Poetry of the New Woman: Public Concerns, Private Matters 303119764X, 9783031197642

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues
A Sketch of the New Woman
Dying Love
Vagaries of Love
Unsettling Misconceptions
Eve’s Supposed Legacy
Musings on Motherhood
Social Duty
Chapter Previews
Chapter 2: The Vagaries of Marriage
Nesbit’s Critiques
Constraint
Estrangement
Infidelity
Dismaying Progression
Chapter 3: The Workings of Desire
Linguistic Fluctuations
Ambiguity Resolved?
Secretive Passion
Varied Strategies
Sea of Desire
Chapter 4: Social Responsibility for the Destitute
Prescriptions for the Victorian Sonnet
Self-Absorption Maligned
Human Community
Disturbing Deprivation
Other Voices Assail Poverty
Failures of the Church
Chapter 5: Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’
A Contextual Framework
Blind’s Tales of the Discarded
No Maternal Protection
Unforgiven
Dead or Alive?
Unabated Agony
Chapter 6: Poets on Poetry
Poetic Pioneers
Poetic Challenges
Poetic Responsibility
Seeking the Heights
Inspiration and Its Discontents
Fulfilling a Duty
Chapter 7: The Promise of London
A Fitting Correspondence
Significance of the Omnibus
Creativity and the City
Country Versus City
Endless Movement
London’s Darker Side
Watson/Tomson Verses
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Speculating on the Future
Final Thoughts
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Poetry of the New Woman Public Concerns, Private Matters

Patricia Murphy

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor

Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800-1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Patricia Murphy

Poetry of the New Woman Public Concerns, Private Matters

Patricia Murphy English (emeritus) Missouri Southern State University Joplin, MO, USA

ISSN 2634-6494     ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-19764-2    ISBN 978-3-031-19765-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9 © 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 credit line: whitemay/Getty Images. 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

As always, I greatly appreciate the encouragement and interest my brother, Jim Murphy, and my sister, Sue Roche, have given me over the years for my scholarly endeavors. I also wish to thank K. Schoenbrod for such support and for the advice given long ago to change careers and enter grad school at the University of Iowa to study literature, which has fascinated me since early adolescence. I am grateful as well to Florence Boos for teaching me so much about Victorian poetry during grad school. I also much appreciate her interest in my scholarship on Victorian women poets. In addition, I wish to thank two journals for allowing me to publish modified material from articles that appeared there. Victorian Poetry featured my essay on E.  Nesbit’s verses about marriage, and Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature published my essay on Mathilde Blind’s poems about “fallen women.”

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Contents

1 Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues  1 2 The Vagaries of Marriage 37 3 The Workings of Desire 71 4 Social Responsibility for the Destitute109 5 Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’147 6 Poets on Poetry179 7 The Promise of London217 8 Conclusion: Speculating on the Future251 Works Cited257 Index271

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues

Immersed in a tumultuous culture at the fin de siècle, New Woman poets advanced significant, opportune, and compelling perspectives in addressing public matters and articulating personal concerns, with the boundary between them often blurred.1 In so doing, these writers contested the intellectual and behavioral constraints that plagued Victorian women, exposing the many ways in which they were deprived of fulfilling lives. Moreover, the poets sought to raise awareness of injustices that hindered society at large by fostering inequality and misery among the many disadvantaged Victorians. As Aurora Leigh argues in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s seminal verse-narrative about the eponymous protagonist, poets need to “[e]xert a double vision” that enables them to see “near things” and “distant things” by concentrating on the contemporary world (Book V, ll. 184, 185, 186). “Their sole work is to represent the age,” Aurora asserted, “this live, throbbing age” and “[n]ever flinch” from creating “living art, / Which thus presents and thus records true life” (Book V, ll. 202, 203, 221–22). New Woman poetry irrefutably evidences that such advice was deeply inculcated, cultivated, and heeded. The important issues probed by New Woman poets certainly were not unique to their work, since an array of novels also explored such contemporary conditions. Critical commentary has carefully probed many New Woman novels to provide enlightening assessments of these once-ignored texts, and the subgenre has been receiving well-deserved attention. New © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_1

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Woman poetry as a complementary subgenre has not experienced such widespread interest, however, though occasionally verses have surfaced in anthologies and perspicacious authors have been studied. Yet this late-­ century poetry merits far more consideration. In part, this book seeks to bring the often-neglected poetry to the fore, much of which languishes in archival collections. Feminist scholars have labored to rescue such work from obscurity, and their efforts have been invaluable. Nevertheless, many fine poems have not received the intensive interventions accorded to the novels, and Victorian scholarship suffers from the omissions.

A Sketch of the New Woman The literary and cultural figure of the New Woman generated both vociferous condemnation and ardent approbation in the fin de siècle, bringing the Woman Question that had preoccupied Victorians for multiple decades into glaring attention. The unconventional individual emerged at a significant moment in cultural history when gender roles received intensive scrutiny as marriage, motherhood, education, professions, and other issues came to the fore. To opponents, the New Woman threatened the family, social stability, and even the viability of the human species. To proponents, she augured crucial improvements in social mores, female independence, and personal growth as well as human advancement. Whether vilified or applauded, the New Woman was certainly not ignored, as indicated by numerous periodical essays and other texts discussed below. Detractors launched attacks in general terms to underscore the New Woman’s ostensible perfidy. Charles G.  Harper groused in Revolted Woman: Past, Present, and to Come that “[s]ociety has been ringing lately with the writings and doings of the pioneers of the New Woman, who forget that Woman’s Mission is Submission.” Venomous and incessant critic Eliza Lynn Linton called the New Woman “a social insurgent [who] preaches the ‘lesson of liberty’ broadened into lawlessness and license,” seeking “absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men.”2 Among their supposed characteristics, Linton maintained that New Women were “[a]ggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, rebellious to authority and tyrannous.”3 Sexologist Havelock Ellis warned of “nothing less than a new irruption of barbarians.” Physical traits also came under assault. Cornhill Magazine sniffed that the New Woman was a “sallow” individual who “has a long face, with a discontented mouth, and a nose indicative of intelligence, and too large for feminine beauty as

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understood by men.” As Sally Ledger observes, caustic remarks about the New Woman sought “to ridicule and to control renegade women.”4 Supporters pointed to the New Woman’s role in bettering society and the human condition. Nat Arling asserted that characterizing the New Woman as “a monstrosity,” “an absurdity,” and “an interloper” came from “the bigoted and the superficial.” M.  Eastwood considered the New Woman as an advanced example of evolution and noted that “she is adapting herself with marvellous rapidity” as the world changes. Similarly, to A. Amy Bulley, the New Woman “can rightly be viewed only as the advance of a wing of the great human army, and therefore intimately related to the movement of the other sections”; moreover, “it is only clear that with the development of society is bound up henceforward the more complete and perfect evolution of women.” H. E. Harvey contended that New Women were unjustly condemned for their efforts to improve institutions when accused of a “wish to overthrow morality and order, and introduce a state of chaos.” At century’s end, Herbert Jamieson foresaw widespread acceptance of modern women and said that “prejudice is dying.” The iconoclastic figure “has only … to be understood properly, and her admirers will be legion,” he predicted.5 Certainly other advanced women had appeared in literature during previous decades and could be considered forebears. In fiction, for instance, Charlotte Brontë’s famed Jane Eyre (1847) brought an independent protagonist to the Victorian public. Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) sought to grow intellectually rather than be shunted into ignorance. Dorothea Brooke similarly yearned for cognitive stimulation in Middlemarch (1872). In poetry, for example, Aurora Leigh (1856) featured a strong, compelling individual from childhood to adulthood. Augusta Webster challenged the constrictive cultural alliance between women and nature in several works featured in Portraits (1870). Yet the fin de siècle witnessed an explosion of literary accounts of advanced individuals characterized as New Women. No one definition epitomizes the multivalent New Women, for they differed in perspectives and priorities. Nonetheless, all New Women sought a more fulfilling life and greater control over their own destinies. The multitude of terms designating the controversial individual seemingly attests to complexity, for the New Woman was called Novissima, a wild woman, an odd woman, a third sex, an unsexed anomaly, and a shrieking sister, among other unflattering sobriquets. Although the idea of the New Woman arose in the early 1880s, likely because of the unconventional

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female protagonist in The Story of an African Farm, the appellation appeared in 1894  in dueling essays by Sarah Grand and Ouida. The “Bawling Brotherhood,” wrote Grand, which was familiar with the “cow-­ woman,” did not understand “the new woman,” who “proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy.”6 Grand assailed men who had denied educational advancement and then “jeered at us because we had no knowledge”; restricted “our outlook on life so that our view of it should be all distorted” and then ridiculed women as “senseless creatures”; and “cramped our minds,” sneering at their supposed illogicality. Ouida, applying capital letters to the New Woman, lambasted her for failing to “surrender her present privileges” but seeking “the lion’s share of power.” Such an “overweening and unreasonable grasping at both positions,” Ouida claimed, ultimately would “end in making her odious to man.” Ouida castigated the New Woman’s desire for higher education and public life as well as a supposed distaste of motherhood. The same year as the essays appeared, Sydney Grundy’s mocking play titled The New Woman made numerous assaults on the figure. The play derided educational aspirations because they produce “a Frankenstein”; argued that a man seeks a woman—and “that’s all,” rather than “brains, accomplishments,” and other “vanities”; and insisted that traditional gender roles should be upheld rather than believe that a woman should become “a beastly man,” thus creating “a new gender.”7 The latter point was frequently adopted as the New Woman was vilified for being manly or a member of a third sex. Linton, for instance, complained that “Wild Women … are neither man nor woman.” Cornhill Magazine denounced the New Woman’s dress as “always manly.” Saturday Review advised in the unambiguously titled “Manly Women” that “the rage now is for women to appear manly and to copy men in all things; and a great mistake it is.” Punch proclaimed that New Women were “[e]qually ‘manly’ in dress, work or play.” Among defenders, Emma Churchman Hewitt insisted that “[t]he masculine woman is no more common than the effeminate man”; working for her living “no more makes woman masculine than” a husband assisting in child care makes him effeminate.8 Curiously, the New Woman was also accused of being an oversexed, uncontrolled predator who was undermining the social fabric, even though many individuals favored celibacy. Fiction writers were censured for, as Hugh E. M. Stutfield averred in “The Psychology of Feminism,” “literary scavaging” in “refuse-heaps.” In “Tommyrotics,” this vitriolic adversary

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decried “all the prating of passion, animalism, ‘the natural workings of sex,’ and so forth, with which we are nauseated” and accused writers of observing life “through sex-maniacal glasses.” James Ashcroft Noble commented that such fiction merely sought to present “an appeal to the sensual instincts of the baser or vulgarer portion of the reading public.” Margaret Oliphant blasted “[t]his inclination towards the treatment of subjects hitherto considered immoral or contrary to good manners,” while Edmund Gosse called the works “tiresome and ugly” and, “in short, they err grievously against taste.”9 Among the major concerns of opponents was the New Woman’s perceived menace to reproduction and healthy offspring. Since women had been slowly gaining in opportunities for higher education, critics backed away from contentions that females lacked the necessary cognitive ability to succeed in universities and instead blamed intellectual advancement for jeopardizing humanity’s future. Such brain stress, foes opined, would draw from the body’s limited supply of energy that was needed for maternity. As physician T. S. Clouston averred, “Why should we spoil a good mother by making an ordinary grammarian?” Biologist Grant Allen warned that numerous women “acquired a distaste, an unnatural distaste, for the functions which nature intended them to perform.” Eugenicist Karl Pearson cited women’s “prerogative function of child-bearing,” and he feared that higher education could bring “a physical degradation of the race, owing to prolonged study having ill effects on woman’s childbearing efficiency.” Harper sputtered that “nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring”; such women could “peopl[e] the world with stunted and hydrocephalic children,” bringing forth “the degradation and ultimate extinction of the race.”10 In contrast, educational proponents held that intellectual stimulation would produce more effective mothers and improve generations. An unsigned contribution in Westminster Review, though cautioning about “serious injury to the health of women from overexercise of brain,” noted the “beneficial effect” of advanced study for “children borne by such cultured women.” Helen McKerlie countered suppositions that education would damage women’s reproductive functions and instead argued that hampering intellectual growth would “reduce women to one dead level of unintellectual pursuit.” Hewitt argued that “[t]he ‘new’ woman with her independence, her clearly defined ideas of right and wrong, her knowledge of the world, and her superior education, is far better fitted to be the

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mother of noble men” than an “‘old’ woman with her narrow environments and her knowledge, which went little beyond household lore.”11 Marriage, like education and reproduction, brought intense debate. New Woman adversaries maintained that she despised the institution. Pearson claimed that marriage would be “questioned and remoulded by the woman’s movement,” and “there can be little doubt that the cultivated woman of the future will find herself compelled to reject its doctrines.” In a defense of marriage, Walter Besant noted that “Modern Society is based upon the unit of the family,” and “[t]he family tie means, absolutely, that the man and the woman are indissolubly united.” In attacks on fiction, Stutfield argued that “the horrors of matrimony from the feminine point of view are so much insisted upon nowadays” along with “the ‘choked up, seething pit’ of matrimony.” Janet E.  Hogarth reproached writers for considering marriage “the head and front of society’s offending” behavior. Oliphant assailed fiction that insistently demeaned the institution and decried “the crusade against marriage now officially organised and raging around us.”12 New Woman adherents did not overtly reject marriage but sought crucial improvements. Grand believed that “it is upon the perfecting of the marriage relation that the upward progress of mankind depends.” Harvey noted that the “necessity for meeting the demands of the marriage market has given to the sex an artificial character of subservience and servility.” Mona Caird wrote extensively on the flawed institution in essays as well as fiction, contending that Victorian marriage enslaved wives. Julia M. A. Hawksley said that girls needed to be apprised of the nature of marriage rather than being nudged into it without comprehending its ramifications and being “sacrificed in ignorance.” As Arling put it, the New Woman “wishes to make marriage no longer an auction of sale to the highest bidder, or an exercise of tyranny on one side and subjection on the other, but a covenant of mutual help and service.”13 With all of the complexities associated with the New Woman, it is not surprising that scholars have devoted attention to the figure in recent decades. Although much work has centered on fiction, poetry certainly has been an interest. In the latter twentieth century, anthologies such as Victorian Women Poets (1995), edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, features numerous New Woman poems, helping to bring neglected writers to the fore. Appearing the next decade, Linda K. Hughes’ anthology, New Woman Poets (2001), provides a broad selection of writers

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and key verses. Also published that year was Virginia Blain’s Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology, which offers several works by New Women. Additional important texts include Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), which discussed work by several late-­ Victorian writers, such as Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Victorian Sappho (1999) by Yopie Prins examines the complex literary constructions involving the ancient poet and also features Field in the analysis. Among significant studies appearing in the twenty-first century are The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2000) by Talia Schaffer, which explores pioneering texts by Rosamund Marriott Watson and Alice Meynell, among others; The Fin-de-­ Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005), edited by Joseph Bristow and including essays on several New Woman writers; and Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (2005) by Ana Parejo Vadillo, which details representations of London by Amy Levy and other poets. Numerous single-author monographs of New Woman poets have emerged as well, investigating the writings of such figures as Levy, Mathilde Blind, and Watson. Of course, many essays also have appeared in recent decades on many New Woman poets. Although the above compilation of significant texts cannot be exhaustive, it does convey the breadth and depth of the subjects addressed in anthologies and scholarship. My study primarily explores noncanonical work from a host of noteworthy writers, some of whom are slowly finding greater recognition and receiving extended discussion.14 Certain issues in particular engrossed New Woman poets, and six of those concerns are examined in this book. Although many vital topics appear in the fin-de-siècle poetry, the six subjects chosen are especially meaningful to consider: marriage, desire, poverty, “fallen women,” metapoetry, and city life. Because this analysis is necessarily limited in scope, other issues cannot receive elaborate treatment, but nevertheless deserve notice. Therefore, this introduction reviews several of those matters in appraising the vagaries of love, purported inferiority, unrealistic expectations, supposed passivity, Eve’s legacy, ecclesiastic misperceptions, maternal thoughts, and cultural shortcomings. The poems chosen to delineate these topics are extremely worthwhile to analyze.

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Dying Love The loss of love in its various manifestations became a frequent and insistent focus of New Woman poetry. For example, three pieces by Augusta Webster in A Book of Rhyme (1881) poignantly describe the demise of love in varied states. “Once” presents a sad progression of three stages delineating the speaker’s life, deploying floral imagery to mark each response to the prospect of love. The first of three eight-line abbbcaca stanzas recounts a state of innocence, emblematized by a lily, during which the speaker trusts that the experience of love would be lasting. Only the initial three lines, mellifluously presented in iambic tetrameter, convey the optimistic thought, however, succeeded by the disturbing realization that love is ephemeral.    I set a lily long ago;   I watched it whiten in the sun;   I loved it well, I had but one.   Then summer-time was done, The wind came and the rain,    My lily bent, lay low. Only the night-time sees my pain—    Alas, my lily long ago!

The burgeoning whiteness of the lily contributes to the aura of innocence, underscoring the floral linkages to purity and modesty while foreshadowing other connotations of grief and death.15 With the sun serving as a signifier of masculinity, the speaker’s ardor swells with the lover’s ongoing and expanding presence. In accordance with the floral image, the end of summer provides an apt moment for the lover to leave, and the unpleasant change in climate intimates the grave effect upon the speaker. Unable to express or display her sadness, she can only suffer in solitude. The next stanza follows a similar format, with the first three lines gently detailing another incidence of love, followed by its painful cessation when summer has given way to severe weather. A rose provides the floral connection with its resonances to passion and sexuality. The stanza indicates that the attraction commenced in spring, a time of growth, and the speaker’s new relationship also blossomed. The rose’s color intensifies as time passes, suggesting that the passion has reached its apex and sexuality has ensued. Yet the lovers’ connection dissolves.

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   I had a rose-tree born in May;   I watched it burgeon and grow red,   I breathed the perfume that it shed.   Then summer-time had sped, The frost came with its sleep,    My rose-tree died away. Only the silence hears me weep—    Alas, lost rose-tree! lost, lost May!

This second relationship takes an even harsher toll on the speaker. Not only has summer concluded, but its rapid abeyance reveals an even more transitory enjoyment of love than in the first stanza. Rather than rain and wind, wintry cold arrives; unlike the lily, which merely leaned when the climate altered, the rose ceases to exist altogether, eliminating any hope that the flower will revive. Through the excruciating loss, the speaker can only sob, with the ambient silence accentuating her disconnection from life. The final line further relates that this relationship has produced greater misery than the first, for the word “lost” is emphatically and thricely uttered. The final stanza again presents a positive outlook in its beginning. Spring has returned, and the literal lily and rose will reappear, with no regard to the unpleasant weather that will again succeed the summer. In contrast, the speaker does not enjoy such a renaissance. The collapsed relationships she has endured have caused such serious damage that she no longer even seeks to search for love again.    The garden’s lily blows once more;   The buried rose will wake and climb;   There is no thought of rain and rime   After next summer-time. But the heart’s blooms are weak;    Once dead for ever o’er. Not night, not silence knows me seek    My joy that waned and blooms no more.

The poem’s title augured this resolution of the speaker’s defeats in stressing that these events transpired “once,” never to be repeated. Emotionally deadened, the speaker cannot undergo more agony wrought by a faithless lover.

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Webster’s “Farewell” presents a searing portrait of a couple irretrievably estranged but not physically separated. The opening line evidences the disjunction, when “we” immediately separates into “two.” Farewell: we two shall still meet day by day,     Live side by side; But never more shall heart respond to heart.     Two stranger boats can drift adown one tide, Two branches on one stem grow green apart.      Farewell, I say.

The stanza is filled with divisions and dualities to mirror the pair’s broken connection: day/day, side/side, and heart/heart, as well as separate “stranger boats” wandering aimlessly and branches sharing a stem but abiding “apart.” Melodic iambic meter belies the discordant state of the couple’s relationship. The opening “farewell” and its repetition in the final line reinforce that the bond between the individuals will never be restored, a pattern repeated in each of the other two abcbca stanzas. Continuing the thematic approach of the first stanza, the second one characterizes the pair as no more joined than random individuals flung together simply by circumstance. The interactions between the couple resemble those of fleeting acquaintances who converse but pursue no further intimacy. Farewell: chance travellers, as the path they tread,      Change words and smile, And share their travellers’ fortunes, friend with friend,    And yet are foreign in their thoughts the while, Several, alone, save that one way they wend.      Farewell; ’tis said.

Like the couple, these strangers share no emotional connection but instead remain alienated, as emphasized by their being “several, alone” and their subsequent parting. In the closing stanza, funereal images stress that no positive resolution awaits the couple. Farewell: ever the bitter asphodel      Outlives love’s rose; The fruit and blossom of the dead for us.     Ah, answer me, should this have been the close, To be together and be sundered thus?      But yet, farewell.

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The asphodel provides an especially apt image as a lily associated with the grave and with memory lasting beyond death. Similarly, the couple are doomed to remember their once-promising bond, now eternally dead. A Homeric link to the asphodel accentuates the inescapable demise, for the flower appears at gravesites in the underworld. In The Odyssey, “breath-­ souls” of the dead abound in a dreary asphodel meadow but retain their memories (Book 24:14). The ghost of Achilles ominously advises his fellow wayfarer Agamemnon that “it was your fate that death would claim you / Prematurely, before your time, the fate that no one born can escape” (24:26–27). The asphodel of “Farewell,” not the rose of passion, will prevail, the speaker laments, unable to understand the causative chain leading to the couple’s wretched state. The history between the two former lovers and the reason they stay together remains obscure. Possibilities abound: a spinster grasping onto a marital prospect to avoid censure, an engagement that cannot be broken without scandal, spouses who have emotionally or intellectually drifted apart, a philandering husband who cravenly visits other women, or an illegitimate pregnancy concealed through a hasty marriage. In each case, fear of crippling disapprobation provides the sole rationale for the pairing to continue. In leaving the cause of the emotional separation unknown, the poem carries a chilling suggestion of universality whereby any couple could descend into such misery unawares. Perhaps the “Farewell” pair never truly loved but were driven together by their youth, proximity, and illusions. Such is the scenario of Webster’s “In After Years,” which also features a speaker cognizant of the bitter loss of affection, accentuated by a plethora of trochees. The poem’s fluctuations among the trochees, anapests, and iambs suggest an unsettling disharmony. Adopting a brutal tone, the speaker urges her partner to recognize in the first of four abcbcaa stanzas that their relationship cannot be sustained. Love is dying. Why then, let it die.     Trample it down, that it die more fast. What is a rose that has lost its bloom?     What is a fruit with its freshness past? And where is the worth of the twilight gloom? Let the night come when the day has gone by:      Let the dying die.

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Multiple iterations of death, both in noun and predicate forms, infuse the poem. The first and last lines of the stanza refer not only to the end of life but do so twice, leaving no prospect of ardor ever reappearing. The violence intimated in the second line reflects the speaker’s irrepressible impatience to accept an inevitable outcome and proceed forward. As in Webster’s “Once” and “Farewell,” this poem deploys floral imagery to represent the bitter course of passion but intensifies the impression through the reference to fruit with its deterioration. In questioning the value of maintaining a relationship in a state preceding death—its “twilight gloom”—the speaker is admonishing the partner to reject a delusional hope. Nothing can restore the amorous feelings, the speaker chides her lover: “Leave your useless smiles and your tears, / Weepings and wooings are, oh, so vain!” Moreover, love never even existed, she contends: “Nay, but say ‘It was always so; / Love was not love in the other years, / There is nought for tears.’” The language becomes harsher in the third stanza when the speaker insists that her partner confront the dismal truth. Say “We lose what was never ours,    Lo, we were fooled by a fond deceit; Because we chanced to be side by side,    Because we were young and love is sweet, Love seemed there: but could love have died? When has decay touched immortal hours?     Love was never ours.”

In the final stanza, the speaker retreats from the scathing tone and instead questions if the relationship truly had no substantive foundation. Regret surfaces as she poses a series of queries and wonders if all was only illusory. Ah, my heart, is it true? is it true?    Did all longings and fears mean no more? Whispers and vows and the gladness mean this?    What, we grow wiser when years are o’er, And weary in soul of a mimic bliss? Did we but dream, hand in hand, we two?      Must it needs be true?

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In effect, the speaker is uttering sentiments that her partner would likely express. In an odd way, the pair come together only in ruing loss, not in sharing affection.

Vagaries of Love The element of chance that the speaker credits for the relationship also surfaces in E. (Edith) Nesbit’s “Vies Manquées” albeit in a different configuration. Disjunctive timing undermines reciprocal affection, and no gratifying result appears in the seven-quatrain abab poem, which was included in Lays and Legends (1886). The speaker recalls the situation a year previously when the pair had wandered “the happy woodland ways” replete with nature’s spring bounties. The initial stanzas recount the setting in detail: a blackbird tends to her nest, a thrush warbles amid expanding foliage, a dusky sky transforms branches from winter to spring coloration, and masses of flowers flourish. The portrait of the woods conveys harmony, peace, and promise. Yet the companions do not fully absorb the scene and reflect upon its beauty but instead react to their surroundings from very diverse perspectives. She does not reciprocate his deep affection and therefore “missed the meaning of the world / From lack of love for you.” In contrast, he feels too overwhelmed by his emotions, both positive and negative, to attend to the idyllic setting, the speaker states. You missed the beauty of the year,    And failed its self to see, Through too much doubt and too much fear,    And too much love of me.

Yet the situation sharply reverses in the next year when they again walk through the springtime forest with its attractions revived. The speaker regrets that the pair will never experience the same feelings simultaneously for a reason that “we shall never find.” Again the woodland beauties receive little notice from the pair as they grapple with their antipodal emotions. Our drifted spirits are not free    Spring’s secret springs to touch, For now you do not care for me,    And I love you too much.

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As in the Webster poems, no satisfactory resolution appears possible, with no hint that the situation will alter and the pair’s emotional timing become synchronized. Mathilde Blind’s “The Forest Pool,” which appeared in Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (1885), offers an even darker picture of unsuccessful love. Composed of four aabb stanzas, the poem depicts a woodland setting in a depressing manner rather than present the pastoral attractions of Nesbit’s verse. The atmosphere is established as the poem opens, with the titular pool so “[l]ost amid gloom and solitude” that it is concealed, and flowers are not praised for their blooms but are characterized by their shadows. The next stanza heightens the impression of dreariness in the lifeless environment. Bare as a beggar’s board, the trees Stand in the water to their knees; The birds are mute, but far away I hear a bloodhound’s sullen bay.

The third stanza augurs a shift in tone, but the impression endures only momentarily. The speaker describes a bucolic scene of flowers “[k]issed by a little laughing brook” as well as by her partner. Yet the quatrain’s last line ruthlessly undercuts the promising scenario, for the forget-me-nots “[f]loat in the water drowned and dead.” In the closing quatrain, the relationship of the speaker and her lover is even more excruciating. And dead and drowned ‘mid leaves that rot, Our angel-eyed Forget-me-not, The love of unforgotten years, Floats corpse-like in a pool of tears.

A death of a different sort caused by love defines May Probyn’s “Ballade of Lovers: Double Refrain,” which was published in A Ballad of the Road, and Other Poems (1883). The poem consists of an ababbaba rhyme scheme, a concluding envoi, and disturbing dual refrains; the first indicates that the woman holds scant importance and the second relates that through extreme dependency upon her partner, she loses any sense of her own subjectivity. The initial stanza elucidates that she represents little more than a decorative object to him. “For the man she was made by the Eden tree,” the poem begins, “[t]o be decked in soft raiment, and worn

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on his sleeve.” Underlining her status as an object, the first refrain refers to her as “[a] thing to take, or a thing to leave.” She becomes so immersed in him that she devolves into a cipher, never to regain status as a subject; through his presence, “her soul will escape her beyond reprieve.” The second refrain reinforces her self-effacement: “And, alas! the whole of her world is he.” The next stanza reiterates that she holds no consequence for him, and his seeming shows of affection are disingenuous since other women are readily available. Despite her knowledge of his disloyalty, she cannot wrest herself from his influence and grovels before him. To-morrow brings plenty as lovesome, maybe—   If she break when he handles her, why should he grieve? She is only one pearl in a pearl-crowded sea,    A thing to take, or a thing to leave.    But she, though she knows he has kissed to deceive And forsakes her, still only clings on at his knee—    When life has gone, what further loss can bereave? And, alas! the whole of her world is he.

The third stanza repeats the point made in the poem’s opening line that “[f]or the man was she made.” Like the paradigmatic self-sacrificing Victorian woman, she apparently exists only to serve the male who has laid claim to her, becoming his “helpmeet what time there is burden to heave.” She can merely follow his lead and conform herself to his wants and needs, “to interweave / Her woof with his warp.” Such behavior will continue until he tires of her and seeks to shed the clutching spider by “clear[ing] his way out through her web.” Even if a woman avoids such an all-encompassing loss of subjectivity, another manifestation of self-effacement occurs when her driving ambition is to marry, despite the deficiencies and disparagements of a prospective mate. The scenario reflects a cultural supposition that she ignore such flaws and accept an unworthy lover nonetheless. Constance Naden’s 1881 “Love versus Learning” entails a troubling portrait of an intelligent woman whose dominant concern from girlhood is to find a wise husband and become “a philosopher’s bride.” In her musings, she envisioned him as “learned and witty, / The sage and the lover combined.” Yet in actuality she succumbs to an unworthy Oxford graduate with an advanced degree, despite her uncertainty about the match; “fate overtook me at last,” she realizes, and her “freedom was past.”

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She later comprehends that she had sorely misjudged him and her “visions are fatally marred.” Asserting that he resembles “neither a sage nor a bard,” she learns that he has become entrenched in ideas absorbed as a student and recognizes no necessity to expand his thoughts. Then begin his patronizing denigrations of his companion’s intellectual talents. My logic he sets at defiance,   Declares that my Latin’s no use, And when I begin to talk Science   He calls me a dear little goose. He says that my lips are too rosy   To speak in a language that’s dead, And all that is dismal and prosy   Should fly from so sunny a head.

The realization of her lover’s unfitness frequently leads her to consider abandoning him, but he spews forth quasi-scientific compliments that she accepts nevertheless. Even though she finds “[t]his conflict of love and of lore” quite bewildering, she unfortunately decides that “I must cease from my musing, / For that is his knock at the door!” If a woman wishes to forge her own path, unlike the protagonist of “Love versus Learning,” and pursue a substantive life not dependent on a male’s selfish interests, she faces the prospect that a loving relationship cannot occur. Another Naden poem, “The Lady Doctor,” makes the problem abundantly clear. As an adolescent, the protagonist possessed “[t]he golden hair, the blooming face, / And all a maiden’s tender grace.” She was enamored with a youth but lost her affection through an unknown cause, possibly because of his opinions or aggressiveness. Deserting her stricken lover, she turns to medicine and earns her degree, still “young and fair, / With rosy cheeks and golden hair, / Learning with beauty blended.”16 Yet the exigencies of her profession transform her into a careworn, rapidly aging woman whose “roses all were faded.” She has deteriorated into a “spinster gaunt and grey, / Whose aspect stern might well dismay / A bombardier stout-hearted.” To an observer, she seems unsexed, a frequent criticism hurled at New Women, and appears like “a man in woman’s clothes, / All female graces slighting.” The toll her profession has taken is exemplified by “[t]he woe of living all alone, / In friendless, dreary sadness,” and she thinks longingly of affectionate companionship. The poem concludes with a dispiriting moral that a

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Victorian woman can choose either a rewarding profession or a mate, but not both. Fair maid, if thine unfettered heart Yearn for some busy, toilsome part,   Let that engross thee only; But oh! if bound by love’s light chain, Leave not thy fond and faithful swain   Disconsolate and lonely.

Although New Woman poems, like the preceding examples, tend to present love in disheartening terms, an occasional exception arises. Even in that more optimistic situation, however, obstacles materialize. Rosamund Marriott Watson’s “Hic Jacet” from Vespertilia and Other Voices (1895) provides a case in point, as the funereal title indicates with its translation of “here lies.” The speaker is confounded that a deep, shared love will become meaningless and disintegrate through death. And is it possible?—and must it be— At last, indifference ’twixt you and me? We who have loved so well, Must we indeed fall under that strange spell, The tyranny of the grave?

The protagonist continues to question the inevitability of death dividing the lovers and causing them to forget each other. She finds it difficult to accept that the intense emotions they reciprocate will simply cease to exist. Shall not my pulses leap if you be near? Shall these endure, the sun, the wind, the rain, And naught of all our tenderness remain, Our joy—our hope—our fear? …

Ultimately, the speaker realizes that to “rail or weep, / Plead or defy, take counsel as we may, / It shall not profit us.” Instead, she places her hopes on chance, “the blind powers,” that the pair will live and love for as long as possible. Rather than despair completely of the situation, the speaker urges that the couple value their love in the limited time ahead. Nevertheless, the prospect of death, whenever it may occur, looms over the poem and generates an unavoidable tension.

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Unsettling Misconceptions Not only the vagaries of love trouble New Women, of course, but also the myths readily accepted by a Victorian culture shaped by an essentialist perspective. M. E. Coleridge’s 1899 “In Dispraise of the Moon” from her Poems adopts the lunar image to illustrate the disparagement of women as inferior beings. Composed of three aabb stanzas, the poem begins with a demeaning portrait of the moon, the conventional symbol of women in contrast to the masculine sun. Presumably spoken by a male, the initial stanza carries an unpleasant tone. The moon is depicted as a witch-like presence with its ability to attract predatory birds and vampiric creatures. Contrasted to the weak moon is the exalted sun, whose stellar quality the moon besmirches through its debilitating influence. I would not be the Moon, the sickly thing, To summon owls and bats upon the wing; For when the noble Sun is gone away, She turns his night into a pallid day.17

Pernicious and parasitic, the moon relies upon the sun’s luminescence for its subsistence like a traditional Victorian female dependent on a male for guidance and sustenance. The woman represented by the moon only amounts to a distasteful specter of the culturally powerful male. She hath no air, no radiance of her own, That world unmusical of earth and stone. She wakes her dim, uncoloured, voiceless hosts, Ghost of the Sun, herself the sun of ghosts.

Building upon suppositions about the moon’s destruction of sanity, the final stanza cautions against lengthy observation. Otherwise, “[m]ortal eyes that gaze too long on her / Of Reason’s piercing ray defrauded are.” Unlike the vitalizing powers of the sun, the moonlight brings harm. Though sunlight “doth feed the living brain,” the stanza concludes, “[t]hat light, reflected, but makes darkness plain.” Dora Sigerson’s “The Awakening,” published in Verses (1893), demonstrates the absurdity of tenets propounding female inferiority. The speaker regrets that her dearth of sufficient erudition precludes her as a suitable partner for the man she loves, and she pleads for enhanced learning.

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“Knowledge, be my master,” she beseeches before demanding, “Turn brain, O faster. / Grind the seeds of wisdom fine, / Till no mind be wise as mine.” Subsequently, however, she realizes that she had misjudged her love, who was just a fool with “[m]uch the chaff and little wheat.” His assertions of an advanced mind prove groundless, since “[a]ll his thoughts [were] a borrowed store.” This false light that made my day Was the sun’s reflected ray, Dancing broken on the wave Of ignorance, nor can I save One tossing spark of foolish light To make a beacon for my night. Blind for love’s sweet sake to be, Seeing is a misery.

Just as unnerving as the denigration accorded women for their supposed intellectual mediocrity is the misguided idealization that typified much Victorian thought. Naden’s 1887 “Love’s Mirror” chronicles a man’s unrealistic assessment of a woman as a goddess figure resembling the valorized and widely accepted impression of the Virgin Mary.18 The poem also advises that such a cultural appraisal harms women by convincing them of the validity of the impossible standard. In the first two of five stanzas, the speaker recognizes both that her partner appraises her as an exemplar of the ideal and realizes the enormity of his misjudgment. I live with love encompassed round,   And glowing light that is not mine,    And yet am sad; for, truth to tell,    It is not I you love so well; Some fair Immortal, robed and crowned,   You hold within your heart’s dear shrine.

As the longest in the poem, this stanza assumes the greatest weight in asserting the ideal as a faulty norm. The next stanza prods the lover to dismiss his erroneous belief, accept the flawed speaker, and understand that perfection cannot be attained. The two words introducing the stanza can be read as a spondee that underscores the forceful message.

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Cast out the Goddess! let me in;   Faulty I am, yet all your own,   But this bright phantom you enthrone Is such as mortal may not win.

The poem begins a daunting turn, however, as the woman expresses a wish to embody the idealized paradigm. She urges her lover to retain the perfect image in memory, and she will endeavor to transform herself. At first, her intention appears admirable as she seeks to emulate the goddess figure so that “all my meaner self departs.” Yet that desire indicates not simply the wish to become a better person, albeit a human who cannot correct every shortcoming. Instead, she imagines herself attaining the ideal. And, while I love you more and more,   My spirit, gazing on the light,   Becomes, in loveliness and might, The glorious Vision you adore.

Word choice reinforces the speaker’s absorption of an unattainable objective promoted by her culture. Rather than rejecting the unrealistic imperative and reiterating that she must be accepted as an imperfect being, the speaker etherealizes herself as a “spirit” reaching the heights of beauty and strength to become the image her lover worships. The inadvisability of cultural expectations governing appropriate female conduct becomes abundantly apparent with May Kendall’s “In the Toy Shop,” included in Songs from Dreamland (1894). The three-stanza ababcdcd verse juxtaposes two approaches to gender expectations in featuring a living girl and a wooden doll speculating on their situations.19 The first stanza depicts the actual girl as rebellious and assertive, facing pressure to meet validated standards of behavior. If read as an emphatic trochee, the “she” introducing multiple lines highlights the girl’s forceful personality. The child epitomizes a nascent New Woman who understands that a girl with inclinations considered unseemly cannot accommodate societal dictates. The child had longings all unspoken—    She was a naughty child. She had “a will that must be broken”;    Her brothers drove her wild. She read the tale, but skipped the moral.

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  She thought: “One might be good, If one could never scream and quarrel,    If one were only wood!”

In contrast, the doll rues that she lacks the energy to defy expectations of quiet behavior, a point reinforced by her pronouns being unstressed. Rather, she yearns to act against tradition and challenge delimiting presumptions. Meanwhile the doll: “Ah, fatal chasm!    Although I’ve real curls, I am not made of protoplasm,    Like other little girls. You see on every wooden feature    My animation’s nil. How nice to be a human creature,    Get cross, and have a will!”

The doll seems to recognize that change is occurring around her, but the movement toward expanded freedom is bypassing her. The “fatal chasm” represents two distinct ways to live: adopting or rejecting gender limitations. She is missing the “protoplasm” required for an organism to exist and direct its own path, and thus be truly alive. Unlike the actual girl, the doll has no resoluteness that would propel her to a full life. The chasm informs the final stanza, which further compares the doll with the girl and deems the former deficient. The doll’s inability to become her own agent clashes with the girl’s refusal to accept artificial norms. The doll’s lament is coupled with her understanding that an embrasure of New Woman resistance leads to pain and setbacks, although the battle continues despite obstacles. But some of us are nervous tissue,    And some of us are wood. And some to suffering, striving wildly,    Are never quite resigned; While we of wood yet murmur mildly    At being left behind.

The passivity demonstrated by the doll is rejected by another New Woman in a Dora Sigerson Shorter poem appearing shortly after Queen

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Victoria’s death. Rather than accede to the belief that females should avoid aggressive actions that a male is expected to perform, the protagonist demonstrates agency. “Love in Disguise” from As the Sparks Fly Upward: Poems and Ballads (1903) features a male narrator recounting the forceful approach of a woman that appalls him. Although he grieves under the assumption that his lover Phyllis has been untrue, the man never reveals her supposed transgression, but with his distorted views about appropriate female behavior, his complaint likely lacks foundation. As he rests outdoors preoccupied with his sadness over the rift with his lover, a passing woman whom he considers a nymph assumes the role of a male suitor. She merely holds his hand, but he responds with horror: “Her boldness I did much upbraid, / And said: ‘Begone, thou wanton maid; / I seek no love of thine!” Feeling “all stricken with disdain,” he melodramatically calls for death because of the supposedly disloyal Phyllis. From the speaker’s perspective, the situation with the “nymph” becomes even more alarming as the disguised woman clasps him “in a close embrace,” causing him to reiterate his “Begone!” The man again decries her forwardness, effusing that “I hold thy boldness in disdain.” The poem concludes when the woman lifts her veil and exposes her true identity as the maligned Phyllis. Although he does not disclose his feelings for her when she reveals herself, no suggestion exists that he will emotionally embrace his former lover. Considering his disgusted tone and the exclamatory punctuation deployed in his earlier utterances, his final words— “My Phyllis smiled on me!”—suggest that he will be unable to shift from repulsion to acceptance.

Eve’s Supposed Legacy Among the numerous misconceptions that New Woman poetry assailed was the impression that women were manifestations of the sinful Eve who wrought misery upon all ensuing generations. Eva Gore-Booth’s “The Repentance of Eve,” which appeared in the author’s Poems (1898), assaults the condemnation of Eve alone when Adam also partook of the disastrous apple. The blame heaped upon Eve for devastating the future of humanity will never ebb, the poem predicts. Although plunged into despair and regret for her transgression, Eve will suffer for all time, the first of the two abab stanzas relates.

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This is our Mother Eve, who shall not win    Respite or peace; in vain she makes lament She ate but half the fruit, sinned half the sin,    Eternal hunger is her punishment.

In identifying Eve as “our Mother,” the quatrain implies that her female descendants will feel the onus of her sin. Like Eve, women will forever carry the burden for paradisical loss and share her “eternal hunger.” A.  Mary F. Robinson’s “Adam and Eve” from Songs, Ballads, and a Garden Play (1888) subtly places blame on both of the original humans.20 Adam, the poem relates, created Eve in accordance with his objective, which makes him accountable for Eve’s transgression since without his intercession his future companion would not have existed. As her creator, Adam would be fully cognizant that the ultimate sin was inevitable and thus not only share her guilt but be the primary cause of the devastating result. When Adam fell asleep in Paradise   He made himself a helpmeet as he dreamed; And lo! she stood before his waking eyes,   And was the woman that his vision seemed.

The second stanza positions Adam as more culpable than Eve in that she gains her character from him rather than choose to sin without his influence. Adam’s iniquity burgeons through his assumption of divine authority with Eve’s birth and a disturbing hubris, since biblical accounts unambiguously relate that God created her. The poem connects Adam to Eve’s existence because of his rib forming her and thus she would reflect him to some degree. She knelt beside him there in tender awe   To find the living fountain of her soul, And so in either’s eyes the other saw   The light they missed in Heaven, and knew the goal.

As a “fountain,” Adam is her origin; like a fountainhead, he is the source of her being. Eve looks to Adam as a quasi-divinity as she prostrates herself before him. The guilt for the Original Sin belongs to them both; in gazing at each other, they recognize that they share the same “goal” of incredible power.

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The last of the three stanzas, which departs from the quatrain format in an ababcc rhyme scheme, serves as a pronounced final statement of Adam’s complicity. Although Eve “brought thee for her dowry death and shame” and also “taught thee one may worship and deceive,” Adam holds the main responsibility; his vision and Eve “were still the same.” Furthermore, Adam is linked to the demonic Lilith, identified in some accounts as his first wife. According to one version of her history, Lilith rebelled against God and left Adam in the Garden of Eden; she was also thought to become a destroyer of newborns as the agent of disease. The final lines of Robinson’s poem stress that Eve had no part in Adam’s involvement with the loathsome Lilith. Whether Eve’s story led to dissatisfaction with the Church among some New Women poets presents an unanswerable question, but criticism or rejection of organized religion certainly appeared in fin-de-siècle verse. Although many New Women writers were or became staunch Christians, such as the Michael Field partners, others expressed their very different judgments about faith. One of the most forceful non-believers, Naden wrote broadly in poetry as well as prose that matter, instead of conventional spirituality, was the vital element to recognize. Naden’s 1887 “The Nebular Theory” credits non-religious forces in its alternative reading of creation events through a reworking of the Genesis accounts, as James R.  Moore comments.21 The poem identifies cosmic energy rather than divine intervention for the origin of the universe, resembling the theory that the scientific world found unconvincing.22 Nevertheless, the hypothesis informs the poem, which immediately announces that it is promoting an alternative to the Christian story. This version is accorded credence in part through the hard end-stopped first line; thereafter, only the closing line finishes with this most assertive of punctuation marks reinforcing the opening declarative sentence with analogous content. The poem proceeds to delineate the stages of creation, with resonances to the biblical Genesis being reshaped. This is the genesis of Heaven and Earth.   In the beginning was a formless mist   Of atoms isolate, void of life; none wist Aught of its neighbour atom, nor any mirth, Nor woe, save its own vibrant pang of dearth;   Until a cosmic motion breathed and hissed   And blazed through the black silence; atoms kissed,

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Clinging and clustering, with fierce throbs of birth, And raptures of keen torment, such as stings   Demons who wed in Tophet; the night swarmed    With ringèd fiery clouds, in glowing gyres Rotating: aeons passed: the encircling rings    Split into satellites; the central fires   Froze into suns; and thus the world was formed.

Direct usurpations from Genesis appear throughout the verse, most evidently in the first three lines, which in the biblical narrative read “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void.” The poem’s reference to the mist parallels the Bible, which states that “there went up a mist from the earth” and that God gave Adam “the breath of life” (2:6,7). Naden’s “atoms” evidence a subtle revision of Adam, and the eventual illumination reminds of the Genesis statement, “God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (1:3). The poem’s concluding line directly borrows from the Genesis version: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them” (2:1). M. E. Coleridge, writing under the Greek name “Anodos” in Fancy’s Following (1896), posits in “Self-Question” that nature and art entail sufficient substitutes for a belief in infinite existence.23 Composed of two abab quatrains, the poem chides and disparages the reader for the inability to value the two material elements. Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee, Nor Nature, nor that deep man’s Nature, Art? Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,          Thou little heart?

In the second quatrain, the speaker reminds that humanity began and will end in dust, “[a] spark of fire within a beating clod.” The poem presupposes that the spark lasts eternally and leaves the reader with the thoughtprovoking question as to its source: “must it be God?” Another entry in Coleridge’s Fancy’s Following takes a different approach by rejecting organized religion and embracing an individual version of faith. Resembling “Self-Question” in its format, “Every Man for His Own Hand” prizes the personal over the communal. “I may not call what many call divine,” the speaker remarks, but “my faith is faith in its degree.” The valuation of solitude permeates the poem. The speaker

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“worship[s] at a dim and lonely shrine” in the first quatrain, and the motif fully shapes the second stanza. The secret grace of faith’s celestial part I hoard up safely for mine own self’s own; Within the hidden chambers of the heart      I love alone.

The second line especially conveys the solitary preference with its repetition of individuality through “mine own self’s own.” The rejection of traditional religious practice that these poems express may cause a dismaying reaction, as Blind’s “The Agnostic” demonstrates. Included in Birds of Passage (1895), the sonnet devotes its octave to an explanation for refusing to connect with God in dire situations. Not in the hour of peril, thronged with foes,   Panting to set their heel upon my head,   Or when alone from many wounds I bled Unflinching beneath Fortune’s random blows; Not when my shuddering hands were doomed to close   The unshrinking eyelids of the stony dead;—   Not then I missed my God, not then—but said: “Let me not burden God with all man’s woes!”

The sestet shifts to the moments when the speaker feels a forceful urge to bond with God that arise amid glorious sights. Presumably, the speaker is experiencing the sublime, where a sense of awe and respect for a divine presence becomes overwhelming. Indeed, one is reminded of William Wordsworth’s musings in The Prelude when the speaker happens upon an extraordinary natural vista. Blind’s sestet identifies various locales that elevate the speaker’s consciousness so loftily that common nouns take on the trappings of proper nouns through capitalization; aspects of the natural world become personified as they wave, flash, and laugh; and light imagery threads through the stanza. Yet the speaker becomes irreconcilably frustrated because gratitude cannot be offered to a divine being that has been rejected. But when resurgent from the womb of night   Spring’s Oriflamme of flowers waves from the Sod   When peak on flashing Alpine peak is trod

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By sunbeams on their missionary flight; When heaven-kissed Earth laughs, garmented in light;—   That is the hour in which I miss my God.

The sonnet captures sentiments that seem corollaries of agnosticism. Reliance on the self through trying times becomes a source of pride, but the inability to connect with the creator of beauty undercuts the sense of satisfaction.

Musings on Motherhood On a more positive note, motherhood becomes a source of happiness in varied New Woman poems, though sometimes tempered by unsettling realities. Nesbit’s “Baby Song” in Lays and Legends (1892) features a loving mother encouraging her infant to rest. Peaceful and comforting allusions prevail in the six-stanza aaba poem: animals return to their nests and folds; flowers sleep; and angels watch carefully. When “good, glad morning’s here,” the mother asks the baby to awaken and effuses about joyous nature while again asserting her love.   Wake, baby dear!   Thy mother’s waiting near, And love, and flowers, and birds, and sun,   And all things bright and dear.

Yet the absolute picture of happiness that the poem presents is problematized in another Nesbit poem, “Lullaby,” from the same collection. Initially, the poem stresses both the mother’s absolute love and vigilant oversight. No one, including the mother of God, could love her child more than does the speaker, she believes. With a simple aabb rhyme that is suitable for a baby’s song, the eight-stanza poem assures the infant that he will be painstakingly protected and kept secure. Lie here quiet on mother’s arm,    Safe from harm; Nestled closely to mother’s breast,    Sleep and rest!

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Mother feels your breath’s soft stir    Close to her; Mother holds you, clasps you tight,    All the night.

Despite her devotion, the mother realizes that the moment will come when she cannot deflect harm and the son will face the trials that all individuals undergo. Sleep, my darling, sleep while you may— Sorrow dawns with the dawning day, Sleep, my baby, sleep, my dear, Soon enough will the day be here.

The poem’s final line accentuates the inevitability of tribulations in the baby’s later years: “All too soon will the day be here.” A different concern arises in Dollie Radford’s “What Song Shall I Sing?” from A Light Load (1891). In the ababcc three-stanza verse, the speaker has put “the wee ones” to bed and is deciding on a song as well as books to share. Maternal affection suffuses the first stanza depicting the children’s bedtime. “Now each little sleepy head / Is tucked away on pillow white, / All snug and cosy for the night.” The second stanza, however, reveals a wistfulness that other singers and writers are presenting their work as she says, “But I can sing, these evening times, / Only the children’s songs and rhymes.” Being totally immersed in the children’s lives as the days proceed, the speaker in the final stanza cannot turn her thoughts to adults’ artistic creations. All the day they play with me,    My heart grows full of their looks, All their prattle stays with me,    And I have no mind for books, Nor care for any other tune Than they have sung this golden June.

As Leeanne Marie Richardson observes, the verse explores a “meta-­poetic concern: the difficulty of combining the work of a poet with the work of a mother.”24 Yet “What Song Shall I Sing?” offers no solutions to the vexing problem.

