bears out these various claims about a poetic deficiency abetted by emotive and melodic power. Published among his great hymnic output of the late eighteenth century, in his Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), Wesley’s “Jesu, Lover of my soul” ranked third with the Sunday at Home audience, with notable Victorians in Stead’s study as diverse as Sir H.  H. Fowler, M.P., Newman Hall, Rev. H.  Price Hughes, and Bishop Moorhouse placing it among their top three hymns.60 As noted above, it is undeniable that hymns like “Lead, Kindly Light” were made popular by a uniform, engaging tune61; and certainly, the lilting meter of Wesley’s “Jesu, Lover of my soul” in trochaic tetrameter catalectic, which creates seven syllables per line, allows it to be sung to the fairly common 77.77 D (double) meter. However, Wesley’s “Jesu, Lover of my soul” never had a unique 77.77 D tune consistently associated with it.62 Most frequent are two tunes with diametrically opposite qualities: the earlier one, “Hollingside,” was written by J. B. Dykes for Hymns Ancient and Modern, a light, slightly plodding but engaging melody in G major, while the second tune, Welshman Joseph Parry’s 1879 “Aberystwyth,” is a slow, haunting tune in D minor. These and other tunes were among a host to be sung to this ever-popular hymn, but they do not explain its popularity alone. Its text is meaningful as well, though is inconsistent, beginning with the “Jesu” to “Jesus” discrepancy. The first four lines themselves have been tinkered with more than almost any other hymn, there being disagreement on the use of “lover” especially.63 Likewise, the number of verses printed varies; originally written with five verses, most hymn books use four (e.g., Golden Bells [1925], The United Methodist Hymnal [1989]), although some will condense it to three (e.g., H A & M [1861]; Psalter Hymnal [1887]). McCutchan also points out its stripped-down language;  Clapp-Itnyre [2016], 128.  Qtd. in McCutchan, 497. 60  Stead, 116–119. 61  For more discussion, please see Clapp-Itnyre 2016, 114–121. 62  McCutchan, 359–360. 63  McCutchan, 359. 58 59

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that of “the 188 words used, 157 are of one syllable, leaving only 31 polysyllabic words,” this being very unusual for any hymn of the era, especially by Wesley.64 The simplicity of its verse perhaps made it appealing to children in that it was included in 9% of children’s hymn-book editors of my survey, notwithstanding its imagery of the lover. However, its popularity among Victorian adults—being their most favored of the 600 hymns written by Wesley—begs an explanation. Wesley enlists several powerful metaphors that describe the believer’s daily wrestling with strife: Jesu, Lover of my soul,     Let me to Thy Bosom fly, While the gathering waters roll,     While the tempest still is high. (v. 1)65

Beginning with a reference to flying to a lover’s physical embrace, Wesley’s speaker then turns to the hydraulic imagery of “gathering waters” and the tempestuous “storm of life” (verse 1, line 6). Referencing images of “haven” (line 7), “refuge,” “support,” and “comfort” (verse 2), Wesley then returns to the imagery of flight but now with “Jesu” as the bird: All my trust on Thee is stayed,     All my help from Thee I bring; Cover my defenceless head     With the shadow of Thy wing. (v. 2)

Not unlike Elliott’s and Toplady’s hymns, Wesley’s third verse, not always printed, focuses on human fallibility and weakness (“I am all unrighteousness”) cured by the Christ: “Raise the fallen, cheer the faint, / Heal the sick, and lead the blind” (v. 3, #361 Golden Bells).66 Reflecting the Methodist faith, Wesley lingers on “Grace to cleanse from every sin” and the “eternity” of heaven as he concludes with new, more peaceful water  McCutchan, 359.  H A & M, #179. 66  In this book’s instance, it is hard to say why this particular verse is excised; the best rationale may simply be space. But an editor’s decision to use certain verses does beg close examination as suggesting certain nuances of their faith, attention I was able to give to the editing decisions by Reverend Patrick Brontë for his Sunday school hymn sheets in “Editorial Choices and Lived Religion” in Brontë Studies (2020), 309–322. 64 65

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imagery (“healing streams”): the storm has been constrained to become a fountain: Thou of Life the Fountain art,     Freely let me take of Thee; Spring Thou up within my heart,     Rise to all eternity. (v. 4)

