Felicia Hemans

Poetry

Casabianca

• mixing ballad meter with orientalism for a female audience who must emulate these self-sacrificing values
• importantly it's narrative, again balladic, vs. lyric
• story of filial devotion past death, nobility
• last stanza (36-40):

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
That well had borne their part -
But the noblest thing which perish'd there
Was that young and faithful heart!

The Image in Lava

• her note: "the impression of a woman's form, with an infant clasped to the bosom, found at the uncovering of Herculaneum."
• "woman's heart hath left a trace / those glories to outlast" (7-8)
• "childhood's fragile image...survives the proud memorials reared / by conquerors of mankind" (9, 11-12)
  • compare to Ozymandias: not the total futility of saving something against time, but that the mother/child bond (rather than conquerors' monuments) will survive
• the aphoristic point (33-40):

Oh! I could pass all relics
Left by the pomps of old,
To gaze on this rude monument
Cast in affection's mould.
[ ]
Love! human love! what art thou?
Thy print upon the dust
Outlives the cities of renown
Wherein the mighty trust!

• genre of infant mortality poems
• in some ways characteristic Romantic distinction between Man's monument and Nature but here nature leaves a monument (see my note above about Ozymandias)
• relics less holy than the grasp between mother and child: redefining the pilgrimage
  • the strangeness of relics in modernity -- it's not taken for granted anymore
• love as a secular religion?

Context

• Hemans a professional, commercial poet: cf. Leighton 1992 for a discussion of her success and work in Keepsake-style annual publications
• from Charles's seminar:
  • FH is representative of a type of piety that gets articulated in Anglo-American poetry
  • Elizabeth Gray, NZ scholar: second wave feminsm takes for granted that women's religious poetry participates in patriarchy: taking it away takes away the most salient position from which these women could speak