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Webster’s unfinished sonnet sequence, Mother and Daughter (1895), contains many moving poems about motherhood in various moods and stages. Among the most interesting, sonnet twenty captures the bittersweet moment of a mother whose daughter has matured. Although “she is to-day, dearer and more; / Closer to me, since sister womanhoods meet,” the mother regrets the loss of her little girl. “There’s one I miss,” the speaker relates, the “little questioning maid” who filled the mother’s life so expansively. “I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat feet, / The eager baby voice outside my door.” Although the poems discussed here demonstrate maternal affection and tenderness, Katharine Tynan presents a divergent case in “The Fairy Foster-Mother” from Ballads and Lyrics (1891). The poem reminds of Mona Caird’s criticism of motherhood as entrapment in The Daughters of Danaus (1894), in which protagonist Hadria Temperley characterizes it as “the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bondage.”25 Tynan’s allegorical verse recounts the story of Ailie Carroll, who deserts her family to become “a fairy’s nurse.” She responds to the implorations of the fairy king, whose wife died in childbirth and left the baby “dwindling every day / For mother’s love and milk.” Though “her own wee troublesome lad / May pine,” Ailie refuses to return to him and her “crazed and sad” spouse. Mapped onto contemporary motherhood, the poem illustrates the situation of a wife and mother so unsatisfied by her domestic existence that she chooses another man as well as his child. The poem thus presents a curious scenario with Ailie leaving one family and replacing it with another, presumably providing a better match for her temperament and inclinations. Perhaps the poem is exemplifying Hadria’s criticism of motherhood as a trap that cannot be escaped. Yet the poem is substantially removed from other Tynan pieces about motherhood that indubitably value it rather than seek an escape. “Maternity,” included in Poems (1901), relates a woman’s eagerness to provide sustenance to her baby with her “sacred body of Motherhood.” So exalting is the maternal state described in the two-stanza aaba verse that she opens her heart to embrace “all earth’s hapless brood.” Another poem in the collection, “Talisman,” features a woman who holds “[a]ll Heaven in my arm.” The baby seems magical to her, a “charm” that wards off hurt. The mother expresses her elation in the second of two stanzas. O mouth, full of kisses! Small body of blisses!

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Your hand on my neck And your cheek to my cheek. What shall hurt me or harm With all Heaven in my arm?

Social Duty The compassion and selflessness displayed in many motherhood poems emerges on a broader scale in New Woman verses advocating social justice. Shifting from the personal to the public realm, the poems cover a range of issues in their exhortations for fairness and freedom, as the following examples indicate. Graham R. Tomson’s “On the Road” from The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets (1889) indicates that substantive change is a long-term objective with current work merely an interim stage. The arduous journey poses daunting obstacles that prevent efforts from coming to fruition at the present time. As the refrain of the six-stanza poem stresses, “The road is long,” and results will not appear during contemporary lifetimes; rather, “[t]he fruit will fall when we ourselves are clay.” Opponents seek to derail social progress but ultimately will not prevail, the poem stresses: “The gaunt grey wolves are famished for their prey, / But we are bound, and hungrier than they.” Repeatedly the poem warns that only initial steps are being taken, and future generations must continue the efforts. The sands of Tyranny are slow to run. Alas! that this and many a morrow’s sun Must see the goal ungained, the work undone!         The road is long. Our lives were ladder-rungs: the Cause moves on; The light shines fair as ever it has shone; ‘Twill blaze full bright ere many long years be gone—         The road is long. We are but bubbles breaking in the sea, The strong slow tide that one day will be free; We shall not know it—yea, but it will be:         The road is long.

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The poem forms a mantra of sorts, with the rhyme consistent in the initial three lines of each stanza. One can imagine a gathering of progressive individuals proclaiming their objectives and buttressing their resolve. L.  S. Bevington’s “The Secret of the Bees,” found in Liberty Lyrics (1895), employs the insects’ endeavors as an allegory for human aspiration. The verse features an interrogatory section of nine couplets succeeded by the “Answer” in seven couplets. The speaker queries the bees about their success in producing an equitable society that humans have been unable to achieve. How have you managed it? bright busy bee! You are all of you useful, yet each of you free. What man only talks of, the busy bee does; Shares food, and keeps order, with no waste of buzz.

The question portion of the poem raises several problems that bees have avoided and carries a socialist tone. The bee world has no taxes, rents, “property tyrants, no big-wigs of State.” All bees have equal rights with “[f]ree access to flowers, free use of all wings.” No battles are sought for spurious recognition or for pecuniary advantage, and the bee society avoids “over-work, under-work, glut of the spoil.” The final question wonders in general how bees have achieved a healthy society that enables all to enjoy financial comfort and freedom in an orderly communal system. In the answer section, the bees see no reason that such a vibrant social order should not exist. They have no masters, money is inconsequential, and all comfortably coexist without guile “in one nest,” with “[n]one hindering other from doing her best.” Their success, the bees say, is simply a matter of “sheer Common-Sense.” For Isabella J. Southern, diversity among the human population must be recognized and valued, “[f]or two alike thou shalt look earnestly in vain!” Titled “Variety” and consisting of four abab stanzas, the poem was published in Sonnets and Other Poems (1891) and offers both nature and art as arguments for tolerance. After citing discrete differences among individuals, the poem adopts an analogy from nature to underscore the “immense variety of shape and hue” among trees and plants, all distinct from each other. None suffers discrimination, with even the most vulnerable in size able to “be its own true self, to drink from earth and dew.” Proceeding to the human world, the poem comments that diverse books carry value because of their individuality.

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Thy books are many, and ’twould be a childish thought   Shouldst thou desire that all should tell the self-same tale. Their value lies therein, that through them thou art brought   To feel that minds are various, as are hill and dale.

The poem’s closing quatrain takes a Darwinian turn in reminding that variety participates in the evolutionary process. Moreover, through evolution come more and more dissimilarity and diversification. This “universal law of life,” the poem concludes, will be unstoppable. The implication is clear: refusal to value diversity violates natural law. Although many New Woman poems about social justice approach the topic in general terms, specific instances of concern appear as well. Gore-­ Booth’s “Clouds” from Poems (1898) regrets the course of events in Ireland but believes that a far more hopeful future awaits. A dedicated advocate of a liberated Ireland, Gore-Booth considers the island in its current condition as dead and bereft, as the first two of five aabb stanzas depict. In the first, Ireland is out of rhythm with both nature and the universe, while the second quatrain focuses on the misery of the inhabitants. Drooping over Ireland, veiled in sombre gray, See the sky is weeping all its light away; Heedless of the magic music of the spheres Drooping over Ireland, land of falling tears. Land of falling tears and broken promises; Land of idle slaves and famine and distress, Land of crime and struggle, and of futile strife, Land of acquiescence, land without a life!

Yet the terrain is “not dead but sleeping” and will awaken to determine its destiny. Honor and courage will lead the fight to freedom, and Ireland will be transformed into glory rather than persist in misery. The pain that Ireland has undergone has fortified it, as the country exists “strong and free again.” When addressing social justice in either general or specific terms, New Woman poems decried indignity, inequality and tyranny. For some poets, the future augured hopeful change, however. Whether the poems helped create a climate of reform and an improved social system cannot be determined, but the admonitions and encouragements transmitted crucial messages.

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Chapter Previews The chapters follow a relatively unusual format in featuring an author whose oeuvre includes significant works on a particular subject, followed by pertinent verses by other poets. This pattern provides numerous viewpoints on the topic and in so doing reveals various currents of thought circulating at the fin de siècle. Moreover, many poems that have faded into oblivion over the generations can move to the foreground, as can their writers. Consequential work by several of the poets appears in multiple chapters. In the descriptions below, a sense of important critical inquiries is included. The second chapter scrutinizes marriage, an especially important issue for New Women when cultural practices left many wives feeling trapped and bereft. Nesbit, who probed unsatisfactory marital conditions in multiple ways, serves as the main poet in this discussion. The selected verses address three areas of special concern, which often intersect: constraint, estrangement, and infidelity. The remainder of the chapter analyzes poems by Nora Hopper, Radford, Amy Levy, and Sigerson, which were chosen because of their astute assessments of the flawed state of Victorian marriage. Key questions: how disturbing are marital conditions in the fin de siècle? What factors lead to miserable marriages? The varied permutations of desire emerge in the third chapter, reflecting the heightened awareness and exploration of sexuality in the late century. The poetry of Olive Custance dominates the chapter and offers a broad spectrum of erotic interests in both heterosexual and same-sex configurations. Custance’s own bisexual history provides an intriguing contribution to the study of her work. Completing the chapter are investigations of poems by Levy, Alice Meynell, Radford, Field, Mary C. Gillington, and sister Alice E. Gillington. These verses present compelling techniques— the workings of dreams, a Sapphic connection, and sea imagery—for articulating the controversial and sensitive issue of desire. Key questions: how can desire by conveyed both to conservative and sexually aware Victorian readers? How can female desire be made ambiguous or indecipherable to individuals who would find it distasteful? The emphasis shifts in Chap. 4, which details the misery and apathy that destitution engenders. Southern’s sonnets provide the main subject and call for greater compassion and attentiveness to this widespread problem. Rarely discussed in critical commentary, Southern’s work provides perceptive analyses about the causes and ramifications of poverty. The

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chapter proceeds to examine verses by Radford, Nesbit, Annie Matheson, Kendall, Bevington, and Coleridge, whose works assess both secular and ecclesiastical responses to indigence. Key questions: how can the sonnet project an unconventional voice and uncomfortable sentiments in Southern’s oeuvre? How can other poetic forms be appropriated to capture the straits of the impoverished? The sufferings of a specific group, “fallen women,” are targeted in the next chapter. Blind’s poems form the core of the chapter, and they describe the painful and often fatal results when inexperienced girls and young women, particularly of the lower classes, are seduced and left to fend for themselves in a harsh world. Concluding the discussion are verses by Emily Pfeiffer, Robinson, Levy, and Nesbit, who deftly convey the dire plights of the fallen woman and the social irresponsibility she encounters. Key questions: how can poetry influence apathetic or hypocritical Victorians so that they will become sympathetic to the dismal condition of fallen women? How can society’s response to fallen women be condemned effectively? Chapter 6 moves to metapoetic deliberations, with particular focus on women writers. Robinson’s work presents valuable insights on the poetic process, touching on such matters as innovative contributions by women, the challenges of the genre, and the difficulties of uncovering one’s voice. Other verses by Pfeiffer, Radford, Custance, Gore-Booth, Bevington, Nesbit, and Coleridge assert the poetic authority of women, convey the vagaries of inspiration, and ponder poetic responsibility. Key questions: how can poetry convey a woman’s perspective on the writing process? How can poetry combat and overcome social illusions of female inferiority? The final chapter considers London as a desirable environment for New Women with its many positive attributes. Londoner Levy’s poems portray the city in its diverse manifestations that hold promise for advanced women seeking to make their marks as authors. The rest of the chapter covers the metropolitan poems by Watson, who wrote extensively on the subject and praised the energy, allure, and beauty of the city. Key questions: how does the urban environment provide vital benefits for a modern woman? How does city life outweigh country life? Perhaps my study will encourage other scholars to turn attention to these often-obscure poets, which has been a key objective for its creation. Many other women poets, unknown or barely recognized, deserve to have their work recovered and discussed. Such efforts can only enhance and enrich the study of Victorian poetry.

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Notes 1. As Sally Ledger remarks, “[T]he figure of the New Woman was utterly central to the literary culture of the fin-de-siecle years” (The New Woman, 10). 2. Charles G.  Harper, Revolted Woman, 2; Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 596. 3. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 604. 4. Havelock Ellis, New Spirit, 9; “Character Note: The New Woman,” 366; Ledger, The New Woman, 9. 5. Nat Arling, “What is the Role of the ‘New Woman?’” 576; M. Eastwood, “The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact,” 377; A.  Amy Bulley, “The Political Evolution of Women,” 1, 8; H. E. Harvey, “The Voice of Woman,” 196; Herbert Jamieson, “The Modern Woman,” 572. 6. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 271. 7. Grand, “The New Aspect,” 272; Ouida, “The New Woman,” 612; Sydney Grundy, The New Woman, 299, 305, 300. 8. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 605; “Character Note,” 365; “Manly Women,” 757; “Sex versus Sex,” 58; “The ‘New Woman’ in Her Relation to the ‘New Man,’” 335. 9. Hugh E.  M. Stutfield, “The Psychology of Feminism,” 115; Stutfield, “Tommyrotics,” 836, 844; James Ashcroft Noble, “The Fiction of Sexuality,” 490–91; Margaret Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” 136; Edmund Gosse, “The Decay of Literary Taste,” 118. 10. T. S. Clouston, “Female Education from a Medical Point of View,” 224; Grant Allen, “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” 453; Karl Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought, 360, 355; Harper, Revolted Woman, 27. 11. “The Higher Education of Women,” 157, 161; Helen McKerlie, “The Lower Education of Women,” 119; Hewitt, “‘The New Woman’ in Her Relation to the ‘New Man,” 337. 12. Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought,” 370; Walter Besant, “Candour in English Fiction,” 7; Stutfield, “Tommyrotics,” 835, 836; Janet E. Hogarth, “Literary Degenerates,” 591; Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” 144. 13. Grand, The Modern Man and Maid, 29; Harvey, “The Voice of Woman,” 193; Julia M. A. Hawksley, “A Young Woman’s Right: Knowledge,” 316; Arling, “What is the Role of the ‘New Woman?’” 576. 14. Several of the authors interacted at salons, observes Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, and “[t]he sheer variety and number of salons that emerged during the 1880s and 1890s show their importance at the fin de siècle.” Participants included Rosamund Marriott Watson, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, Augusta Webster, Dora Sigerson, Dollie Radford, and Mathilde Blind (23). Poets “moved freely from one salon to another,” Vadillo remarks (“New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” 31).

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15. The meanings of flowers were a popular topic addressed by writers of the period. See, for example, The Language of Flowers: A History, by Beverly Seaton for information on the floral vocabulary. 16. Naden was an ardent advocate of education, which “is given us that we may think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, act for ourselves; why then should we not speak for ourselves?” (quoted in Poetry of the 1890s, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain, 25). 17. As Virginia Blain observes about the stanza, the moon cannot produce its own illumination and it lacks its own atmosphere, which prevents sound from traveling and thus precludes the transmission of music. The reference to “hosts” invokes the underworld and positions the moon as “queen of the dead” (Victorian Women Poets, 296). 18. As Thornton and Thain’s Poetry of the 1890s comments, “the mirror imagery” adopted by Naden enabled her “to complain about the damaging role women were expected to adopt in relation to men,” which serves as “a leitmotif of women’s writing of this period” (26). 19. Bonnie J. Robinson considers “In the Toy Shop” an example of work that “sought to uplift the gifts of nature overthrown by man, feminine gifts of will-power, anger, and animation which were deemed ‘unfeminine.’” Kendall’s poem, “[a]ccepting the equation of ‘little girls’ and ‘dolls, … nevertheless overturns this equation” (“‘Individable Incorporate’: Poetic Trends in Women Writers, 1890–1918,” 8). 20. Robinson hosted an especially popular salon with many attendants, comments Vadillo. “Because of Robinson’s fame as a poet, the salon was visited by eminent women poets, such as Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Louise S. Bevington, Augusta Webster, Emily Pfeiffer,” and others (“New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” 27). 21. James R. Moore, “The Erotics of Evolution: Constance Naden and HyloIdealism,” 248. 22. For information on the nebular theory, see Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie’s “Robert Chambers and the Nebular Hypothesis.” 23. “Anodos” is a Greek term that carries such meanings as enlightenment, an ascent, and a wanderer. “Anodos” also was the name of a character appearing in the 1858 Phantastes by George MacDonald. 24. Leeanne Marie Richardson, “Naturally Radical: The Subversive Poetics of Dollie Radford,” 112. After Radford’s A Light Load was published, Richardson comments that “Radford’s poetic dreams were deferred, or at least diverted into another channel. ‘What Song Shall I Sing’ narrates Radford’s absorption with the duties of motherhood” (“Dollie Radford,” 195). 25. Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus, 341.

CHAPTER 2

The Vagaries of Marriage

The intense conversation about Victorian marriage that marked the fin de siècle presented the profound, significant, and powerful voices of several women poets who insightfully explore the dark side of wedded life. In verse collections that appeared in the century’s final decades, the poets resolutely addressed controversial marital issues that permeated contemporaneous nonfiction and fiction as well in stark terms. The work appeared at a seminal cultural moment, when marriage became a paramount concern of New Women writers in the late 1880s and 1890s.1 The provocative poetry made a vital contribution to the societal debate in indicting the deep-rooted injustices and deleterious effects of the institution, drawing a compelling picture of the angst experienced by Victorian wives. Several women poets giving voice to the multiple concerns about marital distress are analyzed in this chapter, with the prolific E.  Nesbit leading the discussion.2 By this time, marriage laws had undergone changes, with some of the most egregious limitations discarded. Under the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, wives, like single women, gained control over their own possessions. Four years later, the Married Women Act gave greater access to means of support for wives who had been deserted. Also in 1886, the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, with their grossly inappropriate treatment of women suspected of being prostitutes, were repealed. In 1891,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_2

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the Infant Custody Act expanded mothers’ rights over their children. The same year, the law that enabled a husband to force an unwilling wife into conjugal activity was overturned. The cessation of burdensome legalities improved women’s position, but the emotional and intellectual harm resulting from the vagaries of Victorian marriage continued its course. Even though concerns about the marital state had surfaced in the past, the issue gained dramatic prominence with the 1888 publication of Mona Caird’s acerbic essay, “Marriage,” which famously drew 27,000 letters. Among its contentions, the essay decried the influence of “current notions regarding the proper conduct of married people.”3 Indeed, Caird asserted, “modern ‘Respectability’ draws its life-blood from the degradation of womanhood in marriage.” In a model marriage, Caird insisted, a wife has an “obvious right … to possess herself body and soul, to give or withhold herself body and soul exactly as she wills.”4

Nesbit’s Critiques The complex oeuvre that Nesbit produced is an unusually expansive one, which enables an unflinching exploration of the multifarious facets characterizing female discontent. The chapter concentrates on three crucial aspects of special interest: constraint, estrangement, and infidelity. Nesbit’s work strikingly illuminates the Marriage Question in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In assailing contemporary marriage and in other respects, Nesbit seemed an advanced woman of the time. Margaret D.  Stetz identifies Nesbit as a New Woman, “by contemporary definitions of the term,” whose “work forges links between poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and the fictional projects of the ‘New Women.’5 Nesbit was a founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization with the objective, she explained, “to improve the social system—or rather to spread its news as the possible improvement of the said S.S.” Nesbit also befriended progressive women in the society—among them Olive Schreiner, Annie Besant, and Eleanor Marx, biographer Julia Briggs observes. A zealous reader of varied texts, including John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women, Nesbit advised that she was “doing a good bit of serious reading,” adding that “I seem to want to read all sorts of things at once.” At the same time, Nesbit bemoaned the dearth of reading opportunities that allowed women to receive only “a smattering” of material.6 A 1907 piece claimed that Nesbit proved herself “very apt at giving voice to many of the indefinite yearnings of

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womanhood towards higher ideals, a fuller development, a wider sphere.” In 1899, the Quarterly Review declared that “the chief value of her work” resided with her lyrical poetry, “which bear[s] the burden of what she has to say.” Through these poems, the reviewer maintained, Nesbit “sounds repeatedly the modern note of independence, the woman’s desire for freedom” as well as “an impatience, not only of the control of the man, but of that in her which urges submission to his domination.”7 Nesbit also embraced the physical appearance and other indications of the advanced woman. She became an avid smoker who refused to wear corsets and transported tobacco in a corset package. Nesbit chopped off her hair because she had heard that “[w]hen a woman becomes ‘advanced’ she cuts her hair.” Nesbit added in the letter, “I don’t know whether I am ‘advanced’—but I have cut my hair off,” and she appended to the emphatic statement a string of exclamation marks. “It is deliciously comfortable,” Nesbit affirmed, as were the woolen clothes that she found “deliciously pleasant to wear.” As biographer Doris Langley Moore commented, such garments were favored by the modern individual. Nesbit also adopted unusual clothing embraced by aesthetes, even fashioning a bedspread into a dress and donning a coat created with muskrat ears, says biographer Elisabeth Galvin. Not only did Nesbit take part in masculine physical activities such as climbing and rowing, notes Moore, she rode a bicycle, a symbol of the New Women, and even sported bloomers. Moore also comments that Nesbit further indulged in such masculine pursuits as carpentry and plumbing.8 Nesbit’s life was quite an independent and unconventional one for a Victorian woman. Yet Nesbit was a paradoxical individual in her views about women, as biographical accounts have indicated. Refusing to support the cause of women’s suffrage, for example, Nesbit considered activists as “militant, unfeminine, and, ultimately, psychologically disturbed.”9 Nesbit complained that “I was infinitely bored” at a women’s rights gathering and described its featured speaker, a leading suffragist, as “hideously like a hippopotamus.” At a meeting about women’s issues, a friend comments that a youthful Nesbit departed so that she could instead “have a nice long talk all about young men,” with the final four words capitalized.10 Nesbit even thought that men were superior to women, Briggs says. The poet shared her spouse’s conventional ideas about raising daughters, which he aired in his writings about appropriate conduct, Moore remarks. Husband Hubert Bland also insisted in an essay titled “If I Were a Woman” that “[w]oman’s realm is the realm of the heart and the afternoon tea-table, not of the brain

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and the intelligence.” Moreover, as a woman he “should never be advanced,” he professed, “clamour for a vote, or advocate out-of-the way views about marriage.”11 Bland exerted a substantial influence on his wife, as biographers have reported. Nesbit’s own marriage was utterly bizarre and unconventional. Married while pregnant, Nesbit learned months later that her husband was still involved with another woman to whom he was supposedly engaged and who had given birth to a son. The relationship continued, even though Nesbit knew of it, but that affair was not the only one. Bland also was involved with Nesbit’s friend Alice Hoatson, who became pregnant. She and her child were part of the household, and Nesbit pretended that she was the child’s mother. Bland was a serial philanderer, as acquaintance H. G. Wells asserted. “He was under an inner compulsion to be a Seducer,” which Wells described as Bland’s “essential preoccupation.”12 Bland favored “illicit love,” Wells wrote, believing that “a love affair [was] more exciting and important if one might be damned for it.” Bland “would have thought it a crowning achievement to commit incest or elope with a nun,” Wells opined.13 He maintained that “most of the children of the household were not E.  Nesbit’s but the results of Bland’s conquests.” Wells added, “All this E. Nesbit not only detested and mitigated and tolerated, but presided over and I think found exceedingly interesting.”14 Adding to the complications was the fact that Nesbit had her own interests in other men. Yet Nesbit’s poetry is not simply an autobiographical response to her husband’s perfidy, a chaotic marriage, and her own conflicted responses. Instead, Nesbit approaches Victorian wedlock in a global sense, examining the many permutations and situations that troubled unions could display. Like other fin-de-siècle writers, Nesbit brought to the surface the inequities that marred the institution and made it a bleak situation for a host of female contemporaries struggling to find meaning and comfort in their lives. The ideas expressed in contemporary fiction and nonfiction strikingly resonate with Nesbit’s poetic arguments, for they expose the emotional, intellectual, and behavioral restrictions that plagued Victorian wives. Despite personal resonances, Nesbit’s poetry aims to unveil for Victorian readers the vexed institution’s distressing deficiencies, varied miseries, and untenable demands. No easy solutions exist, the verse demonstrates, but perhaps a suffering wife could gain some comfort knowing that her struggles were understood. Whether faced with such conflicts or not, a Victorian reader could take from the poetry a window into the

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experiences of others and gain a more comprehensive perspective on finde-siècle marriage. For readers as a whole, recognition of and dismay about marital despair could eventually lead to substantive change in the institution. The poetry collections investigated in this essay begin shortly before Caird’s momentous “Marriage” essay appeared and end a decade later: Lays and Legends (1886), Leaves of Life (1888), Lays and Legends (Second Series, 1892), A Pomander of Verse (1895), and Songs of Love and Empire (1898). The volumes featured a range of topics and included work published in periodicals. Nesbit also wrote a substantial amount of fiction, but she did so for income and viewed poetry as a true calling, Moore observes.15 Nesbit claimed that she turned to “stories because I wanted the money they would bring to me. … It was not a desire for the thing in itself—not a desire to achieve, to attain—but depended for its vitality on a secondary motive.”16 Although Nesbit believed that her extensive children’s writings were well done, Moore says,17 “she never imagined that they were the highest manifestations of her literary capacities,” and she “looked upon herself first and foremost as a poet.”18 Biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons similarly observes, “Poetry was her true passion.” Nesbit averred, however, that “I have no time to do any good work—in the way of writing verse I mean.” Nesbit considered herself not simply a poet but envisioned being “a great poet, like Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti.”19 With Nesbit’s high esteem for poetry, it is not surprising that she turned to verse rather than prose as the vehicle for her extensive analysis of Victorian marriage. With her range of speakers, Nesbit could capture the intricate complexities and subtle shadings of the marital state in ways that prose would be unable to match, systematically deploying numerous voices proceeding from an array of discrete situations. Prose would be less successful for such a project, since the result would likely be a rather disjointed jumble of voices that would occlude instead of illuminate multiple perspectives. In that regard, the poetic form enabled Nesbit to present in a compelling way the warring desires, vital nuances, and lurking ambiguities revealed by those female speakers who both accepted and protested the vagaries of nineteenth-century wedlock, especially in regard to the difficult choice between love and freedom. Nesbit’s marriage oeuvre also includes male personas to weigh in on important issues, who provide a sharp contrast to the women’s assessments. The poetic judgments invariably decry the male speakers addressed in this essay, for they are duplicitous, self-serving, and unsympathetic.

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As the following sections reveal, Nesbit’s poetry undercuts conventional notions of marriage through a variety of thematic approaches, which carry a subversive element as they make their case that the institution is alarmingly flawed. Although the sections individually explore constraint, estrangement, and infidelity, the poetic techniques employed do not dramatically shift with the different topics. In fact, the sections considered together could provide a progression of a doomed marriage. Constraint certainly could cause estrangement, with the wife’s unhappiness drawing her away from her husband or causing him to detach himself emotionally, if not through his actions, from his despondent spouse. In either case, though primarily with the husband, the spouse could stray into infidelity and destroy the marriage beyond repair, even if the couple remained together to avoid revelation of and shame for their failure. The sequence of the three conditions could operate in reverse as well, since infidelity undoubtedly could generate estrangement; for the wife, such estrangement could lead to constraint in terms of the options available to her, considering the difficulties of abandoning or divorcing a philandering spouse and the resultant feeling of entrapment, which could be manifested in an inability to chart her own life’s path.

Constraint The term “constraint” as it is employed here covers a broad array of situations, including restrictions on choice, behavioral conduct, and intellectual endeavor, as well as other forms of power wielded over women that bring submission. Nesbit vigorously opposes such constraint in her unorthodox poetry, providing a subversive voice that belies cultural assumptions of marriage as a desirable and rewarding state for women. Instead, her work exposes the related ills stemming from dependency, such as inequality, that establish marriage as a dire destiny for an unfortunate wife. Caird’s “The Morality of Marriage,” which was among the most forceful contemporary texts adumbrating the flaws of wedlock, provides a helpful context. The essay is one of several pieces that Caird penned about marital dissatisfaction. A supposedly successful marriage, she acidly commented in the 1890 Fortnightly Review essay, “brings about—or rather is brought about— by a gradual process of brain-softening.”20 Specifying dependency as a “curse of our marriages,” Caird cited it as a requisite

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aspect of wedlock.21 Moreover, a woman “must cease to be swallowed in the family,” Caird averred, and “she demands a life of her own.”22 Fiction, especially that penned by New Women, also expressed sentiments found in the Nesbit poetry regarding female constraint. In Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), for example, the intellectually gifted Evadne Frayling discovers after marriage to George Colquhoun that he heartily disapproves of activities that would place her in the public sphere. The promise of noninvolvement that he extracts “cramped her into a narrow groove” and “reduced her to the existence of objectless contemplation”; as a result, she undergoes a gradual mental deterioration. In the 1890 Gloriana; or the Revolution of 1900 by Florence Dixie, a male character muses that the “hundreds of women now unhappily married” would have rejected “that terrible tie if they had been aware of what they were doing.”23 The issue of marital constraint entails a seeming antithesis between love and freedom, which threads through late-century writings24 and informs Nesbit’s poem “The Woman’s World.” Appearing in Lays and Legends (1892), the verse presents a tragic scenario whereby the speaker ultimately discards an ardent wish for independence from her husband because of her love for him, even though the decision means an acceptance of a static situation.25 The four-stanza abbaccdd poem addressed to her husband opens with a lamentation and a stressed “Oh!” to frame the desire for a liberatory life, appraised as the crux of existence itself. The point emerges through a striking though unspoken dichotomy with the resonant Shakespearean phrase “to be” and its absent trace of “not to be.” Concluding with a second exclamatory comment of “alone!” the line establishes a state of solitude as the requisite condition for beingness. The quest for solitariness blends with a craving for freedom in the stanza through the repetition of the phrase “to escape,” with the infinitive’s “to” echoing the prescribed state of meaningful existence demarcated in the poem’s initial line:   Oh! to be alone! To escape from the work, the play, The talking, everyday;   To escape from all I have done, And all that remains to do. To escape, yes, even from you,   My only love, and be Alone, and free.

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With the second and third lines, the poem delineates the whole range of the speaker’s quotidian routine, and the fusion of “every” and “day” conveys suffocation through the missing space, as if signaling that the compression belies the prospect of change. The state of invariability extends into the following pair of lines through the encompassing “all I have done” and the disconcerting “all that remains to do,” as if past and future are inextricably bound in an unwavering pattern. The “be” of the penultimate line, subtly adding emphasis through its placement as the final thought therein, reinforces the valuation of true existence. The closing line affirms the terms of that condition—independence and liberation— and the rhyming of the last two lines (“be” and “free”) reasserts the connection between the two states. The stanza form suggests a sonnet octave but a variation thereof intimating a desire to develop an individualized approach that can depart from conventional ideas. This stanza begins a discordant pattern of sorts, mixing anapests, iambs, and the occasional trochee, which reflects the speaker’s warring sentiments as the poem proceeds. In the second stanza, the speaker wistfully imagines that she can determine her own course.    Could I only stand Between gray moor and gray sky Where the winds and the plovers cry,    And no man is at hand. And feel the free wind blow On my rain-wet face, and know    I am free—not yours—but my own.   Free—and alone!

The erect posture she envisions, with its phallic intimation and associated power, announces an acquisition of agency. Situating herself between land and firmament, the speaker lays claim to the physical world before her. Though shrouded in dreary grayness, the natural space represents a site of promise; the locale removes the speaker from the private sphere, where she would be absorbed by delimiting domestic concerns. In nature, the speaker is untethered from the cultural realm and its behavioral restrictions. Tellingly, the speaker refers to the absence of “man,” not the more inclusive “humans.” With no man present, the speaker faces no constraint that the male dominance of Victorian society entails. In understated

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fashion, the reference to “hand” bolsters the notion of male authority, for a conventional wife would indeed be figuratively under her husband’s hand and literally under his control. Again, the word “free” appears, first in reference to the mighty wind—a force that cannot be constrained and that evinces strength with its powerful “blow”—and subsequently to proclaim a liberated status. The speaker’s “rain-wet face” attests to her immersion in the world beyond the home and reinforces her sense of liberty. The stanza’s concluding pair of lines presents the poem’s most vigorous declarations of freedom, with the interspersed dashes furnishing textual ideations of separation from spousal domination. By professing that “I am free—not yours—but my own,” the speaker is asserting her viability as a subject and disavowing dependency. The final line mimics the closing of the first stanza, reversing the placement of “alone” and “free” to imply that both conditions are necessary elements of subjecthood; the rhyming of “own” and “alone” in the final lines accentuates the idea. The speaker’s two references to “I” in the stanza signify a robust proclamation of self, in marked contrast to the self-reflexive pronoun in the opening stanza that intimates regret and shame. The speaker’s placement in nature becomes more complicated in the third stanza, which in its initial lines returns her to the domestic world with the dual meanings that “home” evokes.    For the soft fire-light And the home of your heart, my dear, They hurt—being always here.    I want to stand up—upright And to cool my eyes in the air And to see how my back can bear    Burdens—to try, to know,    To learn, to grow!

Immediately, the distinction between the outdoor and indoor locales becomes manifest with the oppositional states of coolness (“rain-wet”) and warmth (“fire-light”). Furthering the disparity, the blaze’s luminescence departs from the dark hues of the natural world in the preceding stanza. Spousal presence occurs within the home both through the residence itself and the corporeal site invested with affection (“the home of your heart”). The comforting images of the “soft” illumination and the somatic “home” contrast sharply with the pain identified in the third line.

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No relief will appear, no respite will ensue, since the domestic aspects are “always here” (emphasis added). Preceding this phrase, the verb form “being” provides an ironic counterpoint to the authentic sense of beingness advanced in the opening stanza. The tone abruptly shifts in the next line as the speaker again seeks agency in decisive terms. Not only does she yearn to “stand up,” the speaker amplifies the authoritative demeanor in referring to the “upright” position and its accentuation with the dash. Furthermore, the speaker asserts her own desire—“I want”—rather than that of her spouse, and the comment echoes the sense of self presented in the second stanza (“I am free”). The imagined setting returns to the natural world, with its “cool” ambience, unlike the stifling feeling within the home. The ostensibly soothing atmosphere of the domicile contrasts with the desired discomfort that bearing substantive burdens would entail. Like the previous infinitive phrases with their initiatory “to,” their presence in the closing lines of the third stanza announces the speaker’s claim to subjectivity. The phrasal cadence reminds of the forceful declaration of Tennyson’s eponymous character in “Ulysses” as he concludes his dramatic monologue, exuding ambition and determination, by proclaiming his own intended actions: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Indeed, Nesbit’s speaker selects near synonyms in articulating her activities, with “try” (“strive”), “know” (“seek”), “learn” (“find”), and “grow” (“not to yield”). In effect, the female persona is appropriating the authority of Tennyson’s authoritative male in establishing her own case, with the exclamatory punctuation reinforcing the subjectivity she endeavors to establish. Yet the assured “I” of the second and third stanzas dissolves in the final stanza.    I am only you! I am yours—part of you—your wife! And I have no other life.    I cannot think, cannot do, I cannot breathe, cannot see; There is “us,” but there is not “me”—    And worst, at your kiss, I grow   Contented so.

The “I” of the first line here, which seemingly promises continued self-­ assertion (“I am”), immediately slides into “only you.” Like a Victorian

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wife under coverture, the speaker loses her identity in defining herself solely in terms of her husband. Even more disturbing, the speaker subsequently designates herself as a possession (“I am yours”), followed by a reiteration of her covered condition (“part of you”) and another reminder of spousal ownership (“your wife”). The pair of dashes in the second line provides dismaying accentuation, and the next line confirms the point that the speaker can lay claim to “no other life.” Rather than the sequence of acts that the speaker envisions herself undertaking in the latter part of the third stanza, in this one the emphasis comes on the processes she repeatedly “cannot” perform. The phrasing of the four cited functions provides an unsettling comparison to the Ulyssean endeavors she sought to accomplish, made even more troubling by the initiatory “I” in the central pair of lines that suggests not a movement toward positive ventures but a self-­ fulfilling acceptance of failure. Her suffocating condition (“I cannot breathe”) resonates with her inability to act. Unable to think, do, or see as well, the speaker deteriorates into nonexistence, in disconcerting variance from the persona in the poem’s first line seeking “to be.” Instead, she has devolved into a mere cipher whose subjectivity is wholly immersed in and defined by her spouse, as the next line reveals by her recognizing that only “us”—“not ‘me’”—exists. The poem finishes with a thoroughly depressing sentiment as the speaker accepts her situation as a traditional wife with satisfaction. She recognizes the unworthy capitulation (“And worst”) but replaces regret with approval. The ending of the penultimate line (“I grow”) adds to the disheartening effect by seemingly mocking the development that the speaker visualized at the closing of the previous stanza. No prospect of the speaker’s reassessment of her life is foreshadowed; the nature imagery that emblematized freedom in the previous stanzas is nowhere found in the last stanza, nor does a hint of an assertive “I” appear. The poem’s format reinforces her static situation: the middle stanzas that hold forth the possibility of agency are themselves constrained by the first and fourth stanzas that divulge her unfortunate status. The plight of the conventional wife, then, entails entrapment within domesticity and consent to constraint; no viable options abide, the poem warns, and this somber state sadly constitutes “The Woman’s World.” Love and freedom cannot coexist in marriage, the poem admonishes. The circumscribed life imparted by this poem defines as well Nesbit’s “Under Convoy,” published in Leaves of Life, with the verse’s title itself underscoring constraint. A convoy functions as a sheltering escort,

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metaphorically replicating Victorian coverture, and the titular preposition denotes subjugation, pressure, and subordination. The adverbial “too” suffuses the first of six stanzas and positions any likelihood of change as thoroughly overwhelming for the speaker, despite her suspicion that a customary life is not a worthy one. Too many the questions, too subtle    The doubts that bewilder my brain! Too strong is the strength of old custom    For iron convention’s cold reign; Too doubtful the issue of conflict,    Too leafless the crown and too vain!

Alliteration provides a thematic valence in multiple lines: pronunciation of the /b/ sounds in the second line produces a sputtering effect that intimates confusion; the sibilance of the third line insinuates a seamless invulnerability of Victorian tradition; and the line’s final word of “custom” leads to a string of hard /c/ sounds that convey harshness, particularly in articulating “iron convention’s cold reign.” Even the pronunciation of the multiple “too” insertions contributes to the stanzaic content, for the sound resembles a desperate wail. Like the first line, the concluding one features “too” twice, which serves not only to carry emphasis but also to question whether change would be worth pursuing, since the ultimate reward, the crowning garland, lacks the leaves that would bestow meaning. In the second stanza, the speaker admits that she has unquestionably followed convention, for she has been “[d]riven blindly by wind and by current, / Too weak to be strong as I would.” Unable to find her place in a bewildering world, she is “[t]oo good to be bad as my promptings, / Too bad to be valued as good.” The crux of her predicament rests in a desire to “do the work” that the speaker believes she should perform, but she cannot prod herself to do so. The notion that she has been unreflectively buffeted by cultural forces reappears in the third stanza, which employs the image of a swimmer heading out to sea; analogously, the speaker proceeds “blindly through life, not perceiving / The infinite stretch of life’s ill.” Yet the fourth stanza indicates that she cannot overcome the obstacles preventing her from undertaking the meaningful work she contemplates: “wave after wave crowds upon me— / I am tired, I can face them no more.” The speaker subsequently capitulates to a spouse as a rescuer who will enable her to “rest in [his] arms as before.” Consisting entirely of end-stopped lines, along with a departure from the abcbdb

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pattern with its ababab scheme, the stanza foregrounds the telling shift from a realization of a stagnant life to its acceptance despite constraints. In the penultimate stanza, the wife’s doubts about a traditional life and her speculations about an unconventional path begin to disappear. Convinced that mighty powers would thwart any efforts to alter her world, the speaker assumes that any work would be futile. Implied is a recognition that the speaker’s spouse would at best disapprove and at worst restrain her from undertaking valuable labor, with forms of “end” linked to the husband’s presence. And so you are left me—what matters    Of Freedom, or Duty, or Right? Let my chance of a life-work be ended,    End my chance of a soul’s worthy fight! End my chance to oppose—ah, how vainly!—    Vast wrong with its mass and its might!

Despite the apparent rejection of laudable endeavor, uneasiness remains as the poem concludes. The speaker recognizes her rationalization and seeks reassurance that a traditional wifehood is preferable. She is choosing a comforting existence and societal acceptance at a steep price, however; she realizes not only that her decision is neither honorable nor appropriate, but she also comprehends that she is settling for a constricting rather than a liberatory life. Hold me fast—kiss me close—and persuade me    ‘Tis better to lean upon you Than to play out my part unsupported,    My share in the world’s work to do. ‘Tis better be safe and ignoble    Than be free, and be wretched, and true.                 (emphasis added)

Her unenviable fate, the stanza portends, will resolve into a perpetual acknowledgment that she has betrayed herself. The untroubled future she foresees will not come to fruition. For the female reader, the poem’s bleak resolution serves as an admonition. The speaker’s feeble rationalizations accentuate the difficulty a woman faced in seeking a free life and the obstacles that precluded it if she were to marry. Once again, a Nesbit poem demonstrates that liberty and love are incompatible with wedlock in the fin de siècle.

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Estrangement The dissatisfaction that could pervade Victorian marriage unsurprisingly could lead to estrangement, which is manifested in diverse forms in contemporary writings. Although the term “estrangement” may not appear, it functions as an invisible presence that characterizes the dismaying circumstances confronting an unhappy wife. She faces inadequate options; for instance, a wife may continue to suffer through a miserable union, distance herself emotionally, resist passively, or seek solace elsewhere with a more companionable individual.26 Marital estrangement could be inevitable even before the marriage took place because of the faulty rationale that led the woman to take the vows. Repressive home life encouraged young women to accept inappropriate spouses in hopes of improving an unenviable situation, Kathleen Cuffe wrote in an 1894 Nineteenth Century essay. Once the newness dissipated, Cuffe added, the wife experienced an “awakening” that left “two wrecked lives.” Nesbit’s husband also made the point in his Letters to a Daughter, regretting the “enormous number of young women who marry to get away from [home],” with the husbands “so often regarded by the Beloved as a sort of melancholy alternative.” In the 1888 “Ideal Marriage,” Caird asserted that “as a rule, an unhappy marriage means utter shipwreck of the woman’s life.” Caird identified the curbing of individuality as a primary source of marital discontent.27 Nesbit’s verse, like contemporary writings, examines estrangement in diverse situations, as a trio of poems demonstrates. “A Tragedy,” appearing in Lays and Legends (1892), gains its title from the spouses’ acceptance of damaging gender assumptions, inculcated by the husband and absorbed by the wife.28 The poem thus serves as an indictment of such cultural verities. The wife’s voice emanates from seven abab stanzas as opposed to the five aabbcc stanzas in which the husband speaks, with the rhythmic disparity emphasizing an inharmonious marriage. Additionally, the more complex rhyme scheme of the husband’s stanzas quietly attests to the sense of superiority both he and his wife accord him. In contrast, her simple rhyme scheme seems childish. A desiccated Casaubon figure, the husband immerses himself in his book-filled study so thoroughly that he is physically as well as psychically distanced from his spouse. In the first section of the two-part poem, the wife speaks of the isolation defining their relationship, which is reflected in his static presence indoors and her active movements in nature. The

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distinction is unambiguously drawn, for the husband is entirely separated from the vibrant natural world: “He does not smell the new-mown hay, / The roses red and white,” the wife reveals. In contrast, she “walk[s] among them all alone.” Unlike the natural setting she roams, however, her “world seems tasteless, dead and done,” leading her to conclude that “[a]n empty thing is life.” Her connection to the husband is limited to a patch of light emanating from his study window, which falls upon the ground where she meanders throughout the night. She continues to do so “[u]ntil the chill of dawn,” with the ambient coldness reflecting the state of the marital relationship and foreshadowing her death that the husband never anticipates. This wife’s solitude differs markedly from that of “The Woman’s World,” where the speaker initially sought isolation. In “A Tragedy,” however, solitude results from unwanted emotional separation. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of “A Tragedy” is the wife’s assimilation of the husband’s negative judgments upon her that mirror cultural views: she is “[h]is silly, stupid wife” who has “no brain to understand / The books he loves to read.” Further evidencing the Victorian dichotomy between male rationality and female emotionality that the wife has internalized, she comments that “I only have a heart and hand.” Yet the supportive position expected of a traditional wife, validating her domestic role, cannot draw the spouses together, since “[h]e does not seem to need” her as an affectionate helpmeet. An adult relationship between the pair cannot exist, for he infantilizes her. “He calls me ‘Child,’” she laments, and “lays on my hair / Thin fingers, cold and mild” like an emotionally distant father rather than a desiring lover. So troubling is his behavior that the wife ironically exclaims to the “God of Love, who answers prayer, / I wish I were a child!” If such were the case, she would feel immune to his marital remoteness. Predicting her death in the coming year, the wife regrets that her husband will have never understood her: “He still will read and write and think,” she stresses, “[a]nd never, never know!” The poem subsequently accentuates the distance between the couple with his indoor world of books and her grave covered in living flowers. The wife’s assumptions hold true as the husband muses upon her absence in the second part of the poem. With overdetermined phrasing, he ironically cites his loneliness after her death, not admitting that he had willfully distanced himself from his living wife. “It’s lonely in my study here alone,” he says, “Now you are gone.” His account of their situation includes multiple condescending references as he defines her as “[m]y child” and “my little one.” The dismissive attitude becomes especially

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disquieting in the poem’s final line, for he fuses the subject positions he has imposed upon her as “[m]y child, my wife.” He deprives her of language, referring only to her “sweet, low laughter” and her singing, as might come from a child. His appellations also deny his wife of sexuality, an attribute that he is incapable of comprehending as he obtusely states, “Thank God, your child-heart knew not how to miss / The passionate kiss / Which I dared never give.” Surrendering to desire would supposedly endanger his work and figuratively lower him, for it could “bind me, with my life-work incomplete, / Beside your feet.” His sexuality is so muted that it is expressed only vaguely through his pleasure at watching her in a “white gown ‘mid the flowers,” like a voyeur secretively peering through an unobstructed window. He further excuses his coldness by insisting that he sought laurels on her account. “I studied—toiled to weave a crown of fame / About your name,” he rationalizes as he entirely deflects responsibility for his inattention. Utterly imperceptive about his wife, he presumes that he she was “glad with all the life-joys fair” and “content.” Ultimately, he submerges himself in self-pity, for his “one chance went,” leaving him “unblest” with the “broken fragments of my life.” The sexual emptiness of “A Tragedy” emerges even more openly in “The Ghost,” included in A Pomander of Verse and narrated by a wife estranged from a husband who deprives her of conjugal visits within their home. Nesbit brings a significant element to the cultural conversation about sexuality, for in this poem a physical resolution of the wife’s yearnings would strengthen the marital bond. New Woman opponents assailed the controversial figure for sexual inclinations, couching the desires as illicit in being expressed outside of marriage. Yet the crucial importance of sexuality within marriage was left virtually unspoken. “The Ghost,” in marked contrast, forcefully addresses this consequential topic in its two ababaab stanzas. The poem’s title highlights the husband’s avoidance of sexual behavior and the death in life that it represents through incorporeality. Images of separation, coldness, and death infuse the first of two septets. Now that the curtains are drawn close,    Now that the fire burns low, And on her narrow bed the rose    Is stark laid out in snow; Now that the wind of winter blows Bid my heart say if still it knows    The step it used to know.

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The closing curtains suggest not only window coverings but also the Victorian bed with its concealing drapery. For the speaker, the curtains become a kind of barricade, a closing-off, that represents her relationship with her spouse and his distancing of himself. The dying fire, with its intimation of ebbing passion, contributes to the increasingly remote connection between the pair. The metaphoric “stark” rose, with the adjectival denotation of deathlike rigidity, barrenness, and desolation, captures the speaker’s situation with its confining bed in the harsh snow. Indeed, the description of the rose’s bed evokes a shrouded corpse that is also “laid out” before burial in a comparison to the speaker’s own situation, and the gusting winter wind adds to the gloomy picture of lifelessness. The rose’s “narrow bed” further carries a sense of separateness, as if only the flower could fit within its boundaries. The husband metonymically becomes his step, another sign of incorporeality, and his lack of a name contributes to the picture of immateriality. The once-present step of the husband preparing to join his wife survives only as a memory. The vastly different situation of the present, in contrast to the sexual fulfillment of the past, is literally stressed when the stanza is scanned with trochees accentuating “Now.” The second stanza underscores the absence of a vibrant physical entity, for the husband is reduced to a sound not only by his footfalls but by his rustling nightclothes. I hear the silken gown you wear    Sweep on the gallery floor, Your step comes up the wide, dark stair    And pauses at my door. My heart with the old hope flowers fair— That shrivels to the old despair,    For you come in no more!

The separation conveyed in the first stanza with the curtains and bed imagery reappears with the reference to the wife’s door establishing another spousal barrier. The yearning for his entry, which still “flowers fair,” recalls the doomed metaphorical rose since the prospect “shrivels” as in death. In accord with Victorian suppositions that female desire cannot be openly manifested, the wife can only listen, not act. The husband must take on libidinous agency, which he declines, and she must wait passively. The estrangement causes the wife unrelenting emotional pain, “the old despair,” and a realization in the closing line that the husband will never cross her threshold.

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A departure characterizes the spousal estrangement in “The Adventurer,” found in Songs of Love and Empire (1898). The six-stanza abba poem is narrated by a king who embarks on a lengthy journey to seek treasure and triumphantly returns home to his queen. Yet she receives him not with joy but with derision. As Linda K.  Hughes observes, the king resembles an H.  Rider Haggard character and illustrates an imperialist aspect of marriage; the husband abandons his wife to seek riches and assumes she will await his return without resistance or complaint.29 His spouse seems of scant importance to him, for she is the last in a series identifying the entities being abandoned with his adventure, listed as just another item: “my throne, my crown, my queen.” He undertakes the journey for self-serving purposes, not only to attain wealth and glory but also to conquer challenges that attest to his manliness. Thus, for example, “[t]he curses of the winds I mocked,” and the heavy breezes “became my envious slave.” When he finally returns, he finds his kingdom in disarray and his wife “a faded queen.” Yet she is far distanced from the pliable spouse he likely expected to encounter. Instead, she deploys the gaze upon him as she “[r]aised alien eyes, and looked at me.” Though he displays the riches he has acquired, she responds with disgust as “[s]he smiled pale scorn” and subsequently “turned her weary eyes away” as if dismissing him completely. The queen demonstrates that she is not a commodity to be captured, possessed, and controlled. The poem ends without comment from the rejected adventurer, leaving unsaid whether he even recognized his inappropriate actions.

Infidelity Several of Nesbit’s marriage poems examine infidelity, which is understandable in a biographical sense due to her husband’s scurrilous behavior. The poems assess infidelity from different perspectives: a wandering husband, a wife’s unhappy acceptance of the behavior, syphilitic males, and a vengeful wife.30 An appropriate starting point for assessing Nesbit’s portrayals of infidelity comes with the paired poems in Lays and Legends (1886) in which spouses address the issue but express vastly disparate sentiments. “The Husband of To-day,” spoken by a philandering husband to his unfortunate wife, repeatedly rationalizes his unseemly conduct as if it eluded his control. In this three-stanza ababccdd poem, with the final

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stanza adding an ee couplet for emphasis, he claims that his senses hold him under their sway as an unwilling victim and thus physiological demands prevent his resistance. He presents his unapologetic explanation as the poem opens, ushering forth his presumption of innocence that he will confidently reiterate, with almost all of the lines end-stopped to underscore his confident rationalization. Contributing to his justification are insistent assertions that he loves his wife, with the implication that she should therefore ignore his activities. Eyes caught by beauty, fancy by eyes caught;    Sweet possibilities, question, and wonder— What did her smile say? What has her brain thought?    Her standard, what? Am I o’er it or under?      Flutter in meeting—in absence dreaming;      Tremor in greeting—for meeting scheming; Caught by the senses, and yet all through True with the heart of me, sweetheart, to you.

His excuses become additionally self-serving as he protests that he cannot govern the powerful forces within him. “Only the brute in me yields to the pressure / Of longings inherent,” he says as the second stanza begins. Moreover, he justifies himself by blaming the adultery itself for his surrendering to temptation, insisting that the “vices acquired” have magnified the pressure upon him to succumb. Compounding the unbelievability of his explanation, he contends that he derives no enjoyment from his behavior, designating his actions as “folly—not pleasure.” Again he blames his senses, opining that their “thrills exalted” to a point of “love-­ madness,” as if infidelity could be dismissed simply as a moment of insanity that his own volition cannot conquer. He adores only his wife, he maintains, exclaiming that “[l]ove is fast fettered, sweetheart, to you.” In the final stanza, he shifts his defense to hint that life itself depends on “fresh fancies,” advancing the theory that “[l]ife without folly would fail—fall flat.” Presumably, his wife’s life with him would deteriorate as well since he would be unable to be the man she supposedly wants. Although he avows that her love “lights life,” he positions her in an apparent contradiction as merely one among many. Yet she should be satisfied that he will return to her after a passion has died, he surmises, even though he appraises his liaisons as joyful but associates her presence with sadness.