Metaphors are thus varied, water and flight imagery intermingling throughout. They appear to have resonated with many listeners and singers. “Jesus, Lover of my soul” has been called “one of the supreme hymns of the world…[to] countless children… [and] countless men and women”67 and “the crown of Charles Wesley’s work—one of the greatest hymns of the Universal Church. The finest hymn of the English language.”68 American Henry Ward Beecher said that “I would rather have written [this] hymn…than to have the fame of all the kings that ever sat on the earth….that hymn will go on singing until the last trump” plays.69 Well-regarded hymnologist of the early twentieth century Louis F.  Benson may have unwittingly acknowledged the reason for its fame; using it to demonstrate qualities of the finest hymns, he concludes, “the secret of its appeal lies in a poetic beauty that the average man feels without analyzing it, and in a perfection of craftsmanship that make him want to sing it simply because it awakens the spirit of song in him rather than a mood of reflection.”70 Here, Benson foregrounds the qualities of innate, not learned poetry, and powerful musical inspiration; that even “the average man” may feel the poetic beauty less through rigorous analysis than through its inherent musicality and the deceptive simplicity of its language. An entry from a young girl’s diary provides us with a final testament to this hymn’s power to help during the trials of everyday living. In her 1861 diary, American Caroline Richards records the death of an important minister in her life, and Wesley’s hymn figures prominently in his deathbed scene:

 Jeremiah B. Reeves, qtd. in McCutchan, 357.  John Telford, qtd. in McCutchan, 358. 69  Qtd. in McCutchan, 358. 70  Louis F. Benson, the Hymnody of the Christian Church (Richmond: John Knox, 1927), 122; his italics. 67 68

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December 1—Dr. Carr is dead. He had a stroke of paralysis two weeks ago and for several days he has been unconscious. The choir of our church, of which he was leader for so long, and some of the young people came and stood around his bed and sang, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” They did not know whether he was conscious or not, but they thought so because the tears ran down his cheeks from his closed eyelids, though he could not speak or move. (December 1, 1861 entry; 137)

The last moments of Dr. Carr’s life are soothed by a community of adults and children gathering to share their faith through song. His tears intimate a powerful final emotional connection, bridging generations, the community of faith, and the life beyond—and meaningful enough-to be recorded in a young girl’s personal account of daily life. When W. T. Stead wrote that for “the immense majority” of Victorians of all ages and backgrounds, “the only minstrelsy is that of the Hymn-­ book,” it was no exaggeration.71 Tallies of personal favorites corroborate hymns’ power over the Victorians in numerical proof few literary genres can avow. In fact, many of the hymns I have discussed are still being sung today, an impressive continuity of sung poetry and of faith. Acknowledgment  This chapter is dedicated to the memory of the brilliant Dr. Nicholas Temperley, who died during my writing of it (8 April 2020), under whom I was honored to work as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and who inspired my own work with hymnody during his long, illustrious career in the field.

References Bacon, Dolores, ed. 1907. Hymns that Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the Best Hymns of All Nations for Young People. London: Doubleday. Benson, Louis F. 1927. The Hymnody of the Christian Church. Richmond: John Knox. Bradley, Ian. 1997. Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns. Chicago: GIA and London: SCM. [Brock, Mrs. Carey., ed.] c. 1878. The Children’s Hymn Book for Use in Children’s Services, Sunday Schools, and Families. Publ. under the Revision of the Right Rev.’s W.  Walsham How, Ashton Oxenden, and John Ellerton. London: Rivingtons, Waterloo.

 Stead, vi.