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   Sweet are all women, you are the best of them;    You are so dear because dear are the rest of them;    After each fancy has sprung, grown, and died,    Back I come ever, dear, to your side. The strongest of passions—in joy—seeks the new, But in grief I turn ever, sweetheart, to you.

Despite undercutting his excuses, she concludes in “The Wife of All Ages” that she can love only him. I do not catch these subtle shades of feeling,    Your fine distinctions are too fine for me; This meeting, scheming, longing, trembling, dreaming,    To me mean love, and only love, you see; In me at least ‘tis love, you will admit, And you the only man who wakens it.

As the five-stanza abcbdd poem proceeds, however, the speaker seems to be castigating her spouse for his indiscretions. Initially, she expostulates that he enjoys implicit permission to act in a way that she could not emulate without condemnation or retaliation, nor would her spouse accept that unfaithfulness on her part would not prove love for another. In an indictment of unequal standards, her commentary exemplifies the decisive distinction that gender expectations placed on a Victorian woman. Suppose I yearned, and longed, and dreamed, and fluttered,   What would you say or think, or further, do? Why should one rule be fit for me to follow,   While there exists a different law for you? If all these fires and fancies came my way, Would you believe love was so far away?

Her next point reasserts the belief that her spouse indeed loves his other women, and she deeply resents his claim to the contrary. His feelings, the wife argues, should be directed only to her as he had assured would occur. Being merely one woman in a chain is unacceptable, she tells him, for “[i]t is the only one I care to be.” When the poem moves into the penultimate stanza, the speaker plans to leave her husband; with his lovers—his “sheaves of roses”—she will be unmissed and soon forgotten. Her resistance to his deeds provides an

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encouraging note in an otherwise untenable situation. By the final stanza, however, she has determined that she has no alternative but to remain with her husband: “The world, no doubt, has fairest fruits and blossoms / To give to you; but what, ah! what for me?” Not only does she appraise herself as “your slave and bondmaid,” she returns to her admission in the first stanza that she is emotionally unable to depart. In the closing lines, the speaker dismayingly accedes to his unfaithful behavior and states that she will continue to “welcome any part / Which you may choose to give me of your heart.” The poem is quite tragic in showing that she has no ability to change his behavior but must continue to accept it if she wishes to remain with her unfaithful spouse. The couplets concluding each stanza subtly connect her to the husband through multiple couplets in his version, though the husband’s poem does not reveal any inclination to cease his philandering. No doubt many a Victorian wife found herself in an analogous situation, which makes the poem especially poignant. In two other poems investigating infidelity, Nesbit makes unmistakable references to syphilitic contamination of a clueless wife. The danger of contracting syphilis from promiscuous males, though not depicted in such direct terms, also brought vigorous responses from Victorian commentators. Among prominent voices, Grand particularly condemned the cultural practice of keeping marriageable young women unaware of a prospective spouse’s background that could include a licentious past. Blaming parental silence and control over a daughter, Grand attacked the practice of “hand[ing] her over” and exposing her to the prospect of “disease and death as the chattel of her husband.”31 In contrast, “[g]irls with a knowledge of the world become extremely fastidious in their choice of husbands,” said Grand in “The Modern Girl.”32 Nesbit’s “Quieta ne Movete” (“quiet you move”), included in Lays and Legends (1886), alludes to the dangers a wife could face from an unfaithful husband. The poem features another rationalizing husband, this time one who defends his secrecy about crass liaisons. Although he assumes that his suspicious wife would forgive him, he asserts that neither spouse could forget the past as his justification for remaining silent. He deludes himself in the first of three abab stanzas, whether knowingly or not, that confession would bring him relief. Dear, if I told you, made your sorrow certain,   Showed you the ghosts that o’er my pillow lean, What joy were mine—to cast aside the curtain   And clasp you close with no lies between!

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As Hughes indicates, the reference to spirits evokes Ibsen’s play “Ghosts” and its syphilitic philanderer. The connection is strengthened by biographer Moore’s comments that Nesbit was “[a] fervent Ibsen enthusiast” who saw the 1893 initial performance “and talked Ibsen for weeks afterwards.”33 The poem’s ghosts suggest a hovering specter that epitomizes the lurking presence of syphilitic danger and the menacing symptoms that could arise. The perils for an unsuspecting spouse were especially severe, for a wife not only could contract syphilis herself but she could transmit the disease to her children. A connection between prostitution and syphilis surfaces in the poem’s final stanza as the speaker expresses relief that he can separate himself from his transgressions as long as his wife remains unaware. And I, thank God, can still in your embraces   Forget the past, with all its strife and stain, —But if you, too, beheld the evil faces,   I should forget them never, never again!

The “stain” serves as a telling synonym for disease with its multiple denotations of taint, stigma, soiling, and discredit, while “the evil faces” likely allude to prostitutes the speaker had visited. The intimations of disease that appear in “Quieta ne Movete” become more pronounced in “The Temptation,” though this Lays and Legends poem (1892), like other late Victorian writings, avoids the unspeakable term of “syphilis.” The male persona of “The Temptation” repeatedly advises a devoted woman not to marry him because of his sordid past, even though the prospect likely would bring him happiness. The woman has no knowledge of his background but believes him “pure and true,” qualities that he recognizes apply only to her since “[t]hey were trampled down by me.” As in “Quieta ne Movete,” spectral reminders of his transgressions maintain their presence, which again elicits not only Ibsen’s play but also the possibility of syphilitic symptoms eventually materializing in another. Amplifying the link between the “[h]orrid ghosts” and sexuality, the speaker comments that they “rise up between / You and me” in an oddly phallic insinuation. Unlike the speaker of “The Husband of To-day,” this male apprehends and acknowledges that he has erred through the “poison” derived from dissipation. The central stanza of the five-part abba poem serves as its nexus in terms of syphilitic destruction.

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I should wither up your life,   Blacken, blight its maiden flower;   You would live to curse the hour When you made yourself my wife.

The diction signals contamination with “wither,” “blacken,” and “blight” destroying the innocent woman’s “maiden flower” in a sexually laced phrase. Moreover, the first line hints at a life shortened by the disease whereby the woman would expire soon after marriage to the adulterated spouse. Though the speaker has admitted his errors thus far, the stanza’s final line transfers a share of responsibility to the woman if she were to accept him, positioning her as the agent of an agonizing fate. With the poem’s stress on syphilitic effects, the woman is reduced to a body in the penultimate stanza, designated by her “hand held out” and her eyes that are “[p]leading, longing, brimmed with tears.” Cautioning the woman that he has “lived in hell for years,” the speaker advises her, “Do not show me Paradise.” If she does so, the speaker admonishes, he may be unable to resist and would urge her to “[t]ake me, then!” and “save me if you can,” an ironic statement since he would threaten her life. The comment brings to mind late-century medical opinions on whether marriage to a licentious male would endanger the wife. A widespread but erroneous belief held that a waiting period without symptoms surfacing would enable a man to wed. Eminent physician Jonathan Hutchinson, for instance, believed that a two-year period after symptoms had ceased would be sufficient for a marriage to occur safely. Sir William Osler thought that transmission of the disease from a tainted man to children was merely a rare occasion, and he blamed mothers for dire hereditary effects. One enlightened physician, George Cordwent, said that a contaminated man should not have children.34 The most unnerving of Nesbit’s infidelity poems, “Bridal Ballad” in Lays and Legends (1892), is set in the Middle Ages, with the primary speaker ordering her maidens to make suitable preparations on her wedding night. Among their duties is readying the marital bed, which would be decorated with candles, yet “[i]t seemed more like the bed of death / Than like a bridal bed.” Upon arrival, the groom covers his wife with kisses, but he soon becomes ill and wonders at the cause of his discomfort. Her response is chilling, for she tells him to “[l]ie down and die on thy bride-bed / For I have poisoned thee.” His unfaithfulness led her to act,

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which she believes fully justified “[s]ince thou wert false to me.” Infidelity thus becomes a transgression so grave that it merits the extreme punishment accorded a murderer or other unforgiveable criminal. When facing divine judgment, the bride anticipates that God will absolve her and deem her “guilty hand” blameless. Rather than condemn his wife, the groom assents that he deserves to die. Moreover, he trusts that the murder should make her “[f]irst of the saints on high.” The fifteen-stanza poem makes a disarming statement at a time when a Victorian philanderer would receive virtually no recriminations for his dissipated conduct and could persist at will. Instead of blithe acceptance, the poem maintains, such behavior warrants retribution, with the abab rhyme scheme evoking a tolling of a cause and an effect. With the medieval context, death ostensibly represents a fitting penalty in “Bridal Ballad”; in the nineteenth century, the poem intimates, a punishment suitable for the contemporaneous time must also be imposed. With all of the daunting portraits of marriage presented in Nesbit’s poetry, it is appropriate to conclude the discussion of her work here with a verse contending that the prospect of an admirable and fulfilling marriage is merely chimeric. “Microcosm” in the 1886 Lays and Legends positions individuals simply as pawns manipulated by outside forces rather than capable of acting wholly under their own auspices. The poem resonates with Arthur Schopenhauer’s contention that an individual’s actions resemble “puppets which are set in motion by internal clockwork.” Moreover, the “sense of life may be compared to a rope which is stretched above the puppet-show of the world of men, and on which the puppets hang by invisible threads.” As John Heaney observes, “the complete severance of volition and consciousness is a cornerstone of [Schopenhauer’s] philosophy.35 Nesbit’s speaker-husband of the three-stanza ababcc poem immediately sets out the impossibility that love could be lasting and faithfulness unerring, despite taking marriage vows that such would occur. She and I—we kissed and vowed   That should be which could not be; Just as if mere vows endowed   Love with immortality! Ah, had vows but kept us true, As we thought them sure to do!

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Noting that he and his beloved were “such tiny parts / Of the Evolutionplan,” the man remarks that their life path was basically predetermined as the product of “the ages.” Thus, the spouses existed as “mere counters, toys / Nature uses for her game.” Their lives, the husband pessimistically concludes, proceed “[j]ust as though our will were free.” Such an explanation provides a dismal judgment on the times. Interestingly, the poem is composed of Venus and Adonis stanzas with the ababcc rhyme scheme, but it departs from the form’s unflinching iambic pentameter. The effect is to provide a modern patina to a disastrous relationship where love, rather than Adonis, will die.

Dismaying Progression In the remainder of this chapter, selected poems by Nesbit contemporaries form a sequence of sorts, condemning the negative aspects of Victorian wedlock. The verses begin with an episode prior to marriage and proceed to the marital situation itself. Marriage holds no promise of providing lasting happiness for a Victorian woman in these important poems. “A Marriage Charm,” included in Nora Hopper’s Under Quicken Boughs (1896), presents marriage as a frightening trap devised by a suitor enmeshed in reactionary attitudes that value ignorance and submission from a prospective spouse. A Yellow Book contributor, Hopper explored sexuality in poems appearing in the unconventional periodical. As Hughes observes about “A Marriage Charm,” Hopper “exposes an expression of love as a will to power.”36 The seven-stanza abab poem begins with the suitor demonstrating his control over the unfortunate victim whom he ironically terms “[w]oman most dear.” Nowhere in the poem is her voice heard; instead, he establishes himself as the sole agent of her fate. “I choose you out for mine,” he remarks, like a predator identifying a desirable catch. “I turn my errant feet your way across,” he continues, with the figurative somatic barrier revealing his imposition of constraint that will deprive the woman of the ability to elude him. The lines are almost entirely end-stopped, which seemingly restrain the preceding words like he constrains the woman. The titular reference to a “charm” threads through the poem, with the noun’s denotation of a magic spell conveying inappropriate control and disturbing deceit. In the second stanza, the suitor stifles the woman’s life force (“breath”) and her actions, with no options for relief available.

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I set a charm upon your hurrying breath, I set a charm upon your wandering feet, You shall not leave me—not for life, nor death, Not even though you cease to love me, Sweet.

The appellation of “Sweet” carries a sinister tone, mocking the woman with the word’s suggestion of affection obviated by the context of imprisonment. Especially unsettling is the claim that nothing can ever release her, and his warning that she can never leave him reminds of the legal restrictions placed on a Victorian wife desiring to abandon a disreputable husband. The imagery of bondage reappears as the poem proceeds, with not only the woman’s passage blocked as in the initial stanza but also various body parts are restrained, underscoring that a traditional Victorian wife is subject to a husband’s authority. The fourth stanza is particularly troubling, for it reveals that the suitor will prevent her from developing intellectually or even realizing that she is superior to her loathsome imprisoner. The stanza again ends with the unnerving “Sweet,” preceded by an equally appalling “love” and the man’s ironic self-designation of “lover.” I set a charm upon you, foot and hand, That you and Knowledge, love, may never meet, That you may never chance to understand How strong you are, how weak your lover, Sweet.

The next stanza becomes even more suffocating. I set my charm upon your kindly arm, I set it as a seal upon your breast; That you may never hear another’s charm, Nor guess another’s gift outruns my best.

In the penultimate stanza, the suitor chooses the predicate “bid” to inform the woman of his expectations, and at first glance the verb suggests an invitation. Yet his instructions are far distant from such a gentle comment, for the denotation of “bid” as a command is instead the accurate assessment. The stanza heightens the power that the suitor seeks to impose and prevent the woman from freedom of thought.

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I bid your wandering footsteps me to follow, Your thoughts to travel after in my track, I am the sky that waits you, dear grey swallow, No wind of mine shall ever blow you back.

By referring to himself as “the sky,” the suitor imparts that he will become her entire universe and reiterates that he will never liberate her. The closing stanza reinforces his control over her thoughts and her body. “I am your dream, Sweet: so no more of dreaming,” he insists. The final line reminds that he has placed the secure closure of a seal upon his hapless victim. As with its presence upon an envelope, a seal calls attention to the agency of the person directing the message, not the recipient. Even though a woman anticipates happiness as she weds, her elation may only be transitory, cautions Dollie Radford in “A Bride,” included in A Light Load (1891). A politically attuned socialist, Radford explored gender and sexuality issues, among others, in her poetic work. In the first of five abab stanzas, the speaker of “A Bride” interprets a picture of the eventual wife in troubling tones that belie the anticipated joy of wedded life. I saw your portrait yesterday,   Set in a golden frame; Around it twines a blossom-spray,   Beneath it is your name.

The description connotes entrapment through the frame and its decoration. The verb choice of “set” implies that the woman has not been a true agent of her fate but likely has been compelled to wed by cultural pressure. The frame binds her within its limited space, paralleling her impending situation as a wife subjected to the constraints implicit in a conventional Victorian marriage. The entwining floral spray accentuates the restraints that the woman will face, as it wraps around the frame like an ensnaring coil. The location of her name at the marginalized location of the frame’s base adds to the bleak portrayal in subtly imparting the coming occlusion of her identity in marriage. As the final reference in the quatrain, the name graphically assumes a subordinate place and will soon disappear in actuality as she assumes her husband’s surname. The following stanza delineates the features of the woman’s portrait, all of which present an exhilarated woman before marriage will alter her

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perception. She displays “tender smiles” and “[h]igh thoughts” as she deems her world “beautiful” in her youthful years since she is “so happy now.” The next quatrain continues the positive scenario. The shining gates are opened wide,   Love stretches forth his hand And bids the bridegroom bring his bride   Into the promised land.

The stanza suggests a religious element in situating the impending marriage as an ecstatic act, with “shining gates” alluding to the heavenly entrance and “the promised land” carrying biblical intonations. Added to the blissful prospect is the mythological reference to Cupid, with his own status as a god blessing the union. Yet a disconcerting element underlies the rapturous account through the /b/ alliteration of the penultimate line, with the jarring pronunciation of the hard consonant upsetting the smooth flow of the previous description and undermining the subsequent expectation of a joyful future. The groom, not the bride, has agency, for he is the one leading her into wedlock. In the gap preceding the next quatrain, the wedding has occurred and the marriage seems to fulfill the expectation of happiness. The couple “dwell there alone” in their promised land, implying that the wife’s world is restricted to her husband’s presence. Nevertheless, the marriage flourishes under “Love’s radiant sky,” and the pair is distanced from “all the world’s great grief and moan.” The poem’s tone abruptly shifts in the final stanza, however, to transform joy into misery. Yet on Love’s flowers strange and rare,   Your saddest tears may fall, And in Love’s country you may fare   The loneliest of all.

The floral description insinuates that lasting happiness in wedlock is an anomaly rather than a surety, and the resonance to the constricting flower spray of the opening stanza reminds of the restrictions endured by a traditional Victorian wife. The promised land has become a dreary one with the wife’s solitude.

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In a sense, the wife returns to the glittering frame that metaphorically held her captive, for she has little hope of altering or rejecting the marital state in an unsympathetic culture. The emotional damage that conventional marriage could impose upon an intelligent wife is amply demonstrated in the title poem of Amy Levy’s Xantippe, and Other Verse (1881). Levy’s dramatic monologue, though situated in ancient Greece, serves as a parable for Victorian women. Speaking to her maids when near death, Xantippe examines her life and its searing disappointments. In her unmarried years, Xantippe revealed herself to be an iconoclastic individual who dismissed the thoughts and behaviors that her culture embraces for females. Her soul, she recalls, “yearned for knowledge,” but she realized that she had transgressed societal norms (2).37 Then followed days of sadness, as I grew To learn my woman-mind had gone astray, And I was sinning in those very thoughts— (And yet, ‘tis strange, the gods who fashion us Have given us such promptings)…. (3)

When her father orders Xantippe to marry Socrates, her early revulsion is replaced by the opportunity to gain knowledge and “[r]efresh my thirsting spirit” (5). Yet she discovers that her spouse “[d]eigned not to stoop to touch so slight a thing / As the fine fabric of a woman’s brain” (6). When the couple encounters the learned Aspasia, Socrates considers her a dangerous model, since a woman would become “intoxicate with knowledge” and discard “[t]he laws of custom, order, ‘neath her feet” (8). Appalled by his judgment, Xantippe utters a passionate response, arguing that the gods would not have been satisfied with the “half-completed work” of creating cognitively deficient women (9). Sadly, Xantippe comes to understand in despair that her husband merely “wished a household vessel” (11). Understanding that her hopes of erudition and intellectual growth are chimeric, Xantippe turns to the loom. As Cynthia Scheinberg comments, Xantippe inhabits “an alternative female space that counters the male world of Socratic discourse” and matches “the kind of separate gendered spheres that were so familiar to Victorian ideology.”38 Dora Sigerson illustrates a deficient Victorian marriage, one of her concerns along with gender issues, in “The Skeleton in the Cupboard,” which appeared in The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems (1898). Set at Christmastime, the verse issues forth the prospect that a dysfunctional

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family in a loveless home could step out of its normal behavior and be content for the special moment. The speaker asks that the family join “in fond embrace,” with “[n]o bitter words, no frowning brow” so that “[t]he skeleton’s behind the door.” Despite the conformance to Christmas rituals that draw a family together, in this case those actions are “[i]n vain.” Ghastly imagery infuses the final stanza. Signaling that the family’s “pretence of happiness” will quickly fade, “[t]he death-watch ticks within the walls” and “[t]he skeleton taps on the door”; therefore, “let him back into his place.” Like Nesbit’s expansive oeuvre on marriage, the poem by Sigerson, as well as verses by contemporaries discussed above, abundantly reveal that Victorian wedlock is gravely flawed. The varied perspectives pointing to marital deficiencies provide a historically important commentary and unquestionably make valuable contributions to the fin-de-siècle assessment of the institution. Considered in their totality, the poems discussed in this chapter forcefully demonstrate that cultural practices, unquestioned tradition, and male perfidy are the true culprits producing insufferable unions for conventional women. In sum, the women poets provide crucial insights into marital discontent in the late nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Along these lines, Sally Ledger notes “the centrality of the marriage question in the New Woman debate” (The New Woman, 23). 2. Nesbit’s first name was Edith, though she favored the initial. 3. Mona Caird, “Marriage,” 196. Numerous responses to Caird’s essay were gathered in editor Harry Quilter’s Is Marriage a Failure? which appeared the same year. The volume resembles a legal document in that Quilter establishes cases for the plaintiff, who basically shares Caird’s sentiments, and for the defense. Signatories of the letters often carried such curious names as “A Matrimonial Failure,” “A Lover of Justice,” “The Dog,” “A Maid with a Mind of her Own,” “A Glorified Spinster,” and “One who has been Married Three Times.” 4. Caird, “Marriage,” 197, 198. 5. Margaret D. Stetz, “‘The Mighty Mother Cannot Bring Thee in,’” 231, 230. Stetz notes Nesbit’s “growing rebelliousness against the conventional lot of Victorian women in every social class” (223). 6. Nesbit quoted in Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion¸ 66; Briggs, 68; Nesbit quoted in Elisabeth Galvin, The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit, 36. Also see Gloria G. Fromm, “E. Nesbit and the Happy Moralist,” for biographical information.

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7. Alex H. Japp, “Edith (Nesbit) Bland,” 396; “Some Women Poets,” 53. 8. Nesbit quoted in Doris Langley Moore, E. Nesbit, 76; Moore, 76; Galvin, The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit, 33; Moore, 123, 196. 9. Nesbit quoted in Galvin, The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit, 37. 10. Quoted in Briggs, A Woman of Passion, 69. 11. Briggs, A Woman of Passion, 70; Moore, E. Nesbit, 236; Hubert Bland, Essays by Hubert Bland, 209, 210–11. 12. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 516. 13. Ibid., 517 14. Ibid., 516. 15. Moore, E. Nesbit, 140. 16. Nesbit quoted in Eleanor Fitzsimons, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, 67–68. 17. Moore, E. Nesbit, 140. 18. Ibid., 141. 19. Fitzsimons, The Life and Loves of E.  Nesbit, 67; Nesbit quoted in Fitzsimons, 67, 44. 20. Caird, “The Morality of Marriage,” 311. 21. Ibid., 312. 22. Ibid., 317. Along similar lines, Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling avowed in the Thoughts on Women and Society (1887) that “an organised tyranny of men” oppresses and constrains women (14). Ideally, they stated, “[t]he woman will no longer be the man’s slave, but his equal” (28). Yet commentators additionally identified grounds for hope. For example, A.  Amy Bulley recognized progress in women’s situation, stating that women “are rebel[ling] against the extreme narrowing of their horizon which the domestic sphere has hitherto usually entailed” (“The Political Evolution of Women,” 5). Nesbit, however, definitely did not share such a favorable estimation of the marital state in her verse. 23. Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 349; Florence Dixie, Gloriana, 27. Other examples of marital constraint include Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, in which protagonist Hadria Temperley battles limitations on her development as a musical composer throughout wedded life. George Paston’s A Study in Prejudices (1895) traces the decline of Cecily Tregarthen, a clever artist who is “taken aback” after marriage to a conservative husband by his “proposed curtailment of her freedom” (83). 24. For instance, Olive Schreiner maintains in the brief story, “Life’s Gifts,” that only one of those conditions was possible. In Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, Lyndall claims that marriage “would hold me fast” and she would “never be free again” (236). Herminia in Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did refuses to wed the beloved Alan Merrick, insisting that she must retain “the freedom which I have gained for myself by such arduous efforts” (73).

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25. Linda K.  Hughes advises that “The Woman’s World” appeared without attribution as “Woman Free” in 1893 (“Daughters of Danaus and Daphne,” 486, 492). 26. Contemporary fiction presented varied scenarios that culminated in estrangement. Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus provides one example with the initial promise of Hadria’s marriage fading as her resentment over restraint burgeons in her stagnant life and her husband expresses no sympathy for her frustration. Grand’s The Beth Book chronicles Beth’s emotional distancing from an unworthy husband who even brings his apparent lover into the home. George Meredith’s eponymous Diana of the Crossways and her husband become so alienated that he seeks legal action against her. 27. Kathleen Cuffe, “A Reply from the Daughters I,” 439; Bland, Letters to a Daughter, 145; Caird, “Ideal Marriage,” 623. 28. As Kathleen Hickok remarks, the “real tragedy … is the unnecessary sacrifice of marital joy caused by mistaken ideas of wifely propriety and masculine superiority” (Representations of Women, 70). 29. Hughes, New Woman Poets, 6. 30. Victorian nonfiction strongly conveyed disdain for infidelity, pointing especially to the wife’s dearth of options for ending the marriage. For example, “A Woman of the Day” decried current law in “Dies Dominae” whereby “a man may make his wife’s existence an agony with impunity so long as he does not resort to personal violence, whereas a mere appearance of infidelity is often sufficient excuse for him to obtain a release from his obligations” (721). Elizabeth Rachel Chapman contended in Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction that the current condition “is shamefully unjust to the wife” (112). 31. Grand, “The Modern Girl,” 708. 32. Ibid., 712. Other essayists affirmed Grand’s stance. In an 1890 essay, for instance, Geoffrey Mortimer reviled mothers who kept their daughters ignorant about “the physiology of love” with the faulty assumption that relevant information would be “monstrous” (“The Intellectual Cowardice of Woman,” 506). Fin-de-siècle anxieties about the fearsome affliction were also expressed in fiction. For example, Grand’s The Heavenly Twins imparts such apprehension, with the doomed wife Edith suffering the effects of syphilis contracted from her husband. In A Superfluous Woman by Emma Frances Brooke, Jessamine Halliday marries the disgustingly contaminated Lord Heriot, whose diseased body is yet another manifestation in a generational pattern of promiscuous males. 33. Hughes, “Daughters of Danaus and Daphne,” 492; Moore, E. Nesbit, 136. 34. Jonathan Hutchinson, “A Discussion on Some Aspects of Congenital Syphilis,” 1150; William Osler, The Principles and Practices of Medicine, 266; George Cordwent, “When May Syphilitics Marry?” 944.

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35. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 3:115, 117; John Heaney, “Arthur Schopenhauer, Evolution, and Ecology in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders,” 522. 36. Hughes, “Daughters of Danaus and Daphne,” 491. Hughes remarks that “the ‘charm’ is also a trope of marriage laws that deprived women of political and erotic agency yet were so naturalized by custom and ideology that their hold might well be construed as magic” (491). 37. Page numbers are inserted in the text for this lengthy poem. 38. Cynthia Scheinberg, “Recasting ‘Sympathy and Judgment’: Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,” 181.

CHAPTER 3

The Workings of Desire

For the New Woman, removing constraints on a range of subjects and behaviors was a marked priority. Among the contested areas were traditional presumptions that denied women sexual freedom in any form, whether in verbal or physical expression. Rather than existing merely as objects of desire, however, many New Women sought to become its subjects and to exercise sexual freedom.1 Fin-de-siècle women’s poetry investigates the topic in multiple ways, revealing erotic interest and contesting male representations of female sexuality—or the presumed lack thereof. New Woman poets made revolutionary inroads on the Victorian standards of appropriate behavior by contesting the cultural rule of female purity and enabling alternative voices to be heard. As the verses explored in this chapter reveal, sexual interests and behavior were not limited to heterosexual partners but extended as well into same-sex relationships. Moreover, in some cases, as in the poetry of Olive Custance that leads this chapter, an array of possibilities is examined. Poets discussed thereafter include significant writers of their time, such as Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Dollie Radford, and Michael Field, whose verses are especially riveting. Olive Custance’s poetry serves as the compelling focus in this chapter because her complex work intriguingly addresses the many configurations of desire. Additionally, her oeuvre implicitly posits a continuum whereby neither heterosexual nor homosexual expressions are rigidly fixed at opposite poles but instead desire flows fluidly between them, which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_3

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problematizes the cultural predilection to apply inflexible definitions upon displays of erotic behavior. The poet’s personal history provides an illustrative perspective on the workings of desire, for Custance was herself bisexual. Accounts of her close relationship with poet Natalie Barney evidence Custance’s attraction to other women, while her later marriage to Lord Alfred Douglas confirms her interest in men. Yet complications exist, for Custance repeatedly adopted the persona of an adolescent male while feminizing Douglas, which created an unusual erotic connection between the pair. The poetry assumes that desire is pliant, not irrevocably solidified, for the verses to be addressed resist the imposition of meaning by sliding into indeterminacies that cannot be readily resolved. Instead, identities of the poetic personas are generally confused rather than clarified, leading to multiple readings of their relationships.2 Amorphous sexuality flows through the poems, as if a free-floating force. Gender status can alter as interpersonal bonds shift and thwart attempts to decipher them. Considering her approach to sexuality, it is not especially surprising that Custance adopted the moniker “Opal” with its colorful oscillations.3 Indeed, Custance’s intricate investigations of sexuality account for her New Woman status. Custance has been variably identified as an aesthete and as a decadent writer, but in the poems examined here the decadent influence prevails through the eroticism that pervades them.4 Perhaps the phrase “decadent aestheticism” would provide a fitting characterization of the verses.5 Indeed, the prime journal offering such writing, The Yellow Book, included eight of Custance’s verses during its short existence. In a 1913 examination of decadence, Holbrook Jackson maintained that “writers of the Eighteen Nineties sought to capture and steep their art in what was sensuous and luscious, in all that was coloured and perfumed.”6 Jackson included Custance in his category of “minor poets,” a term that “began as a disparagement and … lived on with a difference,”7 designating writers “who give expression to moods more attuned to end-of-the-century emotions.”8 Jackson averred that the “genuine minor note” entailed “a form of hermaphroditism,” which he characterized as “a passing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and strange.”9 Another contemporary observer pointed to the talent Custance’s work evinced as well as its decadent streaks. Richard Le Gallienne described her first volume, the 1897 Opals—not a startling title, in light of her nickname—as “the best poetry written by a woman for quite a long time,”

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which displayed “spontaneous original charm, even power.”10 Intimating the decadent aestheticism of the verses, Le Gallienne remarked that “Miss Custance does not much trouble her head about … ‘the moral idea.’” That comment provides insight on Custance’s admiration for the oeuvre of the iconoclastic Algernon Charles Swinburne and her attentiveness to Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, all three of whom Sarah Parker identifies as particular interests.”11 Custance’s poetic concentration on erotic behavior that would be deemed transgressive by staid Victorians emerged at a time when sexologists were calling attention to “sexual inversion” and examining congenital and behavioral evidence of homosexuality.12 Richard von Krafft-Ebing claimed in the 1888 “Perversion of the Sexual Instinct” that homosexual activity was “a strange freak of nature” but might indicate only a temporary phenomenon. He contended in Psychopathia Sexualis that female sexual inverts not only adopted a “masculine rôle” but had a “masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.” To sexologist Havelock Ellis, a female invert possessed “a masculine element” that could be exhibited by “advances to the woman to whom she is attracted.”13 Ellis blamed the beliefs and activities that would appeal to a New Woman as indirectly responsible for “an increase in homosexuality.” The “unquestionable influences of modern movements … develop the germs of [sexual inversion],” Ellis wrote in the 1895 “Sexual Inversion in Women.”14 Custance undoubtedly if indirectly participated in the cultural commentary on the purportedly abnormal sexuality as a prominent author, whom Brocard Sewell designates one of the “[t]hree principal women poets of the day.”15 Nonetheless, it is likely that Victorian readers in general were unaware of at least some of the poetry’s inferences and ascribed such references to heterosexual inclinations. One wonders, however, if a reader could completely fail to notice or to disregard the homoerotic inferences and in some cases rather blatant messages that Custance’s poetry presented.16

Linguistic Fluctuations The indecipherability of desire becomes particularly evident in “Antinous,” published in Rainbows (1902), especially when considering Custance’s biographical background as a gloss on the poem. The libidinous confusion begins in the opening line, which seemingly entangles male and female desire: “I spoke of you, Antinous, with her who is my heart’s delight.”

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The speaker’s erotic interest in Antinous, who is later addressed as “oh, my Desire,” apparently coexists with a female beloved as specified by the feminine pronoun. Amplifying the indeterminacy, Antinous was effusively deemed a beautiful youth for centuries. The speaker attests to Antinous’ attractiveness in remarking upon his “gracious loveliness,” a phrase that evokes a comely woman rather than a heterosexual male. Yet other interpretive strands arise in that the biological sex of the poem’s speaker is never revealed. Thus, the speaker could be a woman entranced by another woman or by an effeminate male, as well as the homosexual Antinous; or, the speaker could be a man drawn to a woman or to another male, as well as Antinous.17 Complicating the emotional relationships are the poem’s resonances to Custance’s own gender fluidity with her self-designation as a page and her fascination with male effeminacy demonstrated by her attraction to the “girlishly pretty” Douglas, as an acquaintance characterized him. Antinous himself resembled a page through his personal service to a person of rank in the form of a sexual bond with the Roman emperor Hadrian. Moreover, Custance carried a photograph of the statue because of its resemblance to Douglas, as Sewell has related. In his autobiography, Douglas recalled that “the very thing she loved in me was that which I was always trying to suppress … the feminine part”; Custance, Douglas averred, is “exactly like a boy.” Another connection comes through Oscar Wilde’s literary references to Antinous in “The Sphinx,” with its interrogations of sexual conquests, and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the artist Basil Hallward’s assertion that Antinous’ face was a pivotal influence in Hellenic sculpture. Wilde’s infatuation with Douglas led, of course, to Wilde’s trial for sodomy, which provides another erotic linkage, as does Douglas’ later marriage to Custance.18 Additionally, as Linda K. Hughes has remarked, the speaker’s profound attraction to the Antinous statue brings into consideration its role as an erotic fetish with the obsessive attention it generates.19 The second line of “Antinous” continues the sexual ambiguity in providing an additional layer of opacity. The speaker and the “heart’s delight” converse about the statue in an atmosphere of overdetermined liminality created by twilight, for they “watched the dawn of night through veils of dusk diaphanous.”20 As the night’s dawning, twilight is poised between two very different conditions in an equivocal state. In this poem as in other Custance verses, twilight functions as a multivalent signifier of gender identity, characterizing it as homoerotic, indeterminable, fluctuating, or occluded, for example, and often in a combination of conditions. The

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veils in “Antinous” provide concealment, which is substantially heightened by the twilight’s “diaphanous” quality that imposes yet another impediment to transparency in functioning as a second veil. Various references to light permeate the poem and maintain the impression of uncertainty. The speaker gazes at the statue “all night long” in an ongoing period of imperiled vision, followed by the equivocal “silver Dawn,” an oxymoronic coupling of simultaneous moonlight and daylight. Providing a sensual link, “the sky is stained with scarlet fire,” the literary color of passion. The poem’s dearth of rhyme contributes to the sexual ambiguity through the inability to assign any ordering principle. The overall structure of paired lines imitates an oscillation between two erotic states, and the six-stanza format suggests a broad array of sexual possibilities. An anapest inserted in the middle of the opening line signals a departure from conventionality with its disruption of the iambic meter, as does the occasional appearance of other anapests. Additionally, the first line’s heptameter is an anomaly among octameters. Another statue poem muddles the workings of desire, but in this case the biological sex of the creation as well as the speaker becomes indecipherable as identity fluctuates, with the issue never resolved. “The White Statue,” which appeared in an 1896 edition of The Yellow Book in addition to Opals, features an art object that the speaker inordinately adores, addressing the statue as if a deity with devotional utterances resembling hymns. I love you, silent statue! for your sake My songs in prayer upreach Frail hands of flame-like speech That some mauve-silver twilight you may wake!

The final two lines of the quatrain expand the poem’s indeterminacy, for they can be assessed in quite different ways, neither of which seamlessly applies. Ostensibly, the third line refers to the statue’s hands, which would be frangible because of their unprotected extension from the marble figure. Yet “flame-like speech” does not seem a logical linkage to the static stone hands. The other reading associates the hands with the speaker, reaching upward and compressed in the typical posture of prayer. The “flame-like speech” would therefore refer to the hands metaphorically, as if revealing their somatic language and the fervent plea for the statue to awaken. In both readings, the fragile hands suggest physiologically that

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either, or both, the speaker and statue are female. An additional complication arises, however, for the speaker could be a male addressing a statue crafted as either a female form or as a male object configured in a homoerotic fashion. Accentuating the perplexity is the next line’s mention of “mauve-silver twilight,” which through the double adjective creates a blending and through the noun presents a liminal state, both of which descriptions impose another layer of occlusion. The second quatrain of the four-stanza abba poem adopts nature imagery to convey the magnitude of the speaker’s ardor. I love you more than swallows love the south, As sunflowers turn and turn Towards the sun, I yearn To press warm lips against your cold white mouth!

Gender complication ensues, however, through both animate images. Swallows, upon observation, seem androgynous. As Thomas Bewick asserted in his 1826 A History of British Birds, male and female swallows are covered in almost indistinguishable plumage, and they bustle about in a similar degree of activity.21 Thus, appearance offers no clues as to the sex of the birds, which provides a fitting analogue to the unclear gender identities in “The White Statue.” Moreover, an inserted anapest and trochees in the stanza depart from iambic consistency in pentameters and trimeters. The format underscores the difficulty of making definitive gender designations. Sunflowers obviously seek the illumination of the sun, traditionally designated as masculine, and perhaps offer a clue. The flora could signify a male speaker, self-identified as a sunflower, who is attracted (“I yearn”) to another male as a metaphoric sun, with the speaker’s “warm lips” attesting to erotic stimulation. The third stanza can also foster a homoerotic reading, with the quatrain hinting at sexual interest that the speaker had kept concealed. In revealing the secret, the speaker compares the attraction to the rising day, with the arrival of sunlight significantly described in the hue of passion. I love you more than scarlet skirted dawn, At sight of whose spread wings The great world wakes and sings; Forgetful of the long, vague dark withdrawn.

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The fact that the dawn broadly extends itself, revealing whatever it touches, implies that the speaker either admits to himself the same-sex attraction or no longer cares if his secret becomes known, in effect spreading his own figurative wings. The joyfulness attendant on the burgeoning day, as the “world wakes and sings,” could then be a mapping of the speaker’s relief that the homoeroticism is no longer concealed, whether to himself or to others. The final line augments the notion that secrecy has been discarded with the longstanding “dark withdrawn”; the “vague” quality of the darkness could refer either to the speaker’s previous repression of homoerotic interest or to the speaker’s relief that he no longer needs to hide these inclinations. “The White Statue” ends as it began, raising questions that the poem never answers. The final quatrain returns to liminality, and indistinct gender identity, with the arrival of dusk. I love you most at purple sunsetting: When night with feverish eyes Comes up the fading skies, I love you with a passion past forgetting.

The idea raised in the previous stanzas that the speaker is a homoerotic male becomes unsetttled in this quatrain, which insinuates instead that the speaker is female. The setting has importantly changed from the dawn with its rising sun to twilight as the sky dims. The night, with its feminine association because of lunar cycles, has now become the dominant image and the time when the speaker’s love reaches its apex. The “feverish eyes” would then delineate female rather than male ardor, with the emotion reinforced by the closing line’s “passion.” Undetermined, however, is whether the beloved is male or female.

Ambiguity Resolved? In contrast to the abstruseness of “Antinous” and “The White Statue,” the poem “A Madrigal” seems less problematically to fix desire, assuming a female speaker entranced by another woman. Nevertheless, the speaker’s identity is never confirmed. For conservative Victorians, same-sex ardor would not be presumed since it is enshrouded through an ungendered speaker likely assumed to be male. As Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner note, “Custance played the role of a Cavalier courtier-poet, devoted

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to a female lover, as a way of expressing socially unacceptable desires in an acceptably conventional form.”22 For a perspicacious reader of the 1895 Yellow Book edition containing “A Madrigal,” however, the woman-­ woman connection would be a likely supposition. Until the last of four stanzas, the speaker retains a state of passivity and attempts to repress an undeniable enthrallment. Elements of fear and dread infuse the speaker’s musings in the opening stanza as she refuses to acknowledge a passion that Victorian society would deem appalling. Ah! leave my soul like forest pool In shadow smiling unafraid— Let not thy laughter stir its cool Clear depths, sweet maid. Let not I pray thy sun-like hair Pierce to the thoughts that slumber there!

Multiple references to concealment reinforce the stanza’s fervent plea that the “sweet maid” not stir feelings that the speaker wishes to remain untapped. Thus, the speaker seeks that her desires stay obscured in shade, with hidden passion left unexcited, disturbing ideas kept dormant, and customary steadiness maintained unshaken. As in the subsequent stanzas, the speaker frames her reaction to the maid in terms of the soul, the inner core defining an individual, which she attempts to maintain in a static state but ultimately fails to do so. Upsetting her soul’s calm condition would represent a form of violence in that it would “pierce” her thoughts, with the predicate attesting to the force of the attraction the speaker wishes to resist. The stanza’s negations of activity—“leave” the soul alone, avoid its perturbation (“stir”), and withstand obtrusion (“let not”)—reinforce the reluctance to surrender. The second stanza buttresses the impression of passive opposition but raises the prospect that resistance will be unsuccessful and emotional pain will ensue. My soul is still as summer noon— Its inmost shrines are full of sleep, But when the stars of dream-land swoon ‘Twill wake and weep. The dawn of Love that brings thy blue Bright eyes, will bring a sorrow too!

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As in the previous stanza, placidity, concealment, and slumber are the soul’s identifying conditions. Yet even in such a dormant state, the soul is not immune to the incursion of unsettling dreams that can spur unwanted emotion to be admitted, along with its troubling implications. The sadness wrought through the speaker’s awakening to an overwhelming affection for the maid stems from the desired tranquility being jeopardized. The platitude that the eyes serve as indicators of the soul curiously suggests that the maid’s eyes function like a mirror, causing the speaker to recognize her own repressed inclinations. Nevertheless, the speaker still labors to resist the stirrings of desire, as the penultimate stanza illustrates. The denial of affection, refusal to submit, and need for passivity again dominate, for the soul remains mute. Yet the inert passion continues to pose a threat to the speaker’s emotional equilibrium. My soul is silent—trouble not Its secret reveries with thy songs! The rare red tint thy lips have got! The whole world longs To kiss them—therefore speak not, dear, My soul must struggle should it hear! ...

The speaker endeavors to dilute her interest in the maid by projecting the unwelcome attraction unto others as an ostensibly universal temptation but cannot wholly succeed. The failure is evidenced by the lingering description of the enticing lips and the overriding temptation to kiss them, along with the realization that any comments the maid utters would be nearly irresistible. The speaker’s battle against passion cannot be won, though, as the closing ellipsis ushers forth her profound embrasure of desire presented in the final stanza. I see thee! and my soul is swung In golden trances of delight! I hear thee! and my tremulous tongue Hurls forth a flight Of bird-like songs saluting thee. O! come and dwell and dream with me!

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The speaker’s positioning has evolved from the unassertive stance that had been sought to agential participation in the relationship with the maid. The eyes that had presaged sadness in the second stanza take on a different cast here in that the speaker now recognizes the nature of her feelings and revels in the ecstasy they bring. The attraction carries such intensity that her soul is compelled to switch from denial to acceptance (“my soul is swung”), as if the speaker no longer has any control over the force of passion. Sensations erupt, enabling the speaker to see and to hear the maid rather than remain blind and deaf to the once-obtrusive feelings. The speaker invokes an especially forceful predicate, “hurls,” to underscore the turn to agency, and the “tremulous” aspect of that utterance, with the adjective’s denotation of quivering, reveals a potent erotic response. Like the italicized wake accentuated earlier in the poem, the stressed come foregrounds the speaker’s emotional alteration, as well as insinuates sexual congress. Not only has the speaker accepted the formerly dismaying emotion, she intends that the pair build an intense bond with the insistent request for the maid to “dwell and dream” together. Despite the many indications of same-sex passion, the poem undoubtedly lends itself to an entirely different reading if viewed through the filter of a male speaker. The gender shift certainly accords with the poem’s erotically laced language that often typifies verses voiced by a male persona. A Victorian women writer might choose a male speaker to conform to and participate in the masculine tradition of love poetry, not simply to conceal passion for another woman. Mary C. Gillington, for example, produced a comprehensive sequence detailing a male lover’s pursuit of a female beloved that appeared monthly in Wilde’s Woman’s World (1889).23 If assessed from the stance of a conventional male speaker, “A Madrigal” recounts an individual reluctant to entangle himself in an overriding passion that would substantially alter his life. Alternatively, an existing engagement or a marriage could account for his resistance. An additional convincing scenario holds that the poem is tracing male-male attraction, wherein the speaker is drawn to a “maid” but seeks to avoid the transgressive step that the realization of such desire would entail. The poem’s title opens these widely varying hermeneutic channels, for the Renaissance verse form of a madrigal features multiple voices, which contributes to the indecipherability of desire that Custance’s piece unleashes. As a poetic structure, the madrigal of past eras was set in a musical milieu, and “A Madrigal” subtly makes that connection with its speaker producing “bird-­ like songs saluting” the eventual beloved.

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The poem’s ababcc structure suggests the speaker’s quandary, regardless of gender identities. The a and b lines of the first three stanzas tend to emphasize a sense of serenity when the maid is not agitating the speaker’s emotions, though the fourth line of the second stanza presages consternation. The closing couplets of these stanzas address the unsettling effect of the maid’s presence, while the final stanza shifts to joyful acceptance. Another Custance poem that initially appears to fix the identity of the characters is “The White Witch,” which was published in Rainbows. The poem title alone seems to convey relevant information, considering that a witch is generally assumed to be female, although the term could apply to a male. Composed of four couplets, the poem repeatedly adopts the feminine pronoun in its portrait of the witch, which reads like a compilation of body parts. The verse begins by scrutinizing the figure as a whole before moving particularly to the beloved’s hair, face, eyes, and lips. “Her body is a dancing joy, a delicate delight,” the poem begins, with the /d/ alliteration even mimicking the movement of an enthused dancer. Other stanzas focus on just one aspect of appearance, which highlights the concentration on each consequential feature that draws the speaker. For instance, “[h]er face is like the faces that a dreamer sometimes meets,” the speaker expounds, and “[h]er eyes are like clouds that spread white wings across blue skies.” In contrast, the poem lacks any references to the beloved’s intellect, emotions, personality, or any other internal trait. The beloved is simply like a statue, with the exterior features sufficient to acknowledge. Curiously, the description sounds far distanced from the presumed appearance of a witch, typically marked by hideous features that generate fear and revulsion. The discordance seen with the poem’s depiction implies that the beloved does not conform to usual expectations of the figure but instead refers to a bewitching woman, following a lengthy literary tradition of seductive women. Custance’s witch seems well versed in erotic activity, with the final couplet’s comments about “the smiling lips so many have desired” and the “[c]urled lips that love’s long kisses have left a little tired.” Because the notion of the bewitching woman is a common element of poetry written by men, the speaker sounds like a man attracted to an engaging yet dangerous woman; she is, after all, a “witch.” Yet the negative assessment becomes problematized since she is paradoxically termed a “white witch,” with the adjective that frequently designates purity strangely joined to the conventionally maligned and malignant figure. The beloved’s character thus becomes indecipherable, oscillating between positive and negative appraisals. Moreover, the white hue brings forth another paradox

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in that the decadent judgment of the color, as Jackson’s volume on the 1890s indicated, is an intricate one; although signifying innocence, the color also “gleamed through the most scarlet desires and most purple ideas of the decade.” Jackson’s assertion that “the average taste seemed to lead towards the sum-total and climax of all colours—white”24 further complicates the hue’s connotations, since the amalgamation of colors within whiteness indicates that the many emblematic associations of all the colors produces a wholly confusing and paradoxical blend. For instance, the supposed innocence of white thus joins the red of passion. Applied to Custance’s poem, the mixture upends a decisive determination of the witch’s personality. The hermeneutics of “The White Witch” become even murkier when considering that the speaker may not be a heterosexual male but instead a man enamored of another man. Indeed, Jackson observes that “Oscar Wilde refers often to white things,”25 which brings in another stratum of complexity, considering Wilde’s oeuvre and his homoerotic attractions. None of the descriptions in Custance’s poem obviate the homoerotic scenario, and one line could provide support in remarking upon “[a] face that Leonardo would have followed through the streets.” Although Leonardo is associated with the famous La Gioconda and other female portraits, he also was accused of sodomy and could have faced harsh punishment, though he was later absolved of the charge. In The Renaissance (1893), Pater includes a portrayal of the eminent artist that hints at bisexuality if not homosexuality. The poem additionally leaves open the possibility that the speaker is a female, utterly captivated by the charms of another woman. As in the male-male reading, the poem presents no obstacles to such an interpretation, nor does it exclude a variation on a homoerotic attraction. Biographical information again provides a helpful lens for interpreting the poem. Considering Custance’s proclivity for valuing male effeminacy, the poem’s speaker could even be a woman who is speaking as an adolescent or adult male and reflecting on the allure of a lovely male, possibly the beautiful boy figure that beguiled many during the fin de siècle. As Joseph Bristow observes, “the erotic valences attached to this figure vary among [writers], especially the degree to which the boy’s attractions lie in his male homoerotic, his lesbian, or his transmasculine qualities,” and “the boy can also … be modeled upon a female body.” Indeed, such gender equivocation is demonstrated in a Custance letter to Douglas noting “your sweet golden head … your small red mouth,” and “the most beautiful eyes

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a boy ever had, like two blue flowers under water.”26 On Douglas’ part, he asked Custance at one point, “Why can’t you dress as a boy and come with me?” Not surprisingly, Douglas remarked in his autobiography, “Whether I liked it or not, I did for years attract persons of both sexes with a very powerful attraction.”27 Ultimately, the reader of “The White Witch” knows no more about the character or the admirer than before even perusing the poem. With all of the conflicting and overlapping information presented in this verse, any conclusive interpretation is doomed to fail. Although problematizing the identity of the speaker, “Autumn Night” seems to establish the addressee as female, apparently limiting the options to either a female-female or a male-female bond, but instead the verse seems to proceed from one scenario to the other. Composed of five abab stanzas, the poem begins with two quatrains depicting the evening before moving within a residence and focusing on the woman lounging there. The initial pair of quatrains presents lunar imagery, which seemingly situates the poem within a female-female register. Against the earth’s hot brow the night has pressed   Cool dusky lips to kiss her care away; The moon a bow of silver in the west   Holds all the brooding dragon-clouds at bay: A luminous mist is drawn across the park,   The trees, with leaves new-fallen about their roots, Loom strange and sullen in the shimmering dark,   The hedges glimmer vaguely with wild fruits.

The first quatrain enhances the erotic tone with a second feminine image. Like the moon, the earth has traditionally been connected to the female body as opposed to the presumed intellectual male. The poem’s moon wards off the dragonish clouds, as if guarding against any hostile forces that would vilify or disrupt female bonding. In the second quatrain, the overhanging mist acts like a shroud concealing erotic activity. Like the duskiness of the first stanza, the widespread mist augurs a liminal state that implies female-female sexual interest. The adjectives “luminous” and “shimmering,” along with the predicate “glimmer,” remind of Jackson’s Eighteen Nineties discussion of whiteness, often signified by “silver” and “moonlight,” that so intrigued the decadents with the hue’s mysteriousness.28 The phrases that include the former three words appear oxymoronic—the “luminous mist,” “shimmering dark,” and “glimmer

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vaguely”—since these states seem in their improbability to undermine customary ways of thinking. Thus, these decadent emblems of whiteness bring another apparent violation of expectations in presaging the infatuation that the female speaker will experience. The trees mentioned in the quatrain exude power, especially since they “loom,” and suggest intimidating cultural inhibitions on the “sexual inversion” that the scientific literature of the fin de siècle found so troubling. Yet the arboreal strength has weakened with the loss of leaves, and the adjectival phrase “strange and sullen” connotes an unaccustomed state of defeat in the lunar ambience. The expectation that the poem will continue to explore female-female desire unravels, however, as the setting moves to the interior of a residence, where a rather aloof woman rests near the fireside. The change in locale as well as the fluidity of desire is evidenced since the speaker of the third stanza could readily be male. In that case, the first line draws a marked distinction between the outside environment, with its strong indications of same-sex ardor, to a heterosexual register wherein the speaker adopts the tone of a desiring male, albeit pointing to the irksome appearance and behavior of a self-absorbed woman. But far more fair than any world without,   This golden room fire-glinted glooms and glows, Where, silken robed, you sit with pensive pout,   And pluck forth scentful petals from a rose!

Regardless of the speaker’s gender identity, stirrings of passion emerge in the second line with the reference to the fire, but its varying illumination reflects the speaker’s conflicted response; the line details the fluctuations of the flames with the moments of brightness (“golden,” “fire-glinted”) that alternate with dimness (“glooms and glows”). The aural pattern reflects the inconsistency of the speaker’s reaction, for the alliteration provided by the hard /g/ sounds is broken up with inserted words. The apparent garb of a dressing gown insinuates an erotic scene, which is amplified in the final line as the desired woman somewhat aggressively removes the protective covering of the rose, a longstanding literary emblem of female sexuality that in the quatrain implies the lack of inhibitions. The alliteration switches to /p/ in the final pair of lines and mimics the sound of her lips protruding for a kiss. The “pensive pout” additionally suggests an annoyance that the speaker has not yet responded behaviorally to her attractions.

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Although the biological sex of the speaker remains uncertain, the penultimate quatrain seems to solidify the assumption that the addressee is a woman through the description of the hair, which analogously reveals both her libidinous and devious predilections. You, with your languid face and lily hands,   And loosened hair low tumbled in your neck— Where, freed from ruffled coil rust-coloured strands   Cunningly curled, your skin’s fine fairness fleck!

Released from the constraints of an upward sweeping coiffure with the elaborate curling that women favored during the era, the hair continues its liberatory movement as it collects around the neck. She likely released her “cunningly” arranged tresses to extend a sexual invitation somatically while deflecting culturally unseemly agency since she is merely sitting rather than actively approaching the speaker. Contributing to the erotic ambience is the “languid face,” which not only evokes the decadent traits of ennui and eroticism, but also a deceptively passive readiness for amorous activity. The color of the hands reminds of the decadents’ fascination with whiteness as a compilation of all colors, including the redness of passion, and thereby adds to the sexual aura. Moreover, the reference to the lily creates an ironic twist in that the flower was conventionally associated with female purity. Despite the array of clues that the addressee is female, the descriptions do not exclude a male. Certainly the bored countenance, pale hands, and unblemished skin could apply to a male as well as a female, while the sensuous depiction of the hair could refer to its release when a man removes his hat. The “cunningly curled” hair need not necessarily indicate shrewd artifice but instead the adverb can denote an appealing trait, in this case an inherent waviness. The speaker’s comment would explain both the interest in and resentment of the allure. The sexual tone of the previous stanza, with its references to the robe, pout, and rose, could apply equally to a homoerotic situation, as could the fluctuating fire. Muddling the relationship even further is the possibility that the speaker is indeed a female but is drawn to an effeminate male in an uncustomary variation of same-­ sex desire. Other situations also arise and confound meaning. The poem could be a commentary on bisexuality by charting within itself the movement from one gender identity to another, beginning with a female speaker and

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proceeding to a male voice; additionally, the poem could be switching from a female to a male addressee. The interpretations gain credence when contemplating Custance’s own bisexuality as well as Douglas’ assertion in his autobiography, “I believe that almost everyone is more or less bi-sexual.”29 The final stanza offers no resolution of the personas’ identities but continues to include multiple allusions to sexuality through the prominent rose. How pale your cheek beside that pink rose pressed   Pettishly where your own blood roses sleep— So faintly flushed your lips curl back caressed   By tongues of orange light that towards you leap. …

The eroticism of the flower is enhanced by its physical location, now placed against the face rather than simply being held, where it mirrors the hue of a blush that conventionally reveals desire. The /p/ alliteration of the stanza’s beginning again suggests the lips’ motion in a kiss, and the /f/ alliteration of the third line requires aspiration in pronunciation that imitates the heaving breaths of a captivated observer. The backward curling of the lips resembles a posture of passion as the face leans back in expectation of a responding kiss. The reflection from the fire, the “tongues of orange,” reinforces the sensual component but extends it in that the flames are not simply contained within the grate but seem to reach out and stimulate the addressee with their caresses. The closing ellipsis presages the consummation of the pair’s desire.30 Additional Custance poems also initially seem fairly definitive as to gender identities, tracing either a heterosexual or a same-sex pairing, but not both. When considering that Custance participated in a relationship with Natalie Barney and later wed Douglas, an exclusive concentration on merely one manifestation of desire would not be unlikely since these erotic pursuits did not occur simultaneously. Nonetheless, fissures in certitude are not wholly obviated. Instead, the poems can support multiple readings that confound firm judgments and expand the identities of the subjects and the objects of desire. From a traditional stance, “A Sleep Song” is weighted toward a heterosexual relationship in its five abba stanzas, with a female speaker and a male beloved. The opening line provides a clue to the speaker’s biological sex, for the branch of an apple tree “embroideries” the ground where the pair

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have settled, a verb that evokes the familiarity of needlework typifying a female avocation in the Victorian era. Moreover, the predicate resonates with the Sapphic fragment of “earth embroidered with flowers,” which reminds of the customary female connection to earth and flowers.31 “A Sleep Song” subsequently reports that the beloved has “short crisp curls,” which match a Victorian male rather than a woman commonly sporting lengthy locks. The speaker wishes to comfort her grieving beloved, inviting him to recline with his pale face resting upon her legs. Despite the sad thoughts plaguing the male, sensuality underlies the poem. In the first stanza, for example, the pair relax under a sheltering tree upon “lush grass,” and in the second quatrain “sun-flames fold” around them as the speaker remarks that the beloved’s hair “seem[ed] carved of shining gold.”32 The speaker is subsequently struck as well by “curved lids, fringed with lashes thick and long”—a phrase Custance said directly to Douglas, according to his autobiography33—as she watches him in the heated air. Ultimately, she encourages the beloved, her “dear heart,” to nap and escape his sense of loss as they relax on the “sun-drowsed earth … [s]o languorous sweet.” Despite the poem’s heterosexual valences, the alternative exists that the speaker is a male addressing another male, or a female speaking to an effeminate male, with the addressee’s womanly eyelashes being an enticement. Nothing in the poem undermines either reading. “Love’s Firstfruits” provides another apparent example of a heterosexual bond, with a female speaker who recounts her progression from merely a vague conception of love to her acceptance of a persistent male. The poem features a Sapphic epigraph about gatherers unable to reach an apple on a branch, an obvious metaphor for an innocent girl whom an admirer cannot attain, even though the male eventually does so in Custance’s verse. The speaker begins her tale with the admission that “I bring to thee the fruitage of first love! / The flower but faintly touched with passion’s pink.” Although the flower remained “untended,” its growth continued innocently as did a yearning for love. Each petal pure as sun-soft summer air Pressed forward to the perfect Fane of Love That fronted it. For Love was king and light— The only king that fair faint blossom knew!

The speaker continues to compare herself to a flower, which eventually drops and leaves a fruit in its place. Portrayed with a vague hint of sexual

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maturation, the fruit was “[h]ung warm and sweet, flushed crimson from the sun / Of girlhood’s Summer.” As the season changed, “a Gatherer strong and bold” unsuccessfully reached for the fruit before deciding to shake the tree “until at last / Loosed from its hold Love’s firstfruit dropped to him.” It is unclear if the Gatherer has won the speaker for marriage or has deflowered her without the legal tie, since the speaker has an ambivalent response, initiated by an ellipsis appearing after the fruit has fallen. “So my heart’s harvest has been yielded up,” she relates, “[a] rapturous, speechless sacrifice to thee!” Whether her virginity has been ended in marriage or not, the act itself brings both ecstasy (“rapturous”) and trepidation, as the odd choice of “sacrifice” reveals. The loss of virginity is allied with an element of violence through that noun choice. Additionally, “sacrifice” hints that the woman has lost her sense of self, for her submission occurs with the deprivation of language and agency. Moreover, ambiguity exists as to whether the surrender of self brings happiness or uneasiness. Although the identity of the poem’s two characters may seem unequivocal as female speaker and male addressee, “Love’s Firstfruits” nevertheless could also be read as a woman recounting her relationship with a female who has assumed a masculine role, or the poem could be a man’s recollection of a homoerotic union.

Secretive Passion Unlike “A Sleep Song” and “Love’s Firstfruits,” “Glamour of Gold” at first glance seems a forthright articulation of same-sex rather than heterosexual desire. Gazing while an attendant combs the hair of a lovely woman, the speaker is logically assumed to be a female admirer since a male suitor would not have direct access to the sight in a quotidian setting. In the poem’s first pair of four ababcbc stanzas, the speaker concentrates obsessively, almost fetishistically, on the appearance of the hair. The white hands of my lady’s maid Move deftly through the shining hair! How my heart falters half afraid Lest they should hurt a thing so fair   As my sweet lady’s head! And how I wish that I stood there   Twisting the strands instead!

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Fortunate fingers those, that hold The handles of the steels that fret And dent each heavy tress of gold… Till all the golden mass is set   With waves bewildering, Where fire and dusk together met   Rival day’s sunsetting!

As in other Custance poems discussed, hair becomes a prominent image and serves as a marker of sexuality here with its shine, abundance, and weight. The sensuality of the hair is unmistakable, as if an entity itself. It becomes the center of passion, almost like a femme fatale with its “bewildering” undulations. Reinforcing a reading of same-sex desire is the liminal state announced by the suggestion of twilight. In these stanzas, the speaker is projecting the potency of an erotic gaze onto an enticing feature, rather than on the body as a whole, which raises the fetishistic connection. In the third stanza, the gaze expands to encompass the woman’s face and proceeds to move down the entirety of her body, which heightens the libidinous component. Or so at least it seems to me While gazing on my lady’s face! And when with leaping heart I see Her soft shy breathing ‘neath the lace   That falls even to her feet … The curves of her slim body trace—   See her supremely sweet—

So formidable is the gaze that it becomes invasive in another sense, for it travels through the lacy veiling of clothing and reveals the contours of the woman’s body. The final line of the stanza is marked by /s/ alliteration, which mimics the sensuous examination through the silkiness of its pronunciation. The poem’s closing stanza reveals the forcefulness of the speaker’s desire, which taps a primal state beyond language, for the emotion generated is “[t]oo passionate for words of praise.” Rather than revealing the emotion to the beloved, the speaker admits only to “one prayer, to abide / Safely at her side always!” Again /s/ alliteration conveys sensuality, echoing an instance of it in the stanza when the speaker comments that

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“love swoons too satisfied” and emerging later in the stanza when the maid, “staid and silent,” continues her ministrations to the beloved’s hair. The final lines mimic the suspended moments before sexual consummation when the maid “still delays” in completing the dressing of the hair. A concluding ellipsis buttresses the connection in hinting that the attainment of complete satisfaction will be deferred indefinitely or remain forever unrealized. All that the speaker can achieve, the poem indicates, is a physical proximity to the beloved in the neutral position of a companion that cannot progress further in the Victorian climate. Although “Glamour of Gold” seems a convincing expression of woman-­ woman desire, uncertainty nevertheless exists. A conservative Victorian likely would assume that the speaker is a male, and textual evidence does support such an impression. In one scenario, for example, the speaker could be a male voyeur peering unobtrusively into a private room. Whether charting same-sex or heterosexual desire, any of the interpretations could apply since the speaker’s identity remains untold. Still, the poem provides a particularly effective means of expressing woman-woman desire. “A Pause” also insinuates that same-sex desire cannot be openly revealed. The five-stanza poem, formed by four quatrains and a six-line closing stanza, leans toward a woman-woman reading; like “Glamour of Gold,” “A Pause” features a speaker apparently so constrained by cultural norms that the passion must remain opaque, even to its object. As “A Pause” commences, the speaker appears aware that her desire cannot succeed against the pressures brought to bear upon same-sex relationships. O! do you hear the rain Beat on the glass in vain? So my tears beat against fate’s feet In vain … in vain … in vain …

The impossibility of acknowledging culturally scorned affection is conveyed insistently through the repetition of “vain” and the accompanying ellipses. The line forms a painful lament as if the speaker must incessantly counsel herself that realization of her desire cannot occur. The rain, like other natural elements in the poem, functions as an image that reflects the speaker’s ongoing pain from silence. Through the adoption of such imagery, the poem situates same-sex love as a natural occurrence as well. An analogy between the celestial hue and the beloved’s eyes points to the naturalness of same-sex desire, as does the wind with its iterated sighs.

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O! do you see the skies As gray as your grave eyes? O! do you hear the wind, my dear, That sighs and sighs and sighs …

Moreover, the repetition of “sighs” hints that the desire cannot be spoken, and the lack of internal ellipses in the line signals the unrelenting distress plaguing the speaker as if a painful mantra. The next quatrain charts the strain caused by the concealment of desire deemed unseemly in the Victorian milieu. … Tired as this twilight seems My soul droops sad with dreams … You cannot know where we two go In dreams … in dreams … In dreams.

The introductory ellipsis draws a thematic connection to the closing ellipsis of the previous stanza and imparts that the concealment of same-­sex desire, represented by “this twilight,” brings exhaustion. Only through imagination, the multiple iterations of “dreams,” can the speaker admit the attraction, and the beloved must be left unaware of its presence. As in the first stanza, the repetition and the ellipses in the final line provide a litany reminding that merely in imagination can the speaker attain satisfaction. As the second line of the third stanza notes, however, dreams are far too inadequate for the expression of affection. The speaker realizes that the beloved does not share the romantic feelings and seemingly rejects same-sex desire. You only watch the light, Sinking away from night… In silver mail all shadowy pale, The moon shines white, so white…

The beloved’s desire rests with men, the stanza reveals through the masculine sunlight. The sun’s illumination exclusively captures the beloved’s interest, and she ignores the emergence of the night with its feminized moonlight. The description of the moon bolsters the notion that same-sex desire remains obscured in the cultural framework, with the “shadowy pale” demeanor attesting to the orb’s occlusion. In stressing the moon’s

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light, however, the speaker privileges the lunar presence over the solar one; illumination from the moon presides over the scene in contrast to the diminishing sunlight. As the poem moves toward closure, the speaker wishes that the beloved would shift her amorous attention from male to female, specifically to herself. …O! if we two were wise Your eyes would leave the skies And look into my eyes! And I who wistful stand,… One foot in fairy land, Would catch Love by the hand….

The reorientation of the beloved’s eyes to the speaker’s eyes configures the gaze as a telling sign of transformed ardor. The situations of the speaker and beloved would reverse, with the speaker becoming the object of an eroticized gaze rather than simply generating it. The eye-to-eye contact would represent the beloved’s recognition, acceptance, and return of the gaze and a movement away from heterosexual positioning. The change would relocate the speaker’s desire from the realm of the imagination (“fairy land”) to the reciprocation of desire. As in “Glamour of Gold,” a final ellipsis suggests that the erotic juncture of the two characters could not be openly admitted. The title of “A Pause” seems to be advising the reader to reassess societal conceptions of heterosexual normality and consider other permutations of sexual interest. The greater length of the closing stanza gives emphasis to that notion. The abundance of ellipses in “A Pause” is startling, with every stanza featuring at least one set. The third quatrain includes four ellipses, which suggest that the sentiments they obscure are so unspeakable that they must be almost entirely occluded, a point reinforced by the stanza’s repeated references to dreams with their inherent vagueness. The ellipses rhetorically elaborate on the poem’s titular pause, interrupting lines that could otherwise seem unsettlingly revelatory to a sheltered readership. Despite the strong implication that “A Pause” involves women, the poem could also be chronicling a heterosexual or a male homoerotic experience. Considering a heterosexual register, the verse could be spoken either by a male to a woman or by a woman to a man, with only a reinterpretation of the twilight and the moon necessary. In the first case, the

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liminal twilight could refer to a state in which the male’s imagined relationship is held in suspension, with its actuality attainable only in dreams. The white moon could then designate the woman’s determination to maintain her virginity. In the second case, the moonlight could indicate the female speaker’s desire and the male addressee’s lack of interest in responding to it. Even more complicated, a man could be speaking to a bisexual woman, wherein the twilight and moonlight could be referencing the addressee’s perceived interest in another female. Additionally, a homoerotic reading of a male-male situation could apply; as in the female-female relationship, the twilight and moonlight would indicate a reluctance by the addressee to reciprocate the romantic interest. As all of the preceding poems have shown, desire is manifested in multiple forms that suggest its fluidity rather than fixity in terms of sexual identity and attraction; in effect, these Custance verses establish an expansive range of desire. The poems contend that no interpretation can be solidified; instead, even supposed oppositions of heterosexuality and homosexuality can dissolve and become reconfigured in dramatically different combinations. Implicitly, the poems are arguing that nontraditional expressions of sexuality cannot be denied or ignored. Rather, Custance calls for imagining and accepting a spectrum of behavioral practices.

Varied Strategies Couching same-sex desire in the form of dreams provides a tenable approach for Amy Levy, as evident in two offerings from A London Plane-­ Tree and Other Verse. As the title of “Borderland” portends, the persona cannot clearly ascertain, “Am I waking, am I sleeping?” This indeterminacy initiates the fourteen-line verse, and the state of consciousness is never wholly resolved. The erratic rhyme scheme echoes the fluctuation between sleep and wakefulness of the speaker’s unstable level of consciousness. Vocabulary intimating that indecipherability pervades the poem and underscores the unbroken liminality. “[T]he faint dawn” shrouds a bird, “an unseen presence hovering” in “dusky air.” The bird provides an analogue for a female lover (“It is she”) that captivates the speaker and contributes to the opaqueness of the poem. Thus, the bird moves “[d]rowsy-slow” through a rather oxymoronic “summer-gloom” whereby the abundant light associated with the season is instead clouded. Enveloped in a “dream-rapture,” the speaker falls “[h]alf in a swoon” as she recognizes the lover disguised as the bird. Eroticism becomes more evidently

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drawn as the speaker recalls that “I spread my arms in slow delight” in her torpor, with the protracted movement fitting the languid tone of the poem. A dash following this line acts like an ellipsis in suggesting a continuation of action that is kept hidden from the reader, hinting at the erotic encounter. Thereafter, the speaker pleads, with insistent repetition, “O prolong, prolong the night” to enable the sensual experience to endure. With its opacity, the poem can conceal from a conservative Victorian that it is chronicling a same-sex interaction. To such a reader, the speaker could easily be male. The vague tone of the poem furthers that impression with the unrelenting indeterminacy precluding the gender identification of the speaker, especially since the claim of the bird’s identity occurs in a dream. Similarly, Levy’s “In the Night” presents a speaker whose gender identity is unidentified as in “Borderland,” although a discerning reader likely would recognize that a woman’s voice presents the story. Again, the speaker cannot determine if she is awake or asleep, but in this case she repeatedly insists that a supposed dream is actually reality. Being proven otherwise would be the height of emotional assault and inflicted pain, as the first of three quatrains asseverates. Cruel? I think there never was a cheating   More cruel, thro’ all the weary days than this! This is no dream, my heart kept on repeating,   But sober certainty of waking bliss.

In the second quatrain, the speaker continues her claim that the experience cannot possibly be a mere dream. She itemizes the characteristics of a dream as she counters the supposition that she is actually asleep. “Dreams? O, I know their faces—goodly seeming, / Vaporous, whirled on many-coloured wings.” Her tone brooks no disagreement: “I have had dreams before,” she says, and “this is no dreaming.” Rather, she believes that daylight has arrived, though the closing quatrain unsettles her surety. As in “Borderland,” the beloved is ultimately identified with female pronouns. A confused speaker searches for the reason that “my love … is paling.” The lover becomes difficult to discern as her face becomes increasingly imperceptible. Like sight, touch fails to make a connection with the lover as she seemingly drifts further away. “I cannot clasp her,” the speaker laments, but can only “stretch out unavailing.” An attempt to hold the

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lover fails as the persona reaches “across the silence and the shade,” with the latter noun subtly indicating that the lover is no more than a ghost. The formal aspects of “In the Night” accentuate the content, with the rhyme scheme suggesting the workings of sleep; the abab lines intimate a consistent oscillation between inhalation and exhalation. Nonetheless, the peacefulness of sleep is unsettled by the psychological discord that plagues the speaker. The disruptions to repose are conveyed through a smattering of trochees. A Michael Field selection from Long Ago (1889), verse XIV with the Greek epigraph referring to “my darling,” presents an undoubtedly female speaker since the volume stems from Sapphic writings. Like other poets, Field’s exploration of sexuality provides the New Woman connection. The iambic cadence of the three-stanza abcbca poem itself suggests a classic affiliation. The speaker is beset with uneasiness as she fears that her beloved Atthis will be separated from her. The diction is dominated by references to division and union, with the opening stanza underscoring anxiety with its focus on departure. The speaker shudders at the notion that Atthis has died, though she merely “did’st stray / A few feet to the rushy bed.” So quiet is the setting that in another reference to separation, the speaker wonders “if a soul were drawn away.” In the second stanza, the speaker sees Atthis from a distance as she “pluck[s]” irises, in a sexually redolent predicate, to give the speaker. Nature imagery, which in several other Field poems suggests eroticism,34 defines the stanza as Atthis bounds through an array of flowers. The final two lines of the stanza juxtapose the two states of being apart and together. When presented with the flowers, the speaker “[a]way, away, the flowers I flung / And thee down to my breast I drew.” The closing stanza repeats the appellation of the poem’s opening line, but in this case “My darling” is followed by an emphatic exclamation point, as if the speaker is so unnerved by the possibility that Atthis will leave that she lays claim to the beloved with great vigor. Insisting that the pair will not be severed, the speaker uses references to conditions that seemingly brook no division. “Nay, our very breath / Nor light nor darkness, shall divide.” Reinforcing the unity, the poem indicates that “Queen Dawn shall find us on one bed.” So nervous that Atthis will die, the speaker says that the beloved cannot move away for even a moment. “Nor must thou flutter from my side / An instant,” the speaker beseeches. As the speaker’s anxious commentary makes abundantly clear throughout the poem, her love for Atthis is so intense that any hint of loss cannot be borne.

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Sea of Desire Several contemporary poets focus on articulating the forcefulness of desire, adopting the metaphor of the sea as the mode of elucidation. In a culture in which the open declaration of female sexuality was considered outrageous, couching its expression in nature imagery would provide a safe solution. In these poems, the sea’s movement, potency, and irrepressibility serve as apt substitutes to deal with the ineffability of desire. One striking example of the approach comes in Alice Meynell’s “The Visiting Sea,” which appeared in her Preludes collection (1875). Although the verse was published earlier than the emergence of New Woman writing in the next decade, it anticipates the strategic maneuvers of other women poets grappling with the problem of imparting the strength of desire. Meynell was deemed “the incarnation of housewifery,” as Talia Schaffer comments,35 but the phrase signals more of a performative gesture than an accurate description; rather, Meynell cared greatly about the state of women in her society36 and revealed a pronounced interest in nature. In the latter context, “The Visiting Sea” provides a prime example of Victorian ecofeminism, for it charts the nature/human bond in a highly effective manner.37 Even though the ecofeminist component overshadows an erotic reading, the poem nevertheless provides a compelling illustration of veiled sexuality. Composed of four stanzas, the aabba verse describes the influx of the sea onto land, where it relentlessly fills every space it encounters, both physically and figuratively, in the poem’s opening lines. As the inhastening tide doth roll, Home from the deep, along the whole   Wide shining strand, and floods the caves,   —Your love comes filling with happy waves The open sea-shore of my soul.

Energy and ineluctability ensue from the initial adjective, paralleling the unwavering intensity of desire, which is accentuated in the second line by the reference to depth. The strand functions as a reclined female figure entirely overtaken by the sea, and the caves that the water enters create an obvious libidinous linkage. The stanza suggests the sexual act with the infusion of the tide, imparting the speaker’s desire through the opening of

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her inner core (“my soul”). The sheer power of the emotion emerges in the second stanza, in which the expansive waves leave no space untouched as they encroach upon the land. So expansive is the sea that the speaker notes “the places” that are “[b]rimmed at your coming, out of sight,” as the “tide constrains in dim embraces.” Reflecting the inadvisability of a Victorian woman admitting desire, the speaker keeps her feelings secret, even from the sea. The nexus between the speaker and the tide proceeds in the penultimate stanza, as “the happy shore” is “wave-rimmed.” Secrecy is maintained, however, as additional water images come into play. Thus, the sea “know[s] not of the quiet dimmed / Rivers your coming floods and fills,” while the speaker’s “silent rivulets” are themselves “over-brimmed.” In the closing stanza, the speaker admits her reticence to the “visiting Sea,” capitalized to express the personification it entails, but she also acknowledges the tide’s force. What! I have secrets from you? Yes. But, visiting Sea, your love doth press   And reach in further than you know,   And fills all these; and, when you go, There’s loneliness in loneliness.

As in earlier stanzas, emphasis is placed on the sea’s relentless infiltration that pervades the speaker entirely. Like a solitary lover, the speaker responds dispiritingly when the sea departs. Dollie Radford’s “In Yonder Bay,” published in A Light Load (1891), employs sea imagery primarily to lament unsatisfied desire. Composed of four tercets, the poem is divided into two segments, with the first one describing the action of the sea and the second one drawing an analogy to the speaker’s plight. The opening pair of stanzas chronicles the sea’s experience of satiated desire and the wish for repetition of the experience. In yonder bay the waves find rest, They die along the great shore’s breast   With one low sound Of longing for the fuller breeze Which rode across the trackless seas,   And swept them round.

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The first tercet discloses the speaker’s perception of sexual consummation; with desire fulfilled, the waves gain relief, and the underlying force generating the erotic interlude ceases in la petite mort. As in “The Visiting Sea,” the shore represents a female body, and upon it the depleted lover relaxes. The waves’ “low sound” replicates the utterance of a satisfied partner as well as a yearning for the episode to be repeated. The enjambed final line, followed by a literal gap, insinuates the frustration that the wait creates. The “fuller breeze” of the second stanza suggests the force of desire, with the adjective implying a sense of urgency reaching its apex. The breeze agitates and propels the waves, overwhelming them to such an extent that they are “swept” away. The second segment of the poem reinforces the comparable experiences of the waves and the speaker, with the third stanza repeating verbiage in the first tercet. Ah love, if I might find their rest, Might end my wanderings on thy breast,      I should not sigh For fuller life, so I might stay My heart’s throb on thy heart some day,      Before I die.

These final stanzas raise an interesting scenario for the speaker, presumably a woman. That assumption stems from the similar expression of desire in another poem from A Light Load, titled “Song,” and a brief examination of the verse provides an illuminating perspective on “In Yonder Bay.” The speaker’s passion in “Song” expands in the progression of three abab stanzas charting the intensity of the emotions occurring at dawn, midday, and night. The middle quatrain is relevant here in that it turns to sea imagery with an erotic component. When the sun shone on the sand there,   And the roses bloomed above, And the blue waves kissed the land there,   How I longed to see my love.

The scenario differs from “In Yonder Bay,” with the masculine sun above the sand, which is again a metaphorical female body. The sun’s light causes the roses, a common image of female sexuality, to flower. The waves

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underscore the eroticism as they “kissed the land” being covered. In the poem’s final line, the speaker makes abundantly clear that she is revealing desire, for she comments that “I want him so.” Although “In Yonder Bay” presents a transgressive female speaker, a contemporary reader likely would surmise that the voice is male. Such an assumption would preclude an outcry, and the speaker’s biological sex remains unidentified. Nonetheless, the speaker adopts a male role in seeking the satisfaction of desire, projecting agency while she contemplates resting on the beloved’s chest as did the waves. Unlike the sea, however, the speaker envisions the sexual act not as la petite mort but as the prelude to an actual death. Nor does she crave a repetition of the erotic event as did the waves. Instead, she seeks ultimately to satisfy her desire, the “heart’s throb,” in resting on her beloved before she encounters her own demise. For Mary C. Gillington, like Custance, the investigation of sexuality accords her a place among New Women. In “The Tryst of the Night,” included in Poems (1892) coauthored with her sister Alice, the sea effusively delineates the power of desire. That strength is hinted in the poem’s first line through the forceful /d/ alliteration of dusk, dark, and day, with the three words joining disparate states, as does the verse’s connections between different manifestations of desire. On one level, the four-stanza abab poem provides an amorphous celebration of desire without designating whether it applies to a heterosexual or same-sex union—or even, as Hughes proposes, “a palpitating autoerotic experience.”38 An especially interesting reading, however, considers “The Tryst of the Night” as a chronicle of unreserved same-sex desire. The poem’s title alone intimates that the verse will examine such a relationship, with “tryst” clearly identifying an encounter between lovers and “night” creating a woman-woman context, as in verses explored earlier. At the poem’s opening, a twilight state initiates the presentation of female desire, reminding of Custance’s deployment of the liminal condition to achieve the same objective. Out of the uttermost ridge of dusk, where the dark and the day are mingled,   The voice of the Night rose cold and calm—it called through the shadowswept air; Through all the valleys and lone hillsides, it pierced, it thrilled, it tingled—   It summoned me forth to the wild seashore, to meet with its mystery there.

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The first line situates the setting not only in twilight but at its most extreme point—its furthest edge before night appears—in positioning same-sex bonds far from Victorian society’s perceived norm of heterosexuality. Indeed, the contrasting darkness and daylight point to the contemporary reader’s unfamiliarity with a same-sex couple; the dark indicates the occlusive nature of female-female pairings during the era as opposed to commonplace heterosexual unions that are fully visible and comprehensible. Yet the blending of dark and light advises that both types of desire are acceptable in that neither is privileged with the merge. The onset of night brings same-sex desire to the foreground and reveals that it is not a unique occurrence in that its voice extends broadly across the poetic terrain. The predicate choices of piercing, thrilling, and tingling highlight the sexual component and call the speaker to the seashore. Thus, the shore performs the same role as seen in the Meynell and Radford sea poems by announcing a sexual situation. Gillington’s speaker apparently has never desired another woman but will now learn of the “mystery,” which is detailed as the poem continues. The second stanza focuses on the night’s stunning force and energy in representing female-female desire. Out of the deep ineffable blue, with palpitant swift repeating   Of gleam and glitter and opaline glow, that broke in ripples of light— In burning glory it came and went,—I heard, I saw it beating,   Pulse by pulse, from star to star—the passionate heart of the Night!

The description reads like a sexual act in progress, with a sequence of iterated pleasures. The stanza carries a breathless tone as the lines seem to follow one another rapidly in articulating the passionate moments. The second line with its multiple indications of startling illumination—gleaming, glittering, glowing—discloses the extraordinary magnitude of the event, almost blinding in its intensity as it produces “ripples of light.” The next line traces the act to its completion, but the encounter is so acute that it remains firmly in memory as the stanza concludes. The quatrain’s rhythmic pulsation creates a crescendo that reaches its height with the final line’s reference to passion. The penultimate stanza relives the experience in detailing the surprising succession of events that led to the sexual consummation, but the recollection is not wholly pleasurable.

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Out of the thud of the rustling sea—the panting, yearning, throbbing   Waves that stole on the startled shore, with coo and mutter of spray— The wail of the Night came fitful-faint—I heard her stifled sobbing;   The cold salt drops fell slowly, slowly, grey into gulfs of grey.

The first line characterizes the moments leading to the act itself with the three verb forms depicting the physiological response emanating from desire. As in the previous stanza, participial predicates capture the sense of immediacy and breadth that swept the speaker into action. The subsequent reference to “the startled shore” imparts that the speaker had not expected to be sexually approached, but the “coo,” with its denotation of affectionate and amorous remarks, suggests how she was drawn to her partner. After the overpowering incident has passed, however, the speaker feels regret and sadness as she realizes the immensity of the act just concluded; the weeping Night metaphorically characterizes the speaker’s reaction, as if she is reflecting upon herself as acting so transgressively that she had become a different person whom she is now observing. The alliteration with “fitful-faint” and “stifled sobbing” simulates the sound of weeping with its abrupt inhalations and exhalations of breath. Rather than the dazzling illumination accompanying the passion that commenced in the second stanza, the atmosphere at this moment appears gloomy and engulfing. Yet the final stanza begins with an overwhelming epiphanic moment as the speaker accepts and rejoices in the erotic encounter. There through the darkness the great world reeled, and the great tides roared, assembling—   Murmuring hidden things that are past, and secret things that shall be; There at the limits of life we met, and touched with a rapturous trembling—   One with each other, I and the Night, and the skies, and the stars, and sea.

The opening line signals the occurrence of a life-altering experience, with the speaker’s newfound appraisal of desire overturning her impression of self so overwhelmingly that it merits the analogy to the earth itself moving unexpectedly. The power of desire emblematized by the sea, with the thundering sound of gathering waves, both memorializes the sexual encounter and presages its reiteration. Reminding that the dramatic change in the speaker’s conception of erotic attraction stemmed from a

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same-sex encounter, another reference to liminality appears (“limits of life”) as well as the startling pleasure the coupling brings (“rapturous trembling”). The poem’s closing line erases any doubt that the speaker’s partner in the intense bonding (“one with each other”) is another woman (“I and the Night”). The final reference to the sea and the celestial entities situates the attraction as a natural occurrence, and the smooth consonants underscore the peace that ensues. Gillington interrogates the workings of desire in two other verses deploying sea imagery. An untitled eight-line piece appearing in Mrs. William (Elizabeth) Sharp’s anthology, Sea-Music (1887), again suggests same-sex ardor. Contextualized in the liminal state of sunset, the brief poem uses seaweed as a manifestation of a female body, which responds to the passion emblematized by the sea. The sea-weed rises, sunset-red, Its rosy tips to lift and lave,— Its delicate fronds float all outspread Upon the tossing of the wave. The light that leaves the sunset skies Lingers to kiss it; and the far Sea-voices round it surge and rise, That sound from where old twilights are.

The red hues in the first two lines draw a connection to passion as the water’s restless movement causes the plant to react, with the verb choices of “rises,” “lift,” “lave,” and “outspread” all carrying erotic tones. In rising and lifting, the seaweed positions itself to receive the caresses of the wave that thoroughly bathes the plant as it unfolds itself. The rhyme scheme mimics the ebb and flow of the sea with its alternating lines. The second mention of the sunset amplifies the amorous effect through its kiss, and the arrival of night causes the sea to become so excited as to “surge and rise.” The link between the water’s aural emanations (“sea-voices”) and the distant past (“old twilights”) brings forth a Sapphic resonance and another indication that the poem is delineating same-sex desire. The other Gillington poem, “Intra Muros,” which was contained in Sonnets of This Century (1886) compiled by William Sharp, touches upon the sea briefly in presenting a comparison with the “fever of the day.” The sonnet traces the departure of daylight with “the night-cloud’s deepened shadowing” while “noises of the city drift away.” In contrast to the

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negativity of the urban milieu, the sea portends pleasure, but the speaker can merely contemplate the wonders of the distant locale. “I long, and long,—but no desire will bring / Against my face the keen wind salt with spray,” the speaker muses. The reference to desire encompasses a double meaning, for the speaker cannot reach the sea simply through a wish. As the next lines indicate, the waves signify alluring eroticism; they hail and they buss the strand, which again emblematizes a female body. Moreover, the plants that overrun the shore remind of that poem’s seaweed with its links to passion. “O far away, green wave, your voices call,” the speaker of “Intra Muros” utters wistfully, and “[y]our cool lips kiss the wild and weedy shore.” A glance at “Nocturnes” by Alice E. Gillington provides another interesting portrayal of the eroticized sea.39 Like “Intra Muros,” the two-part, eight-stanza ababccb verse depicts a yearning for the sea linked to a lover but in two different situations. In the first section, the speaker is no longer involved with a beloved, associating the sea with “quiet and cool” responses and “calm refreshment” when not remembering the former partner. The speaker wonders, however, if a “love once spurned” has now “[g]rown turbulent.” Nevertheless, she is determined to escape the past. And never again will I dream of thee—    I shall forget thee for evermore—      While deep waves sigh      The long hours by, And the new moon glints through the trysting tree.

In the second part of “Nocturnes,” the speaker wishes to revive the relationship and renew the feelings of desire. “I want to breathe the salt wind from the sea,” she says, “[a]nd hear the deep waves tossing on the bar.” The speaker repeats the sentiment at the end of the stanza, asserting that “still more I pray” to embrace the sea’s winds and waves. In the poem’s closing stanza, the speaker again references the wind and waves, but now she wishes “[t]o hold your hand to-night” and retrieve “lost joys.” A final poem to be addressed in this chapter is Michael Field’s “Metrum Praxillae,” included in Underneath the Bough (1893). In the first section of the two-part poem, titled “Stream and Pool,” sea imagery depicts the speaker as effusive, smitten, and energetic in regard to a silent and tranquil beloved.

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Mine is the eddying foam and the broken current, Thine the serene-flowing tide, the unshattered rhythm; Light touches me on the surface with glints of sunshine, Dives in thy bosom disclosing a mystic river: Ruffling, the wind takes the crest of my waves resurgent, Stretches his pinions at poise on thy even ripples: What is my song but the tumult of chafing forces, What is thy silence, Beloved, but enchanted music!

With Field’s numerous poems about same-sex relationships, “Metrum Praxillae” comparably delineates the speaker’s homoerotic inclinations. The analogy in the first line divulges that the speaker departs from socially normative desire in her engrossment with the beloved; an eddy follows its own contrarian motion in diverging from and disrupting a main current, which replicates the speaker’s own atypical involvement in a same-sex relationship. In contrast, the beloved conforms to a traditional heterosexual path as the tide implies with its tranquil and unvarying movement. The sunlight’s path from the speaker to the beloved provides a connection between them and further intimates that the beloved is concealing, whether consciously or not, a homoerotic strain in her “mystic river.” The adjective supports the point with its meanings of mystery and occlusion applied to the flowing currents. Similarly, the wind creates a bond between the two individuals, for it travels from the speaker to the beloved. Nevertheless, the speaker recognizes that emotional friction separates the two women (“chafing forces”) but proceeds undaunted to pursue a union. In the final line, the beloved’s resistance is being overcome since her silence tacitly portends that the speaker’s advances will be accepted. As “Metrum Praxillae” and the other intriguing poems addressed in this chapter insistently demonstrate, the workings of desire indubitably transgress the Victorian notion that women should not disclose in language or in conduct any erotic inclinations, whether heterosexually or homoerotically directed. These verses assiduously explore desire in its many facets, even though those examinations may be veiled to deflect outrage and disparagement. The fascinating configurations of desire expressed in the poems provide yet another manifestation of the New Woman’s questioning and criticizing the Victorian constraints on sexual inquiry and behavior.

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Notes 1. Certainly, various New Women advocated celibacy, often as a means of disrupting men’s control. 2. Also calling attention to gender indeterminacies in Custance’s work are essays by Patricia Pulham (“Tinted and Tainted Love: The Sculptural Body in Olive Custance’s Poetry”) and by Joseph Bristow (“‘There You Will See Your Page’: Olive Custance, Alfred Douglas, and Lyrics of Sapphic Boyhood”). 3. Pulham observes, “It is perhaps significant that Custance was known to have ‘a strange passion’ for opals, and liked ‘to be called, and to call herself, Opal’” (“Tinted and Tainted Love,” 176; quotations appear in Brocard Sewell’s Olive Custance: Her Life and Work). Bristow indicates that Custance used “the nickname Opal, which …. [she] had for years used to characterize her changeability” (“‘There You Will See Your Page,’” 284). Sarah Parker notes that the name “also hinted at her bisexual tendencies” (The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 86). 4. Parker advises that “from an early age, Custance began to … integrate herself into the decadent literary milieu” (“Olive Custance” 1). 5. Ruth Livesey applies the term to The Yellow Book, stating that the journal “is so often deployed as a shorthand notation for the particularities of decadent aestheticism in the 1890s” (“Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siècle Poetry,” 514). 6. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 167. Providing a testament to the usefulness of Jackson’s comments is the fact that they have appeared in various critical discussions of Custance. 7. Ibid., 190. 8. Ibid., 192. 9. Ibid., 197. 10. Richard Le Gallienne, Sleeping Beauty and Other Prose Fantasies, 161, 169. 11. Ibid., 163; Parker, “Olive Custance,” 1. 12. As Parker states, “the complex eroticism of Custance’s work … actually marks the beginning of a much larger project of destabilizing gender and sexuality” occurring in the fin de siècle and “takes place at the very moment in which sexual ‘inversion’ is being defined.” Parker adds, “Like the colour-­ shifting opal stone that she made her symbol, Custance refused to be defined by any one discourse of sexuality or gender that was available to her,” noting that “[i]t is her innovative combining of these discourses that make her poetry worthy of further study” (“‘A Girl’s Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance,” 221).

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13. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, “Perversion of the Sexual Instinct,” 565; von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 264; Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women,” 148. 14. Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women,” 156. 15. Sewell, Olive Custance: Her Life and Work, 4. The other poets are Dollie Radford and Alice Meynell. 16. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the Custance poems cited in the chapter appeared in Opals (1891). The remaining poems appeared in Rainbows (1902). 17. Also see Parker for discussion of the line (The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 81). 18. Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, 87; Sewell, Olive Custance, 13; Lord Alfred Douglas, Autobiography, 215; Douglas quoted in Douglas Murray, Bosie, 135; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 32. Douglas claimed in his autobiography that he “never set out to attract [Wilde],” which is the reason the famous poet and novelist “became infatuated with me. It took him a year’s hard work, and every bit of brain he had, to get me half as interested in him as he was in me from the moment he first saw me” (215). 19. Linda K.  Hughes, “Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book,” 863. Hughes makes the point that the statue’s “cold marble and heated lips suggest a woman’s ‘perverse’ sexual acts with a sexual fetish” 863). 20. Other critics have also commented on liminality in Custance’s poems. Pulham observes that “moments of colour and/or transparency occur in the liminal spaces of dawn and dusk, transitional temporal spaces that express and reflect the sexual duality of the statues [in Custance’s work] and the sexual ambiguity of the speakers’ desires” (“Tinted and Tainted Love,” 170). Parker remarks that “[l]iminal times of transition, such as twilight, feature frequently in Custance’s poetry and are often personified as female, allowing her to covertly express lesbian desire under the guise of poetic convention” (“‘A Girl’s Love,’” 224). 21. Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds, xxvi. 22. Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s, 27. 23. See Alison Chapman’s “Virtual Victorian Poetry” for a discussion of Gillington’s work in Woman’s World. Chapman identifies Gillington as “one of the most prolific … writers of this period” (146). 24. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 169. 25. Ibid., 171. 26. Bristow, “‘There You Will See Your Page,’” 266; Douglas, Autobiography, 205–206. 27. Douglas quoted in Bristow, “‘There You Will See Your Page,’” 265; Douglas, Autobiography, 214.

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28. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 170. 29. Douglas, Autobiography, 212. 30. Michelle L.  Whitney reports that “critics were quick to point out [Custance’s] overzealous use of punctuation: her poetry, like her letters and diaries, is saturated with dashes and dots.” Whitney adds that “the reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement (TLS, 25 July 1902) offered a ‘word of trivial advice’: ‘if Miss Custance will realize that one full stop can do quite as much work as three, the look of her pages would be improved’” (“Olive Custance,” 48). 31. Sappho, Sappho: Poems and Fragments, 29. 32. As Bristow comments, “fascination with the sensuousness of hair, both male and female, extends to several other poems, ones that make it equally hard to disambiguate the poetic speaker’s gender” (“‘There You Will See Your Page,’” 279). 33. Douglas, Autobiography, 206. 34. See my chapter on Field in Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women’s Poetry. 35. Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 164. 36. Ibid., 160. 37. See my discussion of the ecofeminist aspects of the poem in Reconceiving Nature (133–35). 38. Hughes, New Woman Poets, 3. 39. Michael Yates and Steve Roud report that “Alice E. Gillington was a pioneer collector of songs from English Gypsies” (“Alice E.  Gillington: Dweller on the Roughs,” 72).

CHAPTER 4

Social Responsibility for the Destitute

As England headed into the fin de siècle, the nation confronted a plethora of societal challenges, especially on the economic front. Summarizing the situation, William Greenslade asserts that “[i]n the early 1880s, Britain was entering what appeared to contemporaries to be a decisive economic, social, and political crisis.” The turn of the decade, the Times claimed, “combined ‘more circumstances of misfortune and depression than any within general experience.’” The problems in the agricultural and industrial sectors of the 1870s brought high unemployment, both for rural and urban laborers, and by the mid-1880s affected a tenth of the population, Greenslade indicates. Moreover, the movement of unemployed workers from the country to the city led to a horrific London plagued by overcrowding, cramped housing, and dangerous slums, and the population burgeoned into the next century. “Huge agglomerations of people lived … in a densely packed urban environment,” comments Jose Harris, “to an extent that was quite unprecedented in human history.” Aggravating the problem was the continuing rise in the city’s population, which Andrzej Diniejko places at four million in the 1890s. Foreign economic threats added to the nation’s burdens as Europe tended toward a tightening of its markets and kept England from continental consumers, David Thomson states. A revitalizing Germany brought competition in commerce, and the United States became a powerful antagonist in the wake of the Civil War,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_4

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“provid[ing] new and serious competition” for agricultural and industrial goods. U.S. railroad development increased access to grain, creating “a dramatically different scale of productivity, which England could not match.” Also impeding British trade was the U.S. MacKinley tariff of 1890 with its “rigorous system of protection,” Thomson observes.1 Penned during this difficult fin de siècle, the poetry of Isabella J.  Southern and other New Women spoke eloquently about the misery of the destitute. With all of the perturbations in England’s economic condition, poverty became a particularly insidious presence, especially in London. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) detailed terrible situations facing the indigent, such as the “pestilential human rookeries … where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors.” Courtyards “reek[ed] with poisonous and malodorous gases” that emanated from liquid waste and disgusting detritus “scattered in all directions and often flowing beneath your feet.”2 The hideous housing was riddled with decaying interiors, “dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin,” blackened grime “everywhere” that dripped from ceilings and walls, and the “putrefying carcasses” of dead animals.3 New Woman poets addressed a multitude of concerns, including the self-absorption, apathy, and disdain that typified many comfortable citizens who ignored the devastating conditions that gravely endangered the health and often ended the lives of their fellow Victorians. As Sidney Webb stated in 1889, “We must abandon the self-conceit of imagining that we are independent units” and work toward “the higher end, the Common Weal.”4 The verse of several progressive women in the fin de siècle demonstrated Webb’s precepts, as this chapter will reveal. Major focus is accorded herein to the sonnets created by Southern, likely an unfamiliar name in the modern era but an important individual in the pantheon of late-century women poets. Southern has languished in obscurity for generations, and unsurprisingly her work has rarely been investigated by critics.5 Moreover, Southern has apparently escaped biographical attention, since a search unearthed no information on the poet. The only clue comes from her dedication in Sonnets and Other Poems (1891) to her father, Thomas Pallister Barkas, who authored books on herpetology and spiritualism.6 Because of the dearth of biographical material, whether Southern actively participated in New Woman endeavors remains unknown. Nevertheless, her poem “The Thirst for Knowledge” reveals her embrasure of the tenet that women remain stifled in development when relegated to the domestic realm and her forthright message that societal strictures must be transcended.7

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Composed of nine abab quatrains, “The Thirst for Knowledge” presents a woman who unsuccessfully attempts to accept a limited access to intellectual pursuits and content herself with the superficial interests of a conventional Victorian wife.8 Rather, she feels unbearably constricted in the role culturally established for her and seeks to escape her delimited existence as a sheltered and veritably confined spouse. Set in a garden, the poem builds upon the many literary associations of the space with female separation from the public realm. She tried to live as others live,   To satisfy her mind as they, To grasp the joy that love can give,   To be content with childish play. But all in vain! She could not rest,   The garden walls seemed far too near; Above the ivy’s tossing crest   Dream faces rose, to disappear.

The garden resembles a prison with the walls that function not only as barriers but also produce a smothering effect with their uncomfortable proximity. The climbing ivy contributes to the disturbing scene, for as a “tossing crest” it acts as an entrapping presence situated atop the walls and an impediment that stymies resistance. The woman’s sole connection to the outside world is simply illusory as she imagines the presence of others who merely exist in her dreams and soon fade from sight. Despite her plea to leave the garden, she is advised to content herself with her circumstances, since she supposedly has freedom within and dominance of her designated space. “O let me see what lies beyond,”   She cried, “though sight bring misery.” “Ah, go not hence,” said voices fond,   “Here surely thou has liberty.” “Here dost thou reign despotic queen,   And all is thine, for thou art loved; Here thou art sheltered by the sheen     Of silken curtains.” Was she moved?

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Her response to the question is a decisive affirmative, for she is “moved to go, and go full soon, / Beyond that kingdom where she reigned” so that she can “know what others have attained.” In successive quatrains, the poem itemizes the ventures she envisions and the varied people she hopes to encounter. She wants to meet disheartened individuals and learn of the strength that enables them to “cling to life.” Similarly, she feels compelled to commune with the poor whose existence is marred by strenuous labor and incessant deprivation. On a more positive plane, she wishes to know the aspirations of the young and gain understanding from those who continually endeavor to discern truth. The woman’s quest for knowledge represents a decisive force that she cannot ignore. ’Tis some necessity that drives    The sheltered from their Eden bowers: “You must,” the heart against it strives,    And then “I will” is said ’mid showers.

The final quatrain indicates that the choice to pursue her own inclinations is a demanding and generally a solitary step, and the stanza affirms the woman’s decision to discern her way beyond the garden walls. Too oft alone the soul fares forth,—    Always alone its choice must make; Yet true as needle to the North,    Its longing points the way to take.

Another Southern poem addressing the obstacles confronting women is the sonnet sequence “The Evolution of Womanhood,” divided into three numbered sections respectively situated in tribal, courtly, and contemporary times. Each octave begins with the exclamation, “Woman a living soul!” and then relates the reactions that the phrase precipitates, while the sestet imparts a woman’s response to the cultural assumptions. In the first sonnet, the octave traces the disdainful rejoinder to the prospect of a woman’s soul as an idea “[s]o wild.” Rather, asserts a “savage” while laughing, a “slavish squaw” merely acts as a servant to “her lord,” bowing submissively as she hands him a desired beverage. The conviction that women lack a soul is reinforced by the fact that women never gain recognition from their tribes and are forgotten after death, and the octave

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concludes with another derisive laugh. The sestet switches viewpoints to “she who hears the words, knows what is said.” Then, “a Something strangely stirs / As softly as a zephyr o’er the furze,” and the tribal chief ponders “her brightened face.” The second sonnet in the sequence indicates that a knight accepts the notion of a female soul and elevates women like the Victorian angel in the house: the knight “deigns to lift / The woman from the earth.” Nevertheless, the knight retains his dominance since “still he wields / A mighty power,” and he assumes a role resembling that of a paradigmatic Victorian male.            “’Tis man,” he says, “who shields   The weakling from the dangers of the way,   From all the heat and burthen of the day,’ That she may shelter in his shady fields.”