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Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. 2012. Writing for, Yet Apart: Nineteenth-century Women’s Contentious Status as Hymn Writers and Editors of Hymnbooks for Children. Victorian Literature and Culture. 40 (1): 47–81. ———. 2016. British Hymn Books for Children: Re-tuning the History of Childhood. Surrey, UK: Ashgate/ Routledge. ———. 2017a. O, Come, all ye Children: Christmas Carols in Victorian Children’s Hymnbooks. The Hymn 68: 16–23. ———. 2017b. Sounding Childhood. coll. Phyllis Weliver, Sounding Victorian. www.soundingchildhood.org. ———. 2020. Editorial Choices and Lived Religion: The Reverend Mr Patrick Brontë’s Sunday School Hymn Book and Hymn Sheets for Haworth Children, 1827–1835.” Brontë Studies 45: 309–322. Cullen, John. 1908. The Hundred Best Hymns in the English Language. London: George Routledge. Flanders, Judith. 2017. Christmas: A Biography. New  York: Thomas Dunne/ St. Maritn’s. Golden Bells; or, Hymns for Our Children. (1890) 1925. London: Children’s Special Service Mission. Hymnary.org: A Comprehensive Index of Hymns and Hymnals. Accessed 1 January 2021. Hymn-Book for the Use of Uppingham and Sherborne Schools. 1874. London: Novello, Ewer. Larcum, Lucy. 1889. A New England Childhood Outlined from Memory. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. McCutchan, Robert Guy. 1937. Our Hymnody: A Manual of the Methodist Hymnal. 2nd ed. New York: Abingdon. McGuire, Charles Edward. 2009. Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa movement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. The Methodist Sunday-school Hymn and Tune-Book. 1879. London: Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School Union. Monk, William Henry, ed. 1861. Hymns Ancient and Modern for Use in the Services of the Church with Accompanying Tunes. London: Novello. Pimlott, J.A.R. 1978. The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press. Pitman, Mrs. E.R. 1892. Lady Hymn Writers. London: T. Nelson and Sons. Religious Tract Society. 1887. Our English Hymns: A Hundred Favourite Hymns Selected by Our Readers. In The Sunday at Home: Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading. May 28, 1887. Richards, Caroline Cowles. 1913. Village Life in America, 1852–1872. NY: Henry Holt. Routley, Erik. 1958. The English Carol. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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———. (1977) 1997. A Short History of English Church Music. With additional material by Lionel Dakers. Carol Stream, IL: Hope Publ. Stanley, Brian. 1990. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester, England: Apollos. Stead, W.T., ed. 1912. Hymns That Have Helped, Being a Collection of Those Hymns, Whether Jewish, Christian, or Pagan, Which Have Been Found Most Useful to the Children of Men. London: Stead’s Publishing. Temperley, Nicholas. 1979. The Music of the English Parish Church. Vol. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Watson, J.R. 1997. The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study. Oxford: Clarendon. ———., ed. 2002. An Annotated Anthology of Hymns. Fore. Timothy Dudley-­ Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Index

A Abolitionist verse, 107, 110 Abrams, M. H., 5 Academy, 177, 178, 214 Addey, Elizabeth, 59 Addey, George, 59 Addison, Joseph, 59, 240–241 Ahmed, Sara, 15, 125 Alexander, C.F., 263 Alfano, Veronica, 17, 207 Allison, Kiera, 11, 16, 183 All the Year Round, 45, 48, 59–61 Arac, Jonathan, 5 Arnold, Matthew, 12, 29 Empedocles on Etna, 30 “Kaiser Dead,” 29 “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” 30 “Memorial Verses (April 1850),” 30 “Thyrsis,” 30 Arseneau, Mary, 88, 208 Ashby-Sterry, Joseph, 175 Attridge, Derek, 86 Auber, Harriet, 257, 263, 265

Auden, W. H., 29 Australian, 14, 107, 113 B Bacon, Dolores, 261, 263, 272 Hymns that Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the Best Hymns of all Nations for Young People, 259 Bad verse, 49 See also Bevis, Matthew Bailey, Benjamin, 232 Ballades, 7, 11, 15, 16, 145, 149, 150, 155, 158, 166, 171, 173, 175 Barker, Canon, 264, 266 Barnes, Julia, 130 Barnes, William, 15, 123–127, 129–136, 140, 141 “Air An’ Light,” 125, 126, 128, 129 “Clouds,” 14, 106–108, 111, 118, 125–127, 129 “The Turnstile,” 123–124 “The Two Churches,” 124 “The Wife A-Lost,” 138

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Behlman, O. Loksing Moy (eds.), Victorian Verse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3

279

280 

INDEX

Barnes, William (cont.) “The Wind Up the Door,” 135, 136 “The Wind Up the Stream,” 123 Beardsley, Monroe, 5 Beecher, Henry Ward, 256, 275 Behlman, Lee, 1, 11, 44, 165, 239 Benjamin, Walter, 157 Benson, Louis F., 275 Bentham, Jeremy, 24, 25 Bevis, Matthew, 23 Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, 23 Bishop, Elizabeth, 176 “One Art,” 176 Blair, Kristie, 6, 10–14, 23, 44, 63, 224 Piston, Pen, & Press on Factory Poetry, 6 Working Verse in Victorian Scotland, 64–65 Blake, William, 87, 94 Boos, Florence, 6 Border Advertiser, 63, 64, 72 Bouts-rimés, 11, 230, 239–243, 245–250 Bowles, Samuel Lisle, 235 Bradbury, William, 267 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 272 Bradford Poets, 71 Brady, Nicholas, 258 New Version of the Psalms of David, 258 Brevity, 13, 17, 45, 92, 208, 213, 216, 224 Brock, Carey, 263 The Children’s Hymn Book, 263 Brooks, Cleanth, 5 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 47, 150, 235, 248 “Little Mattie,” 47 “Lord Walter’s Wife,” 47 “Romaunt of the Page,” 150

Browning, Robert, 12, 27–29, 31, 32, 146, 162, 185 “Being a Contribution to a Scottish Anthology,” 28 The Inn Album, 31 Paracelcus, 27 The Ring and the Book, 31 “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,” 31 “Terse Verse,” 28 “Brown Romantics”, 117 See also Chander, Manu Samriti Burgess, J., 169 “The Third Annual Poem Addressed to the Angola Winders, of Droylsden, for Christmas 1965,” 66 Burns, Robert, 16, 29, 74, 185 Byron, George Gordon, 232 C “Cambridge verse,” 11, 165 Carlyle, Thomas, 11, 16–17, 183, 185–203 The French Revolution, 186, 195–196 Sartor Resartus, 191, 195 Carols, 244, 258 Chambers, Robert, 57 See also Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal, 45–59 Chambers, William, 57 See also Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal Chander, Manu Samriti, 117 Chang, Elizabeth Hope, 152 Chapman, Alison, 6, 10, 13, 43, 220 Chartist poetry, 6 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 176 “You ought to read The Poison Tree” refrain, 176

 INDEX 

Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, 246 Feminine Singularity, 246 Children, 6, 7, 12, 17–19 Children’s hymns, 255 Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa, 6, 18, 253 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 229, 232–233 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 30 Clune, Michael, 149 Writing Against Time, 149 Cockney School, 236 Codner, Elizabeth, 263 Cohen, Michael C., 8 The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, 8 Cohen, Ralph, 5 Colonial literature, 9, 104, 105 Colonial verse, 106, 108 Colvin, Sydney, 207 Comic verse, 24, 64, 162, 163, 165, 166 See also Bevis, Matthew Conqueror, Janet, 75 “Lines on the Wallace Factory Excursion,” 75 Coterie practices, 233–234 Cotton Famine, 67 Couplet club, 232 Cox, Jeffrey, 231, 233–234 Crosbie, Robert, 72–76 “Respectfully Inscribed to the Operatives of Buckholm Mill, as written for, and sung at their Old Year Night’s Entertainment,” 72 “Verses Recited on the Presentation of a Silver Cup to Mr. James Dalziel, by his Employees, on his Leaving the Galashiels for Wealkerburn, Dec 31, 1862,” 72 Cross-over hymn, 264 Crump, Rebecca, 248

281

Cullen, (Rev.) John, 258 The Hundred Best Hymns in the English Language, 258 Culler, Jonathan, 4, 5 Curran Index, 167 D Daily Telegraph, 171 de Banville, Théodore, 145 de Certeau, Michel, 67 de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 167–168 de Man, Paul, 5 Dialect poetry, 15 Dialects, 77, 79, 123, 124, 127 Dialogue, 28, 92, 95, 96, 98 Dickens, Charles, 57, 58, 193 Digital Victorian Periodical Project, 6 Dobson, Austin, 144, 147–148, 161, 177 Doggerel, 29, 53, 254 Dorset County Chronicle, 126, 130, 135, 141 Dorset English, 126, 130, 135, 141 Drury, Annmarie, 15, 123 Dubois, Martin, 131 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 112 The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, 112 Dulot, François, 240 Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton, 14, 15, 104, 105, 107–109, 111, 113–117 “The Aboriginal Father,” 110 “The Aboriginal Mother,” 14, 106–108, 111, 118 “The Eagle Chief,” 110 “The Emigrant Mother,” 112 “The Irish Mother,” 111–112 “Memorialis,” 115 “Native Poetry: Nung-Ngnun,” 110 “Songs of an Exile No.3,” 111–112 “The Two Graves,” 114–115 Ultoniana, 113 Dykes, John Bacchus, 272–273 “Lux Benigna,” 272