The woman in the sestet reminds of the persona in “The Thirst for Knowledge” with her own yearning to leave her restrictive world of “groves,” another garden-like space. She learns from visiting strangers of numerous locales distinct from her own “and longs to climb / To heights where fresher breezes freely blow.” The current moment provides the setting for the third sonnet. Its octave claims that women ostensibly have attained parity with men. Woman a living soul! Thank God, we say,   No woman now need ask that boon to share;   She claims her right that crown of thorns to wear, To lift the cross, to tread the rugged way Which leads from earth, to pure, eternal day;   In truth’s great quest her earnest part to bear,   From falsehood its beguiling mask to tear, Her part right well upon this plane to play.

The sestet takes an unexpected route, for the woman now is not merely equal to but superior to men. They bow before her as she contemplates the skies and counsels “her worshippers” about the way they should live. Although the woman may, at first glance, seem to be a rendition of the angel in the house, she has instead reversed the presumptions from the previous sonnets that women are soulless, unimportant, subservient, or helpless. Not only does she possess a soul, hers is far loftier than that of the

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men who look to her for guidance. In that regard, the poem anticipates commentary on the New Woman by Sarah Grand in an 1894 essay. Man [has] no conception of himself as imperfect from the woman’s point of view, … but we know his weakness, and will be patient with him, and help him with his lesson. It is the woman’s place and pride and pleasure to teach the child, and man morally is in his infancy. … [N]ow woman holds out a strong hand to the child-man and insists, but with infinite tenderness and pity, upon helping him up.

Grand made a similar point in an 1898 essay. The New Woman can be hard on man, but it is because she believes in him and loves him. She recognises his infinite possibilities. She sees the God in him, and means to banish the brute. She has full faith in his ultimate perfection, otherwise she would not tolerate him for a moment.

With its uplifting conclusion, Southern’s sonnet accords with J. Ashcroft Noble’s rule, given in his The Sonnet in England and Other Essays (1893), that a “sonnet should, as it proceeds, gain strength and momentum.” Additionally, the sonnet “should leave with us a sense of victorious accomplishment.”9

Prescriptions for the Victorian Sonnet The Southern sonnets examined in this chapter articulate the challenges encountered by individuals far less fortunate than her readers, urging the latter to look beyond their own comforts with an empathetic eye and to offer assistance. The sonnet, which Samuel Waddington claimed in 1888 “has by this time become thoroughly naturalized and acclimated to our insular severity,” provides an apt vehicle for Southern’s didacticism. As Theodore Watts-Dunton—whom Alexander Japp credited in “The English Sonnet and Its History” (1893) with “hav[in]g done so much to show that the sonnet is adequate for the expression of present-day thoughts and fancies”—asserted in Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder, the sonnet is particularly suited to “poetising didactic matter and bringing it into poetic art.” The process, he said, “can only be exercised by passing the didactic matter through … the laboratory of a true poet’s imagination.” Southern’s sonnets conform to this prescription, not only in content but in structure.10

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The formal aspect is especially inventive in the sonnets discussed here, for Southern frequently departs from conventional patterns, accentuating her contentions and assailing contemporary presumptions. In the process, Southern undermines the sonnet rules promulgated by critics speaking from a masculinist perspective and aesthetic dominance, and she instead asserts a woman’s voice. The unconformities enact a rebellion of sorts in that they defy male attempts to govern the creative process and female expression. Several Victorian essayists established rules about numerous facets of the sonnet form that Southern’s poems often violate. Indeed, Natalie Houston observes that much was written about sonnets beginning in 1840 and continuing to the end of the century. Although, as Houston remarks, “Victorian sonnet theory, unlike with the novel, made very few distinctions based on gender,”11 Southern’s work problematizes an implicit masculine power that underlay and shaped sonnet parameters. William Sharp’s Sonnets of This Century (1886) presents an instructive example of sonnet principles. He set out the “prescribed rhyme arrangement” of abbaabba,12 the standard for the Petrarchan type widely adopted by Victorian poets. In conformance with this dictate, Sharp insisted in his “ten absolutely essential rules for a good sonnet” that the octave obey the “prescribed arrangement in the rhyme-sounds—namely, the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth lines must rhyme on the same sound, and the second, third, sixth, and seventh on another.” The abbaabba pattern would, of course, meet that requirement. The sonnet in its entirety must feature ten-­ syllable lines, Sharp believed, a contention that an 1873 Quarterly Review essay also supported with “a terminal eleventh at option.”13 The sestet structure “may be arranged with more freedom,” Sharp acknowledged, but nevertheless asseverated, as did other sonnet commentators, that an ending couplet must be avoided.14 Sharp maintained that a final couplet otherwise “is apt to come upon one with an unexpected jar, as if someone had opened bang-to a door while the musician was letting the last harmonious chords thrill under his touch.” Sharp expressed the common wisdom that “a rhymed couplet at the close is only allowable” in the Shakespearean version. Although Sharp readily accepted sestet variation, he presented sixteen “more or less appropriate variations” to guide a poet’s work.15 Some of the nine Southern sonnets discussed in the next section meet Sharp’s varied mandates, but several poems break at least one rule. The other sonnets employ accepted patterns but in so doing offer uncomfortable ideas within a comfortable format.

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Self-Absorption Maligned One of Southern’s unconventional sonnets bears the title of “He That Loveth His Life Shall Lose It,” and the insistent declaration provides a summary of the poem. Taken from John 12:25, the titular statement derives its force, as John Wesley explained, from the idea that valuing one’s life “more than the will of God” means that the life will be lost for all eternity. The corollary of the verse, Wesley indicated, means that “he that hateth his life, in comparison of the will of God, shall preserve it.” The lesson is developed as well in Matthew 10:39, Wesley advised, which admonishes that “he that saves his life, by denying me, shall lose it eternally”; in contrast, Matthew states, “[h]e that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”16 The biblical references, coming from the founder of Methodism who introduced its tenets to the Anglican church, would resonate with a devout Victorian audience and evoke other biblical tutelage. Wesley’s notations provided a harsh warning to hypocrites who considered themselves faithful believers yet selfishly attended exclusively to their own interests while ignoring the plights of needy individuals. Another biblical passage, Revelation 3:17, accentuates the message, undercutting the boast that “I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing,” with the reply that the person “knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.” The octave provides ironic instructions to self-absorbed readers, telling them to embrace practices that close off themselves from others to confer protection on both material and subjective levels. The sonnet commences with a literal closing and a second reference to detachment applies the recommendation to the self: “Go, garner thou thy store in well-locked barns, / And keep thy thoughts within thy silent lips.” Retreat and concealment characterize the advice imparted in the subsequent pair of lines: “Venture not forth when frosty winter nips, / And hide thy gold in deep, dark mountain tarns.” Self-enrichment and emotional isolation constitute the exclusive objectives, the sonnet counsels. Keep all thou canst, let no man share thy gains,    Let no man know thou hast a beating heart;    In all the work of life, take thou no part, Dry no sad tears, alleviate no pains.

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The pronoun choices of “thy” and “thou” shape the octave into a perverse version of prayer in adopting biblical forms of address. The volta, however, introduces the consequences of egocentric behavior with unsettling images of dehumanization in the sestet’s first four lines. And then, what art thou? Living all alone, And petrifying slowly into stone,    No humanising accents from thee fall; No fallow field beneath thy care grows green;

The picture of decay devolves immediately into a state of nullity, accentuated with capitalization, as the listener diminishes to merely a cipher. “’Twere better that thy life had never been, / For thou art NOTHING! Judgment worst of all!” To the biblically attuned Victorian, two verses from John’s First Epistle would resonate: “He that loveth his brother abideth in the light” (2:10), and “whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” (3:17). The sestet’s word “judgment” carries a double impact, for it signals that the addressee’s discernment counts even less than nothing and the person implicitly will face the worst imaginable final judgment. As Webb admonished, “we must take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part,” rather than endeavor “to perfect our own individual developments.”17 The poem’s form offers a commentary on the content as a chaotic version of a sonnet lacking a substantive structure. The octave begins traditionally with the Petrarchan abba but immediately strays from the conventional pattern with cddc. Although the latter rhyme begins with the alphabetical order of cd, it then retraces its movement, thereby suggesting that the listener’s self-involvement impedes development and progression. The anomalous rhyme deviates from contemporary dictates on sonnets, not only in departing from the abbaabba format. The shift also violates the common presumption that the octave should feature only two rhyme sounds and follow a systematic sequence. Moreover, in Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882), T. Hall Caine advocates two rhymes in an octave as “a perfection to aim after,” but accepts three rhymes; no additional options, such as Southern’s four rhymes, are included in his recommendations.18 The sestet also displays an aberrant choice in Sharp’s terms in not conforming with his advised sequences. Southern’s sestet traces a circular pattern with eefggf, for the seeming forward direction of eef quickly backtracks

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from gg to f. The sestet’s halting rhyme scheme intimates the addressee’s own paralytic behavior. Contributing to the sestet’s forceful warning is the sole syllabic departure from monosyllables in the end rhymes. With its double syllables, “alone” accentuates the unnerving consequences of separating oneself from others. Also adding to the poem’s unconventional configuration is its rebellion against a Petrarchan practice that, as C. Hugh Holman notes, confined a sonnet to five rhymes;19 Southern’s poem exceeds that number with another two rhymes. All of the sonnet’s deviations from a structural standard carry the underlying suggestion that the content departs from a norm as well, and the assumption is borne out by the poem’s assault against the common tendency to be driven by self-interest. Biblical allusions also inform “A Selfish Paradise,” which fashions a perverse version of Eden to castigate its pitiless inhabitants. The octave presents a bucolic paradise as a secure, tranquil, and fulfilling environment, exceeding all needs in the enclosed space. Stately iambic pentameter contributes to the scene as a place of order and harmony. The residents have no interest in external events or other individuals but instead are fully engrossed in their own matters. They live within an Eden full of joy,   By day they wander in its leafy glades,   At night lie down to sleep in grateful shades, Their youthful hearts are full of glad employ, The cares of life pass by without annoy.   She envies not the dancing, singing maids,   And he breast-high in rapture’s river wades, No serpent glides,—it seems,—peace to destroy.

Appropriately for an Edenic state, the sonnet’s two subjects abide blissfully in perfect concordance with their universe as in the Genesis account preceding the Fall, and the dual appearance of “full” iterates the completeness of the pair’s self-contained realm. The terrain where the inhabitants slumber is “grateful,” attesting to the couple’s seamless symbiotic relationship with the surrounding world. The connection of the river to rapture would remind Anglicans of the prophesized union with Christ after the Second Coming, and the male’s wading there invokes as well the baptismal ritual whereby cleansing waters bind an individual to the Creator. The sonnet’s setting encompasses both a literal and figurative green world,

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seemingly suspended in time and divorced from all anxieties that otherwise “annoy” the less blessed. Yet the idyllic picture carries an unsettling threat in the octave’s final two lines. The biblical connotations of a river as the water of life and abundance (Rev. 22:1) are immediately problematized by the possibility that the satanic reptile lurks within the felicitous contours, for the perfect world only “seems” inviolate. The sestet reveals that the couple’s paradisiacal existence comes at the expense of compassion for others, as similarly derided in “He That Loveth His Life Shall Lose It.” They fare not forth beyond the shining gate,    And take no heed of distant, wailing cries.    She cares not that the orphaned maiden dies Untended, that wild hearts and hungry wait Outside, for falling crumbs of her glad state.    But ah! the longest summer quickly flies.

The opening line is infused with irony, for the “shining gate” that the pair will not pass refers to the site of God, as identified in an Anglican hymn penned mid-century by the cleric Benjamin Hall Kennedy.20 The hymn begins with an enjoinder to the faithful that they honor the Creator: Zion, at thy shining gates, Lo! the King of Glory waits; Haste thy Monarch’s pomp to greet, Strew thy palms before His feet!

The satisfaction derived in the sonnet’s sestet comes from an insensitive detachment from the cares of others who utter “distant” calls beseeching aid, with the adjective choice stressing the couple’s self-imposed isolation. Again an ironic element shapes the poem, for the distressed individuals gather “outside” the Edenic gate that protects the couple from interactions with them, and the reference to “falling” reminds devout Victorians of the dismal fate Adam and Eve brought upon themselves. The final line suggests that the insular couple will suffer an unenviable destiny as well. The lengthy summer nearing its end implies that the seemingly timeless green world of the octave is approaching its own demise, and the pair will face a reckoning on their shameful conduct. The couple’s plight is quietly forecast through the initial and final end rhymes of the octave, for the

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“joy” that completes the first line metamorphoses into “destroy” at the stanza’s completion. In another ironic move, the rhyme structure of the sestet accords with Sharp’s recommended selections that supposedly provide a harmonious atmosphere. Terse monosyllabic end rhymes suggest that tranquility is illusory. “Of Selfishness,” as its name imparts, presents corresponding themes to the sonnets previously assessed, but it features few religious allusions. Instead, a bleak atmosphere marked by coldness characterizes an egocentric life. The sonnet opens with the image of a thick, opaque mist that alludes to the blindness of individuals without mercy. The inability to see beyond oneself creates a prison of sorts, for an ambient boundlessness rapidly constricts. A frosty fog lies on the fields and hides   The ample sky and panorama spread   Above, around; and sullen thoughts are bred In selfish hearts, restricting on all sides The sympathies, those far-expanding guides   By which one soul to other souls is led,   To share with men less favoured daily bread, In faith cast out on life’s o’erflowing tides.

The expansiveness created in the first three lines with fields, an “ample sky,” and a sweeping vista pertains as well to the subsequent “sympathies” with their own widespread reach unless hampered by surliness and disdain. In contrast, the frigidity of the fog serves as an analogue to the churlish individuals lacking altruistic inclinations. If left unconstrained by harshness and self-interest, however, compassion would increasingly expand on a societal scale as the fortunate strive to aid the unfortunate. Religious connections buttress the point not only through references to souls and faith, but also through an intimation of the “Lord’s Prayer” that beseeches the deity to “give us this day our daily bread.” The sestet returns primarily to material imagery, which builds on the coldness noted in the octave and adds deathly visions to delineate the fate of unrepentant egocentrics. Depictions of horrific physical misery become even more unbearable when considered specifically in relation to selfishness.

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The fate of those condemned to icy caves,   Where echoes shrilly answer wasted breath, Congealing as it hangs in cloudy waves, Is bliss compared with selfishness that laves   In petrifying pools of living death, Yet isolated, hates the life it craves.

The first half of the sestet constructs a dire picture of hopelessness for the “condemned” in brutal conditions. Their outcries never reach beyond the caves as power over language disappears. In the remainder of the sestet, a distorted version of baptism ensues for the self-centered persons, whereby they are brought not to life in God but to incessant suffering. Selfishness becomes an animate entity, so monstrous that it utterly overwhelms the individual it corrupts. Irretrievably deadened, those who reject compassion impose unwelcome solitude upon themselves and descend into self-hatred. The format of the sonnet presents the terrible scenario as inescapable for a person who embraces selfishness. Unvarying adherence in the octave to the Petrarchan structure creates an aura of inevitability as the lines advance systematically toward a dreadful conclusion. The repetitive end rhymes of the sestet sound like a military march moving insistently at a reiterated pace of cdc and then cdc. The monosyllabic words terminating each line contribute to the impression with a staccato cadence resembling an advancing army proceeding by one definitive step after another. As a whole, the sonnet serves as a dire warning for individuals so preoccupied with their own interests that they cannot see beyond themselves.

Human Community Southern’s social commentary shifts slightly in “Of Sympathy” and two other sonnets, which concentrate on commonality to urge crucial change. “Of Sympathy” features a somewhat circuitous thematic trail, beginning with a decided emphasis on the physiological foundation that all individuals share, proceeding to self-interest, and concluding with the rewards gleaned from embracing the human collective. The octave traces the first and second progressions, beginning with a vibrant description of physical sensations typifying the human body before turning to the emotions, actions, and egocentrism that also signify universal traits.

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The life which pulsing throbs and thrills through me   Is as intense in you, and permeates   The universe: all sad and happy states Of toiling, erring, hoping men, agree In this one thing; each in himself doth see   The centre of the world, and watching, waits   Coming events, as though all God creates Were formed for his content or misery.

The initial line seems to reverberate with life itself through the predicate choices. Through the participial verb form, the “pulsing” captures the vitality of the life force coursing through every being, and the next verb contributes to the effect by replicating the motion of an active heart. Pronunciation of the phrase thereby formed furthers the impression of cardiac movement through the stress on the first syllable of “pulsing” and the subsequent stress of “throbs.” The next verb, with the alliterative link to its predecessor, maintains the pulsating sensation. Furthermore, the word “thrills” conveys the fervent consciousness of being alive. The “intense” quality of the speaker’s physical state pertains to the addressee as well, and the succeeding predicate extends the commonality of the life force to suggest that everyone participates in a universal community. As the octave advances, it identifies the disparate emotions of joylessness and gladness that thread through humankind. Participial predicates in the fourth line not only echo the animation of the sonnet’s first line, but in this iteration suggest ongoing and enduring conditions. The broad scope of these emotions and actions narrows to “one thing,” and the idea of universality takes an ironic twist in that everyone cares simply about the self as “the centre of the world.” The next phrase of “watching, waits” provides another example of pronunciation imitating the suspended states themselves, for the inhalation of breath to emit the words sounds like an impatient reaction to a delayed resolution. An oxymoronic juxtaposition repeats the notion that the universal shrinks to the personal, in that “all” creations center on the individual’s reaction, whether gratified or distressed. The sestet’s movement reverses the sequence of self and others that began the octave to launch the return to commonality.

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Could man but realise that each man’s heart   Is sensitive to sound and sight as this Which beats in his own breast, how great a part   Of suffering were spared, or changed to bliss, Through gentle tones and touches, from which start   More subtile raptures than from lover’s kiss.

The initial line employs the contemporary connotation of “man” as an ungendered collective noun. The ensuing reference to “each man’s heart” does not validate an egocentric absorption but rather the notion of “everyone else,” with all persons participating in the human community. The second line returns to the sensations presented in the octave, described with the /s/ alliteration of “sensitive,” “sound,” and “sight.” The sibilance seems to merge the senses in paralleling the idea of the one becoming part of the many. The opening phrase of the third line adopts the octave’s imitative effect, simulating a beating heart with the /b/ alliteration. With the reference to “his own breast,” the sestet momentarily turns to the individual, but that communal separation immediately dissolves with the line’s continuation of “how great a part.” Although designating the misery and joy addressed in the next line, the phrase subtly reminds that each person forms a part of a greater whole. The “suffering” and “bliss” of the fourth line echo the “content or misery” of the octave, though the sestet reverses the order of the two conditions to accentuate the movement from the individuality of the octave’s conclusion to the privileged communality. The alliteration of “suffering” and “spared” anticipates with the velvety sounds the mildness explored in the penultimate line. Again, alliteration contributes to the content, with the light pronunciation of the /t/ in “tones and touches.” The sequence from self to many that the sestet has explored finishes with another validation of community, in this instance asserting that the ecstatic reaction it produces exceeds the pleasure stemming from individual experience. “Vicarious Suffering” enacts a similar trajectory as “Of Sympathy” but delves particularly into the critical significance of empathy. The sonnet recognizes that all individuals encounter pain, but for some the distress dissipates and an exhilarating feeling of happiness supplants it. Though every man his meed of pain endures,   Not all have felt the joy beneath the grief,   For which the longest agony seems brief, So true the satisfaction it assures.

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In the concluding segment of the octave, suffering ironically becomes a redemptive avenue for the least empathetic persons. Confronting death, such individuals experience a saving realization and rejection of the dismissive attitude that had dominated. With that recognition, the individual can ease into death with an emotional resurrection that validates empathy. A power there is in suff’ring that allures   The sternest and the hardest to its side;   A dying word suffices to ope wide The long-locked soul, and pour in oil that cures.

Rather than surrender to death, however, the sestet urges the listener to make the taxing decision to rise above one’s own pain and heed the suffering of others. The act generates elation and divine approbation, guiding the addressee along the road of life. Then die is faith. Nay, harder, choose to live!   Thy pain upon the altar bravely lay;   Unselfish joy is thine, if thou canst say “My pangs, for him, or her, I freely give.”   Long tongues of light shoot from celestial day   Their roseate hues to cast upon thy way.

In formal terms, the octave’s rhyme scheme signals with its unexpected approach the individual’s altered view and embrasure of empathy. Beginning with the customary Petrarchan abba, the octave seems to be establishing the usual pattern, an assumption that apparently is borne out with the following line’s /a/ rhyme. Yet the next pair of lines does not turn to a /bb/ rhyme but replaces it with a /cc/ sequence instead, violating the widespread conviction that the abba order should be repeated. The aberration occurs at a decisive juncture, for it announces the redemptive alteration for “the sternest and the hardest.” A concluding /a/ rhyme returns to the Petrarchan format, which highlights the /cc/ departure. The sestet follows an unusual deedee sequence, and the smooth repetition matches the peaceful state that empathy confers. In ending with a couplet, however, the sestet departs from the Italian pattern and its eschewal of a sonnet ending with this rhyme form. Yet Southern’s violation of the decree foregrounds through the jarring ending the overwhelming need for empathy.

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The thematic thrusts of “Of Sympathy” and “Vicarious Suffering” merge in “The Transformation of Pain.” Searing descriptions of distress pervade the octave as pain, so powerful that it is personified through capitalization and irrepressible agency, invades its hapless victims. Depictions of pain present a sepulchral and monstrous presence that ruins all it encounters. With its undeviating adherence to the abbaabba structure, the octave seems relentless as it captures the onslaught of pain. Gaunt Pain, with sunken cheeks and closèd lips,   Stands weeping, groaning, rending her scant locks;   A writhing world with her wild eyes she mocks, Exuberance of thoughtless youth she nips, And flaws the cup the holy martyr sips.   The feeble body quails beneath her shocks,   And backward, forward, seeking ease it rocks, In vain attempt to avoid her scourging whips.

The octave considers individual pain—that of a youth, a martyr, and a weak corpus. The volta, however, gradually shifts to the human commonweal, which provides an antidote to suffering. Personal pain is countered by a recognition of “oneness,” and empathy eases agony. Pain dissipates as it is replaced by another personification, a restorative Pity. But see, a miracle! Her lips long sealed   At last are opening into tender speech;   Her tears of sympathy begin to teach A sense of human oneness, which hath healed Full many a scar beneath its shelt’ring shield;   And Pain, transformed to Pity, smiles for each.

The sestet announces the alteration from wretchedness to compassion with the break in cadence from cdd to ccd as well as the internal pattern of each segment. The sestet’s opening line, with its /c/ rhyme, complies with the Petrarchan format as it marks the exceptional thematic change that the volta introduces. The /dd/ lines act together to depict the movement from misery to sympathy. The next two lines also work as a unit to explain the healing response that the “sense of human oneness” initiates. The final line reinforces the earlier /dd/ lines that indicated transformation and reveals the ultimate result of the regenerative power that empathy carries. The sonnet’s syllabic pattern generally conforms to iambic

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pentameter but deviates from it through internal anapests and three eleven-syllable lines with stressed endings to delineate key concepts. First, the final line of the octave highlights the “scourging whips,” which epitomize the unbearable pain that the stanza details. Next, the second line of the sestet notes the miraculous “opening.” Finally, the fifth line identifies the “shelt’ring shield” of oneness that sympathy engenders.

Disturbing Deprivation In “The Spectre of Want,” the physical toll of poverty becomes especially pronounced. As the title reveals, poverty debilitates so extremely that the affected person loses life in any substantive sense. The octave relates the dehumanization wrought by destitution, which itself takes on such a commanding role that it is personified, systematically stripping away the layers of potentiality from anyone hapless enough to become its prey. The octave traces the degenerative process by stages as a person descends both physically and behaviorally, becoming a veritable animal as the deterioration continues. First comes the deadening of hope, leaving no future for the indigent when possibilities shrink virtually to nothingness. That significant moment is marked in the third line not only by a concluding semicolon, but also by an eleven-syllable line with a stressed ending. Next comes a passive aggressiveness whereby the person displays the somatic toll from starvation before other people who endure no such condition. Brazenness ensues when the unfortunate person becomes a beggar, then a criminal who may face the gallows. The deleterious workings of Want are cumulative, for it strips away nearly every vestige of humanity to leave a wraith-­ like form with a defining trait of disturbing wildness. A dreadful shape is that of pallid Want!   It paralyses every noblest hope,   And narrows to the narrowest this life’s scope; Its famine-stricken limbs it seems to flaunt Before the eyes of plenty; no fears daunt   Its clutching fingers; quickly down the slope   Of beggary to vice, e’en to the rope It strides, and grows each day more wild and gaunt.

“Want” acts like a vampiric presence, draining vitality to the extent that its prey becomes little more than a skeletal entity.

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As Want continues its brutal work in the sestet, impoverishment deprives the victim of shelter and companionship, along with health. Hopelessness annihilates any desire to strive for a better life, dishonor takes hold, and the stigma of disgrace no longer matters. The passage of stages gains momentum as dehumanization unfolds. This haggard spectre knocking at the door   Brings in its train the loss of home and friends, The death of effort, beauty forced to flee, Fair honour dulled; for squalor evermore   Means loss of shame; its scanty rags it rends,    And sinks at worst beneath humanity.

The form of the sestet helps to depict the process of dissolution through the contrast with the octave’s structure. The octave breaks into halves, with each segment beginning and ending with an unindented line, while the spacing of the indented lines is identical. The fifth line is severed by a semicolon, with the first half pertaining to the first four lines and the second half leading into the ensuing four lines. The connection through the fifth line’s punctuation draws the two octave segments together, showing an inevitability of causal events. Commencing with the line’s second part, the pace of the octave quickens to capture the rapid descent “down the slope,” and an internal semicolon in the sixth line heralds the insidious process. The unconventional cdecde sestet, however, amplifies the destruction fueled by Want through the variation in spacing found in the poem’s eleventh and final lines. Each of those lines moves further away from its predecessor, thereby accentuating “the death of effort” and the irretrievable sinking into a subhuman entity. A syllabic deviation occurring in the end rhymes creates emphasis as well. All endings except in two lines are single syllables, which create a force through a staccato effect, while the multisyllable “evermore” and “humanity” provide an ironic juxtaposition since it is the loss of humanity, not its recuperation, that will endure. Southern’s approach to poverty narrows in “Of Children,” which brings deprivation poignantly into relief through the anguish of its youngest victims. The sonnet presents two dramatically different situations, with the octave describing a child born into a comfortable home that provides plentiful sustenance, both literally and figuratively, through parental love. The child becomes the nexus of the household, where every need and desire are fulfilled. Free to engage in the fantasies of youth, the child exists without anxiety.

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Into a solemn household came a child,   And all was changed by his soft, chubby hand,   Which ruled with rod of iron; his demand For love and care, for merry play, beguiled The stately mother till she gaily smiled.   The nursery floor became a magic land,   Where a promiscuous, ever-changing band Of angels, beasts, and fairies wandered wild.

The portrait of this dignified home reveals the class status of its financially well-situated residents, and the child’s tender hand demonstrates that no adversity enters his world to harden him, in either sense of the verb. The only words that suggest anything other than unconditional affection momentarily appear in relation to the child, and they foreground his importance to his caring parents. He, not them, dominates like a monarch with his scepter of a “rod of iron” attesting to his supremacy, and his sole demand insists upon loving attention. The child flourishes in an idyllic realm as he happily plays in his fanciful nursery, untouched by the realities of the outside world. The sestet, however, draws a striking comparison between this carefree life and the travails facing and awaiting other children deprived of a cozy home. The focus shifts from the single child of the octave to the many who can barely survive, hinting that the unprivileged youths far outnumber the privileged ones. Behind that sunshine a dark shadow lurks,   For there are little ones whose unshod feet   Know nothing softer than the stony street. The pen to picture their condition shirks!   What can be done, O Mothers, to make sweet   The lives of children whom men’s curses greet?

Shrouded in misery, the needy children are effectually invisible to persons without want. The privileged ones do not even encounter the “dark shadow,” the sestet’s opening adverb reveals, for the relative splendor of their lives creates a distorted, opaque view of a very dissimilar class. The barren feet of impoverished children become especially evident through pronunciation of “stony street,” with its harsh initial consonants and the aural contrast to the liquid “softer” preceding the phrase. The dismal

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street diverges sharply from the inviting nursery floor in the octave, intimating through these literal surfaces the enormous difference between the figurative foundations affecting a child’s development. So disturbing is the condition of the sestet children that it seems beyond language to capture it, for the pen appears unable to perform the painful task. The final plea to mothers evidences a desperate hope for alleviating the children’s plight, building on the cultural linkage of women to the customary domestic role of nurturing and protecting the young. The sonnet’s closing conforms to the second of John Addington Symonds’ descriptions that “as a wave may fall gradually or abruptly, so the sonnet may sink with stately volume or with precipitate subsidence to its close.”21 Structurally, the sonnet primarily contains monosyllabic end rhymes, which appropriately reflect the limited linguistic ability of children. The octave includes a smattering of end rhymes that soften the privileged boy’s “demand” and drain its aggressive effect with the succeeding fluid rhymes of “beguiled” and “smiled.” The unconventional sestet, in Sharp’s estimation, with its cddcdd pattern contains only monosyllabic words, which create an unsettling impression through the abrupt pronunciation that the children’s situation typifies. The pairing of the end rhymes in the four lines that initiate the sestet contribute to the disconsolate tone with “lurks” and “shirks,” and they remind the reader of physical discomfort with “feet” and “street.” The faint hope of the concluding couplet gains impact with the combination “sweet” and “greet,” intimating gentleness and amiability. In violating the typical Petrarchan pattern, the closing couplet calls attention to the plea for change. The final Southern sonnet to be analyzed in this chapter, “The Nineteenth Century,” explores the prospect of fulfilled hope but also the consequences of apathy toward those left behind. The sonnet carries a broader scope than the preceding pair, in that poverty is not an exclusive concern but an implicit component among others. The octave opens with a call to action at a pivotal moment in Victorian society. The speaker urges an outpouring of boundless love to distressed individuals, which is deemed the true purpose of human life. This is the time for living souls to live,   For generous hearts their wealth of love to pour   Into an ocean widening evermore To hold the utmost measure man can give.

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The second segment of the octave relates that the present time demands serious thinkers to question incessantly the presumptions underpinning the culture and to articulate the proper direction for advancement, despite the possibility of hostile reactions. As in the preceding lines, an urgent tone pervades the octave. And this the age for earnest minds to seek   Secure foundations for fast-growing thought;   To ask, and ask again, is strongly taught, And what each finds, with courage must he speak.

Heightening the impact of the octave is its transgressive abbacddc structure, which not only departs from the Petrarchan model but also includes more rhymes than Caine recommended in his 1882 text. With the volta, the speaker shifts attention to stress that liberty and equality represent the essential traits of a progressive civilization, with the opportunity to reach one’s potential accorded to all. Of freedom, glorious glimpses gleam and glance    Across the eager eyes oped wide to see    The promise of a grander century When all shall march where now a few advance. Although we see it not, our lives to-day Are paving, ill or well, the widening way.

The sestet is not spatially divided from the octave, which reminds of WattsDunton’s comment that in such a configuration the sestet “seems to be merely a portion of the octave’s movement rising to a close more or less climacteric.” Additionally, the format matches Watts-Dunton’s description of the sestet that “seems to be added to the octave’s movement, added after its apparent termination in a kind of tailpiece, answering to what in music we call the ‘coda.’”22 The alliteration in the first line of the sestet substantially enhances the impact of the passage, for the four words beginning with the identical two consonants cause a reader to pause momentarily in pronunciation and hopefully recognize the enormous influence that the promotion of liberty entails. The “eager eyes” of the subsequent line produce a melodious sound that intimates the redemptive possibilities that the future could hold. In invoking militaristic language in the fourth line, the sestet depicts

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the pursuit of social justice as taking on the gravity of a pivotal battle that would determine the culture’s success or failure. The closing couplet imparts a forceful warning, accentuated by the formal anomaly; the path that society will embrace is being determined at this temporal juncture, and only the movement toward decisive equality and shared opportunity will enable the country to thrive. Otherwise, society will become increasingly misguided and perhaps irretrievably flawed. Syllabic configurations and their rhymes powerfully reinforce the sonnet’s content. Eleven-syllable lines ending with a stress accentuate heartfelt generosity in the octave and expansive freedom in the sestet. Single-syllable words dominate the end rhymes, which thereby highlight the multisyllabic ones that offer key pieces of the sonnet’s argument. Thus, “evermore” indicates that the outpouring of love must continue without cessation. “Century” and “to-day” provide the temporal links, intimating the long-term consequences of a positive or negative response to social injustice and the urgency of embracing the proper option at the present moment. “Advance” characterizes the entire thrust of the sonnet: the absolute necessity of helping others for Victorian society to move forward.

Other Voices Assail Poverty Like Southern, Dollie Radford assessed poverty as an overriding problem, and “Two Songs” from A Light Load (1891) turned to the example of a child, oblivious to the gravity of the situation yet definitively affected by it. Composed of three stanzas, the poem is set in a street, likely within London or other expansive metropolitan locale, where a girl and her mother are singing. An assumption that the mother is simply attempting to divert her child immediately dissolves because the parent presumably hoped for passersby to part with a coin or two. The conditions are harsh, for “[w]inds blow cold in the bright March weather,” and the girl wears “tattered garments [that] scarce hung together.” As the girl walks along, the speaker relates that the “little maid” smiled and laughed, even though “too happy to wonder why.” Although the poem focuses primarily on the child, it makes clear that she is not alone in her impoverished state, for “the air is heavy with childish voices.” The possibility of alleviating poverty seems chimeric in the poem’s closing lines, for the future apparently will repeat the present since “[s]ongs which the night with burning tears” unveils will revisit “the coming years.”

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Although the title can be interpreted as referring to songs about two children, the formal construction also implies that the second song is a subtextual one.23 The happiness the child exudes becomes undercut through this latent song, which is marked by discordance and chaos that mimic the plight of an impoverished youth. At first glance, the poem seems to conform to a consistent pattern with the ababcc rhyme extending through all three stanzas. They begin with nine-syllable lines that form a sequence of two trochees, two iambs, and a single unstressed syllable tacked on the end as if an afterthought, reminding of the common cultural response to poverty. Yet the shared progression merely serves as faint but misleading evidence that the poem as a unit tightly coheres and thereby conveys an orderly situation. Instead, stark inconsistencies arise everywhere else in the poem through syllabic deviations and metric anomalies. Lines vary with eight, nine, ten, and eleven syllables with no apparent logic or semblance of cohesion. In fact, only in two lines is there even a consistent section of syllables, with ten- and eleven-syllable lines following the opening line of nine syllables in the first pair of stanzas. An expectation that syllabic discrepancies are deployed to confer emphasis or to separate ideas does not apply, for the disparities appear random. Through the numerous formal discontinuities that the poem displays, the tumultuous lives of the indigent are strikingly put into relief. Also addressing poverty from a comprehensive perspective is E. Nesbit’s “At the Feast,” appearing in Lays and Legends (1886). In its nine aaba quatrains, the poem captures the self-indulgence of financially comfortable individuals desiring “[p]erfection in our luxuries,” along with their utter apathy directed toward the impoverished and a cruel disdain for the travails of others. The selfish priorities of the rich, who act as a collective speaker in the poem, are related in several stanzas, as in the following examples. How our least want may best be satisfied, How not a pleasure may be left untried;   How to appease each longing and desire, This we have learned, and something else beside. Yes, we have learned to know, and not to shrink From knowing, to what depths our brothers sink;   And we have learned the lesson “not to feel,” And we have learned the lesson “not to think.”

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The wealthy insist that they have absorbed the lesson, or else they would be affected by the suffering poor. Three images intermittently appear in the poem to stress the contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor, initially all associated with a pampered life: music, “soft light,” and flowers. As the poem continues, however, the images metamorphose into dismaying reminders of the terrible toll that poverty exerts as the speakers realize that a recognition of others’ misery would disturb their pleasures. We should not hear the music, but instead, Hear that wild, bitter, heart-sick cry for bread,   And in the lamps that light our lavish feast, Should see but tapers burning for the dead. We should not see the myriad blossoms waste, The bloom of them would be thrust back, displaced   By the white faces of the starving children— Wasted and wan, who might have been flower-faced.

The affluent speakers resolve the potential discomfort by continuing to detach themselves from the sordid realities facing the less fortunate. Inconvenient questions are ignored as the rich set aside speculations about whether “these flowers seem fair,” if “music [can] drown the little piteous voices,” and the “little faces there” are visible. Rather, the wealthy begin to realize that the grandeur of their lives does not outweigh consideration of the poor. For “faring sumptuously every day,” For raiment soft and music on our way,   We give—the tortured lives of little children: For such a purchase, what a price to pay!

The poem is written primarily in iambic pentameter, but several deviations illuminate significant points. Thus, the plea for bread, although ten syllables, includes a trochee and a spondee. The pallor of the emaciated children gains prominence through its eleven syllables, which include another trochee and spondee, as well as the next line, also eleven syllables with an anomalous meter. In the succeeding stanza, trochees and spondees stress the heart-rending cries and pale demeanor of the children. The final stanza highlights the line referring to luxurious living through anapests, and the thematic counterpart of the children’s “tortured lives” adds a feminine ending to the iambic pentameter.

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Nesbit’s “A Last Appeal,” also found in Lays and Legends (1886), resounds with Southern’s “Of Sympathy” in reminding that all individuals share universal physiological characteristics. Like Nesbit’s “At the Feast,” the speaker in “A Last Appeal” is a collective one but in this case expresses the sentiments of the poor rather than the rich, to whom the voices instead appeal. Knowing our needs, hardly knowing our powers, Hear how we cry to you, brothers of ours!— Brothers in nature, pulse, passions, and pains, Our sins in you, and your blood in our veins. First in your palace, or last in our den, Basest or best, we are all of us men!

As this opening stanza develops, it calls for fairness so that “common manhood” obtains adequate nourishment and remuneration. The stanza concludes with a refrain that appears in the three remaining stanzas, each of which is composed of eight lines preceding it.   “Food that we make for you,    Money we earn:   Give us our share of them—    Give us our turn.”

The rich are specifically named in the successive stanza—“[l]andowners, bankers, and merchants”—and asked if the poor deserve merely a “pitiful dole” that “just holds worn body to desolate soul.” The tone becomes increasingly insistent and confrontational as the poem proceeds. Ever more passionate grows our demand— Give us our share of our food and our land: Give us our rights, make us equal and free— Let us be all we are not, but might be. Our sons would be honest, our daughters be pure, If our wage were more certain, your vices less sure— Oh, you who are forging the fetters we feel, Hear our wild protest, our maddened appeal—

The stanza then turns to the refrain with its demand for equality.

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The closing stanza becomes even more forceful, containing an oblique threat that failure to provide justice will lead to a violent rebellion ordained by God “when the flame of His patience burns low.” At that point, the poor will become the deadly instrument by which the wealthy will be punished, “with His foot on your necks.” The closing lines preceding the refrain are especially chilling, for God will “thunder your doom, as you die by the rod / Of the vengeance of man through the justice of God.” The poem’s crescendo in content is amplified by an unvarying structure that proceeds relentlessly. The stanzas remain unindented until the refrain, as if moving without pause to the iterated lines. Adding to the effect is the persistent sequence of the couplets that transmit the workers’ demands with the aabbccdd chains. The refrain is dramatically indented, with the second and fourth lines recessed even more than the others; with this varied form, the refrain becomes especially prominent in demanding that workers share in the benefits their labors make possible. Annie Matheson’s 1890 “A Song for Women,” appearing in The Religion of Humanity, directs its attention specifically to the plight of a particular group of workers, detailing the miseries of seamstresses barely able to survive. In addition to her poetry, Matheson wrote about social concerns for various magazines, and the essays were eventually published in Leaves of Prose (1912). Matheson was identified as “[a]n egalitarian feminist” who wrote “vigorous poetic denunciations of the poverty that surrounded her”; Matheson’s “A Song for Women” was featured in a leaflet by the Women’s Protective and Provident League and “became one of her best-known works,” notes Florence Boos. The League was the first trade union for women and represented a range of occupations. Matheson commented that “I have had the high honour of living in the closest intercourse with labouring people, and I know that their lives … are ever on the edge of tragedy.”24 Descriptions of the seamstress’ work area in “A Song for Women” present throughout the poem a harsh picture, especially through troubling adjectives. She labors in “a dreary narrow room,” with the adjectives expressing as well the state of her existence. The room is a dismal carceral setting where she is “[s]hut in by four dull ugly walls” like a prisoner awaiting execution as “[t]he hours crawl round with murderous tread.” The veritable cell, where she “earns a prisoner’s dole,” is located on “a noisome street,” and “the stifling heat” nearly causes the “starving girl” to faint as she “works out her doom.” The poem provides few details about the young woman’s appearance, which suggests that she functions as a

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kind of everywoman for wretched seamstresses. Instead, the attention is primarily trained on the miserable work itself and the meager reward it brings. “Swift ceaseless toil scarce wins her bread,” despite her workday lasting from dawn to dusk. The woman’s “longed-for sleep” brings only a brief respite before she is “roughly wake[d]” to again with “[t]ired hands the restless needle ply.” The Bitter Cry of Outcast London details the unenviable routine of a seamstress who labors seventeen hours with “no pause for meals” but “eats her crust and drinks a little tea as she works.” Her drudgery provides “not her living only, but her shroud.”25 Despite the Matheson character’s “days of changeless want and pain,” she avoids the temptation of prostitution or thievery, “[t]oo pure and proud to soil her soul, / Or stoop to basely gotten gain.” In such physical distress that the “weary woman” can barely realize “if she be alive or dead,” nevertheless “back and forth her needle goes / In tune with throbbing heart and head.” In the last of six stanzas, the comfortably situated speaker wonders if she can ignore the seamstress’s plight. O God in heaven! shall I, who share   That dying woman’s womanhood,   Taste all the summer’s bounteous good Unburdened by her weight of care?

The speaker’s question, however, remains unanswered. Whether the speaker will act to alleviate the seamstress’ misery seems unlikely, though, if the speaker is herself an everywoman for other Victorians who turn aside from such an uncomfortable inquiry. With its unusual configuration, “A Song for Women” seems like a duet, with a quatrain presenting the seamstress’s misfortunes answered with a rejoinder enumerating the beauties and consolations of nature in stark contrast. Each abba stanza is completed by a different three-line response, which is indented beyond the interior recesses of the quatrain and italicized to make it especially prominent, as does the ccc rhyme underscoring the contrast. In several of the quatrains, the first and last lines seem to summarize the ideas. For example, the initial line of the opening stanza describes the dismal room where the seamstress labors and the final line concludes the portrait of the loathsome space by solemnly stating that there she proceeds toward her death. In their entirety, all of the seven-line stanzas except one carry eight syllables in iambic form; the lone exception begins the final stanza with nine syllables, which sets apart the well-heeled speaker’s reaction to the seamstress slowly perishing.

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Perhaps through this variation a Victorian reader would pause to consider the fateful path of a pathetic seamstress and seek to alleviate her pain. In two poems briefly mentioned here, May Kendall also considers specific occupations as bringing not subsistence but poverty. Not only did Kendall write poetry about the working poor and the indigent, she became an activist on social issues who met with workers in rural England, states Diana Maltz.26 The “Legend of the Maid of All Work,” included in Dreams to Sell (1887), draws a sharp comparison between “happy, happy Kensington” and the bleak environment with its “chill mist” where the unfortunate woman resides. In the “Paradise” of Kensington, “[t]he world grew brighter,” faces bore “[a] different look,” and “a cool, refreshing breeze” brought relief. On her “one whole holiday,” the speaker visits the wealthier area but feels “lonely and half lost” among the crowds as if “they an alien people were.” The maid believes she is veritably invisible, musing that “no one saw me there / More than a shadow or a ghost.” The poem stresses the maid’s fatigue from her demanding labor, for she struggles through “the weary day” and is so exhausted that she is “too tired to pray.” During “sultry noonday” the maid undergoes the “hardest time” as she “climb[s], / Half faltering, up the dizzy stair, / When the walls stagger.” Kendall’s “The Sandblast Girl and the Acid Man,” appearing in Songs from Dreamland (1894), is spoken by the latter worker. Preoccupied with the attractive but pale Maggie, the acid man occasionally notes unseemly conditions in the Manchester factory where the pair earn their meager livings producing stained glass in “a most terrific din.” As William Morris stated in 1887 about the factory system, “the necessity of making profits” comes “at the expense of the workman’s life.” The workers, Morris asserted, were “being forced to work in crowded, unwholesome, squalid, noisy dens.”27 Both the poem’s acid man and the sandblast girl have family members whom they financially assist, but the speaker comments that “for a working man, in short, / Life is a fearful risk.” Despite the hazards of his occupation, the speaker realizes that his unpleasant situation nevertheless makes him more fortunate than others. I’m vastly better off than some!    I think of how the many fare Who perish slowly, crushed and dumb,    For leisure, food and air. ’Tis hard, in Freedom’s very van,    To live and die a luckless churl. ’Tis hard to be an acid man,   Without a sandblast girl!

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The poem includes a socialist reference, alluding to the movement’s efforts during the late century to improve labor conditions, that the speaker utters in considering whether he will benefit from such actions. Yet his occasional perusals of the socialist Clarion bring him no assurance that positive change will occur, for he “wonder[s] if they’ll e’er succeed / In putting things to rights!” The poem’s bleak workplace resonates with Morris’ indictment that “[t]he present position of the workers is that of the machinery of commerce, or in plainer words its slaves.” Morris observed that “as we live now, it is necessary that a vast part of the industrial population should be exposed to the danger of periodical semi-starvation.”28

Failures of the Church Apparently, the church will not provide the solution to poverty, according to scathing poems by Kendall and two other New Woman. Observed The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: “Whilst we have been building our churches and solacing ourselves with our religion … the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable.” Similarly, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) by William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, questioned the reason for “all this apparatus of temples and meeting-­ houses to save men from perdition in a world which is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them from the inferno of their present life?”29 Kendall decries the failings of organized religion in the three-part Dreams to Sell verse, “Church Echoes, which is spoken by a vicar’s daughter, a charity child, and a tramp, as the poem identifies them. The vicar’s daughter describes the lowly site “[d]own in the depths of this fair church” of the pews designated for “the strange Bohemians” who cannot afford the preferred seats that others obtain through subscription. “A man may find them if he search,” the daughter says of the physically and figuratively marginalized pews, as opposed to the comfortable seats that wealthier patrons occupy, for “[w]e are above them and beyond.” The daughter adds to her condescending and unsympathetic description that the unfortunate occupants “sit and stare” while “[d]ecorously we meet their view / As if they were an empty pew … and reverently we respond” to ecclesiastical cues during the service. Moreover, each of the three quatrains that relate the daughter’s patronizing remarks fittingly concludes with the parenthetical refrain, (“Have mercy upon them, miserable offenders”), since

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the statement unwittingly erodes her sanctimonious feeling of superiority. Not only does the sentence, as Virginia Blain observes, erroneously quote The Book of Common Prayer,30 it conveniently drops the significant pronoun of the original version that designates “us” as among the offenders. Amplifying the daughter’s dismissive judgment of and privileged position over the supposed Bohemians is the fact that with the refrain, her voice occupies five lines in each of the three stanzas, while the comments of the charity child and the tramp are each fully contained within quatrains. Yet the tramp, who has the last words in the poem, has four quatrains in which to present an important perspective. Unlike the “Bohemians” who have merely one book of prayer to consult, the daughter and “[w]e Philistines in cushioned pews / Have prayer-­ books more than we can use.” Her self-designation immediately evokes, of course, Matthew Arnold’s discussion of the middle class in the 1869 Culture and Anarchy, and the term she smugly selects is certainly a bemusing one. In Arnold’s estimation, the Victorian version of a Philistine is, “as is well known, the enemy of the children of light or servants of the idea.” These anti-intellectual persons who dismiss the culture of the arts are “particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light” and thus the label “specially suits our middle class” more attuned to the “machinery of business” and other materialistic matters than in seeking, according to Arnold’s famous phrase, “sweetness and light.”31 Philistines, Arnold asserted, “believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich.”32 The charity child of Kendall’s second vignette seems to detect the lack of religious sincerity evidenced by the vicar’s daughter as well as her sisters. So unengaged with the meaning of the church ceremony, the daughters appear as if “they are made of wood,” no more animate than “rests for hymn-books.” Unable to remain awake during the lengthy sermon, the charity child and the fellow occupants of the free pews cannot learn if the daughters likewise fell asleep. The unsuccessful attempt to discern the daughters’ engrossment in the service leads the child merely to “think that they are made of wood.” The inability of the sermon to maintain the charity children’s attention points as well to the failure of the Church to provide a relevant, helpful message to the needy poor. The final speaker, the tramp, attests to the seeming invisibility of the poor to the vicar himself as a representative of Anglican officialdom, for he “[h]ardly includes us” in his glance from a “glassy countenance.” Although

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another official, the verger, peers at the indigents, he does so “with superior eyes” while he gazes “in a still surprise,” as if he expected disruptive behavior. A weekly attendee of the service, the tramp nevertheless finds “[n]o hand stretched out to welcome me” in this “friendless land.” Yet the tramp is the true devout among the “ranks of aliens.” Once the organ music issues forth, the tramp is spiritually affected like the “true musician” playing the organ. The tramp can “see” him and realize their shared feeling of the divine presence through the music, unlike other churchgoers who “cannot trace / The light unknown upon his face.” Although other congregants shun the tramp, “music takes [him] by the hand” in a demonstration of true faith. As noted, the daughter’s sense of superiority to the poor, in part suggested by the fifth line of her quatrains seeking mercy for the “miserable offenders,” is undercut by not only the misquotation but also by the tramp’s extra stanza. Yet another aspect of the poem diminishes her standing further, for the quatrains of all three speakers (excluding the daughter’s appended misquotation) follow an aabb progression that subtly places the trio upon the same plane. Thus, the daughter’s commentary is not presented in a complicated, elegant, or sophisticated form that would dignify her, albeit in merely a linguistic way, but in the common parlance indicative of the other speakers. The speech of the charity child and tramp is not marked by flawed grammar, impenetrable sentences, or idiomatic indulgence. Any superiority the Philistines claimed, the comparable syntax insinuates, exists merely on a material level. Kendall made a related point in “Otherworldliness,” also published in Dreams to Sell. The poem chides religious individuals who care only about their own salvation and ignore the problems around them. “Hell, heaven, is not your goal,” the poem admonishes and asks, “Is there nothing to be done / But just to save your soul?” The state of one’s salvation does not outweigh the need to assist others. “For men do what you may— / And leave to God your soul.” To L. S. Bevington, organized religion is utterly corrupt, as asserted in the Liberty Lyrics (1895) poem “In and Out of Church.” An anarchist sympathizer, Bevington was a New Woman and social activist who sought a better life for men as well as women. “In and Out of Church” relentlessly assails the clergy for hypocrisy, dishonesty, and greed in its opening address to the “[d]ogma-dealer, talking treason, / Spurning truth, perverting reason.” The pronouncements of the “canting devil-dodger” are maligned as “twaddle” and “priestly mumble,” but most condemnatory is the clergy’s

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preoccupation with money as “Mammon’s law-paid molly-coddle” in their “Mammon-temples.” Among clerical transgressions is the prospect of “‘Heaven to let’—to paying lodger,” the incessant sale of “gammon / All for pelf,” and the self-indulgence of the Lord Archbishop “[p]aid to gorge himself, and blind you.” Money is attained by preying on those who least can afford to part with it; the funds bear “sweat from poor men’s faces.” The poem calls on the victims to rebel and defy the avaricious clergy. Come, dear toilers, stained and weary, Come and help the world grow cheery, Come from out your prison dreary          Built by greed; You who labour heavy-laden, Slaving mother, trampled maiden, Ever preached to, ever preyed on,          In your need; Let your winters grow no colder, Rise at last and dare be bolder, Setting shoulder firm to shoulder          For a thrust! Yokes be eased, and burdens lighter, As the great Hope warms the fighter, And the broad New Day grows brighter          And more just.