282 

INDEX

E Edgeworth, Maria, 113 Edinburgh Review, 109 Ehnes, Caley, 10 Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, 10 Elegy, 15, 28, 29, 38, 39, 103, 105–107, 109–111, 113, 115–118 Eliot, George, 193 Eliot, T. S., 3, 143 Elliott, Charlotte, 257, 263, 265, 268 The Invalids’ Hymn Book, 267 “Just as I am,” 257, 267, 268 Ellor, James, 262 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 184, 193 Emotion, 124–126, 128, 129, 136, 140, 141, 147 Enginorum, 64 English Parnassians, 15, 143–144, 146–147 Enjoubault, Mélody, 242, 248 The Examiner, 233, 238, 243, 248 Excursion poems, 63 Ezell, Margaret, 233 F Factories, 8, 11, 13, 63–69, 71, 72, 74–76, 79, 80 Factory verse, 13, 74, 79, 80 Filler poems, 13, 43–47, 50 Finkelstein, David, 65 Fitzgerald, G. M., 109 Fixed-form verse, 16, 161–163, 166, 173, 175, 178, 181 Ford, Ford Madox, 3, 143 Form, 1–19, 24–30, 35, 38, 44, 50, 54, 67, 79, 103–107, 109, 112, 116–118, 127, 132, 136, 141, 143–150, 155, 157, 158, 161,

162, 165, 171–173, 175–181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 193, 194, 207, 210, 213, 223, 230–235, 239, 244–246 Formal brevity, 85, 86, 96, 217 Fowler, Frank, 110 The Month: A Literary and Critical Journal, 110 Freedman, Jonathan, 154–155 Free verse, 3, 23, 186 French fixed-form verse, 16, 161 French Republic, 16, 17, 161, 198 Fried, Debra, 220 Frost, Robert, 135 Froude, James Anthony, 184, 186, 286 Frye, Northrop, 5 Fun, 16, 161, 163, 165–167, 171, 173, 181 G Gardiner, Linda, 59–60 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 75 Gautier, Théophile, 145, 166 The Germ, 230 German Romantic school, 185, 194 Gilbert, Sandra, 247 Girondins, 197, 199–203 Gladstone, William, 272 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 188–189, 202–203 “Kennst du das Land,” 188, 202 Gosse, Edmund, 144, 147–148 “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” 147 Gray, William, 66 “On the Death of Jonathan Harris, Sen,” 66 Greer, Germaine, 207 Gubar, Susan, 247

 INDEX 

H Hall, Newman, 273 Hamilton, Solomon, 114 Hanft, Lila, 218–219 Hankey, Katherine, 263 Hardy, Thomas, 104, 149, 254, 272–273 Far from the Madding Crowd, 273 Hassett, Constance W., 210, 214, 217 Hazlitt, William, 193 Heaton, William, 69–72 “To John Crossley, Esq,” 69–72 Heber, Reginald, 258 “Brightest and best of the sons of morning,” 258 Hegel, G. W. F., 4–5 Aesthetics, 4 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 14, 83, 209, 221 Hemans, Felicia, 87, 109, 112, 116 Henley, William Ernest, 144 Hensley, Nathan, 117, 144 Henville, Letitia, 144–145 Hertz, Alan, 135, 140 Historical poetics, 7 Historical prose, 143, 146, 186 Hobbs, Andrew, 10 Hobhouse, John, 232 Hollander, John, 5 Holloway, John, 184 Hood, Tom, 162 Rules of the Rhyme, 162 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 3 Horrocks, Clare, 167 Hošek, Chaviva, 5 Lyric Theory: Beyond New Criticism, 5 Household Words, 45, 57, 59–61 Howden, Jessie C., 59, 60 Hughes, (Rev.) H. Price, 273 Hughes, Linda K., 6, 10, 16, 161 Hunt-Keats Circle, 18, 229, 231–237, 243

283

Hunt, Leigh, 18, 229–230, 233–238, 243 Foliage, Or, Poems Original and Translated, 18, 230, 231, 233–238, 250 “On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from the Same,” 232, 235, 237 “To Percy Shelley, on the Degrading Notions of Deity,” 232, 234 “To the Grasshopper and Cricket,” 231 Hunter, J. Paul, 214, 220 Hymnody, 253–276 Hymns, 6, 18, 253–256, 260, 262–263 Hyper-regularity, 44, 48 I Indigeneity, 10, 14, 104–106, 110, 111, 113, 116–118 Industry, 14, 63–65, 67–69, 71, 73, 75, 79, 144 J Jackson, Virginia, 4–7, 14, 84, 90, 146 Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, 4, 84 The Lyric Theory Reader, 5 Jacobus, Mary, 5 James, Henry, 144 Jameson, Fredric, 5, 201 Januszewski, Claire, 10 Jerrold, Evelyn Douglas, 167 “Ballade de l’Anglophobie,” 167–168 Johnston, Anna, 10, 14–15, 103 Johnston, Ellen, 65, 72, 75 “Address to the Factory of Messrs. J. & W.L. Scott & Co., John Street, Bridgeton,” 65