The three-line stanzas, followed by a truncated fourth line, present an angry speaker berating the clergy, with the last line seeming like a shout. Nearly every trio of lines follows an aaa scheme, which creates an insistent, pounding litany of church offenses in its own version of a rhythmic hymn. A line that deviates from the format does so to emphasize “your Mammon.” To avoid sounding like an impromptu rant, the poem coheres through rhyming pairs of the fourth lines in a continuous pattern that belies a presumption of unbridled thought. Instead, with this unvarying stanza form, the poem reveals that its assertions proceed from careful consideration.

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M. E. Coleridge’s “Our Lady,” published in Fancy’s Following (1896) under the pseudonym “Anodos,” provides an implicit critique of wealthy hypocrites who consider themselves preferred by God over the poor people they spurn. Although the great-great niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge asserted that “Woman with a Big W bores me supremely,”33 she carries New Woman credentials for her many years of teaching at the Working Women’s College, as well as the sexuality inherent in several of her verses. In five ababb stanzas, “Our Lady” makes indisputably clear that the indigent, not the rich, are the recipients of divine approbation. The poem achieves that objective by repeatedly demonstrating that the woman chosen to bear Christ, and whom affluent Victorians revered, came from an impoverished, exceedingly humble background. The point is made abundantly clear in the opening stanza. Mother of God! no lady thou. Common woman of common earth! Our Lady ladies call thee now, But Christ was never of gentle birth; A common man of the common earth.

The next stanza subtly derides the prosperous individuals who would have expected one of their own privileged status to be selected as the mother of Christ, rebuking them that “God’s ways are not as our ways.” The stanza proceeds to demonstrate the degree to which even an aristocrat would sacrifice to receive the honor. The noblest lady in all the land Would have given up half her days, Would have cut off her right hand, To bear the Child that was God of the land.

The poem suggests, however, that a noblewoman would have refused to marry the lowly Joseph. Never a lady did He choose, Only a maid of low degree, So humble she might not refuse The carpenter of Galilee. A daughter of the people, she.

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Mary’s modest background continues to be heralded, in contrast to a noblewoman who would be incapable of likewise singing “the song of her heart” for “all mankind.” Unlike the higher classes, Mary “knew no letters, had no art.” The poem concludes with a sharp warning to “listen lords and ladies gay!” As Luke stated in the New Testament, the poor will be rewarded and the rich dismissed. “He hath filled the hungry with good things,” the poem advises in resounding italics quoting Luke (1:53), but “the rich He hath sent empty away.” Whether through such religious references or through secular arguments, the poems assessed in this chapter make amply clear the responsibilities of the privileged few to assist the unprivileged many. The noted resonances to nonfiction writings derived by clerical, socialist, and other humanistic observers brought startling accounts of the tragedies that so many impoverished Victorians were doomed to endure. Through their poems, the women writers both expressed the miseries of the indigent and the hope that their favored contemporaries could help alleviate the pain. In exposing, describing, and condemning the plights of far too many Victorians, the poets performed an indispensable function that aimed for a more just and merciful society.

Notes 1. William Greenslade, “Socialism and Radicalism,” 76; Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, 54; David Thomson, England in the 19th Century, 194; “The Victorian Age,” 1029; Thomson, 194. 2. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 7. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Sidney Webb, “The Basis of Socialism: Historic,” 58. 5. Two critics who have examined Southern’s poetry are Fabienne Moine in Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (114) and Amy Christine Billone, who devoted part of a chapter in Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet to assessing Southern’s work (Chap. 4). 6. Thomas Pallister Barkas was involved in business and occupied municipal positions. He held a keen interest in science and published books on fossils of a variety of wildlife. He was also an advocate of spiritualism, about which he wrote and lectured. 7. All of Southern’s poems discussed in this chapter were published in Sonnets and Other Poems.

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8. Moine discusses “The Thirst for Knowledge” in the context of gardens. The main character, Moine comments, lives within “a prison, albeit a gilded one.” Because she is female, the character “has to live by social rules and accept the limitation of space and opportunity imposed on her sex.” Moine asserts that “Southern questions the gendered orientation given to gardens and those who use them” (Women Poets in the Victorian Era, 114). 9. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 272–73; Grand, “The New Woman and the Old,” 674; J. Ashcroft Noble, The Sonnet in England and Other Essays, 13. 10. Samuel Waddington, English Sonnets by Living Writers, 192; Alex H. Japp, “The English Sonnet and Its History,” 259; Theodore Watts-­Dunton, Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder, 172, 173. Japp mentions several critics discussed in this chapter: Waddington, Watts-Dunton, T. Hall Caine, Noble, and William Sharp. 11. Natalie Houston, “Towards a New History,” 148, 164. 12. Sharp, Sonnets of This Century, xxxv. While Japp said that Sharp’s book was “admirable … in many ways” (“The English Sonnet and Its History,” 276), Japp nevertheless registered strong criticism about the volume’s supposed failings. 13. Sharp, Sonnets of This Century, lxii, lxi; “Review,” 188. Recognizing an eleventh syllable as acceptable in an octave is not a radical idea. An additional unstressed syllable is a common approach. 14. Among them were the Quarterly Review essayist, Caine, and the Spectator essay mentioned above. Japp, however, was strongly opposed. Japp said that “it is clear that close study finds a sufficiently strong precedent for the rhyming couplet-ending, whatever critics may choose to urge against it nowadays” (“The English Sonnet and Its History,” 269). 15. William Sharp, Sonnets of This Century, xxxvii, lxii, xxxvi. 16. John Wesley, The New Testament with Explanatory Notes, 252, 41. 17. Webb, “The Basis of Socialism: Historic,” 58. 18. Caine, Sonnets of Three Centuries, xxiv. 19. C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 423. 20. Benjamin Hall Kennedy, The Anglican Hymn Book, no. 45. 21. Symonds quoted in Watts-Dunton, Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder, 185. 22. Watts-Dunton, Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder, 179. 23. Ruth Livesey reads the poem as referring to two children. “The two songs of the first two contrasting sesta rima stanzas are those of girl children in radically different social positions: the indigent beggar child and the happy ‘little maid” out for a walk with her mother” (“Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Poetry,” 504). Linda K. Hughes speculates that Radford’s poem itself may count as one of the songs (New Women Poets, 7).

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24. Florence Boos, “Annie Matheson,” 143; Matheson quoted in Boos, 147. 25. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 16. 26. Diana Maltz, “Sympathy, Humor, and the Abject Poor in the Work of May Kendall,” 313. 27. William Morris, Signs of Change, 28. 28. Ibid., 16, 11. 29. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 4; William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out, 16. 30. Virginia Blain, Victorian Women Poets, 323. 31. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 62. 32. Ibid., 13. 33. Coleridge quoted in Angela Leighton, “Mary E.  Coleridge (1861–1907),” 612.

CHAPTER 5

Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’

Before the nineteenth century’s final decades, societal attitudes about the “fallen woman” often followed a scathing script that condemned the unfortunate transgressor to a bleak life as an outcast awaiting premature death. Conversely, enlightened individuals called for compassion, support, and reclamation rather than disdain and punishment. Although some Victorians retained reactionary views, judgments about fallen women eased somewhat by the fin de siècle. Yet, as poems explored in this chapter contend, many outcasts did not benefit from a charitable viewpoint, primarily impoverished females relegated to the lower classes, who were deemed inferior and hopelessly lost. Such a woman sadly remained a castaway, to invoke Augusta Webster’s powerful term for the titular protagonist of her 1870 dramatic monologue. Girls and young women were especially vulnerable to victimization, the works discussed in the following pages reveal, and the poems champion their cause. Societal abhorrence, accompanied by disturbing hypocrisy, continued to plague these females who had transgressed the code of Victorian morality, the poetry reveals. This chapter focuses initially on the extensive and important verses penned by Mathilde Blind, followed by significant poems written by her female contemporaries.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_5

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A Contextual Framework Rather than a seamless narrative, the nineteenth-century perceptions of the fallen woman varied considerably, shaped by gender identity, class status, and experience.1 As modern scholarship has revealed, literature had a marked effect on attitudinal tendencies, even though it often presented a very different story from actual conditions. Literature frequently consigned a fallen woman to an unbreakable, dismal, and descending spiral. Once she had fallen, the woman could not regain her former life. The main character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), for example, is punished for her seducer’s dishonorable act by early death when she contracts his disease while selflessly acting as his nurse. Little Em’ly in David Copperfield ultimately pays for her sexual surrender to the loathsome Steerforth by being expelled from the narrative and sent to Australia. Another Charles Dickens character, Oliver Twist’s Nancy, ends life as a murder victim. Later, the 1880s saw an alteration in the literary climate, notes Eric Trudgill, and fictional fallen women benefited from a “new liberalism” and a turn toward forgiveness. Jane M. Kubiesa credits sensation fiction for a greater acceptance of the literary fallen woman in the 1890s, citing a “less rigid view” as with George Moore’s Esther Waters and Thomas Hardy’s Tess.2 Nevertheless, Esther experiences her share of misery, while Tess and her baby suffer premature deaths. In the fin de siècle, Kathleen Hickok observes, the scenarios for fallen women had expanded and conventional literary patterns had virtually disappeared. Beginning in the middle of the century, the fictional fallen woman progressed from being “miserable and irretrievably lost” to “less inexorably doomed and degraded.”3 Such a broadened perspective provided a closer match to actual Victorian lives, for a fallen woman did not invariably suffer from social exclusion, unrelenting antipathy, and penitential behavior, critical commentary indicates. Murray Roston relates that portrayals of the figure as a “‘repentant sinner,’ longing to be reaccepted into society, bore only a limited resemblance to truth in the real world.” Some fallen women became economically comfortable, and respectable marriages with men of higher class status did occur.4 In fact, the boundary dividing the honorable from the dishonorable “might have been reasonably fluid,” Nina Auerbach points out; additionally, “the mobility of actual social life reverses the popular myth of a woman’s implacable fall.” As Dinah Mulock Craik argued in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858)¸ the notion “[t]hat for a

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single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature’s own dealings in the visible world.” Craik added, “[L]et a woman feel that, in moral as in physical disease, ‘while there is life, there is hope!’” In The Terrible Sights of London and Labours of Love in the Midst of Them (1870), Thomas Archer reminded readers that the fallen woman was “our sister, for whom Christ died.” Physician William Acton’s Prostitution that year provided an encouraging note about troubling cases, for there was “every reason to believe, that by far the number of women who have resorted to prostitution for a livelihood, return sooner or later to a more or less regular course of life.”5 In the early decades, rescue efforts proliferated to assist the fallen woman, as numerous reclamation and reform institutions, such as temporary transitional residences and more permanent Magdalen homes, were established with Christian principles in mind. A “very real presence of an emergent social outreach” existed, states Scott Rogers. Yet some reform establishments were deeply flawed. “[F]eeble institutions creep on from year to year,” said an anonymous essay in an 1848 Quarterly Review, which are “conducted on most imperfect principles.” Not only were homes cramped, explained rescue worker Felicia Skene in 1865, but “a narrow minded discipline, administered without either love or humility,” prevailed. The penitentiaries apparently had produced “far more evil than good,” Skene argued, and residents described them as “worse than jail.”6 The normal routine involved lengthy and strict instruction, periodic silence, severe discipline, and virtual imprisonment, with even minor infractions of the rules bringing harsh retribution, Skene reported.7 Furthermore, the selection process for applicants was “most ingeniously contrived to frustrate the object of the Refuge, by excluding all but an infinitesimal number out of the great aggregate,” she said. Successful applicants were required to demonstrate “unmistakable signs of penitence,” provide documentation of “perfect health,” and agree to a two-­ year residence, Skene revealed. In his late-century Hints on Rescue Work, Arthur J. S. Maddison indicated that “[s]trong girls … are readily admitted, and given plenty of work to do—perhaps more than is desirable,” while “weakly girls … are rejected.” Although Maddison insisted that the “very strong prejudice” against the homes was generally not based on fact, he did admit that exceptions remained. Another difficulty facing reform institutions, explained Rogers, involved a “tremendous confusion” on the part of rescue workers regarding fallen women, as well as the public’s oscillation between an understanding of circumstances leading to a fall

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and a belief that fallenness was a choice.8 As time passed, public sentiment increased in favor of social acceptance, although conservative Victorians were deeply concerned by their perceptions of moral transgressions. Diverse views about fallen women continued to define the century, even into the fin de siècle. Some writers argued in the late century that the plight of fallen women remained appalling. In his 1883 autobiography, for example, Anthony Trollope sympathized with a fallen individual who “remains in her abject, pitiless, unutterable misery, because this sentence of the world has placed her beyond the helping hand of Love and Friendship.” Trollope asked, “How is the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?” A character in The New Godiva (1885) serves as a mouthpiece for author Elizabeth Rachel Chapman in commiserating with “victims to the selfishness of men, the indifference of women, and the ignorance and callousness of society generally.” In an 1894 essay, Sarah Grand lamented the destroyed female lives, citing “the desolate and the oppressed” as well as “the awful dumb despair of those who have lost even the hope of help.” As late as 1898, Bishop Edgar Newcastle considered the situation disturbing and spoke of an apathetic response to helping fallen women. “[T]oo many professing Christians repudiate all responsibility for these outcasts of society,” he said. “They will say no prayer for their conversion, give no alms toward agencies that are set on foot to win them back, and sometimes even suspect the motives of those who are giving themselves to this work with untiring sacrifice.”9 In contrast to pessimistic assessments, philanthropist Mary Jeune spoke repeatedly and optimistically in the fin de siècle about successful interventions “for raising and rescuing the fallen.” Although she does not identify her own specific actions as a rescue worker, her vast practical experience, along with authorship of at least fifty essays in an array of periodicals, positioned Jeune as a highly consequential voice on the issue.10 Through reformist efforts, Jeune indicated in 1885, many women had been “restored to a respectable life, and have regained a position in the world that … [once] seemed impossible.”11 The untenable position of fallen women that existed in the past no longer prevailed, Jeune contended. Until recently, she observed, fallen females who had been “deserted by men who had ruined them, abandoned by friends and relations, seemed to have no prospect but residence in the workhouse for the rest of their lives.” Society ignored their plight and refused to accept them, for “[n]o repentance, however long, painful, or sincere, could expiate the fault,” Jeune stated. Indeed, for a fallen woman “the door of society was

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relentlessly barred against her, and over the portals of the new home and life she entered were inscribed the words, ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here.’”12 Fortunately, Jeune averred, “long desired change has come.”13 She asserted in 1891 that “there are hundreds of prosperous, happy, respectable wives and mothers in Britain whose lives, could they be revealed, would testify in striking terms that such is the case.” Moreover, Jeune observed that employment opportunities could be readily found, whereas a decade earlier such was not the case. The outcasts with the greatest chance for reclamation, Jeune thought, were those whose fall had recently occurred.14 Not all individuals, however, could benefit from assistance efforts, Jeune believed, and she drew a sharp distinction based on class status. Jeune certainly favored the higher class over the lower, and she applied middle-class values to the poor, judging them harshly rather than understanding their customs or extending sympathy for their situation. “A poor woman is … not a modest-minded woman in the same sense as women in a better class of life,” she averred, for the former is concerned not about moral failing but about the inconvenience brought by sexual experience. “To tell them that they have lost what ought to be to a woman her most precious possession is to appeal to instincts unknown to them,” Jeune presumed.15 The lower class, either urban or rural, has “no strong feeling in favour of women being pure,” Jeune insisted, and therefore its members resist reclamation efforts because they care only about their misfortune.16 These individuals were “ignorant” and lacked “real moral training,” Jeune opined, and there was “always the weak spot somewhere in their character.”17 A girl from the “better class” had been “shielded from every temptation and from the knowledge of the vice and evil of the world around her”; conversely, lower-class girls held “completer knowledge” than the middle-class daughters, and even were accustomed to sleeping alongside males. Jeune therefore concluded that “it is impossible to apply the same test to both.” As Emma Liggins remarks, Jeune’s dismissive assumption about working-class women considered them “always already fallen” and “very close to the shameless prostitute, even if they do not sell their bodies on the street.”18 Although Victorian attitudes had broadened over the decades, as evidenced not only by societal changes but also by the wide popularity of New Woman novels, late-century fiction still tended to punish rather than accept fallen women. For sexual New Women, however, a choice is made to pursue an unconventional life; as members of the middle class, they do

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not confront the overwhelming obstacles facing the destitute. Nevertheless, those New Women characters often end poorly. Once fallen, the characters suffer through hopeless lives with no opportunity to alter their bleak destinies. For them, no substantive improvements had occurred over time. Even if they do not actually die, these young women perish in every other sense. They do not benefit from the rosy prospects of Jeune’s “reclaimables” but become her “irreconcilables” instead, considered unredeemable and readily ignored by society.

Blind’s Tales of the Discarded As her poetry reveals, Blind did not accept such a dismissive response. Her oeuvre on the fallen woman is especially valuable both through its numerous offerings and its multiple scenarios. Four of the verses in particular compellingly address diverse situations that led to ruination, hopelessness, and abandonment for those lacking acceptable options for conducting their lives. In totality, the poems castigate Victorians who refused to recognize the perfidy of men exploiting such young women with impunity and virtually sentencing them to horrific destinies. An especially sharp indictment of societal attitudes toward the fallen woman comes in Blind’s signature poem, the book-length narrative The Ascent of Man (1889), which rewrites the Darwinian counterpart to undermine the odious notion of female inferiority, chronicle the grave problems created over centuries with male control, and consider women to be future saviors of the world. One vignette, included in “The Leading of Sorrow” segment of the triadic poem, makes the case against supposed male superiority in relating the story of a ruined woman. In the sketch, “a simple country-maiden” is seduced by an aristocratic youth who “often pledged his word” but abandons his supposed beloved whom he impregnated. Cast away by her unsympathetic father and left to “shelter henceforth how she may,” the new mother is forced into prostitution to care for her baby (93).19 Despite the mother’s sacrifice, the child dies and the mother suffers her own emotional death. With no recourse, the woman descends irretrievably into habitual prostitution, depicted in hellish terms: Beauty’s brilliant sceptre, ah, how brittle,   Drags her daily deeper down the pit. Ruin closes o’er her—hideous, nameless;   Each fresh morning marks a deeper fall.   (94)

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The /d/ sounds in the second line of the passage call to mind a harsh dirge, with each of the consonants resoundingly tolling a deadly proclamation. The passage’s final line, with its “deeper fall,” provides an unnerving echo. The woman eventually contracts syphilis and lives her final days in a hospital at age twenty, “callous, cankered, shameless.” Becoming delusional, the woman relives her peaceful days before the fateful event. Throughout her dolorous story, the woman is decidedly presented as a victim and her innocence repeatedly expressed through floral imagery.20 She is termed “a rustic blossom” even after the seduction (94). As a child she wandered through fields replete with hyacinths, lilacs, and other foliage; she is so immersed in the pastoral landscape that she is imbued with its elements, even as she awaits her supposed suitor and the sexual act that will lead to her devastation. Thus, with her virginal “milkwhite throat,” she reveals “the glow of maiden blushes” that emerge from her “rosy cheek,” and the apple blossoms that “fluttered” upon her coincide with the surrounding birds and her own “fluttering” heart (92). The lover’s visits occur in a “lilac-laden” environment, yet the meetings carry a disconcerting note in that they take place in a murky “[m]oonlight twilight” (93). The seduction is equated with a violation of nature, for lilacs fade and fledglings depart when the aristocrat ignores his troth and destroys the young woman emotionally as well as socially, financially, and ultimately somatically. As ghastly as the woman’s fate is in “The Leading of Sorrow,” the poetic vignette extrapolates the unnerving story to encompass a host of young women who are similarly despoiled and discarded, with floral imagery again coming into play to accentuate their innocence. The imagery not only reinforces that their unhappy circumstance stems from a breach of natural law, but also underscores their victimhood through predicates that signal a lack of agency. As Amanda Anderson comments, “the attribute of attenuated agency … typically defines fallenness.” Notes Chapman’s The New Godiva, adolescents are not free agents and not “fit to be launched upon the world alone” since they are “quasi-children.”21 Blind’s vignette employs compelling floral imagery to portray the fate of ruined young women. Lovely are the earliest Lenten lilies,   Primrose pleiads, hyacinthine sheets; Stripped and rifled from their pastoral valleys,   See them sold now in the public streets! Other flowers are sold there besides posies—   Eyes may have the hyacinth’s glowing blue, Rounded cheeks the velvet bloom of roses,   Taper necks the rain-washed lily’s hue.   (93–94)

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The /l/ alliteration in the first line, with its smooth sounds, evokes unbroken innocence before victimization. Subsequent /s/ alliteration with its sleek cadence provides an ironic contrast after exploitation occurs. The pleiads of the second line bring to mind the mythological ones, who escaped Orion with aid. Unlike them, however, no powerful figure will intervene to protect the poem’s unfortunate youths. The passage reminds of W. T. Stead’s disturbing 1885 exposure of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which was published in the Pall Mall Gazette.22 Blind’s stanza similarly alludes to unworldly girls wrested from their rural homes and forced into prostitution. The widespread tragedy of these other children, as well as those who have been seduced and also lack alternatives, provides a biting social commentary of upper-class males preying on naïve girls. “[T]his vast tribute of maidens, unwitting or unwilling, … is nightly levied in London by the vices of the rich upon the necessities of the poor,” said Stead. Although he does blame the seducers, Stead especially assails the organized ruination of children who are “snared, trapped and outraged.” The modern metropolis, “beneath the gas glare of its innumerable lamps, became … a resurrected and magnified City of the Plain, with all the vices of Gomorrah.”23 Adding to the horrendous picture is a resonance to Oscar Wilde’s 1885 “The Harlot’s House” with its “grotesques,” “silhouetted skeletons,” and “horrible Marionette” where “the dead are dancing with the dead” and dawn “[c]rept like a frightened girl.” Blind’s unstinting condemnation points to aristocratic predation as well as the contempt accorded to fallen women, the injustice experienced by the impoverished, and the hypocrisy of the upper classes. Following her father’s rejection, the poem’s main character suffers from a pitiless society that refuses aid. She fits Jeune’s category of those who have just fallen and worthy of assistance, but as an impoverished woman she is left adrift. Who will house the miserable mother   With her child, a helpless castaway! “I, am I the keeper of my brother?”   Asks smug virtue as it turns to pray!   (93)

As the narrator of Trollope’s An Eye for an Eye remarks, “terrible retribution” comes to a fallen woman although the “sin has been mutual, [and] falls with so crushing a weight upon her who of the two sinners has ever been by far the less sinful.”24 Unsurprisingly, then, not only is assistance

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refused to Blind’s protagonist, the “outcast” earlier serves as the object of implacable enmity who is reviled and punished, rather than her victimizer and a culture that refuses to hold him accountable. Scapegoat of a people’s sins, and hunted,   Howled at, hooted to the wilderness, To that wilderness of deaf hearts, blunted   To the depths of woman’s dumb distress.

The central character becomes an emblem of the fallen female, demonstrating both her own and “woman’s” despair in analogous situations. Such individuals are mute (“dumb distress”), for they are powerless to speak out and alter the scathing judgments they are compelled to endure. To other Londoners, the protagonist is merely unwanted material, considered “[j]etsam, flotsam of the monster city” that should be cast aside. She is “[s]purned, defiled, reviled” (91). The /h/ alliteration of the second line carries an onomatopoeic element through its mimicry of the disparaging exclamations. The hard /d/ sounds of the final pair of lines evoke a harsh condemnation of an uncaring mob. After the woman’s death, the poem attacks her seducer, the “most noble lord” who had compromised the maiden “in her innocent prime.” This reminder of her victimization immediately precedes further evidence of the aristocrat’s insincerity as he “preaches” to his dinner companions while consuming his wine that they should be resigned to the fate of fallen women. With the preachifying predicate highlighting the seducer’s pretensions to virtue, the poem proceeds to heap further scorn upon him as well as upon “a grateful public” that deems his comments “[o]racles of true philanthropy.” The situations of the lord and the woman he led to her pitiful death are strikingly contrasted in contiguous lines to underscore the unfairness of the destroyer being lauded and the destroyed being reviled. While the aristocrat is traveling to his dinner and the accolades he will receive, he passes the “pauper’s grave” into which the scorned woman had been “[p]itched,” as if a piece of rubbish being discarded (95). Class status and gender preserve the victimizer but devastate the victim. Following these events, the poem attacks the injustice of a culture that allows such a scenario to occur, first invoking the language of war to claim that an insentient cannonball wreaking devastation is preferable to an apathetic society.

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Peace ye call this? Call this justice, meted   Equally to rich and poor alike? Better than this peace the battle’s heated   Cannon-balls that ask not whom they strike!

As the stanza continues, the scathing imagery of predation foregrounds the inhumanity that enables the rapacious behavior destroying female lives. Better than this masquerade of culture   Hiding strange hyaena appetites, The frank ravening of the raw-necked vulture   As its beak the senseless carrion smites.   (95)

The dictional choices underscore the animalism of men who feed upon innocents and of contemporaries, regardless of biological sex, who refuse to punish the guilty in accordance with the dual standard of the time. As Trollope said, “almost all the punishment and disgrace is heaped on the one” far less sinful; yet “for our erring sons we find pardon easily enough.”25 The first line of the Blind passage accuses the culture of pretense and falsity in assuming a mask of propriety as it enables despoliation to flourish. The subsequent lines draw upon two particularly repulsive images to convey the gravity of victimization. A hyena is known as a carnivorous hunter, conniving thief, and persistent scavenger that rends its desired food, leaving it merely a scrap of its former self. The “strange” aspect of the hyena’s cravings denotes unsettling behavior that parallels the hungers of its human counterparts. An “appetite” connotes an irrepressible hunger that drives a predator to feed, and in a libidinous context the word suggests sexual voracity. Like the hyena, the vulture consumes the dead; the human version feeds on the living dead. The vulture’s “ravening” denotes ferocity and insatiability, while its “raw” neck indicates coarseness—all of which are qualities of the males whom Blind’s poetry indicts. A vulture’s beak pierces, an act that also evokes the ravaging of a virgin. She is the “senseless carrion,” the stunned and dehumanized individual whom her assaulter violently attacks. Of the various characters populating Blind’s narrative, ironically only the fallen woman displays compassion. Before she enters the hospital and begins her journey toward death, the woman comforts and cares for the orphaned children of a drunken father who murdered their mother in a rage. Left alone, “the children wail forsaken, / Crane their wrinkled necks and cry for food” (90). The protagonist becomes a savior figure, for “one

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came” to minister to the children in a reminder of the biblical statement that a “soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation” (Psalm 62:1). Despite her history as a prostitute, she is still depicted as “a girlish thing,” an innocent who was controlled by others. Degraded by her exploiters, however, the woman is termed “a creature” whose lack of agency is reflected by her being “[f]lung by wanton hands ‘mid lust and crime.” In another allusion to Christ, the “outcast came” to aid the children, feeding and nurturing them (91).26 Yet the toll wrought by her tragic experiences becomes apparent as she is expiring in the hospital, demanding alcohol and laughing coarsely. The scene ushers forth another condemnation, in this instance aimed at a religion that provides care only as death approaches, rather than during her painful life when further misery could be averted. Thus, she derides a “meekly praying nurse, / Eloquent about her soul’s hereafter,” with a curse. The protagonist responds to the prayers with a sneering “Souls be blowed!” (94) in a curious statement that resonates with the floral imagery that had signified her innocence, before “her youth’s pollution” (92). A “blowed” flower has bloomed and is in the process of dying, and the woman’s curse indicates that the time for religious entities to save her soul had passed without meaningful intervention. She enters death as “an unrepenting sinner,” a resentful victim of an unforgiving and hypocritical Christian culture that ignored its own responsibility, allowing the circumstances generating a fall to continue but considering condemnation of the fallen justified (95). Craik summed up a prevalent reaction of such harsh individuals, which she deemed “unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy”; she added, “God may forgive you, but we never can!”27 The woman’s story as unfolded in this Ascent of Man vignette gains additional force through its formal qualities. The stanzas seem like distorted sonnet fragments, disfiguring both Petrarchan and Shakespearean structures. The eight-line stanzas resemble the octave linage of the Petrarchan type, yet no sestet provides an apt or comforting conclusion. Although lacking the quatrains of the Shakespearean variety, the stanzas carry the ababcdcd rhyme scheme indicative of the first two Elizabethan quatrains. Rather than a smooth, unvarying progression, no consistent metric pattern occurs. Some stanzas carry five feet while others have different numbers, but the sequence is jumbled from stanza to stanza. With these ragged, irregular, and turbulent structures, the stanzas reflect the wretched existence of a fallen woman marked by devastation and destruction.

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No Maternal Protection The thematic thrust of The Ascent of Man vignette is similarly played out in “The Message,” an entry in Blind’s Dramas in Miniature. The 1891 collection, which includes several verses about fallen women, also includes numerous poems about love in its various facets.28 In “The Message,” the main character, Nellie Dean,29 is a prostitute dying at a hospital, whose girlhood was one of innocence until the death of her mother and the resulting loss of protection. In her delusion, Nellie returns to her childhood and seeks her mother, who “left me in the world alone, / In the wild world astray” (26). With no maternal aid, Nellie descends into prostitution to avoid starvation, and she becomes coarsened and embittered. As Deborah Anna Logan comments, the lack of a mother would mean to Victorians that she could not “foster proper moral growth during her daughter’s sexual rites of passage.”30 Nellie scorns the hospital nurse who is praying for the soul of this likely syphilitic sufferer and bemoaning the lack of success in the effort. We could do nothing, one and all   How much we might beseech; Her girlish blood had turned to gall: Far lower than her body’s fall   Her soul had sunk from reach. Her soul had sunk into a slough   Of evil past repair.   (19–20)

Indeed, Nellie curses, sneers, mocks, and abuses, with no interest in salvation. She refuses to kneel and pray, rails against heaven, and dismisses “canting chaff” (19). “She was too cankered at the core,” the nurse recalls, to change her sordid outlook and repent (21), even proclaiming that Nellie would follow the same path if given a new chance. Like the Ascent protagonist, Nellie rebukes religious figures since they declined to aid her in her earlier life. The nurse’s exhortations “pall,” Nellie asserts, with the predicate suggesting they are merely shrouds covering the dead rather than sources of spiritual enlightenment (21). Spewing venom to the nurse, Nellie scoffs, “You’ll make no convert here” (18). As Jeune said about fallen women who resisted spiritual aid, “[i]t is … useless to dwell on the religious or on the sentimental aspect of the subject. One is baffled and disappointed at every turn.” Jeune added, “To come to a woman in this

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desolate and forlorn position with any of the common-places or consolations of religion only irritates her.”31 Nellie’s understandable bitterness serves as an indictment of a culture that ignored her vulnerability, exploitation, and abandonment; had society provided early assistance, her life path likely would have been far different. Paralleling Nellie’s ruined soul, somatic images of illness and death weave through the poem. Her grim face appears damaged by frost, her “dwindling eyes” attest to her feverish state (18), she bears the mouth of an old woman, and she has been “seared” by her experiences (17). Nellie repeatedly moans as she is consumed by pain, her hands and head feel feverish, and she assumes the demeanor of a corpse, “rigid as one dead” (19). Nellie even throws the flowers brought to the hospital by an unsullied young woman seeking to comfort the patients. As in The Ascent of Man scenario, floral imagery indicates innocence. An emblem of purity, the visitor appeared “[a]ngelically fair” and carried “gifts of grace” (23). Her innocence contrasts sharply with the prostitute’s condition, with both nearly the same age. Nellie, however, resembles a “torn lily” in her deflowered state (19). Despite the patient’s initial rejection of the visitor’s gift, the floral presence alters her and instigates a delusionary return to her girlhood. In Nellie’s recollection, the comfort of a snug cottage soon disappears as she embarks on the futile search for her mother. Believing that her lost parent has sent her a sign, Nellie tries to sit in the bed and reveals “luminous, transfigured eyes, / As if they glassed the opening skies” before immediately succumbing to death (31). This poem, as seen elsewhere in Blind’s oeuvre, provides a modern twist on the conventional pastoral verse that characterized rustic life as bucolic. “The Message” presents a harsh, realistic vision of the countryside at the fin de siècle, not an Arcadian paradise. Part of the poem’s stunning impact comes from a detailed recitation of Nellie’s harrowing entry into prostitution. Traversing London’s labyrinthine “never-ending streets” to find her mother, Nellie encounters “blurred masks of loafers [who] leer / And point at me in scorn” (28). Exhausted from running, Nellie falls to the ground under a street light, a telling image that reminds of Wilde’s 1881 poem “Impression du Matin” and presages her fate. In that verse, “one pale woman all alone” still remained outdoors at dawn, where she “[l]oitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare, / With lips of flame and heart of stone.” In a curious similarity, Nellie “dropped upon the stones” in a literal and figurative fall as “[t]he lamplight grew one quivering blot,” with the latter word tellingly a

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synonym for a stain (29). The subsequent description of Nellie’s surroundings further signals her fate as a fallen woman when she revisits the moment with disturbing and overdetermined diction. A hard bed make the stones and cold,   The mist a wet, wet sheet; And in the mud, like molten gold, The snaky lamplight blinking rolled   Like guineas at my feet.

Since it is upon the ground, this bed exists at the lowest level possible, characterizing the beds to which Nellie will soon descend as a prostitute. The “wet, wet sheet” suggests a shroud, which anticipates the deadly life awaiting her. The unsettling lamplight in Wilde’s poem becomes even more ominous in Blind’s verse, for it drops to the mud in “snaky” fashion portending Nellie’s Edenic fall and metamorphoses into currency that the new prostitute will earn. The Luciferian connection continues as “[a] voice hissed in my ear” with the promise of money (29). Displaying a devious leer, the unsavory speaker is joined by other men as Nellie’s future is sealed. Apparently she is taken to a brothel, where she is ravished and battered, as “[s]trange men would come, strange men would go.” A streetwalker as well as a brothel resident, Nellie encounters lustful men as if in a blur while roaming nearby lanes. So dehumanized by these events, she adopts a significant noun in considering herself a “thing of shame” (30). Yet Blind assails a hypocritical society rather than the victimized woman, echoing the verdict conferred in the Ascent story. The nurse muses upon Nellie’s situation, wondering if the prostitute was “a wicked girl” before indicting the men who defiled her but escaped censure. “She was not worse than all those men / Who looked so shocked in public,” the nurse decides, since “[t]hey made and shared her sin” (21). Moreover, it was men who drew Nellie into a life of prostitution rather than aid her. They became the agents of her fate and thus deserved the condemnation that instead was directed to a despairing young woman. The lamplight that accompanies Nellie’s fall participates in the poem’s thematic work as part of the light imagery that threads through “The Message.” Her first vision of the lecherous men occurs in ominous “twilight yellow-drear” (28), and the brothel is a place of unnatural, harsh, and “blazing nights [that] turned daylight pale” (30). Sunlight, in contrast, brings fear to the feverish patient in serving as a painful reminder of

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innocence, and she seeks to avoid it. The sun seems like a divine presence that will illuminate her many failings and bring her to an unsettling judgment. Unable to bear the light, Nellie shouts, “Oh, shut the sunlight out!” (22). The young visitor arrives as the sunlight is brightening the hospital, and in her unblemished state she “[p]assed like a sunbeam through the place” (23). As the visitor distributes the flowers, Nellie repeats her angry comments about the sunlight but concludes them with a plaintive lament: “Will no one shut it out?” (24). When Nellie recalls her childhood, the light again assumes a positive cast. Firelight provides a warm environment in the family cottage, and Nellie believes that her deceased mother has given her “[a] fair light from the past” in contrast to the “dark” London of her fall (31). The poem’s form creates a sense of relentless movement toward a bitter end and accords with Nellie’s situation. Composed of fifty-one, five-line abaab stanzas, the narrative poem follows a consistent pattern that suggests no deviation is possible. Once Nellie descends into prostitution, her only pathway leads to death, which correlates with the most pessimistic of Victorian assumptions about a fallen woman’s fate.

Unforgiven The misfortunes of Blind’s characters in the Ascent passage and in “The Message” both derive from the situations of country innocents who envision no recourse but prostitution when left to fend for themselves; “The Russian Student’s Tale” from Dramas in Miniature follows a somewhat different line in relating the case of a seamstress so woefully paid that she turns to prostitution to survive, although she is eventually freed of that life. Charles Booth’s London at the turn of the century identifies the situation as fairly common, for needlewomen “take to the life occasionally when circumstances compel.” Chapman’s text brings the harsh situation to light more vividly: “How can we expect self-control, self-denial, self-­ respect, from those poor shivering, underfed bodies, to whom a hearty meal, a warm good garment … comes only in the form of temptation?”32 Rather than temptation spurred by desire, in this case it is driven by financial hardship. In “The Russian Student’s Tale,” the former prostitute and the titular narrator on one occasion cross a river to a remote establishment where they rent a room. The student, who does not know about the young woman’s past, stresses the innocence of his eventual lover, with “[h]er face

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that of a little child / For innocent sweetness undefiled” (5). The youth tells his companion of his instantaneous but eternal love—a common statement for encouraging sexual intimacy. He declares “[h]ow I was hers, and seemed to be / Her own to all eternity” (7). The key word in his statement is “seemed,” as the unfolding story will reveal. As James Diedrick comments, the “strategic use of the verb ‘seem’” leaves a reader unconvinced.33 While the couple await dinner in their room, the student becomes consumed by lust, and his pulse “[s]hook wildly as she smiled” (6). Images of a tempestuous night proceed, mimicking their sexual union, with undertones of violence. And through the splendour of the white Electrically glowing night, Wind-wafted from some perfumed dell, Tumultuously there loudly rose Above the Neva’s surge and swell, With amorous ecstasies and throes, And lyric spasms of wildest wail, The love-song of the nightingale.   (7)

The nightingale provides an especially apt image, for it resonates with the myth of the sad Philomela, recounted most notably by Ovid in Metamorphoses. Philomela was raped and irretrievably damaged, made mute by the lustful husband of her sister. The two women took their revenge on the villainous Tereus but feared his unfettered vengeance. After praying to the gods for protection, the sisters were transformed into birds, with Philomela becoming a nightingale. The linkage to Blind’s female character is evident; not only was she the sexual object of lascivious men, she never speaks in the poem. Instead, the student speaks for her in a reminder of male power, and he never deigns even to utter her name. Like most other fallen women, she is given no voice to speak for herself; men speak for her instead. After all, the poem is titled “The Russian Student’s Tale,” not the woman’s tale. The same passage described the scene before the pair arrived at the inn while the two were rowing across the river to reach the abode (5). This earlier recitation by the student discloses that his lust is motivating him to make the journey and his subsequent proclamations of everlasting ardor provide the tool for seduction. A gap in the text follows the second appearance of the nightingale passage, signaling not only the sexual act in

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progress but also a marked change in the couple’s relationship, for the woman then reveals her past to the student. Even after learning of her disreputable background, however, the student again stresses her innocence in describing her as “[s]o sweet a flower” (7) who was but “half a child” when led into prostitution. Left unprotected in the street, Where, when so hungry, you would meet All sorts of tempters that beguiled. Oh, infamous and senseless clods, Basely to taint so pure a heart, And make a maid fit for the gods A creature of the common mart! She spoke quite simply of things vile—

The young woman apparently was tricked by “devils with an angel’s face,” who brought her to a brothel. Nevertheless, “[i]t seemed the sunshine of her smile / Must purify the foulest place.” Her story brings the student nearly to tears, so overwhelmed that he cannot speak. Yet his apparent sympathy seems questionable; after all, he displays the lecherous behavior that she had experienced when forced into prostitution. Moreover, the student’s description of her fall was prefaced by a note of condemnation; she had traded “all that honest women hold / Most sacred—for the sake of gold” (8). Her fall becomes a form of death and irretrievably severs the student’s interest in her, “for between us twain / A murdered virgin seemed to lie” (9). Of course, he ignores the fact that if she had been a virgin, he would have been a figurative murderer as well, driven by allconsuming lust. Accentuating the cause of the woman’s virtual demise, a third recitation of the nightingale passage ensues (9). Although the student continues to refer to the former prostitute as a child, he also deems her a “[p]oor craven creature.” Despite the disparaging identification, he does evidence a degree of remorse in questioning his right to judge her actions since he, among others, had contributed to her exploitation. This poor lost child we all—yes, all— Had helped to hurry to her fall, Making a social leper of God’s creature consecrate to love.   (9)

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Nevertheless, he now belies his vow of undying love and refuses to marry her. The poem reinforces that an unmarried woman’s sexual experience brings a living death, for a “[a] blankness overspread her eyes-- / The blankness as of one who dies” (10). Her future is marked indelibly by her past. The student insists again that he deeply loves the woman, yet the avowal simply sounds like a self-serving rationale, for he then refuses to touch one who “had been kissed in sin,” as if she carries a dreadful disease. The rationale continues as he claims that he did kiss “her work-worn hand and thin,” which still showed damage from needle marks, with “a reverential thrill” (10). The insincerity of his words is immediately underscored by a resonance to the Edenic serpent, for “between clenching teeth I hissed / Our irretrievable farewell” (11). As Jason R. Rudy asserts, the “woman is abandoned, after all, not only by the Russian student, but by a culture and social structure with little room for the truly impoverished, and especially not for those who through desperation turn to prostitution.”34 The poem concludes with another recitation of the nightingale passage but with crucial alterations and a dramatic shift in tone. Rather than tracing the eroticized movement of the river and the nightingale’s song, the closing lines reiterate that sexuality brings destruction to an unwedded woman. And through the smouldering glow of night, Mixed with the shining morning light Wind-wafted from some perfumed dell, Above the Neva’s surge and swell, With lyric spasms, as from a throat Which dying breathes a faltering note, There faded o’er the silent vale The last sob of a nightingale.   (11)

Night has shifted from its splendid, shimmering quality to dying embers. In the three previous appearances of the passage, morning has not been mentioned, keeping the focus entirely on the nighttime passion. In this version, however, morning blends with the darkness, creating a gloomy new day suggestive of an altered perception of the evening’s passion as a sullied act. The next two lines, identical to those in the earlier passages, remind of the pair’s unrestrained passion, but the concluding four lines evoke misery and death rather than jouissance. The nightingale’s “love-song” has been replaced by a final sob, reflecting the status of the fallen woman.

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Yet her experience with the student raises questions about her character and the effects that ensued from her initial fall. After all, she embarked with him to an isolated establishment unaccompanied by other individuals who could provide a degree of protection for an unmarried woman. Such behavior alone would condemn her in societal judgment, especially since, with her background, it seems unlikely that she would be unaware of his carnal intentions. Her motives are unclear, leaving open the possibilities that she sought to entice him into marriage or at least gain a measure of security as a kept woman. Underlying these suspicions, however, is the likelihood that her entrapment into prostitution irretrievably warped her judgment and sense of proper conduct, leaving her forever damaged by her exploitation. Her situation thus becomes even more pitiful, for she can never return to the unblemished person she once had been. The erratic course of the woman’s life is complemented by the poem’s form. No pattern exists in the stanza length, for there is almost no repetition in the number of lines. Moreover, ellipsis-like breaks appear in the verse, presumably to signal the passage of time or an alteration in the student’s feelings, but even these ruptures are inconsistent in that several stanzas conclude with unmarked gaps for no obvious reason. In their totality, the poem’s oddities convey the tumultuous, shifting, and unforeseeable nature of the woman’s unenviable existence.

Dead or Alive? The boundary between living death and actual death for a ruined woman becomes virtually indecipherable in Blind’s 1895 “Noonday Rest” from Poetical Works, which concerns a homeless outcast grasping her infant as they lie on Hampstead Heath. Reflecting the status of a fallen woman, the six-stanza poem is replete with references to downward motion. An array of nature images performs this function, beginning with the poem’s initial line as willow trees “whisper very, very low” to a gentle wind. A leaf occasionally “faints” onto the inhospitably searing ground, and the woman reposes “beneath” the tree while birds gaze down upon her. Only nature displays agency in the poem; aside from the whispering trees and fainting leaves, flies hum, sheep graze, birds fly, and the willows “rock” the prostrate woman. In contrast, she is utterly passive, as the poem’s title implies, suggesting that she was thrust into infamy through the machinations of villainous individuals. Thus, she reclines “[s]till as a stone” as if “[h]er heavy eyes are shuttered by a sleep / As of the slumbering dead.”

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Additional descriptions of the woman further adumbrate the poem’s thematic work. Even though she remains in her childbearing years, the woman seems preternaturally old, as evidenced by her “grizzled hair and brow,” perhaps hastened by a sexually related disease. She appears a “ghastly human thing,” as if not quite a person, with the supposition buttressed by the fact that she is “nameless.” Moreover, she is “a ragged woman,” which describes not only her outworn garments but also conveys the psychological damage wrought by a life of pain, hardship, and rejection. Indeed, this reference to her condition is the only one that identifies her as a woman, and the sole other noun accorded to her is “castaway.” Elsewhere, the woman simply becomes a pronoun. The unbearable heat that surrounds the woman, from “simmering skies,” “sunburnt leas,” and “hot ground,” evokes a hellish atmosphere reflective of a disreputable past, and the unidentified speaker wonders, “O’er what strange ways may not these feet have trod / That match the cracking clay?” To tread is to walk, and this sole indication of any movement indicates that the woman’s previous life as a streetwalker stands as the characteristic that defines her to others, as a continuation of the stanza reference will reveal. Treading carries other suggestive denotations as well, for it can mean to copulate and beget, as well as strive to stay alive. The linkage of her past to the clay broken from the heat alludes to a severe societal judgment through the denotative characteristic of human earthiness as opposed to the splendor of the soul. Immediately following the streetwalker connection comes societal and religious condemnation: “Man had no pity on her—no, nor God,” for she is reductively identified as the “castaway.” The line resonates with Old Testament suggestions of a judgmental and angry divinity, rather than New Testament messages of a merciful and compassionate savior. In the final stanza, only nature provides comfort, serving as a maternal presence that demonstrates acceptance rather than castigation. But Mother Earth now hugs her to her breast,   Defiled or undefiled; And willows rock the weary soul to rest,   As she, even she, her child.

In this stanza, the woman has been reclaimed in two senses. First, the negative valence of earthiness stemming from her earlier connection to clay dissolves here through the undoubtedly positive aspect of caring

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nature. Second, she is further differentiated from the demeaning aspect of earthiness in being characterized as a soul on a journey toward unaccustomed peace. Only outside the framework of Victorian culture, “Noonday Rest” indicates, can a fallen woman be perceived, treated, and valued as a complex human being rather than tagged with the dismissive definition by which society considers her little more than a sinful outcast. Indeed, the poem’s form parallels such a simplistic viewpoint with the very basic abab pattern, which can be read almost as presenting oppositional entities of a and b that reflect the binary of good and evil embraced by society. Contributing to that effect, only two words at line endings exceed one syllable, and these three-syllable words foreground the antithetical judgment made between “castaway” and “undefiled.” As “Noonday Rest” and the other poems investigated here make abundantly clear, a girl or young woman lacking economic and emotional support, without a sheltering individual, is disturbingly vulnerable, subject to exploitation and victimization. Blind’s work makes that point forcefully in tracing the diverse but sadly common situations of impoverished fallen women. The Ascent of Man vignette shows that paternal rejection becomes another aspect of victimization, leaving no other choice but prostitution for a young mother whose child needs adequate care. “The Message” articulates the disastrous results when a mother’s guidance and love disappear through death, leaving a daughter to face the harsh world alone. “The Russian Student’s Tale” demonstrates that once fallen and thrown into an unsavory life, a young woman cannot expect acceptance thereafter. “Noonday Rest” provides a fitting conclusion to Blind’s narratives, for these fallen women end in death, whether actual or figurative. For them, all hope must be abandoned.

Unabated Agony Like the protagonists in Blind’s poetry, fallen women in verse by contemporaries fare poorly. Unfaithful lovers bring agony to girls and young women, who face scorn rather than sympathy from others. For these unfortunates, the future offers no hope or redemption within their society. “From Out of the Night” by Emily Pfeiffer, a supporter of women’s rights to education, relates an all-too-common script for fallen women. Moments before suicide in “From Out of the Night,” the unnamed speaker of the lengthy abaab verse recounts the sad tale of her experience with a college student who romances and then betrays her. Trochees in the

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opening stanzas capture a pleading voice as the speaker utters “Let me look upon the river,” the site that marked her descent into misery. Subsequent trochees break up the metric flow, conveying the narrator’s agitation as she shares her story. In the preface to the second edition of Under the Aspens (1882), Pfeiffer said of the poem that “I have a purpose no less serious than to exhibit dramatically a young mind pervious to all the influences of beauty, love, joy, and sorrow, which, having lost its hold upon the Unseen, drifts in the first tempest of life, upon destruction.” Pfeiffer added, “They grow black in the reek, are made bitter where once they were sweet” (vii). “From Out of the Night” is set at the riverside as Cambridge crews race on a March day. The speaker chooses the river as her auditor, and she shares the progression from ecstasy to misery. “Only a look exchanged” began the speaker’s nightmare, and “my fate had met me in the eyes”; the youth whom she “had singled from the rest” led her into “another world, ruled by another sun.” For several months, the student woos her and professes his undying love to the virginal narrator. When the pair do consummate their love by the river, the episode is set within multiple images of the beauties of nature on the verge of spring as if validating the act. Nature imagery continues with the arrival of a new month as the lovers “rode in the triumph of Nature which seemed to be ours.” Even the river participated in the couple’s bliss, the narrator recalls: “How brightly you beamed on us, river, as if you took part / In the joy that grew vocal beside you as softly we trod.” Enraptured, the speaker becomes increasingly enamored with the loving words of her “river-god.” Yes, I hear him, he murmurs, “My fair one,” he calls me his queen—   Of the May, of all Mays, and all months all the blessed year through; But he calls me his wife that shall be,—and the word is so keen   That it cuts all my life, the before and thereafter, in two.

Like many young women who experienced similar situations, the speaker has no parents to guide her and must “fight for my share” in “[a] poor place in the shadow-crossed world.” Before she was orphaned, the speaker was far distanced from such a harsh existence, “[w]hen the heart of a mother had held me from shadow of care.” Now impoverished, the speaker labors under a difficult “task-mistress” in an unspecified occupation, but the young woman believes that her lover can cure her desolation.

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I, poor with the poorest, with none for my sorrow to care,   More beggared of love’s daily need than of silver or gold, I, who only of life had hard work and hard words for my share,   With no home but the grave, where the heart of my mother lay cold. I, dropped from the hands of the dead on the floor of the world,   To be lifted again …

Extremely vulnerable in her solitude, the speaker is overwhelmed by the student’s effusions: “I, beggared of love and of hope, stand here shaken and thrilled / With the full pulsing life of that high day of affluent spring.” The pair promised each other everlasting ardor, even beyond the grave, which gave meaning to her life. Yet a harbinger of disaster emerges in the form of a wizened woman whose ruined appearance suggests the wretchedness that a fallen woman encounters. Nevertheless, the speaker believes that she and her lover will prevail. Convinced that she “seem[s] made for your mate” and “worthy to sit by your side” with her beauty and grace, the protagonist is abandoned as the student decides to marry within his class. When his engagement is communicated to her in a lengthy letter “effacing the vows we had whispered in vain,” the speaker believes that her life has ended. But to die as I die, overthrown, disposed and forlorn,   And be charged as I may be, a spectre unwelcome to stand Betwixt you and that other with whom you to-day were foresworn.   Thus to die, O my love, that once loved me,—and die by your hand Is to perish past hope, and be drawn to some foul, tangled deep,   With life’s ends all unended and endless for ever to dwell; To lie cold amid forms of disorder that hinder from sleep,   Or be hustled by chance through the wastes of some latter-day hell; For I died by your hand in that letter.