284 

INDEX

Johnston, Ellen (cont.) “Lines Dedicated to James Kennedy, Esq, of Bedford Street Weaving Factory, Belfast,” 65 “Lines to Mr. James Dorward, Power-Loom Foreman, Chapelshade Works, Dundee,” 65 Jones, William, 4 “Essay on the Arts Called Imitative,” 4 Joyce, Patrick, 65, 66, 79 “Factory Culture,” 65, 67 K Karlin, Daniel, 2, 37, 247, 249 The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, 2 Keats, John, 145, 149, 150, 155–156, 229 “Bright Star,” 156 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” 150 “On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt,” 232 “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” 229 Poems, 233 “To Henry Robertson, John Gattie, and Vincent Novell, Not Keeping Their Appointed Hour,” 233 Keble, John, 156, 256, 263–264 “Awake, my soul,” 264 “Sun of my Soul, Thou Savior dear,” 256, 264 Ken, Thomas, 256, 263 “Evening Hymn,” 256 “Morning Hymn,” 256 Kennedy, E. B., 106 Kenner, Hugh, 175, 220 Kieth, W. J., 140 Kilrain, Jake, 171

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 88, 223 Krieger, Murray, 146 L Lacrom, Lucy, 266 A New England Girlhood Outlined from Memory, 266 Lang, Andrew, 15, 16, 18, 144–145, 148–149, 151–152, 154–155, 158, 161–162, 165, 171, 173, 175, 177–179 “At the Sign of the Ship,” 171, 178 “THE BALLADE,” 179 “Ballade of His Choice of a Sepulchre,” 156 “A Ballad of Blue Pill,” 173 Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems, 151, 162 “Ballad to Theocritus, in Winter,” 154–155 “BY UNDERGROUND,” 169–171 Family Friend, 152 “Literary Plagiarism,” 157 “The Manhood of Great Boys,” 171 “MUSE IN MANACLES,” 179 “PAPER-KNIFE POEMS,” 175, 177, 179 Rhymes à la Mode, 171, 175, 177, 179; “Ballade of Literary Fame,” 175; “Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise, 175; “Ballade of the Neglected Merit,” 175; “Ballade of the Railway Novels,” 175; “A very woeful Ballade of the Art Critic,” 175 “THE RONDEAU,” 181 “The Story of the Common Willow Pattern Plate,” 152 XXII Ballades in Blue China, 145, 173 (see also XXXII Ballades in Blue China)

 INDEX 

285

XXXII Ballades in Blue China, 145, 152–153, 155 “THE TRIOLET,” 180 “THE VILLANELLE,” 180 Lawson, Henry, 117–118 Lecourt, Sebastian, 144, 151 Leeds Times, 71 Le Gallienne, Richard, 272 Leigh, Thomasine, 233 Leighton, Angela, 87, 105, 216, 219 Levine, George, 184 Levinson, Marjorie, 234 Leyden, John, 109 Light verse, 2, 11, 23, 165, 230, 239, 246, 247, 249 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 272 “Little Things,” 47, 50 See also Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal Lockhart, John Gibson, 236–237 Longinus, 3 On the Sublime, 3 Longman’s Magazine, 171, 178 Long Meter, 267 Lowell Offering, 65 Lowell, James Russell, 146 Love, Harold, 233 Luke, Jemima Thompson, 264, 266 “I think when I read that sweet story of old,” 264 Lund, James, 77, 78 Lyric, 4–8, 10, 14–16, 19, 51, 83, 86, 87, 90, 94, 98–100, 115, 145–147, 157, 158, 246 Lyric studies, 5, 14 Lyte, Henry Francis, 259 “Abide with me,” 259

Martin, Meredith, 7, 224 Materiality, 12, 27, 32, 53 Mazel, Adam, 11, 44, 165 McCarthy, Justin, 272 McCutchan, Robert Guy, 271–273 McDonald, Peter, 220 McGann, Jerome, 234 McGill, Meredith, 7 Medieval French verse, 144, 155 “Mere verse,” 3, 207, 213, 231 Meter, 3, 6, 13, 16 Meynell, Alice, 209, 271 Mill, John Stuart, 4, 6, 7, 24, 195, 196 “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 4 Milton, John, 109 Minton, Thomas, 152 Hymns Ancient and Modern, 258, 261, 263, 272–273 Monkhouse, Cosmo, 177–178 Montgomery, James, 257, 263 Moran, Joe, 12 Moresby, Jane, 47 “Last Words,” 47 Morris, (Sir) Lewis, 29 Morris, William, 12, 26, 27, 149, 151, 156 The Earthly Paradise, 156 Morton, Peter, 63, 64, 66 Moss, Edwin, 263 The Home Hymn Book, 263 Motherhood, 17 Moy, Olivia Loksing, 1, 11, 17, 18, 229 Müller, Max, 272 Müller, Philipp, 194

M Maidment, Brian, 163 Marsh, Jan, 241

N Nathan, Rosetta, 106 The Nation, 207

286 

INDEX

Native poetry, 110 Newman, John Henry, 257, 272–273 “Lead Kindly Light,” 272–273 Noble, Edmund, 214 “Nonreading,” 8 Nursery rhymes, 17, 85, 91–92, 207–208 O Ollier, Charles, 229, 232 Once a Week, 45 P Parlor games, 1, 17, 229–231, 239, 243, 248, 250 Parry, Joseph, 273 “Aberystwyth,” 273 Pastiche, 145, 148–150, 152, 157, 158 Pastoral, 71, 124, 125, 129, 130, 135, 140, 141 Pastor-poet 15, 124 Pater, Walter, 148–149, 151 Patmore, Coventry, 209 “Essay on English Metrical Law,” 209 Payn, Harriet “Tiny,” 53 “On a Sheet of Blank Paper,” 53 Payn, James, 53 Penny Post, 75, 76 Periodical poetry, 13, 47, 56–57 Perronet, Edward, 257, 262, 265 “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” 262 Our Hymnody, 271 Pettit, Claire, 53 Phenomenology, 15, 125, 126, 129, 130, 135 Pitman, Mrs. E. R., 263 Poet ferneat, 232

Poetics, 15, 17, 19, 28, 74, 105, 116, 126, 146, 148, 192, 193 Pound, Ezra, 3, 143, 144, 146 Pope, Alexander, 109 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 12, 32–37 Keepsake Verses, 35 “Lines Written for a Blank Page of ‘The Keepsake’,” 32 “Verses Written in the First Leaf of a Child’s Book, Given by-----to her Godson, Aged Four,” 33 Pre-Raphaelites, 15, 144–146, 148, 230, 241 Prins, Yopie, 5–7, 146, 209 The Lyric Theory Reader, 5 “Printer-poets”, 65 See also Finkelstein, David Psomiades, Kathy, 144 Punch, 8, 16, 161, 163, 165, 171, 178, 181 R Ranke, Leopold, 194–195 Reid, Julia, 144 Reiman, Donald, 234 Reign of Terror, 17, 198 Rennie, James, 108 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 232–233 Rice, James, 232 Richards, Caroline, 275 Richards, I. A., 5 Robinson, A. Mary F., 171 A Handful of Honeysuckle, 171 Rollin, Lucy, 219 Romantic poetry, 192, 234 Romantic sonnet, 18, 235 Romantic theory, 3 Rondeaus, 7, 11, 16, 149, 166–167, 177 Rossen, Charles, 198

 INDEX 

Rossetti, Christina, 14, 17, 18, 83, 84, 89–91, 207, 209, 211, 213–215, 217–219, 221, 223, 224, 230, 235, 241–244, 248, 249 Called to be Saints, 221, 222 The Face of the Deep, 213, 224 Goblin Market and Other Poems, 45, 83, 87, 246, 249; “Noble Sisters,” 67, 246; “Sister Maude,” 246 Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets, 242 Maude: A Story for Girls, 230–231, 242–250 “Monna Innominata,” 86, 218, 242 A Pageant and Other Poems, 83 Seek and Find, 214, 221, 223 Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, 14, 17, 84, 85, 91, 93–95, 98, 100, 207–213, 215–220, 222–224; “I dreamt I caught a little owl” 94; “If hope grew on a brush,” 208; “The horses of the sea” 93, 94; “Love me,-I love you,” 92, 95; “Kookoorookoo,” 92, 93 Speaking Likenesses, 247 The Thread of Life, 235, 245 Time Flies, 213, 221, 222 Verses (1893), 83; “An exceeding bitter cry,” 95–96; “The goal in sight!,” 99; “Me and my gift,” 96–97; “Short is time, and only time is bleak,” 97; “Then shall ye shout,” 99 Verses: Dedicated to her Mother (1847), 36 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 84, 150, 151, 162, 235, 241, 242 The House of Life, 242 “Sister Helen,” 150 “Stratton Water,” 150