Claiming that he was “summoned to suffer, to strip [his] life bare,” the student insists that he had rejected her to preserve an ancient name by marrying wealth and thereby save his ailing father from the death that the loss of fortune would bring. The speaker views herself as a victim resembling a Christ figure through her own suffering and death to redeem another’s life. Like many other fallen women, the speaker faces condemnation from others, including her supposed friend and fellow worker who had joined

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the speaker on the fateful day she first glimpsed the student. The speaker takes refuge in a church, but a “pack” of the attendees discover and relentlessly hunt her as she makes an escape. The scene serves as a chilling indictment of both religious hypocrisy, evidenced by the rabid church-goers, as well as social condemnation through their refusal to offer sympathy and assistance in her troubled state. The student’s mother encounters her after the speaker’s “torturers had fled” and she “sat aloof in pride of race.” Misery is even heightened when the mother, with “those cold eyes,” condescendingly and insultingly offers the protagonist employment in domestic service, “never noting I was dead.” The speaker’s situation demonstrates the extraordinarily different treatment accorded to a woman and to a man who were sexually active before marriage. Whereas church-goers hound and demonize the protagonist, the student stands at a church altar with his imminent bride. Unlike the unfeeling treatment the speaker received shortly before the ceremony, the new bride receives a kiss from the mother while the fallen woman looks on. The student “dared not touch” the bride as the speaker watched, however, “[f]or he felt my ghostly presence and my shadow rise in between.” Yet she recognizes that her “shadow” over him will diminish in time. Spectral imagery pervades the poem’s closing section, which underscores multiple aspects of the speaker’s demise. Her existence as a fallen woman in Victorian society is itself a form of death, denying her the ability to continue her life as before. To her detractors, she has become less than human and deserving of the predatory behavior unleashed upon her and the unbearable sadness she suffers. “I shall go to final peace as through a burning lake of pain,” she says. The ghostly images allude not only to her societal death, but also to the emotional destruction leading her to suicide wrought by her lover’s betrayal. “Has anyone tasted my sorrow and learnt to endure,” she wondered earlier, and her determination to drown herself reveals that she has not found an answer. The ghastly imagery signals as well her death within the student’s life with his choice of another woman as his permanent mate. Indeed, she laments in an imaginary address to her rival that the “costly bridal robe of thine must serve me for a shroud.” Nonetheless, the speaker seeks to remain in the student’s memory and urges that a remnant of her fading presence be allowed to remain with him. “[L]eave for me a little space,” she asks in her thoughts to the bride. The speaker then issues a plea to her lover, which he will never hear, that she will not be forgotten.

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O my love that loved me truly in the days not long ago,   I am young to perish wholly, let not all of me be lost; Take me in, and never fear me—nay I would not work you woe; Keep for her the cheerful daylight, keep for her the firelight glow,—   Let me wander in the twilight of your thoughts, a harmless ghost. Let me steal upon your dreams, and make your broken life complete,   Take me in, no mortal maiden, but the spirit o your youth; I have done with earthly longings, and their memory, bitter sweet, And would feed you with an essence you should only taste, not eat,   And so keep your soul undying in its tenderness and truth.

When she is “looking my last,” the speaker believes that her secular prayer has been answered and so informs the river in her final words. “See, he opens his arms—O my River-God, clasp me, I come!” Pfeiffer’s “A Protest,” included in the 1888 expanded edition of Sonnets and Songs, also presents a sympathetic treatment of the fallen woman but puts its focus on a harsh condemnation of her detractors. The three-­sonnet sequence begins with a dictate to other women not “to veil thine eyes / From any naked truth whereof the cries / Reveal the anguish.” Rather than pretend that evils do not exist, Victorian women need to recognize the despicable practice of sacrificing “lost souls” to “[f]eed full that gulf of hell which is man’s lust.” Instead of castigation, the speaker insists, the “frail victims” and “martyrs” need to be validated. The octave of the second sonnet assails the rationale that an impoverished female can be exploited without guilt to protect the “purity” of supposedly respectable women. Sweet Christ!   That there be men in virtue’s name And Thine, would levy on Thy “poor” a toll Whereof each fraction is a living soul To drop in stygian depths of sin and shame. O, vainly lost ones!   If of our fair fame, Our woman’s peace and purity, the whole Fierce chastisement is laid on you, your dole Brands our white brows with more than answering blame.

The sestet asks that courageous individuals act to protect women from exploitation—“[t]he torments of these damned”—and leave their innocence intact.

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The final sonnet further addresses “the queens who claim to reign in right / Of this foul wrong.” These individuals, the octave argues, banish consideration of the agonies experienced by sexual victims, “[y]our hapless hostages.” The octave continues to castigate the privileged women who believe that they are deserving of others’ sacrifices and who know nothing of the dire situation that causes a woman to become a prostitute. The privileged merit no such favoritism, the sestet emphasizes, that allows them “to float” while others “must drown.” The fortunate women justify their “narrowed” views by wearing an “unearned crown” that they believe justifies their willful ignorance. Similarly “The Scape-Goat” by A. Mary F. Robinson places blame on individuals who allow a female to be dragged into a hideous sexualized life without attempting to remedy her situation. Published in the The New Arcadia and Other Poems (1884), Robinson’s verse resembles “A Protest” in emphasizing the innocence of the exploited victims, in this case by repeatedly referring to the protagonist as a child. The girl has been raised in a wretched abode, which she shared with her fierce brothers and her drunken father until his death. Deserted by the brothers, the girl is left to fend for herself. The dysfunctional family had slept together in a “stifling room,” but upon her siblings’ departure the girl resides alone in fright. Despite the brothers’ abusive treatment, the girl finds her situation untenable: “Ah, better their violence, better their threats, than the gloom / That now hung close as a pall!” Her dismal life is filled with work, and she was vulnerable to the “praises and vows” of a man who offered a semblance of companionship. As was the case for so many girls, this one also falls into disrepute since she has no one to turn to except a victimizer. Ah, me! she was only a child; and yet so aware   Of the shame which follows on sin. A poor, lost, terrified child! she slept in the snare,   Knowing the toils she was in.

Attesting to the universality of the situation, the poem’s seven quatrains follow the basic and common rhythmic pattern of abab. Robinson’s subject descends into drunkenness and crudity as she rambles “with a heavy reel, / Shouting her villainous song.” The unidentified narrator expresses deep sympathy for the girl’s disastrous condition and speculates on who deserves blame for the bleak

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situation. The speaker wonders, “Is it only pity or shame, do you think, that I feel / For the infinite sorrow and wrong.” Rather, the speaker expresses guilt for not intervening to protect the girl. With a sick, strange wonder I ask, Who shall answer the sin,   Thou, lover, brothers of thine? Or he who left standing thy hovel to perish in?   Or I, who gave no sign?

Everyone familiar with the girl’s situation, the narrator realizes, carries responsibility for her destruction. The poem’s title is especially apt, considering that a scapegoat is blamed for the wrongs of other individuals as a ready way of avoiding accountability, and the protagonist’s situation certainly fits such sloughing of culpability. A biblical reference adds another interpretive layer, for a goat was sacrificed to carry and to compensate for the sin of Aaron. As recounted in Leviticus, the scapegoat not only was chosen for atonement but was cast into the wilderness (16:10) in a striking parallel to the fate of the poem’s defiled child. Amy Levy’s “Magdalen,” included in A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884), follows a different path in revealing the wretchedness of a dying woman, presumably in a penitent house. Disparate stanza lengths and erratic rhyme suggest that she is focused solely on imparting her message, without regard to niceties of speech. The religious institution is disturbingly dismal, so much so that the speaker finds it unbearable. As such, the troubling surroundings send a message that fallen women would find no solace in penitentiaries supposedly established to assist them, which serves as a condemnation of a society that fails to assist the unfortunates in any meaningful way. The poem’s beginning characterizes the penitentiary in dire terms.35 All things I can endure, save one. The bare, blank room where there is no sun; The parcelled hours; the pallet hard; The dreary faces here within; The outer women’s cold regard; The Pastor’s iterated “sin”;—

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Yet the sordid environment disturbs the speaker much less than her victimizer’s foreknowledge that she would face ruin because of his actions and his betrayal of her love. These things could I endure, and count No overstrain’d, unjust amount; No undue payment for such bliss— Yea, all things bear, save only this: That you, who knew what thing would be, Have wrought this evil unto me. It is so strange to think on still— That you, that you, should do me ill! Not as one ignorant or blind, But seeing clearly in your mind How this must be which now has been,

Before the woman’s downfall, her lover merely performed the role of a caring beau, appearing solicitous and affectionate. A foreshadowing of her sexual fate came with the piercing of her hand by a rose thorn, accompanied by his apparent distress about her wound as he sought to bandage it with his handkerchief. His performance was abundantly convincing. “Pale grew your cheek,” the speaker recalls. “Your voice came with a broken sound; / With the deep breath your breast was riven.” In retrospect, the speaker wonders “did God laugh in Heaven?” Utterly deceived by his apparent devotion, the speaker remarks that she would have done anything for him, including death, to keep him from harm. Although she believed that “[w]ith one great pulse we seem’d to thrill,” the woman realizes that “we thrill’d with pulses twain.” Like the child in Robinson’s “The Scape-Goat,” the protagonist was left unprotected from an avaricious seducer. If she had been warned that “poison lurks within your kiss,” she would have immediately rejected him, despite the emotional pain entailed. As she rests upon her pallet bed, the speaker finds sleeping difficult. She hears residents weeping but her pain is so severe that she cannot find relief from crying. Isolated mentally and physically, the speaker has no expectations of relief. She exists in a state of suspension, convinced that “[t]he future and the past are dead.” Although told that she is dying, the speaker does not care; she has “no faith / In God or Devil, Life or Death.” When the poem closes, she believes that she will finally escape suffering and that her lover, “through all eternity, / Have neither part nor lot in me.”

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E. Nesbit’s “Refugium Peccatorum,” which was published in Leaves of Life (1888), similarly offers death as the sole relief for a fallen woman. The damaged protagonist passes a lighted chapel and hears beautiful song, which “seemed to call her in from out the night” as she walks along the street. As the speaker reads the woman’s face in detail, it reveals a hardened life. Sordidly sensual, unlovely, base, Scored with coarse lines burnt in by years of wrong, Stamped with the signet of the vile and strong; Hopeless, impure, with eyes unwashed by tears Through many soulless, desecrated years.

Sitting near a rendering of Mary and Jesus, the woman is morally far removed from the “pure mother and ideal child.” The protagonist instead “sat there stupid, broken, lost, defiled.” Apparently she regrets that she had not given birth and has no understanding of “the unnamed bliss” of motherhood. As she listens to the singing, she recalls her unsullied youth before she had descended into “devilry and drink.” She had listened at the nearby church and absorbed “ghastly tales of sin and death and hell” that foretold her future. Her cottage home was surrounded by lovely flowers, but the memories of her former life dissolved in her later depravity with its very different “tawdry hothouse flowers.” Like many other fallen women in late-century poetry, the protagonist had been left motherless. Had her mother lived, the daughter’s life would have unfolded far differently. “A woman’s soul—her soul—might have been spared,” the speaker asserts, if “there had been any one on earth who cared.” The emotionally damaged woman then hears a sermon about a loving Mary who feels sadness for sinners. “She weeps for us who sin—how can we dare In such a mother’s heart plant grief and care? She who is all we might be if we would, Lovely and loving, gracious, great, and good; Only not happy—how can she be glad While all men sin, and, sinning, are made sad? “But saddest tears of all are those that rise, Through the clear radiance of those crystal eyes, When women sin—the women who might be

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Mothers as pure or maids as clean as she; Women whose souls might be as chaste and clear As the calm eyes of her, divine and dear.”

When the service concludes, she asks the priest if Mary truly loved a woman like herself, “[w]hom shame and sin have crushed and pressed awry / From all her possible peace and purity.” Though assured that she was indeed receiving Marian love, the woman thinks that her sins have been too grievous to deserve it. Again told that Mary cared for her, the protagonist decides she will never return to her tawdry life and begs for salvation. The priest gives her sanctuary and advises her to pray for guidance. Joy infuses the woman in realizing that Mary does indeed sympathize with her, but the poem ends with a troubling resolution: “She does not weep now—does not breathe nor stir, / The Maiden Mother has had pity on her.” The poem’s title reveals the bitter belief that death provides the only “refuge of sinners.” Nesbit’s poem, like the other verses explored in this chapter, leaves a grim message. Even though Victorian attitudes toward fallen women did reveal greater compassion and empathy as the century moved toward its close, not all castaways benefitted from a more enlightened society. For some, especially those relegated to the lower class, virtually nothing significant had changed. They continued to be victimized, discarded, and ignored by a hypocritical society that proclaimed its Christian values but often disregarded them in practice. The words that the anonymous Quarterly Review contributor asserted in 1848 still held in the fin de siècle for those women not deemed worthy of meaningful assistance: “Woman falls, … never to rise again.”36 The verses by this chapter’s authors provides them the voice they rarely possessed, telling the stories of the doomed.

Notes 1. Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women, 96. 2. Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens, 305; Jane M.  Kubiesa, “The Victorians and Their Fallen Women,” 7. 3. Hickok, Representations of Women, 116, 97. 4. Murray Roston, “Disrupted Homes,” 95. 5. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 161, 158; Dinah Mulock Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, 270; Thomas Archer, The Terrible Sites of London and Labours of Love in the Midst of Them, 476; William Acton, Prostitution, 39.

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6. Scott Rogers, “Domestic Servants, Midnight Meetings, and The Magdalen’s Friend and Female Homes’ Intelligencer,” 446; “A Short Account of the London Magdalene Hospital,” 361; Felicia Skene, Project Canterbury Penitentiaries and Reformatories, 5. 7. Skene, Project Canterbury Penitentiaries and Reformatories, 6. 8. Ibid., 4; Arthur J.  S. Maddison, Hints on Rescue Work, 104; Rogers, “Domestic Servants,” 458, 445. 9. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, 205, 206; Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, The New Godiva, 68; Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 274; Edgar Newcastle, “Preface,” Hints on Rescue Work, vii. 10. As William Davis reports, Jeune’s early essays, which first appeared in 1885, dealt with the fallen woman (“Mary Jeune, Late-Victorian Essayist,” 187). 11. Mary Jeune, “Helping the Fallen,” 672. 12. Ibid., 671. 13. Ibid., 672. 14. Jeune quoted in William A. Davis, “Mary Jeune, Late-Victorian Essayist,” 189; Jeune quoted in Davis, “‘Irreconcilables,’ ‘Reclaimables’ and ‘First Falls,’” 77; Jeune, “Saving the Innocents,” 346. 15. Jeune, “Helping the Fallen,” 673. 16. Ibid., 672, 673. 17. Ibid., 674. 18. Ibid., 672; Emma Liggins, “Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s,” 41, 42. 19. Page numbers are given for quotations from this lengthy poem. 20. Resonances to nature often appear in Victorian writings about fallen women, Kubiesa comments. “One well-liked Victorian literary convention and furtherance of the framework of fallen woman fiction is the reaction of the elements and the invocation of nature to represent characteristics and mood,” Kubiesa states (“The Victorians and Their Fallen Women,” 5). Since women were considered closer to nature than were men with their supposed greater intellectual prowess, the floral connection coincides with Victorian presumptions. Conventionally, innocence is associated with flowers budding and blooming, while unapproved sexuality may be presented by a dying or dead flower. As Annette Stott explains in discussing nineteenth-­century art, a flower could stand “as a versatile sign of female sexuality to represent anything from moral laxity to innocent chastity” (“Floral Femininity,” 66). 21. Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, 15; Chapman, The New Godiva, 70.

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22. Trudgill says that Stead’s “revelations were widely regarded not only as hypocritically prurient but as gross distortions of the truth,” and “even purity workers were amongst those who rejected them as spurious” (Madonnas and Magdalens, 198). Liggins speaks of “Stead’s (in)famous exposé of child prostitution which employed the language and conventions of melodrama and pornography both to titillate readers of the sensationalist Pall Mall Gazette in which it was first published and to push through reforms in social policy” (“Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s,” 50). Whether deemed overtly sensationalized or graphically realistic, Stead’s vivid descriptions helped to spur awareness of a tragic situation that led to progressive legislation. 23. W. T. Stead, “The Maiden Tribute of Babylon,” 2. 24. Trollope, An Eye for an Eye, 104. 25. Trollope, An Autobiography, 206, 207. 26. James Diedrick also sees the Christ connection, noting that the woman “in her abasement becomes a Christlike figure ministering to the poor and abandoned” (Mathilde Blind, 215). 27. Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, 270, 269–70. 28. Diedrick comments that Dramas in Miniature and The Ascent of Man are Blind’s most significant works and “became part of the larger cultural debate concerning the New Woman and decadence” (Mathilde Blind, 205). 29. Diedrick observes that “[t]he prostitute’s name … is almost identical to that of the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, whose narration is often unreliable” (“‘My Love is a Force That Will Force You to Care,’” 374). Paula Guimarães also notes the link to Wuthering Heights (238) as well as to “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning (“Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets,” 237). 30. Page numbers are given in the text for “The Message” and the subsequent “The Russian Student’s Tale.” Deborah Anna Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing, 8. 31. Jeune, “Helping the Fallen,” 673. 32. Charles Booth, Charles Booth’s London, 128; Chapman, The New Godiva, 98. 33. Diedrick, “‘My Love is a Force That Will Force You to Care,’” 363. 34. Jason R. Rudy, “Rapturous Forms,” 453. 35. Rogers references an 1860 essay in Magdalen’s Friend that characterized penitentiaries as “‘more adapted, by construction and system, for criminals than penitents.’” Rogers notes that the Magdalen’s Friend often carried similar critiques (“Domestic Servants,” 448). 36. “A Short Account,” 360.

CHAPTER 6

Poets on Poetry

In a 1902 Fortnightly Review essay, Hannah Lynch averred that A. Mary F. Robinson “has never met with the appreciation she deserves, and has not taken her proper place in the rank of English poets.” Moreover, “[i]t is absurd to class [her] with all the minor poets singing to-day.” The same situation holds true more than a century later, in that Robinson’s important poetry has received far less attention than it deserves. Even though Robinson herself humbly classed herself among minor poets, she said of her “little songs” that they carry the “saving virtue of sincerity which is the salt of Art,” and such poetic integrity certainly is evidenced in her compositions. Among her most interesting verses are those exploring metapoetry, which cover significant issues confronting serious writers, particularly women authors of the fin de siècle. Indeed, as friend Arthur Symons argued, Robinson’s work “is very modern,” and it provides valuable insights into her cultural moment. The selections addressed in this chapter can be grouped into three categories: women’s pioneering efforts in crafting verse, the multiple challenges of the creative process, and poetic responsibility. These themes threaded as well through the writings of her contemporary female poets, as the latter section of the chapter will discuss.1 Robinson’s work reveals her New Woman perspective in multiple permutations. Several poems, for example, point to the cultural limitations on female behavior. In “The Barrier,” appearing in Retrospect and Other Poems (1893), the traditional female space of the garden represents © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_6

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dismaying confinement.2 The speaker unnervingly dreams that the garden wall where she stands cannot be breached. “My hand I raised to lift the latch,” she remarks, “But, lo, the gate was gone!” Instead, “all around, ay, all around / There ran a wall of stone.” Another Retrospect poem, “The Bookworm,” characterizes the Victorian era as “a narrower age” than the time of Joan of Arc, “when men were men indeed / And women knightlier far.” Imagining herself fighting alongside the French warrior, the speaker immerses herself in tales of long ago throughout the day. When twilight “creeps across the page” and “the enchantment goes,” she prepares to return to the present, abandoning the books “with a sigh” and trudging home. “Celia’s Home-Coming” from An Italian Garden (1886) celebrates the title character’s “far triumphant days” as neighbor women eagerly gather to hear of her experiences. Interestingly, the name “Celia” is associated with the Latin term for “heaven,” which suggests her fulfilling life beyond the domestic sphere and her being “out of doors a star.” During her return home, Celia is not inserted into a constricting female role as she positions herself at the veritable center of the house, its hearth. Rather, she assembles the women to hear her atypical story, appearing “[b]y the hearth a holier Lar!” The ancient reference brings to mind the Roman tutelary deity who served as a protector of the home and was considered its core. In the poem, the connection situates Celia as the source of wisdom and guidance because of the iconoclastic path she has treaded. Other Robinson poems touch on desire, social consciousness, and specularization, with the latter term indicating that a woman in a patriarchal society serves merely as an appropriated reflection contributing to the identity of a male. In “An Oasis,” featured in An Italian Garden, the speaker functions as a Narcissistic reflective well for a man who remained in her life only briefly but whose influence remains ineradicable. “My soul I gave you as a well to drink,” the speaker recalls in an unsettling vampiric reference. Her sense of self has been utterly erased, for she becomes merely his mirror.3 The image of your face, which sank that day   Into the magic waters of the well,   Still haunts their clearness, still remains to tell Of one who looked and drank and could not stay.

He has wrested away her identity, she recognizes, for “[o]nly your face, unchanged and unforgot, / Shines through the deeps.” As R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain comment, Robinson’s deployment

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of the mirror simulacrum “to complain about the damaging role women were expected to adopt in relation to men is a leitmotif of women’s writing of this period.”4 Tracing a different aspect of female longing, “Rosa Rosarum” unveils the depths of desire, presumably directed to another woman since the title references roses, with the flower conventionally a feminine representation. Perhaps the poem alludes to Robinson’s lengthy, close, and possibly sexual relationship with Vernon Lee. The poem’s rose acts not only as a marker of same-sex desire but also as an emblem of realized passion, which informs multiple references to secrecy. The speaker urges: Give me the secret of thy life to lay   Asleep within my own, Nor dream that it shall mock thee any day   By any sign or tone.

The lovers have separated, “[k]nowing that never more the rose shall rise / To shame us, being dead.” Yet the “sudden dawn of red” indicative of desire tenaciously remains for the speaker. Like other New Woman poets, Robinson felt deep compassion for those less fortunate than herself. Her social conscience was abundantly displayed in “The Scape-Goat,” described in Chap. 5 about the fallen woman, but Robinson empathized with the difficult plight of many other individuals. “The Scape-Goat” appears in The New Arcadia and Other Poems (1884), which explores the dismal lives of an array of rural characters suffering from impoverishment, anxiety, and despair. The depth of Robinson’s compassion emerges as well in the volume’s prologue and epilogue, which will be explored later in this chapter. Robinson ’s connection to the New Woman exists on the biographical side also, not only in the ongoing and iconoclastic relationship with Vernon Lee that extended well beyond casual affection, but also through her literary accomplishments. Robinson was an erudite and a prolific author, described by William Sharp as “the brilliant young scholar-poet.” Said Gaston Paris of Robinson, “Never was the originality of a poet, always so difficult to render, seized with greater force and subtlety, wedded with keener sympathy, expressed with greater felicity.” The poet was a dedicated student of Greek literature, which she explored in her association with London’s University College, and she later published a translation of Euripides’ work. After marriage to another scholar, James Darmesteter,

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Robinson moved to his French homeland and published also in that language. Robinson’s expansive scope of interests led her to produce not only poetry, but also short fiction, a novel, reviews, historical accounts, and biographies of Emily Brontë and Ernest Renan. Robinson held salons visited by other New Women poets, including Amy Levy, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, L. S. Bevington, and Emily Pfeiffer.5 Robinson’s alignment with New Women forcefully appears in her assaults on deprecations of female ability.6 “To be quite naturally a failure because one is a woman,” Robinson contended, is a “[h]orrible thought.” Such a belief is “intolerable and unspeakable,” Robinson said in proclaiming her “fierce rebelliousness” toward misogynist assumptions of inferiority, adding “No, I will never believe it.” She called upon such female models as Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Sand “to ‘shelter me with the Aegis of your ways!’”7

Poetic Pioneers Robinson’s metapoetry on the literary contributions of ancient women undoubtedly undermines cultural presumptions of female inferiority. In the preface to her Collected Poems (1902), Robinson maintained that women’s songs of long ago served as the forerunners of poetry. We women have a privilege in these matters, as M. Gaston Paris has reminded us. We have always been the prime makers of ballads and love songs, of anonymous snatches and screeds of popular song. We meet no longer on Mayday, as of old, in Provençe, to set the fashion in tensos and sonnets. But some old wife or other, crooning over her fire of sticks, in Scotland or the Val d’Aosta, in Roumania or Gascony, is probably at the beginning of most romantic Ballads.

Virginia Woolf made a similar comment a few decades later in A Room of One’s Own, citing the poet who translated The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as assumed authority. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.8

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Robinson draws the connections between women and poetry in a trio of compelling verses. “A Search for Apollo” provides a logical starting point, for it traces poetic creativity beginning with the Greek deity who oversaw and inspired songs, poetry, and other arts. At the opening of the two-stanza poem, which appeared in A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878), the speaker recounts a seemingly endless journey to discover the god of creativity. In the first four-line segment of the eleven-line stanza, the speaker evinces frustration in that “I have sought thee too long, O Apollo” during incessant travels in both natural and urban settings. The speaker then mentally travels backwards in time to Apollo’s own era and his initiation of the arts, beginning with a famed musical contest. And I have listened hours on hours   Where the holy Omphé of violins The organ oracle overpowers,    While the musical tumult thickens and thins, Till the singing women begin to sing, Invoking as I do their Master and King:    But thou tarriest long, O Apollo!

Among the stringed instruments devised by Apollo, the violins channel through this deity the Omphé, or divine voice of Zeus, which guides the Delphic Oracle with its veracities. Delphi was considered to be located in the navel of the earth, named for the goddess Gaia. That central point and parallel site in human terms, the umbilicus, enables life itself to arise. With these gendered connections—the oracle, the earth, and life source—the poem quietly characterizes women as the locus of creativity. Apollo is fittingly the deity assigned to the oracle since he also stands as a prophet. As such, his actions foretell the poetic path that the speaker adumbrates. With his lyre, Apollo vanquishes the arrogant Pan, whose own “organ” consisted of a series of reeds, when the pair vied to produce the finest music. Traditionally associated with Apollo, the lyre additionally serves, of course, as an emblem for poetry in an enduring linkage. The passage’s “singing women” undoubtedly refer to the Muses, who fall under Apollo’s governance and themselves oversee music, poetry, and other artistic endeavors. As seers and sources of inspiration invoked by Homer and other ancient poets, the Muses disseminated the knowledge that enabled the literary achievements of the early Greeks, then shared through their oral tradition. With stunningly beautiful voices, the Muses

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brought words to music, which was replicated in actuality in the early phase leading to poetry. Notes James A. Winn about the origin of verse, “Our best evidence about primitive song suggests that melodies and rhythms precede words, that the first step toward poetry was the fitting of words to pre-existent musical patterns.”9 In this stanza, then, Robinson is tracing a progression from music, to songs, and ultimately to poetry. Like the Muses, the speaker seeks guidance for creative inspiration, embodied in the mythical figure of Apollo. In the second stanza, also composed of eleven lines, the speaker again laments the inability to discover Apollo. “Could I find but thy footprints, oh, there would I follow. / Thou God of wanderers show the way!” Yet the search remains futile except in the form of a dream. Discussing prevalent assumptions over the ages, T. V. F. Brogan comments that as a seer, the poet attains “ideas, images, phrases, and words” emanating “from some source outside or beyond herself,” which for centuries “was formulated as the doctrine of divine inspiration.” Attained by poets only, Brogan speculates that “such seeing” stems from an “altered state of experience,” such as the dream.10 Only in that mental form can Robinson’s persona find Apollo, but dream and reality become fused and inseparable. She wonders parenthetically, “If that or this be the dream, who shall say?” In this blended state, the speaker encounters a male passerby “playing a quaint sweet lyre.” Like Apollo, the man had a youthful face and “blue eyes [that] gleamed,” but unlike the deity, his hair had grown grey in an indication of the vast span of time between ancient and modern eras. The association of the man with Apollo becomes apparent as the passerby “sang the songs of an ancient land” in a reminder of poetic origins, a point amplified by the fact that “no hearer could half understand” the melodies long unsung. With the origins of songs and ultimately poetry attributed to women, both in mythology and reality, the Apollonian figure is implicitly recognizing those contributions and presenting the path for creative successors to follow. Robinson’s speaker is reaching that realization, for she wonders about the passerby, “Can this have been Thou, my Apollo?” Interestingly, the verse’s atypical format suggests that poetry evolves, shifts, and innovates over time. The unusual stanza length provides one indication, as does the uncommon rhyme scheme of ababbcbcdda, as if it were borrowing elements from and extending the length of Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets. Such experimentation attests to the creative

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process undergoing change and development, as if building upon precursory forms of verse. Moreover, the syllable count follows no discernible pattern, randomly appearing anywhere from eight to thirteen stresses. The formal variations, wrought by a woman poet, signal that Robinson’s speaker is continuing the work done by female forebears, building upon their efforts and pointing to new imaginative possibilities. Indeed, Robinson’s homage to those poetic pioneers rests both in her appreciation of their endeavors and her desire to construct modern verse from the foundations they devised. Such a project faces an obstacle, however, in that Robinson’s contemporary audience apparently dismissed its value. Robinson explains in her preface to Collected Poems that “[s]ome persons of culture have refused me the right to express myself in those simple forms of popular song which I have loved since childhood as sincerely as any peasant. If the critics would only believe it, they have come as naturally to me, if less happily,” than they did to other women, such as eighteenth-century Scottish balladeer Lady Wardlaw. Robinson’s attraction to predecessors’ songs gains further clarification with the poet’s remark that “I have never been able to write about what was not known to me and near.”11 Robinson credits women as poetic progenitors more overtly in “The Sonnet,” which appeared in Retrospect (1893). The verse’s title subtly makes the connection in that it is “the” sonnet as a form, not merely “a” sonnet, that women ushered forth with their long-ago singing. In fact, the word “sonnet” stems from the Italian word “sonetto,” which translates to a “little song.” The poem is dedicated to Gaston Paris, likely for his respect given women’s role in crafting poetry.12 “The Sonnet” traces the form’s origins from female singers to its eventual usurpation and domination by male versifiers, thus distancing women from the configuration. Yet the speaker contests such marginalization in a bold revision of the sonnet’s structure and a reassertion of female influence upon it. Rather than accord with either the Petrarchan or Shakespearean version, Robinson dramatically modifies stanza construction and rhyme scheme. Indeed, as husband and French professor James Darmesteter commented in English Studies (1896), Robinson “assimilated her models; they did not assimilate her. They lent her their hues … to express, not their spirit, but her own soul.”13 Robinson’s modification project is announced in the poem’s first line as the speaker chides the sonnet to obey her direction, not cling to convention but instead to embrace innovation.

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Sonnet, be not rebellious in my hands      That ply the spindle oftener than the lute:      Without our woman’s singing thou wert mute, O sonnet, born of us in sunnier lands!

As this opening stanza evidences, Robinson plays with the octave arrangement by breaking the eight-line Petrarchan version into two quatrains, as if signaling that tradition will be repudiated. An assumption that the sonnet will turn to the Shakespearean pattern because of the quatrains is belied in that they follow the Petrarchan rhyme format. Robinson’s quatrains are additionally manipulated through extensive indentation, conforming not to the unvarying left margins of a typical sonnet but by recessing the two inner lines.14 Although the octave segments adhere to the abba scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet and carry ten-syllable lines, they deviate from a rigid iambic pentameter with a trochee variation. The seemingly random arrangement of the verse makes apparent that the modern female poet is renewing the vibrant creativity of the sonnet’s women pioneers. Yet after the first line’s admonition to the sonnet that it must comply with its new structure, the second line underscores that contemporary women are no longer the primary authors of sonnets but instead adhere to the gendered work of spinning physical materials rather than words. The spindle is juxtaposed with the lute in seeming opposition, since as a stringed instrument the lute serves as another symbol of its creator Apollo. That binarism cannot hold, however. Spinning is synonymous with weaving, and, as Brogan indicates, “[t]he oldest metaphors in the world for the poet’s work are those of weaving.” The poet has been deemed since olden times both a “seer” and a “maker,” Brogan comments, and the latter term “recognize[s] the poet’s work as a skilled craft.” In a Homeric example, the Muses are asked to furnish the imaginative stimulus, but the poet’s “accrued technical skill” is required “for the making of the song”; the “union of special knowledge and technical skill is the distinctive mark of the poet in Homer.”15 Robinson’s reference to the spindle implies that, despite their marginalization as sonneteers, women retain their talent. The quatrain in its final two lines reasserts women’s poetic pioneering, since without their songs the sonnet would be “mute.” A contrast is drawn between the sonnet’s origins “in sunnier lands” where women developed their songs and distant England where male poets now reigned.

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The second quatrain reinforces women’s role in reminding the sonnet of its origins. Think, how the singing-women trooped in bands      To seek the greenwood, dancing to the flute!      Hast thou forgot the refrain dissolute? The circling dance, the chant, the ivied wands?

Ceremonies would last for days as the women danced and sang in their agricultural celebrations. Adding to the pagan element is the sonnet’s “refrain dissolute,” while a hint of sorcery and witchery emanates from references to the “chant” and “ivied wands.” The circle dance, accompanied by song, is considered the earliest form of dancing that stemmed from communal interaction. With its close physical contact, the lively dance contributes to the unrestrained scene. John Keble’s 1827 poem “The Christian Year” provides a useful counterpoint with its disdain for the “Heathen” who resides among “the orchards green,” like the “greenwood” where the dancing women of “The Sonnet” cavorted. Keble derides pagan practices in exclaiming, “Fly from the ‘old poetic’ fields, / Ye Paynim shadows dark!” Pagan symbols, including “the ivied wand” that Keble references, would be replaced by Christian prayers. Like the fractured octave, Robinson’s sestet departs from convention with its two segments. Although it retains Petrarch’s six lines, the sestet deviates from the typical rhyme scheme in adopting a cdcede sequence. Indentations persist as well. Even though the sestet lines are each ten syllables, they wander from a strict iambic pentameter sequence with trochees. The sestet changes again call attention to the female poet’s creative approach to the sonnet. In the initial three lines of the sestet, the speaker again reminds the sonnet of its pagan past. Sonnet, a thousand years ago to-day      Thou wast indeed the wild instinctive song That women chaunted for the Feast of May!

As the sestet unfolds, it marks a seminal change in the character of the sonnet, which has been altered from its energetic and effusive nature of long ago.

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But now, O solemn mirror of the mind,      Now it is I am weak, and thou art strong, Keep me a coign of clearness and be kind!

The bodily movement of a bygone era thus is counterpoised against the stasis that the sonnet assumed in merely reflecting mental perambulations. Since women were traditionally associated with the body into Victorian times and men with the mind, the alteration from “wild instinctive song” to a “solemn mirror of the mind” reveals that men have appropriated the sonnet from women.16 Now that male hands control it, and men are the arbiters of poetic fashion, the sonnet has become a favored and powerful form of expression. The speaker thus has become “weak” through the sonnet’s decided transference to male poets. She is so marginalized that she pleads for a measure of access to the form, the “coign of clearness,” even though she would be markedly circumscribed. The almost identically titled “Sonnet” from An Italian Garden implores women to break from the masculine tradition and devise their own poetry, not simply make slight modification to men’s verse as does the speaker. Unlike “The Sonnet,” this poem follows the conventional Petrarchan format of the unbroken stanzas in iambic pentameter, but it does provide its own minute twists on tradition. Although the poem begins with the abba scheme, it shifts to acca as the octave continues. Indentations appear, albeit considerably less extensive than those in “The Sonnet.” The sestet follows the conventional scheme of repeated rhymes but instead of the typical cdecde or cdcdcd it features dedede. The octave traces the speaker’s gloomy existence as she strives to translate personal pain into verse but realizes that her poetry would not gain acceptance. Since childhood have I dragged my life along   The dusty purlieus and approach of Death,   Hoping the years would bring me easier breath, And turn my painful sighing to a song; But, ah, the years have done me wrong,   For they have robbed me of that happy faith;   Still in the world of men I move a wraith, Who to the shadow-world not yet belong.

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The diction is unrelentingly grim as the speaker metaphorically trudges through a murkiness that will only lead to her demise, facing the unending pain that accompanies her failure to produce the kind of poetry she desires. Her life is suffocated; she struggles to gain her breath and cannot transform the weary exhalations into “song.” This choice of noun profoundly illuminates her misery with the implicit resonance to the songs of ancient women whose imaginative energy led to poetry. Unlike those predecessors, the speaker cannot be an innovator but instead feels condemned merely to follow male traditions, with little space for her own original “song” to emerge. Thus, she simply becomes imitative. Especially compelling are the final two lines of the passage, for the speaker considers herself as merely a spectral presence in an era when only men’s poetry seems to hold value. She is simply a shadow figure, like the living dead, for in her world a woman’s poetry seems inconsequential. In the sestet, the speaker feels the strain of writing only derivative poetry under male aesthetic conventions before beseeching other women to chart new paths. Too long indeed I linger here and take   The room of others but to droop and sigh; Wherefore, O spinning sisters, for my sake,   No more the little tangled knots untie; But all the skein, I do beseech you, break,   And spin a stronger thread more perfectly.

The speaker has existed in her unpleasant condition longer than she should have remained, as the phrase “room of others” reveals. In its early meaning, the word “room” indicated a designated site; for the speaker, the room becomes a stifling environment where she is expected to take her place as a mimic among those “others” to whom the room belongs. Ironically, a “room” denotes a locale where an activity can be performed because it provides sufficient space, but in the speaker’s case such a supposition is not valid. The speaker’s condition as a lingerer discloses with its denotations that she is not only slow to make a change, but also that she is approaching death as strength ebbs, a condition evidenced by the fact that she can only “droop and sigh.” The sestet assumes a different tone in its closing sentiment, pleading for other women poets to pen original verse rather than becoming veritable mimics, like the speaker. The reference to “spinning sisters” builds on the

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gendered activity in its literal sense to bring forth the notion of weaving as poetic skill referenced in “The Sonnet.” The remainder of the sestet elaborates on the spinning metaphor, urging other women not merely to “the little tangled knots untie” by making only minor alterations to male tradition. Instead, the speaker calls for a complete rupture with constrictive conventions in demanding that women tear apart “all the skein.” In its place, “Sonnet” indicates, would come the “stronger thread” that women poets would weave with vitality as innovators, not imitators. Viewed in their totality, then, the trio of verses just investigated tell the stories of three different challenges for women poets. “A Search for Apollo” traces the speaker’s quest for inspiration and the eventual glimmerings that appear. In “The Sonnet,” the poet yearns to be relevant in an era when male writers eclipse the influence of the ancient female forerunners of the art. With “Sonnet,” the speaker imagines the constraints of the male tradition breaking apart and a resurgence of female creativity.

Poetic Challenges Among the obstacles facing a poet, Robinson imparts, are the difficulties of finding a voice, the ephemerality of ability, and the limitations of the genre. In the first situation, the speaker of “A Reflection,” published in Songs, Ballads, and a Garden Play (1888), realizes that the approaches that served ancient predecessors cannot help to articulate her pain. The verse traces the speaker’s progression from the contented poet of the first stanza to the disillusioned one of the concluding lines. The poem’s title applies in two senses: the speaker reflects on her authorial journey, and she ultimately realizes that her work would be but a poor reflection of esteemed poetic ancestors. In the opening stanza, the speaker recalls the pleasures and the trials she encountered in shaping a poem. Facing imaginative challenges, she persistently followed unsuccessful endeavors with renewed efforts to devise a worthy piece. Although arduous, the inconsistent process brought pleasure rather than dissatisfaction and provided the ultimate reward of a finished composition. This song I wrote—ah me, how long ago!   When up the stair of Heaven and down again   (For even then I did not long remain), With happy feet I used to come and go.

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The speaker then describes the verse as the outcome of her quest for the eternal verities abiding within venerated Greek poetry from long ago. She positioned herself under a laurel branch to recite her verse, as if attempting through this emblem to absorb the wisdom of honored forebears, and she even adopted their frequent vehicle of the ode as her model. Through her “little verse,” the speaker poured forth her sorrow of that time, leaving a metaphorical bloody stain that only hinted at the pain to come. The initial anguish seems utterly insignificant compared to her present state of mind. This ode I sang beneath a laurel-bough   Where I had sought for Truth among the dead;   This little verse, and still the page is red, To soothe some easier pang forgotten now.

The third stanza builds on the connections to Greek bards through two images, the lily and the amphora. I took the dew of lilies grown apart,   The scanty wine of Amphoras and, bright And clear, the blood that flows from trivial scars.

One of the original cultivated plants and recognized for medicinal qualities, the lily emblematized rebirth in olden culture and thus provided an appropriate representation of the speaker’s desire to emulate the illustrious poets of old. As a common vessel adopted by the Greeks, the amphora could hold invigorating wine from which the speaker could figuratively imbibe. Yet the lily and the amphora in “A Reflection” are enervated. Having “grown apart,” the lilies seem vulnerable in their solitary and detached state, and the amphora is already partially drained. In the attenuated condition, neither image holds promise of providing the intellectual sustenance that the speaker seeks. As a result, she can obtain only a limited measure of assistance from the Greek models, and she can gain relief merely for “trivial scars.” As the poem moves toward closure, the tone shifts dramatically with the speaker’s rejection of further poetic work: But with the bitter ink of mine own heart   I have not written and I must not write,    Lest rust and acid dim the eternal stars.

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The speaker has traveled far from the delight of the opening quatrain to arrive at distressing conclusions. First, the speaker cannot find a vehicle through which to voice intense distress. Second, poetry can provide the speaker only an illusory sense of solace for easing sorrows. Third, the models of the ancient Greeks are neither efficacious nor applicable to the modern condition. Fourth, the early male poets spoke from an entirely different, masculinist perspective that cannot provide a model for a Victorian woman whose outlook is inflected by gender concerns and issues. Fifth, the speaker cannot reconcile her life into art, instead seeing her thoughts as corrosive and destructive, as well as an insult to the ancient poets she had revered whose work likely will be honored perpetually. The speaker has come to realize, then, she must reject the poetic process because it cannot ease her pain. The poem’s structure complements its content primarily through stanza length and ultimately through indentation. The first two stanzas are quatrains but the concluding two shrink to tercets, as if signaling that the contentment once experienced would fade away. Also projecting a sense of loss, the concluding stanza varies from its predecessor with indentation as the lines themselves erode. In the previous stanza, the middle line is indented but the closing line conforms to the flush position that opened the stanza, suggesting a return to a kind of stability. The final stanza, however, displays increasing indentations in the second and third lines, which intimate a departure from an equilibrium; this movement further and further away from the initial position visually portrays the speaker’s own passage from a state where poetry brought gratification to a dismal recognition that her expressive ability could no longer provide answers, with no prospect that it would be regained. Like “A Reflection,” the sonnet “Art and Life” from An Italian Garden traces the loss of poetic articulation but turns to nature imagery rather than draw connections to ancient Greek poets. “Art and Life” explores the frustration attending the departure of inspiration, employing the coldest seasons as a background motif. As the sonnet opens, the speaker comprehends that her time of poetic achievement has passed, with the imagery playing on the notion of a poet no longer fruitful and productive. When autumn comes, my orchard trees alone, Shall bear no fruit to deck the reddening year—    When apple gatherers climb the branches sere Only on mine no harvest shall be grown.

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In the second half of the octave, the speaker relates her period of poetic fecundity. Her compositions rose to the level of art and were captured therein, as if her work had been frozen in time and eternalized. For when the pearly blossom first was blown,   I filled my hands with delicate buds and dear,   I dipped them in thine icy waters clear, O well of Art!   and turned them all to stone.

Life’s alteration into art represented the apex of the poet’s accomplishments, to be succeeded by inferior compositions.17 Poetic inspiration has fled almost entirely, leaving the speaker to produce lifeless verse instead of pieces worthy of the artist she had formerly been. Autumn is decomposing into winter in the sestet, and the speaker, though still striving to produce art, instead “shall go hungry.” Therefore, when winter comes, I shall not eat Of mellow apples such as others prize:   I shall go hungry in a magic spring!— All round my head and bright before mine eyes The barren, strange, eternal blossoms meet,   While I, not less an-hungered, gaze and sing.

“The barren, strange” poems now written provide a distinct contrast to the “eternal blossoms” once crafted. The difference between former and current efforts preoccupies the speaker, even as she will “gaze and sing.” Life, not art, awaits her. The sonnet’s rhyme scheme coincides with the alteration in content. In its Petrarchan octave, the poem complies with the conventional rhyme of abbaabba. In the sestet, however, the rhyme sequence takes an atypical path with cdedce. The cde ironically augurs a continued progression of the speaker transforming life into art with the alphabetic succession, but such a positive sequence is immediately undermined. The final three lines jumble the letters so that the sestet adheres to no pattern. The lines do not simply appear in reverse as edc, but instead form a perplexing string of letters. In so doing, the sestet arrangement suggests the nonlinear path the speaker’s poetry is traveling, lacking a progression of ever-improving verse and instead succumbing to disarray.

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Also conveying a cessation of inspiration is Robinson’s “Song,” appearing in the New Arcadia collection (1884). Unlike the speaker in “Art and Life,” this poet is unable to produce work at all, regardless of quality. The first of two septets adumbrates the speaker’s distress. I have lost my singing-voice;   My heyday’s over. No more I lilt my cares and joys,    But keep them under cover.    My heyday’s gone:    I sit and look on While Life rushes past with a sob and moan.

The verbiage emphasizes the absence of agency. Even the few active predicates signal dissolution with the departure of the speaker’s voice (“lost”), inability to sing (“lilt”), concealment of thought (“cover”), and separation from the world around her (“Life rushes past”). The other two verbs are explicitly passive, for the speaker remains immobile (“sits”) and simply observes. The dual noun choice of “heyday” increases the speaker’s emptiness with its denotation of vigor now vanished. The rhyming pairs suggest equivalencies: the “voice” is equated with “joys,” the notion of being “over” accords with “cover” as a kind of suffocation since ideas can no longer be expressed, and the final sequence of “gone,” “on,” and “moan” implies that loss leads to misery. As the second stanza unfolds, the speaker’s pain comes into relief. Wherefore should I stop to tell   The pang that rends me? If it leave me all is well;    And if it last it ends me.    Should one tear rise    To my entrancèd eyes It falls for a world full of hunger and sighs.

The opening line imparts the speaker’s utter lack of direction with the cessation of poetic inspiration and expression. The result is a veritable shredding of identity in the next line, characterized as a violent act through the denotation of “rends.” The remainder of the stanza amplifies the speaker’s passivity as one whom pain ripped apart, for the speaker lacks control even of her own tears. The adjective “entranced” expands the desperate tone,

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for the word’s meanings include being cursed, dazed, and unconscious. In this deeply personal vein, the speaker ends her lament by indicating that her life holds no hope, only “hunger and sighs” from the loss of poetic acuity. The poem’s format provides an implicit commentary. Although both stanzas follow an ababccc scheme, the rhymes produce dissimilar effects. Unlike the first stanza, the second is somewhat ironic. The first rhyming pair of “tell” and “well” undercuts itself in not displaying equivalency, for the act of disclosure brings no positive result of recuperation; the speaker cannot even express her distress. Although the two rhymes of “me” do not participate in the irony, they underscore the destructive consequences of incessant suffering, with pain rending and then slaying. The final lines return to the ironic element, with “rise” and “eyes” suggesting an upward movement rather than the downward movement of a tear, and “sighs” conveying a poet’s descent from power over language to a total dearth of that ability.

Poetic Responsibility Yet this reading of “Song” as a highly personal, discrete entity is not the sole interpretative position. Instead, analysis from a public perspective applies when assessing the poem within the framework of A New Arcadia, which in its entirety foregrounds the grim life of rural residents.18 Their “new Arcadia” resembles not the idyllic realm envisioned by pastoral poets but rather a world of tribulation. Robinson’s treatment of the subject, John Addington Symonds informed her, reflected an “intense humanity,” which he believed “the quality essential to true art in this book,” rather than “the excellence of versification or the direct poetic vision.” In a letter to Symonds, Robinson claimed that she sought to assist needy individuals. I only want to be good and some use in the world…. I think I am growing more thoughtful for others. At least I know I often feel the love of the whole unhappy world and a passionate longing to help it that burns like a fire in me like a real physical fever. But it is so easy to feel unselfish. I often feel passionately unselfish, but I live a life that is narrow selfish, self-centered so that I hate myself.19

When “Song” is appraised as part of the ongoing narrative defining A New Arcadia, the verse implies that the loss of the “singing-voice” stems

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from a realization of the genre’s limitations in effecting substantive social change. The speaker can no longer write poetry because it seems far too focused on self-exploration than on aiding humanity in a material way. The perceived ineffectuality of poetry in this context explains the speaker’s withdrawal from her work and her consciousness of passivity. Writing of her “cares and joys” seems selfish and disengaged from the world around her, and thus she feels compelled to “keep them under cover.” Now believing that poetry cannot materially uplift the human condition, the speaker can only “look on.” The “Life” that races by is not linked to a lost inspiration for depicting her own preoccupation; rather, the “sob” and “moan” the speaker notes stem from the suffering of others, not her own. In this public context, the speaker in the second stanza cannot identify anywhere to dissipate the anguish that sunders her, for her personal despair at forsaking her poetry does not matter on a larger scale when her rural contemporaries struggle in their challenging circumstances. She must suffer silently, and whether she survives or decays emotionally seems a matter of chance. Yet a movement from this private concern to public empathy returns in the final lines, for her possible tears will not arise in response to her own misery but to “a world full of hunger and sighs.” As the final poem preceding the “Epilogue to the New Arcadia,” “Song” assumes a tone substantially distinct from the collection’s opening “Prologue,” which carries a far more hopeful note. Composed of fourteen stanzas that resemble rhyme royal, “Prologue” envisions poetry as opening minds to the true condition of the rural poor, not the illusory picture of pastoral bliss proclaimed in customary verse. “Prologue” repeatedly stresses that the violent, criminal, and brutish behavior associated with urban life exists as well in the seemingly bucolic world. “Hunger and passion are present there, no less,” the speaker announces, with “[m]an’s soul, unneighboured in its hideousness, / Man’s darker soul” indisputably present. Syllabic variations repeatedly occur in the poem that generally conforms to the iambic pentameter cadence of rhyme royal. Although an eleven-syllable line with a feminine ending is not an uncommon variation of iambic pentameter, the poem’s long lines instead finish with a stress. Other syllabic anomalies appear—of eight, twelve, and thirteen syllables— that, joined with their eleven-syllable counterparts, produce a disconcerting effect that contributes to the poem’s disturbing content. As Emily Harrington remarks, “‘Prologue’ announces a new sort of discordant lyricism, one that deploys modern, jarring rhythms to correspond to the modern realities.” Contributing to the unsettling rhythms are the trochees

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and anapests randomly sprinkled throughout the poem. Symonds asserted that The New Arcadia in general “frequently and violently” deviated from iambic pentameter, complaining that anapests “have driven the iambic rhythm so far away, that it becomes intrusive on our ear.”20 Like the meter, the rhyme scheme also brings disorder. Although several stanzas follow the ababbcc sequence marking rhyme royal, others replace the /b/ of the fifth line with an unexpected /a/, in no consistent pattern. All of these departures from rhyme royal signal that Robinson’s verse will deviate substantially from the pronouncements of traditional pastoral poetry. The primary targets of the “Prologue” are the poets who blithely present the rural environment as an idyllic realm rather than expose “the hidden dreaded thing / Festering underneath.” The speaker condemns “the greenness of the leaves” in a double reference to pastoral locales and to the pages of immature verses that fail to reflect the reality of a seemingly verdant world. These works disseminate the false impression with “all their delicate tremble in the air,” a phrasing that foregrounds the fragility and insubstantiality of such poems, for they cannot indefinitely occlude the truth of country life. Like those writers, the speaker once followed pastoral literary tradition, producing a metaphorical child with her oeuvre, before learning the true situation. As mothers tell the death-bed of their child, My child was gentle visions, and all were wrong, And false, and cruel; and I bury it here: Lend me your spades,—I do not ask a tear.