287

Rossetti, William Michael, 7, 9, 10, 84, 88, 89, 230, 241, 243, 248, 249 Rudy, Jason, 112 Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, 112 Russell, Bertrand, 25 Rhyme, 24, 27–29, 32, 38, 84–86, 91–99, 162, 167, 175, 176, 180, 181, 207, 208, 211, 213–218, 220–224, 229, 239–249 Rhythm, 186, 191–195, 199 S Salt, (Sir) Titus, 71 Sanders, Mike, 6 Sarasin, Jean François, 240 “Dulot vaincu,” 240 “La Défait des bouts-rimés,” 240 Scott, J. R., 51 “A Novelette. In Four Chapters,” 51 Scottish stanza, 29 Schur, Owen, 129, 130 Seriality, 44, 45, 57 Sermons, 15, 125, 130, 131, 136, 138, 140, 141 Settler fantasy, 111 Sickbert, Virginia, 217 Sider, Justin, 15, 143 Siegel, Jonah, 144, 145 Shakespeare, William, 235 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 106, 117, 229, 232, 234 “Ozymandias,” 232, 235, 238, 250 “To the Same,” 234 Shklovsky, Viktor, 148 Settler society, 104 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 5 Smith, Charlotte, 235 Smith, Horace, 232

288 

INDEX

Smith, Jem, 171, 172 Smulders, Sharon, 222 Sonnet, 12, 17, 18, 23, 85, 86, 89, 91, 151 Sonnet contests, 229–234, 236–239 Stead, William Thomas, 253–256, 261, 264, 272 Hymns That Have Helped, 253–254 Steele, Timothy, 3–4 Missing Measures, 3 Stenhouse, John, 109 Sterling, John, 187, 190 Stevenson, Valerie, 167 Stewart, David, 105, 109 Stewart, Garrett, 193–194, 220 Stewart, Susan A., 94, 150, 151 Stillinger, Jack, 232, 234 Strategic brevity, 213 Sullivan, James Frank, 163 “The Detached Train,” 163–164 “The Partiality of Fortune,” 164 Sullivan, John L., 171 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 143–144, 151, 166 Sydney Morning Herald, 108, 110 T Tate, Nahum, 258 “While shepherds watched their flocks by night,” 258 Tennyson, G. B., 17, 184, 192–193 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 12, 28, 29, 38, 39, 87, 144, 162, 185 In Memoriam, 38–39 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 47 Thain, Marion, 144, 156 Thomas, Dylan, 176 “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” 176 Toplady, Augustus, 18, 267, 268

“Rock of Ages,” 18, 107, 267–268, 271 Tucker, Herbert F., 2, 5–6, 12, 149, 235 “For Better for Verse,” 6 Turner, Mark, 10, 43, 57 U Usher, Nora C., 50, 51 “Yes,” 50, 51 V Vers de société, 165, 230–231, 239, 248 Verse, 1–19, 23–40, 44, 48, 50–53, 63–68, 72, 83–100, 103–112, 114–118, 124, 130–133, 135, 141, 144–149, 152, 155, 156, 158, 161–163, 165–173, 175–179, 181, 183–190, 192–194, 196, 199, 202, 203, 207–209, 213, 219, 220, 224, 230, 231, 233–244, 246–250 culture, 10, 44, 64, 65, 68, 80, 165 drama, 23 novel, 23 studies, 6, 8, 10–12, 14, 19 verse-letter, 36 Villon, François, 166 Poems and Ballads, 164 W Warren, Robert Penn, 5 Watson, J. R., 259, 267 Watts, Isaac, 261 Watts, Theodore, 178 Webby, Elizabeth, 104 Webster, Augusta, 223

 INDEX 

Wesley, Charles, 258, 261, 273–275 “Hark! The herald angels sing,” 258, 264 Hymns and Sacred Poems, 273 “Jesu, Lover of my soul,” 273 Wesling, Donald, 186, 193 White, Gleeson, 146, 177–178 Wildman, Abraham, 71 Williams, Carolyn, 7, 149 Williams, Isaac, 88 Wilson, Helen K, 52 “Treasure-Trove,” 52–53 Wilton, Charles, 57 “Long Ago,” 54, 56–60 Wimsatt, W. K., 5, 214 Wood, Evelyn, 272 Woods, M. A., 263 Hymns for School Worship, 263

289

Wordsworth, William, 30, 47, 104, 112 Wolfson, Susan, 234 Working-class literature, 65 Working-class poetics, 74 Working-class poetry, 6 Workplace verse, 13, 63, 65–68, 79 Wright, William, 77, 78 “The Bold Buchaneers,” 77 Trips to Malsis and Windermere, 77 Wu, Duncan, 108 Y Yorkshire Factory Times, 68 Z Zetosophian society, 232