The second line of the passage, with its recognition of error, is accentuated in being the sole eleven-syllable line of its stanza. The speaker’s realization that her poetry had been fallacious and built on unquestioned illusions came from her own revelatory experience. So searing was the moment that an earlier stanza relating the effect is highlighted in the third line as the only one with thirteen syllables. And I have heard long since, and I have seen, Wrong that has sunk like iron into my soul, That has eaten into my heart, has burned me and been A pang and pity past my own control, And I have wept to think what such things mean, And I have said I will not weep alone, Others shall sorrow and know as I have known.

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In refusing to “weep alone” and in claiming that she will impart her knowledge, the speaker has identified the responsibility of the poet. Truth, not assuagement, must be the poetic objective, the stanza insists. “Prologue” is directed not only at the conventional pastoral poets the speaker has derided but also the “others” referenced in the stanza’s final line. Left unspecified, the word encompasses all Victorians who hold faulty opinions about rustic existence that they refuse to recognize and discard. The next stanza directly castigates those individuals, and the speaker vows to destroy their erroneous but self-satisfying conclusions to fulfill her responsibility as a truthful poet. The stanza returns to the imagery of the leaves that had been associated with the false poet, but this time the references encompass the “others” as well. Others shall learn and shudder, and sorrow, and know What shame is in the world they will not see. They cover it up with leaves, they make a show Of Maypole garlands over, but there shall be A wind to scatter their gauds, and a wind to blow And purify the hidden dreaded thing Festering underneath: and so I sing.

The allusion to the wind, a metaphor for poetry, reminds of Alice Meynell’s comment in “Winds of the World” that “[e]very wind is, or ought to be, a poet.” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s well-known “Ode to the West Wind” would resonate with Victorians, especially since the opening stanza accords with Robinson’s references to the impermanent leaves of customary pastoral verse. Shelley addresses the potent wind as “Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead / Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”21 Robinson directs yet another assault on paradigmatic pastoral verse that irresponsibly provides a false mirror of rural life, as the “Prologue” speaker advises Victorians of her contrasting purpose. … I do not sing to enchant you or beguile; I sing to make you think enchantment vile, I sing to wring your hearts and make you know What shame there is in the world, what wrongs, what woe; ................................................ Only your eyes I ask, only your ears.

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The speaker’s plea for attention to her words is multiply reiterated as she states on one occasion, “let me sing, and listen to my song, / Though it is rough wild sobs, and harsh and wild.” Often accompanying her requests is a reminder that society must strive to improve the lives of country residents. “I know that you will help,” the speaker maintains, and “you will let them be / Foreseeing, noble, wise, and even as ye.” In effect, “Prologue” beseeches privileged individuals to cross class boundaries and assist others less fortunate. Telling readers not to “stand aloof” and erroneously muse on the “happy lives these peasants win,” the speaker begs that the upper classes instead recognize actuality. “See, round the hearth, squat Ignorance, Fever, Sin,” says the speaker, whose words are especially emphasized by being the only eleven-syllable line in the iambic pentameter stanza. As M. Lynda Ely remarks, “Prologue” contends that a woman poet’s linguistic weapon cannot wield the material strength to effect change.22 Without a sword to “fight the battles of God,” the speaker has “only a song at my command,” minimized as “[t]he froth of the world.” Although she claims that her song is “water weak,” she insists that “since it is my weapon, let me speak.” She exhorts her listeners who “are more mighty than I” to “go forth and do what I but dream.” One might expect that this significant stanza therefore would fall in the exact middle of the verse to highlight its crucial content, but its placement elsewhere adds to the overall disquieting effect projected by the poem as a whole. Despite the ardent call to social justice that the speaker views as the responsibility of poetry, New Arcadia ends on a disquieting note, even more so than did the preceding “Song.” The “Epilogue to the New Arcadia,” though continuing the mission of social justice, points as well to the presumed limits of poetry. The inequities and sufferings of the New Arcadia, the speaker reveals, defy expression in language. “I cannot show, / I cannot say the dreadful things I see,” the speaker laments in the final lines of the sonnet’s octave. Rather than hope, the speaker sees only despair ahead.

Seeking the Heights As the above examples have demonstrated, Robinson explores quite varied attitudes about the poetic process, ranging along a spectrum of positivity and negativity. In a quartet of verses by a trio of Robinson’s contemporaries, however, the genre is elevated to uncompromised heights,

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figuratively and literally, in asserting female poetic authority. One such verse is “Aspiration I,” part of a four-segment sequence by Emily Pfeiffer, a New Woman committed to improving conditions for others. In the poem, Pfeiffer makes the gender connection unambiguous in its biblical epigraph referencing a female eagle tending to her young. The Petrarchan verse, included in Sonnets and Songs (1880), situates a young eagle in its nest on high, “[b]etwixt the blue above and blue beneath,” in the octave. Able to rest only momentarily when a deadly threat looms, the eagle soars on “viewless winds” in search of “an unknown quest.” With the wind often equated with the poetic voice, the octave sets up the sestet as the speaker relates her own lyrical journey. Moreover, as Virginia Blain notes, the phrase bring to mind John Keats’ 1820 “Ode to a Nightingale” with “the viewless wings of Poesy”23 that lead the speaker on the avian search through the imagination. The sestet draws an equivalence between the octave’s “callow eagle” and the speaker’s soul, which is analogously compelled to leave its tranquil home “[a]nd made to stretch t’wards some far distant goal / Of glory.” The height motif expressed earlier expands as the soul begins its “upward journey,” propelled by “the Spirit,” Pfeiffer’s own version of Keats’ poetic imagination, to prevent the speaker-eagle’s destruction. Thus, the poem’s title carries a profound meaning, for the speaker’s compulsion to pursue poetry derives from her “aspiration,” not only of desire but also of the very act of life-sustaining breath.24 As Pfeiffer’s verse makes clear, poetic imagination emanates from within the speaker herself. Unlike male poets who beseech the Muses for inspiration, the speaker calls upon no exterior auxiliary force. With her self-­ initiated inspiration, Pfeiffer’s speaker underscores the divergent path of the female poet, who does not follow the literary practices of her male counterparts but instead draws upon her own imaginative resources. Moreover, the designation of the soul as the speaker’s poetic force severs the customary association of a female with the denigrated body in contrast to the supposed intellectual superiority of a male. The speaker’s faraway objective of attaining “glory” would translate into a broad recognition of her work as worthy of veneration, not the scorn often heaped upon female poets. Mathilde Blind’s 1895 “Soul-Drift” in her Poetical Works similarly separates the ostensible female link to the body by also equating poetic authority with the soul, which reaches increasing heights and gains agency as the poem progresses. In the first of three quatrains, the speaker permits

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the soul to travel upon an aimless breeze, merely riding passively as the speaker’s deliberations about the surrounding buds burgeon. The breeze follows a low trajectory as it lifts seed-like expulsions of an earthbound thistle, which parallels the speaker’s early yet expanding poetic facility as her thoughts then rise from the prickly plants to float with the dusty exhalations of the trees. I let my soul drift with the thistledown   Afloat upon the honeymooning breeze; My thoughts about the swelling buds are blown,   Blown with the golden dust of flowering trees.

The second quatrain continues the drifting motif as the speaker still allows the soul to float, but the breeze of the previous stanza has been transformed. Instead of the soul merely meandering as the speaker is immersed in thought, the soul now moves “[o]n fleeting gusts of desultory song.” The contemplation of the first stanza has metamorphosed into the crafting of poetry, albeit not adequately formed in its desultoriness. As an emblem of poetry, the more powerful wind designates the speaker’s growth, and in the stanza’s penultimate line the wind becomes a “Psyche.” Not only is the Psyche considered more powerful than a breeze, it also functions as a synonym for the soul. With the term’s capitalization, the soul has been personified to become an entity moving under its own volition rather than simply a passive drifter. It becomes an agent as it “flies and palpitates among / The palpitating creatures on the wing.” The soul has reached heights far exceeding the level of the first quatrain’s thistledown. The soul’s agency gains in force in the final quatrain as the speaker fully unleashes it. Go, happy Soul! run fluid in the wave,   Vibrate in light, escape thy natal curse; Go forth no longer as my body-slave,   But as the heir of all the Universe.

For the first time in the poem, the soul itself has been capitalized to reflect its status as an independent being wholly separated from the speaker. The quatrain is filled with active predicates demonstrating the soul’s agency as it can run, vibrate, escape, and proceed. The soul has completely transcended the body through its inheritance of the entire universe. With the

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soul serving as a sign of poetic imagination, the closing stanza reveals that the speaker has attained unimaginable heights with the verse she now can craft. Moreover, the female poet is no longer figuratively tethered to the earthly body and all its demeaning and delimiting associations in Victorian culture. In the process, she has demonstrated her poetic authority. The ability to reach ultimate heights in crafting poetry defines as well Dollie Radford’s ”To-night,” included in A Light Load (1891). The images in the two eight-line stanzas are ethereal, as the speaker’s soul will travel increasingly upward. No references to the body or to the earth are present to compromise a female poet’s capability, emphasizing the soul’s detachment from the material world. As the poem opens, even time is suspended as night approaches and the soul begins its journey. The hours of the day have departed,   They folded their wings to rest, When the last red ray of sun-light   Faded away in the west, And fleecy clouds cover the stars,   And beyond is a world of blue, And my soul awakes from a slumber   To-night, and I see right through—

The disappearance of the sun, a conventional emblem of masculinity, enables the female poet to escape a gender register that would otherwise diminish her achievements in a Victorian mindset. The poem’s title becomes doubly significant in that it can be read not only as “tonight” but as an encomium “to night.” In the second stanza, the soul flies upward to the level of celestial immortals and peers down at the universe. Away to a world of azure,   Where white-wing’d spirits meet, While the clouds float and fade below them,   And the stars shine at their feet. They hold out their hands in welcome,   And now, for a moment of time, Limitless worlds, and boundless space,   And planets—they all are mine.

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The stanza recognizes that poetic inspiration appears only intermittently and abides only briefly. In that limited duration, however, the speaker’s talent is unbounded, as in Blind’s “Soul-Drift.” Also possessing the universe with her absolute creative power, Radford’s female speaker announces that she, too, wields poetic authority. As in “Soul-Drift” and “Aspiration I,” that authority emerges from within the speaker, drawing upon her own resources and demonstrating an ability not constrained by masculine tradition. Another Radford poem resonates especially with “Aspiration I” and its central image of an elevated nest. “Because I built my nest so high,” published in Songs and Other Verses (1895), concentrates entirely on the speaker, however, with no metaphorical eagle embarking on a parallel quest. In the first of three quintains, the speaker questions whether a forceful wind’s destruction of the nest should bring despair when lower nests have been left unscathed. The fact that a wind, with its allusion to poetry, should be the despoiling entity seems odd, but not if the speaker’s work does not reach her potential. The wind’s “bitter cry” as it avoids the branches below serves as a judgment that the speaker’s creative efforts are inadequate. In the second stanza, the speaker wonders if she should still regret the nest’s lofty position, again higher than that of other nests, if hers should be strewn. The verbiage faintly echoes the story of Icarus. Because I hung it, in my pride,   So near the skies, Higher than other nests abide, Must I lament if far and wide   It scattered lies?

Like the mythological figure, the speaker projects an egotism that considers her work superior to that of other poets. As in the first quintain, however, the nest is destroyed, again indicating that the speaker has not attained the level of practical expertise commensurate with her talent. The stanza reminds of Icarus’ self-satisfaction and hubris, and the speaker seems to be emulating his faults. Yet the passage also offers a more positive reading, whereby the speaker continually strives to excel rather than content herself with lesser endeavors. That interpretation is borne out in the final stanza.

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I shall but build, and build my best,   Till, safety won, I hang aloft my new-made nest, High as of old, and see it rest   As near the sun.

As the first line indicates, the speaker has attained the ultimate level of excellence that matches her potential through a marked determination. The repetition of “build” conveys that persistence with the repeated attempts to craft a worthy work. Having achieved that level of skillfulness, the speaker can suspend her “new-made nest,” the latest iteration of her creations safe from the wind’s accusation of inferiority. Like Icarus, she approaches the sun; unlike him, she achieves her goal, well deserved through arduous and unflagging efforts that will enable her to flourish, not perish. The speaker’s expectation that she will eventually succeed threads through the entire poem, in part indicated by the widespread use of “I.” The pronoun evidences a firm belief in her poetic authority, especially signaled in the final stanza when she has achieved her objective. The “I” initiates two of the stanza’s lines in contrast to the pronoun’s insertion less assertively later in the lines of the previous quintains. The pronoun intimates as well that the speaker has triumphed through her own vision and resilience, unfettered by the masculine poetic tradition.

Inspiration and Its Discontents Achieving poetic aspirations requires inspiration, of course, and as Robinson’s poems demonstrate, the creative stimulus can be exhilarating as well as elusive. Several of her contemporaries also grapple with the issue and articulate the vicissitudes of inspirational workings. On one end of a continuum is the fruitful presence of inspiration to bring beauty to life, while at the other end is the utter despair wrought by an inspirational absence. In a positive manifestation of inspiration, Olive Custance’s “The Snow,” included in Rainbows (1902), proceeds from an aestheticist perspective to reveal the power of beauty. The fifteen-line poem begins with a reference to the “sullen skies” as images of descent depict the presence of snow with the repeated predicate “fall.” Thus, “[t]he frail white snowflakes fall like fairy butterflies, / Fall on the pale small snowdrops, fall and fall.” The imagery turns funereal with the verb form “covering” in another series of repetitions. The snow is “[c]overing the purple violets, covering / All the fair fragile children of the Spring; / Covering the big warm earth as with a pall.”

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Yet these dreary images immediately shift into a positive register as the sun appears and birds trill their songs. The “strange white world” is transformed into “crystal glittering,” which provides the inspiration needed to dispel the speaker’s bleak view. Through the altered impression, beauty overlays the darkness of life. And my soul that in silence for so long Has shuddered at the wounded world’s red sins, And sordid griefs and passionate dumb sorrows, Suddenly dreams a shining dream and spins A silver poem, and straightway opens wide The great dim windows of her house of song And laughs to know her dark despairs have died.

The speaker’s metamorphosis conforms to Walter Pater’s contentions in The Renaissance (1893). Beauty, he believes, must be defined “in the most concrete terms possible,” and “the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.” To Pater, importance lies in “the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.” The reaction of “The Snow” speaker accords with both of these seminal assessments of an aesthetic vision. Michelle L. Whitney comments on Custance’s “growing disillusionment with the superficiality of fin-de-siècle life,”25 and “The Snow” offers a way to bracket off an ambient shallowness through the power of beauty. Custance’s “The Song Spinner,” part of Opals (1897), pursues a similar path in beginning with a suggestion of a harsh world that is subsequently countered by beauty, again provided by nature. In the first of three nine-­ line stanzas, the speaker is detached from the life around her. Safe in my golden room of thought,      I hear outside the rush and sweep Of travel wearied wings of sin:      I hear the tears of those that weep …

The external world seems to hold interest only as a source of material for poetry, with “[v]ague threads of music to weave in, / The songs of life I sit and spin.” The speaker’s inert position in this final line of the stanza adds to the sense of disconnection from her surroundings, reminding of the feelings of malaise and ennui often associated with the fin de siècle.

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In the second stanza, the speaker’s disengagement is reiterated with a slight rewording of the previous line: “I sit and spin the songs of life…” Yet the recognition of beauty, in floral form, initiates inspiration that enables the speaker to write in an intense and profound way. The “proud flowers” envelop her like a nurturing parent, for “[t]heir leaves fold round me like soft wings, / Their colours soothe as the caress / Of cool slim hands.” The speaker experiences a response so powerful that it resembles the force of violence in its effect on her poetry.     … like a knife    Too sharp to hurt, their keen fresh scent    Stabs through my senses to the pent And passionate soul beyond that sings Of mortal and immortal things …

From this transformation comes a time of poetic productivity described in the closing stanza, as “aureoled days / Of song” that extend “from rosedawn / To languorous drift of light out-worn.” Indulging in “fervid care,” the speaker continues “[s]low spinning the poem fabric fair!” The workings of inspiration take on dismal contours, however, in another Radford poem from A Light Load. “My Songs” laments a lack of inspiration that precludes the speaker from writing anything other than unoriginal poetry.26 The five triplets remind of fin-de-siècle exhaustion as the speaker opens with the regret that “[t]here is no unawakened string, / No untried note for me to ring, / No new-found song for me to sing.” In the three succeeding triplets, the speaker discusses well-worn themes that characterized predecessors’ poems. First, the speaker discusses the theme of summer, when “my heart is light,” and the discouraging turn to autumn “when the birds take flight.” Second, the ecstasies of young love are recalled, when a lover is overcome by the beloved’s appearance, so idyllic that “[t]he sun-light never leaves her hair” and “[h]er beauty fills me with a prayer.” Third, the speaker muses upon the hours spent in “many a tryst and watch I keep” with others “[b]etween the hours of work and sleep.” Not surprisingly, the poem’s conclusion matches its beginning as the speaker mourns that all the themes of interest “have rolled / Through times and ages manifold, / A mighty chorus fully told.” The elusiveness of inspiration takes on darker tones in Eva Gore-­ Booth’s “To a Poet,” included in her Poems (1898). Born in Ireland but residing mainly in England, Gore-Booth assiduously labored to improve

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women’s working conditions, expand educational opportunities, and promote women’s rights.27 The twenty-six line verse, arranged in couplets, denies that a poet can ever attain the desired level of inspiration. A kind of poetic impotence exists in that meaning seems inaccessible and thus cannot be communicated. The poet cannot capture life in language and can only present shadows of meaning. The opening couplets set the dismal mood. No visions speak to thee— No visions shalt thou see— The very sunset thou shalt know But in its fading afterglow. In thy mind’s secret place Is neither light, nor song, nor grace— Foolish echoes, void of sound, Wander o’er the stony ground.

Any expectation that true insight can be reached is merely a chimeric delusion, the poet is harshly informed. “Think’st thou that life shall cast divine / Pearls before such feet as thine?” Despite arduous labor, the poet will fail to grasp elusive meaning, for “[t]hou art only half alive.” Varied allusions maintain the penumbral tone. Music, even “in her highest rapture,” can convey merely “snatches of remembered tunes.” Sounds will remain “unheard” or “unsung,” as will a “whispered word.” The situation is insurmountable, for no “shaft of light” will dispel “thy spirit’s night.” Instead, the concluding couplet warns the poet that no “life, nor beauty, shalt thou know, / But endless echoes, and an afterglow!” It is rather ironic that in childhood Gore-Booth was given a statue of Apollo that brought an effusive reaction to the wonders of poetry. As she recalls in a 1929 posthumously issued memoir, “The Inner Life of a Child,” the “beautiful white gleaming face” of the figurine produced “a mad, struggling throng of associations, of dreams, of thoughts jostled together in her mind” as well as an overpowering “flood of new emotions.” So impressive was the statue that she “prayed with all her heart” not simply to the Apollo representation “but to the Divine idea of beauty, the symbol of the conquering soul.”28 Such a sincere embrasure of beauty, imparted by the statue commemorating the god of poetry, offers a remarkable contrast to the pessimism pervading “To a Poet.”

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Amy Levy’s “To Death” goes even further than the negative assessment in “To a Poet” by suggesting that without the ability to write inspired poetry, life is not worthwhile. The brief poem from A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884) is subtitled “From Lenau,” a telling reference to German poet Nikolaus Lenau whom Levy studied and whose state of mind provides a window into Levy’s own sentiments. Her acquaintance Eleanor Marx commented that Levy “had a peculiar liking for Lenau, the poet of melancholy and human liberation.” Moreover, “like her favourite Lenau,” Levy was “inclined to hopeless melancholy.”29 Composed of two quatrains, “To Death” is marked by funereal references. The first stanza compares the lack of inspiration to “mould” within a poet’s heart, an indicator of a creative dissolution. The speaker employs the contrasting states of warmth and coldness in referencing the loss of poetic capability. “If the flame of Poesy … grow cold,” says the speaker, “[s]lay my body utterly.” Without poetic inspiration, the poem suggests, the body is meaningless and requires a comparable death. A sense of urgency emerges in the second quatrain as the speaker seeks death before creativity wanes. Swiftly, pause not nor delay; Let not my life’s field be spread With the ash of feelings dead, Let thy singer soar away.

The dearth of inspiration turns a vibrant “life’s field” into a burial site strewn with crematory ashes. Contrasting with this grim site is the image of the poet taking flight before creative nothingness ensues, a far preferable fate.

Fulfilling a Duty Another Robinson concern, poetic responsibility, is also shared by contemporary women and is especially evident in four verses that explore the situation from varied perspectives, two of which were penned by L.  S. Bevington. In “Ye Poets,” which appeared in Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets (1882), the speaker assails writers who contribute to the failings of society by bolstering faulty behavior. Resembling a sonnet, the first section of the poem indicts those misguided individuals, in part through emphatic punctuation.

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Ye poets of our transient poverty!    Weak strengths that pour sick passions into song!    Who finding right struck dumb, enthrone wrong, And crown mean lust with love’s own royalty!

The speaker acknowledges a temptation to indulge in such erroneous authorial conduct “at self’s high tide” and becoming another “voice in your wild choir of craven pride.” The speaker immediately casts aside such notions, however, declaring that she would abandon poetic work rather than join the dishonorable contingent. Instead of following the offensive example of unethical poets, the speaker chooses to embrace beliefs she once held that validated arduous efforts to seek an ethical path. Yet rather let me cease from minstrelsy To grope for ever dumbly, onward still Up the old rugged way, the blood-stained hill That seen afar in youth seemed plainest road Leading from self the slave, to man the god. Yea, rather let me lay my music by Than for mere music’s sake hymn slavery.

Despite Bevington’s atheism, the references to slavery suggest human error in acting disreputably and thereby enslaving oneself in disdainful thoughts and base actions as opposed to seeking righteousness and elevating the self. The religious connotation is amplified by the predicate “hymn” in its ironic pairing with “slavery” and a reminder of the moral depths to which an individual can plummet.30 It is wrong to write inappropriately, the speaker insists, simply to be writing. Poetic responsibility means turning away from authorship if its pursuit is ethically compromised. The speaker’s determination to separate herself from unworthy poets gains emphasis from the verse’s formal features that are themselves distanced from tradition. Although resembling a typical sonnet with its fourteen lines, similarities tend to end there. Not only is an octave not physically detached from a sestet, Bevington’s volta comes after the seventh line and within an incomplete sentence. The quasi-octave carries two pairs of indented lines, which stress the ideas of weakness, wrongness, and undeserved pride. Rather than uniformly distinguished by pure iambic pentameter, the poem includes two deviations, both of which foreground a movement from debased to uplifted behavior. In one case, the line begins

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with trochees to highlight “the old rugged way,” and in the other case, the phrase “Leading from self to slave” is itself led by a trochee. Moreover, the rhyme scheme begins with the Petrarchan abba but shifts to acca and then three couplets of dd, ee, and a return to aa. The sonnet form is almost unrecognizable in “Ye Poets” to bring to the fore the speaker’s rejection of the apparently new “traditions” she condemns. In “My Little Task,” also published in Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets, Bevington validates poetic responsibility even while recognizing the limited change that verse can enact. In the opening pair of eight triplets, the speaker wonders how she can help foster improved conditions in her cultural moment when others are oblivious to its problems. I throw a guess out here or there, I breathe a hope into the air, I feel a dumbness like a prayer. What, with this fencèd human mind, What can I do to help my kind? I such a stammerer, they so blind!

As she ponders the question, the speaker determines that she can achieve “nothing,” but she immediately realizes that through her poetry she can indeed accomplish something. First, “through the single gate / Of utterance,” the speaker can “throw my little weight / To swell the praise of what is great.” Second, she can through every poem “[h]eap cold discredit on the wrong, / And cheer the march of right along.” Moreover, the speaker realizes that when she encounters the beauties of nature, she can communicate her appreciation and “[s]ing forth the mood that feels their worth.” In addition, her poetry can acknowledge compassion when she experiences “a bitter woe … healed by tender sympathy.” In the final stanzas, the speaker perceives that her poetic efforts to effect change can have only minimal results, yet through their accumulation, the social condition can improve. So add what force a singer may, To ring opinion’s echoing sway A few chords mellower day by day. Through chiming all that’s pure and true, Through hymning steadfast love anew, This is the most that I may do.

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As the closing line attests, the speaker recognizes the limits of poetry, yet with the previous stanzas it becomes evident that verse can make the world a better place. Poetic responsibility of a quite different sort is addressed in two verses by Bevington contemporaries. These works warn of the danger implicit in a poet’s embrasure of self-enrichment through commercialism replacing a desire to create substantive and important verse. E. Nesbit’s “To a Young Poet,” included in the 1892 series of Lays and Legends, brings a sarcastic tone to the issue in encouraging the writer to succumb to the lure of substantive remuneration. In the first of four quatrains, the speaker comments that to attain an easier authorial life, the poet should “drop away.” The phrase denotes both a fall and a departure from the higher echelons of poetic work. “Pen the muse, and drive the pen,” says the speaker in this play on the verb and noun forms of the repeated word. That is, the addressee must stifle poetic creativity in favor of pursuing contemporary acceptance by “stay[ing] with living men.” The second quatrain recommends that if “[f]ancy fails,” the young poet should appropriate the verses of others and “pluck from those / Gardens where her blossom blows.” With a bit of reworking to create a derivative product, the poet can devise a marketable commodity. “Trim the buds and wire them well,“ the speaker advises, for then the “bouquet’s sure to sell.” The encouragement continues in the next quatrain, which begins with a chant-like exhortation to keep churning out profitable poetic merchandise. Write, write, write! Produce, produce! Write for sale, and not for use. This is a commercial age! Write! and fill your ledger page.

The act of writing and commercial success blend together in this stanza, with a boundary between authorship and remuneration blurred, especially in the first and fourth lines where the two notions are closely coupled. The final stanza counsels the addressee to ignore any disconcerting feelings that creativity has been traded for revenue and to remember that poetic integrity will not translate into money. If your soul should droop and die, Bury it with undimmed eye. Never mind what memory says— Soul’s a thing that never pays!

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The “droop” and death of the soul resonate with the “drop” of the poem’s initial line, and the poem circles back upon itself through the synonymous terms. With this return, the verse intimates that the addressee will become entrapped in a commercial world but will feel no regret since the soul itself has been effectually interred. This ironic poem carries a far different tone than M.  E. Coleridge’s “Therefore I wrote it, not that men should buy,” appearing in Poems (1908). With its eight-line structure and abba rhyme scheme, “Therefore I wrote it…” resembles a sonnet octave, but there is no volta here to alter the message. The opening line sounds like a reader has interrupted a conversation in which the speaker is validating the poetic course that had been taken. “I care not, I, to sell my soul for bread,” the speaker continues, and the repeated “I” separates her from other poets writing not for integrity but for pecuniary ends. The soul will outlive the body, the speaker suggests, as if poetry crafted apart from commercial considerations will endure while tainted verse will not prevail through time. “The craving senses must themselves be dead / Before the soul in such extremes could die,” the speaker asserts. Coleridge’s point resonates with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh when the protagonist maintains that “whosoever writes good poetry, / Looks just to art” (Book V, ll. 251–52). The second quatrain begins with a pronounced repetition of the first stanza’s insistent explanation for the poem’s creation, with a slight alteration whereby the speaker assails the motivation to write merely for fawning praise. With the same opening phrasing, this stanza seemingly equates the evils of writing for money and for laudation. Therefore I wrote it, not that men should cry,    “This is well thought of!” “This is bravely said!”    For flattery’s poison is a thing to dread More than the steel-tipped shafts of enmity.

Flattery, the speaker maintains, is considerably more dangerous than disapprobation. Extensive praise would bring with it the temptation of writing merely to gain self-serving appreciation and ignoring the integrity bound up with truly admirable poetry. For M.  E. Coleridge, as well as A.  Mary F.  Robinson and the other authors addressed in this chapter, their verse evidences that it indeed proceeded from integrity. Though all, like Robinson, have been effectually treated as minor poets over time, their work instead is insightful, deft, and

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consequential. Perhaps the obscurity in which these writers have languished for so long derived from the very fact that they represented competition for their male counterparts and thus their work was deemed superficial, unskilled, and forgettable. Such insidious judgments could not be more in error.

Notes 1. Hannah Lynch, “A.  Mary F.  Robinson,” 275; A.  Mary F.  Robinson, Collected Poems, viii; Arthur Symons, “A. Mary F. Darmesteter,” 363. 2. R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain remind of the typicality of the garden as a feminized space and women writers’ efforts “to subvert it.” They add, “The walled garden became an image of imprisonment, often containing a distressed and lonely inmate” (Poetry of the 1890s, 26). 3. As Margaret Reynolds argues in comparing “An Oasis” to poems about artists and their models, “the ‘male gaze’ … wipes out woman’s individuality,” leaving her just “a vehicle for reflecting his own image” (“A. Mary F. Robinson [1857–1944],” 539). 4. Thornton and Thain, Poetry of the 1890s, 26. 5. Sharp quoted in Ana Parejo Vadillo, “Immaterial Poetics: A.  Mary F.  Robinson and the Fin-de-Siècle Poem,” 240; Paris quoted in Lynch, “A. Mary F. Robinson,” 260; Vadillo, “New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” 27. 6. Robinson presented her sentiments in Greek, observes Yopie Prins (“‘Lady’s Greek’ [With the Accents],” 599). 7. Robinson quoted in Prins, “‘Lady’s Greek’ (With the Accents),” 599. 8. Robinson, Collected Poems, x; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 49. 9. James A. Winn, “Music and Poetry,” 803. 10. T. V. F. Brogan, “Poet,” 922. 11. Robinson, Collected Poems, x. 12. The poet was a close friend of Gaston Paris, who was among the participants at her salon in France, which “soon became a fashionable center of Parisian intellect and culture” (Cynthia K.  Huggins, “A.  Mary F. Robinson,” 205–206). 13. James Darmesteter, English Studies, 174. Robinson and Darmesteter married in 1888. “The news of their engagement in 1887 brough on a nervous and physical collapse in [Vernon] Lee,” Huggins states. “It took Lee several years to regain her strength—if indeed she ever did finally recover, for she suffered from physical debility, migraine, and digestive problems for the rest of her life,” Huggins adds (“A. Mary F. Robinson,” 205).

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14. Cheryl Wilson also says that the poem is “[e]schewing traditional Shakespearean and Petrarchan models” and “indenting lines to create a visual distance between her sonnet and other incarnations of this form.” Robinson, Wilson adds, “posit[s] her text as a hybrid—a generic sonnet that has been modified to suit her particular needs” (“Politicizing Dance in Late-­Victorian Women’s Poetry,” 202). 15. Brogan, “Poet,” 922. 16. Wilson notes that “as Robinson explains in the closing lines of her poem, the sonnet has lost these associations with the physical body and the natural world. … The sonnet has devolved into a tool of the patriarchy” (“Politicizing Dance in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry,” 204). 17. Vadillo comments that Robinson “rewrites Pater’s dictum ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,’ by quite literally cutting the flowers in full bloom so they never become ‘fruit.’ … By freezing this magic spring, Robinson makes the moment eternal as she transforms life into art” (“Cosmopolitan Aestheticism,” 177). 18. Among Robinson’s works, critics have been especially intrigued by A New Arcadia. For discussion of the collection, see, for example, the essays by Emily Harrington and M. Lynda Ely. 19. John Addington Symonds, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 1869–1884, 907; Robinson quoted in Harrington, “The Strain of Sympathy,” 71. 20. Harrington, “The Strain of Sympathy,” 90; Symonds quoted in Ben Glaser, “Polymetrical Dissonance,” 207. 21. Alice Meynell, “Winds of the World,” 23. As Harrington observes, “the wind is a material force meant to sweep away the pastoral show of Maypole garlands” (“The Strain of Sympathy,” 89). 22. Ely, “‘Not a Song to Sell,” 101. Ely reads the section as the speaker’s addressing men who write poetry. The sword and wisdom that the speaker references are “traditionally the weapons of male poet-warriors, with which to wage this poetic battle” (101). 23. Blain, Victorian Women Poets, 95. 24. Blain points out that an 1868 poem by Adah Isaacs Menken, also titled “Aspiration,” carries much the same message as Pfeiffer’s version (Victorian Women Poets, 95). 25. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, xix, xxi; Michelle L.  Whitney, “Olive Custance,” 50. 26. Leeanne Marie Richardson observes that Radford’s poem “expresses anxiety … over the problem of being derivative—of being a latter-day Romantic” (111). Richardson adds, “Her sense of belatedness, of coming too late to contribute something new, accords with fin-de-siècle concerns that British culture had reached its apex” (“Naturally Radical,” 112).

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27. Along with sister Con Markievicz, Gore-Booth was memorialized in a 1927 poem by William Butler Yeats. An Irish national activist, Markievicz participated in a 1916 uprising and received a death sentence. Gore-Booth intervened to help her sister escape execution. 28. Gore-Booth quoted in John C. Hawley, “Eva Gore-Booth,” 70. 29. Marx quoted in Max Beer, 50 Years of International Socialism, 72. 30. Even though an atheist, Bevington frequently included religious references in her poetry, as evidenced in her Key-Notes collection (1879).

CHAPTER 7

The Promise of London

For many fictional New Women, London meant exhilaration, invigoration, and exploration. Two characters in Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold, for instance, recall being “so thrilled by that deep and mysterious emotion which the first glimpse of London always produced within us” and hearkening to “the wonderful, ceaseless beating of feet and the tread of hoofs.” George Gissing’s Rhoda Nunn went to Bath in hopes of soon traveling to London. Gertrude Lorimer in Amy Levy’s The Romance of the Shop asserts that London engendered “something of passion” and carried “a curious fascination.” The eponymous protagonist of George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways discovers upon becoming an urban dweller “a savage exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown.”1 Not only fictional characters espoused the wonders of London, however. Women poets of the fin de siècle also portrayed the city as a site of rare opportunity. Among those authors, A.  Mary F.  Robinson created a trio of “London Studies,” Dollie Radford featured an Elgin column in “To the Caryatid” of the British Museum, Isabella J. Southern examined the scenes at “The Central Station,” and May Kendall turned to the working class in “Songs of the City.” This chapter departs somewhat from the format of previous ones in examining the work of only two poets—Amy Levy primarily and Rosamund Marriott Watson secondarily—because of their prolific treatment of the city announcing its array of benefits and beauties.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_7

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Levy’s important A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889) offers a unique opportunity for examining New Women’s metropolitan poetry. Although several other New Woman poets adopted London settings, the verses tended to be anomalies rather than extensive representations of an oeuvre. No other writer produced the kind of cohesive grouping solely focused on London that Levy provides with the eleven verses joined in her collection. As a special unit, the poems investigate multiple aspects of London within a larger context. A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse has enjoyed critical attention, more so than work by many New Woman poets. Nevertheless, my analysis brings a different perspective to the London verses, exploring them as a totality forming a veritable guidebook for the New Woman, one that is far different from contemporary prose publications. Levy opens the section of the London poems with a fitting epigraph taken from Austin Dobson: “Mine is an urban Muse, and bound / By some strange law to paven ground.” Levy’s collection serves as an encomium to the metropolis and an enticing invitation to the New Woman. The poems, organized under the heading “A London Plane-Tree,” set out a persuasive and multifaceted case claiming that the city offers substantive, unique, and crucial benefits for the independent woman. Every verse acts like a chapter and contributes to the guidebook’s agenda, presenting one or more arguments supporting the value of urban life to characterize the city as a haven for the New Woman in general and the female writer in particular. The poems address issues of paramount concern to the modern individual, emphasizing such inducements as an unaccustomed measure of freedom, creative energy to spur the writing process, meaningful participation in the life force of the city, a chance to engage in purposeful endeavor, and the ability to traverse and observe urban spaces readily. In the process, the poems offer a robust rebuttal to negative assessments of London aimed at deterring female entry into the city as a means of preserving male authority. The guidebook effectually instructs the New Woman about the advantages of urban life and negotiating the city by foot or by omnibus. Coincidentally, the collection’s peripatetic structure, meandering from one topic to another and then revisiting a subject, emulates the circumlocutory travels of an inquisitive wanderer through the London terrain. Certainly, a plethora of guidebooks to London circulated in the Victorian era, often in multiple editions and even occasionally bearing identical titles though proceeding from different publishers. Best known are the Murray’s traveler handbooks and the Baedeker guides, with the former first covering London in 1851 and the latter in 1878, with both updated periodically.

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Murray’s contribution was titled Handbook to London: As It Is, and Baedeker’s version was named London and Its Environs. Other offerings populated the publishing landscape throughout Queen Victoria’s reign. For example, A New Pocket Guide to London and Its Environs by John H.  Brady emerged in 1838, proclaiming in its subtitle that it included “everything worth seeing or knowing within twenty-five miles of the metropolis” and was even “enlivened with biographical and other anecdotes.” London and Its Sights appeared in 1858, identifying itself on the cover as “being a comprehensive guide to all that is worth seeing in the great metropolis,” while Nelson’s Guide to the Environs of London was published the same year. Black’s Guide to London and Its Environs touted on its cover the “maps, plans, and views” it contained. Despite the many offerings of guidebooks, they tended to cover similar topics. Government offices, population data, churches, palaces, parks, theatres, and museums were among common subjects addressed in the handbooks, which varied considerably in length, ranging from fewer than one hundred pages to more than three hundred, as in Murray’s 1879 edition. Yet none of the guidebooks attended to the particular interests of a New Woman contemplating residence in London, with the exception of the British Museum. The London-born Levy, indubitably exemplifying the advanced New Woman, was especially suited to fill that informational gap through the London Plane-Tree guidebook. With a Cambridge education, urban familiarity, and support of New Woman issues, the Bloomsbury resident brought a fresh voice to writings about the city in speaking from the position of a progressive individual. For a New Woman, London offered innumerable cultural prospects, aroused intellectual curiosity, and initiated exciting experiences. As critics have remarked, Levy’s work applauds London, filtered through a female perspective to embrace such aspects as the town’s perpetual movement, incessant changeability, indefatigable vigor, and striking modernity.2 Levy’s collection certainly fits the label of modernity, for poetry about city life represented a step forward. As Arthur Symons wrote in “Modernity in Verse,” selecting London as subject matter was a hallmark of the poetry, “to represent really oneself and one’s surroundings, the world as it is to-­ day.” Moreover, he averred that “the finest of modern subjects” is found in “the pageant of London.” As Linda Hunt Beckman says, verses about London were “unconventional … before the 1890s,” with previous authors primarily interested in nature. She adds that “Levy’s decision to focus on the urban scene, then, is … important and daring.” An 1899

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Academy essay cited Levy’s “genuine love of London, its varied life, its sights and sounds,” noting that the city “has touched the depths of her nature.” The essay added, “From the bewildering multitude of city impressions she has chosen those most real to herself.”3 Levy entered the public arena of London as a pedestrian and an omnibus traveler who broke through gender-limiting boundaries by encroaching upon male privilege. She implicitly contested the masculine identity of flânerie as an alert observer of the many facets of London life. Levy’s 1889 activities, for example, included visits to galleries, concerts, parks, salons, parties, dinners, and clubs, as Beckman reports.4 Other women also valued their city excursions, Levy indicated: “From the high and dry region of the residential neighbourhood the women come pouring down to those pleasant shores where the great stream of human life is dashing and flowing.” Like many other New Women writers, such as Mathilde Blind, Olive Schreiner, Annie Besant, and A. Mary F. Robinson,5 Levy was an enthusiastic and regular visitor of the British Museum’s Reading Room, which she praised in an 1889 essay for its “wonderful accessibility” and other qualities. The locale provided the opportunity for careful study, consequential writing, and supportive interactions with other female intellectuals—despite the disparagement by various male visitors, who did not escape Levy’s disapproval.6 Her essay included illustrations of frivolous men described as “tottering under the weight of knowledge,” having “a siesta,” and making “a change to lighter literature,” in contrast to serious women, with one identified as “reaching after knowledge.” In an 1888 article, Levy praised “feminine club life” in the city that allowed like-­ minded individuals to gather and escape the “isolated position” of women “engaged in art, in literature, in science.”7 Levy also specified “the complete and rapid change of the female position that has taken place in this country during the last few years.” She added, “The tide has set in and there is no stemming it.”8

A Fitting Correspondence Appropriately for Levy’s guidebook, the initial poem, “A London Plane-­ Tree,” articulates the city’s compatibility and suitability for the New Woman, with the cited species functioning as a metaphor for her.9 A highly popular and widely encountered London presence, the sturdy plane-tree manifests a striking affinity with urban settings, as did the successful New Woman. The four-quatrain poem immediately establishes the city as a

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locale that enables the tree to flourish, with the first word “green” emphasized through the trochee and attesting to the metropolis as a life force for this particular arboreal specimen. The initial stanza contrasts the plane-­ tree, which “loves the town,” to “[t]he other” proximate varieties with their desiccated brown leaves, expiring in the urban atmosphere as “[t]hey droop and pine for country air.” Further distinguishing the plane-tree in the second stanza is its “recuperative bark,” a phenomenon that suggests a resurrecting quality since the tree will “bud and blow” in a recurring cyclical process. Like the plane-tree, which is characterized as female in the poem, a New Woman experiences an analogous rebirth when immersed in the restorative environs of London that enable her to thrive as well. Additional botanical characteristics offer considerable parallels between the plane-tree and the cosmopolitan New Woman. The species is a hybrid formed from two trees whose scientific names signify their oppositional nature: Platanus occidentalis and Platanus orientalis. In a sense, the New Woman also represents a hybrid species, for she evinces attributes and demonstrates behaviors traditionally deemed male. Tellingly, the plane-­ tree features both female and male flowers in its own juncture of opposites. The London female hailing from suburban or provincial areas is additionally hybridized, for she is combining city life with an undoubtedly different background. Moreover, the plane-tree’s urban adaptability derives from an unusual capacity to withstand noxious pollutants and survive even for centuries, a compelling product of natural selection. A New Woman similarly encounters debilitating forces to overcome, and she surmounts challenges through her own strategies of adaptability. In another correspondence between the counterparts, the bark’s coloration creates a camouflage effect, which resonates with an adept New Woman’s ability to blend into her surroundings through the anonymity of city life among the surging crowds. Both plane-tree and New Woman display their hardiness, extending their rugged, resilient roots into their environment. For the plane-tree, the aggressive entry can erode human-crafted walkways and edifices; the New Woman’s own assertive passage into a male-dominated world can create unsettling effects as well as through her ongoing resistance to female subordination. The plane-tree’s signature leaves offer another analogy with their rough teeth at the margins, suggesting a New Woman’s need for defensive strategies to counter efforts aimed at marginalizing her. Endurance further represents a shared quality, for the planetree is an exceptionally hardy species, as must be a New Woman striving to reach her unconventional goals. Like the plane-tree, the New Woman

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requires ample space for healthy growth, manifested in her case by the freedom to act as desired. Levy’s poem intimates in its middle quatrains the developmental strides that the city milieu can foster in depicting its interactions with the plane-­ tree and, by extension, the speaker. In the second stanza, the female persona scans her surroundings through a garret window, which identifies her as an artist through the customary connection of the attic site with creativity and the window with vision. The window also blurs the boundary between public and private space, like an urban New Woman transcending the constraints of the domestic realm. The speaker’s locale provides a secure site as well in enabling the speaker to be the observer rather than the observed, eluding the intrusive male gaze that might otherwise confront a woman within the metropolis. In describing her window view, the speaker asserts that “I mark” the tree’s regenerative process, with the predicate implying that she is forging her own “mark” through her art. Additionally, the tree “spread[s] her shade below,” producing an expansive effect that a female writer presumably would seek to emulate. The penultimate stanza establishes the plane-tree as wholly integrated with the city’s elements: Among her branches, in and out,   The city breezes play; The dun fog wraps her round about;   Above, the smoke curls grey.

The first lines present London, in the form of wind, as a profound influence on the tree; in traveling “in and out,” the breezes can reach and affect every appendage. The phrase carries a subtle erotic charge as well, for it is mimicking the intimacy of sexual congress. The verb “play” hints that the city benefits from interactions with the tree, as it would through the contributions of the New Woman, since the breezes derive pleasure from their encounters with the tree limbs. The city’s “dun fog” further obfuscates a division between the tree and the municipality. A fog envelops and conceals the surroundings, obliterating a visual boundary between elements so that they appear as one. The “dun” hue accentuates the obscuring effect, for the adjective conveys a neutral coloration that blankets the tree, and the haze “wraps her round about” to conceal the tree entirely. The plane-tree and the city thus are inseparable, and the spiraling smoke, with its gray opacity, amplifies the amalgamation.

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The final stanza foregrounds the synthesis of speaker, tree, and city even more through slippage of noun and pronoun. Others the country take for choice,   And hold the town in scorn; But she has listened to the voice   On city breezes borne.

The opening “others” resonate with the first stanza’s reference to the perishing “other trees” in a personalizing register and also designate individuals dissimilar to the speaker. Both “others” evince disdain for the city, in sharp contrast to the feminine presence attuned to London’s “voice.” The reference to “she” continues the confusion, for it could refer to the planetree or to the speaker listening to the breezes.10 For the New Woman, the desired locale is indubitable: it is the city, not the country, that draws her. Also making the guidebook’s argument that the New Woman is readily assimilated into the city is “The Piano-Organ,” composed of four abcb stanzas. In the first two quatrains, the speaker is absorbed in academic work, for her “student-lamp is lighted, / The books and papers are spread.” Yet her studious thoughts are overtaken by an urban sound, which travels even through a closed window in her garret and “comes floating upwards, / Chasing the thoughts from my head.” The speaker is compelled to “open the garret window” and “[l]et the music in” while in the final stanza she “stand[s] upright by the window” as if summoned to attention by a “tune [that] twirls on and on.” The city, in effect, brings the speaker into its unique form of language that surrounds her as an alert listener.

Significance of the Omnibus Though the compatibility of the New Woman with London also provides the thematic thrust of Levy’s “Ballade of an Omnibus,” the poem moves the setting from the vantage point of an interior space to that of the streets. Additionally, the verse contributes several vital facts to the guidebook in delineating the enviable access, effortless mobility, scopic authority, and valued independence offered by the transportational mode. The poem delineates the close relationship between the speaker and the city both conceptually and formally, as the initial noun of the title intimates. Levy’s piece parallels Andrew Lang’s “Ballade Amoreuse,” included in his early

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1880s Ballades in Blue China and featuring the refrain, “To see my love suffices me!”; “love” identifies a human beloved as the poem’s central interest.11 The refrain serves as an epigraph to Levy’s piece, which draws the connection between the two poems. In Levy’s ballade, however, the equivalent lover is London itself, with her poem being a tribute to the vehicle that allows the speaker to traverse the metropolitan breadth. Consequently, the verse reworks Lang’s refrain, proclaiming that “[a]n omnibus suffices me.” Levy adopts the approach that Lang follows in identifying individuals that the speaker dismisses as less significant than the beloved. Lang’s speaker prefers to see the lover rather than an array of notable mythical figures, concluding each of the ballade’s three stanzas with the refrain. Levy’s persona primarily references contemporaneous “rich and great” men, although including Croesus and Lucullus, as those rejected in favor of her urban beloved. The focus on the modern omnibus provides a temporally appropriate link to the independent woman, with both of them charting intriguing paths and initiating change. The very name of the vehicle forges a connection, for the Latin designation of “omnibus” translates to “for all”; the term thus opens the city to the New Woman, as well as others, who likely would be unable to afford the expensive carriage, hansom, fly, or steed that the poem’s first stanza associates with wealthy men. In contrast, omnibus travel was affordable, as Walter Besant remarked in his London in the Nineteenth Century: “people who could not afford the expense of the short stage … welcomed the omnibus, which enabled them to go farther afield and to get into town cheaply and expeditiously.”12 “Omnibus” is a fitting label in another regard, with the “omni” prefix reminding of power, as in the cognates “omniscient” and “omnipotence.” For the modern woman, the omnibus does indeed confer a measure of power through its capacity to provide transport across the vast metropolitan topography. As Besant averred, “The omnibus has possession of all the highways; it goes into all the suburbs; the lines stretch from one end to the other of the huge city; and it is the cheapest as it is the readiest way of getting from one place to another.”13 Furthermore, the omnibus schedule indicated that the vehicle covered its routes frequently, which would allow a New Woman to travel around town at almost a moment’s notice. Levy’s poem attests to the expanse a rider could investigate: the speaker can move “[f]rom Brompton to the Bull-and-Gate,” thereby journeying from the city’s southeast side to the northwest Kentish Town that housed the well-known public house.

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The omnibus additionally enabled observation from a commanding perspective, another important advantage that the guidebook includes for a New Woman. Levy’s speaker, who describes herself as “[a] wandering minstrel, poor and free,” becomes elevated, in both senses of the word. By the late century, the omnibus featured an upper level in the open air, which presented an especially advantageous position for spectators wishing to scrutinize the surroundings and immerse themselves in the urban ambience. For a woman, however, occupying the upper section was considered unseemly and transgressive. Levy was a pioneer in that regard,14 and the poem’s speaker assumes the position also, in evocative phrasing: “I mount in state / The topmost summit, whence I see / Croesus look up.” The predicate “mount” carries multiple manifestations of power. To “mount” obviously denotes ascension, initiated by the very person striving to rise, which is certainly a fitting term for the New Woman seeking her own figurative elevation. The noun form also reveals that one has attained an authoritative level—a threatening prospect for reactionary males accustomed to exerting control exclusively. By mounting “in state,” the speaker becomes a kind of sovereign overseeing her realm. The term further denotes sexual dominance, another disturbing insinuation for conservative Victorian men. The poem’s overdetermined phrasing emphasizes through redundancy the female persona’s attainment of height: she reaches “[t]he topmost summit,” with the virtually identical terms unmistakably delineating an indomitable positioning. Further underscoring the point, the kingly Croesus must “look up” to the speaker occupying the commanding space. She objectifies him as the observed and situates herself as the observer. Viewing from a high position converts a metropolis “into a text that lies before one’s eyes,” Michel de Certeau asserts in “Walking in the City,” which enables “one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.” As Ana Parejo Vadillo remarks, Levy “appears to be proposing … that the omnibus is an optical device to see the modern age as it glides across one’s eyes.”15 In occupying the omnibus summit, the New Woman also could somewhat assume the role of flâneuse. A number of critics, however, have tended to deny that such an individual would even be plausible at the fin de siècle.16 Even Levy herself famously wrote in 1888, “The female clublounger, the flâneuse of St. James’s Street, latch-key in pocket and eyeglasses on nose, remains a creature of the imagination.” Levy’s statement assumes that a flâneuse would simply be a female copy of a flâneur and evidencing all of his traits, whether admirable or reprehensible. Yet as

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Deborah L. Parsons asserts, “The urban woman Levy supports and imagines is not the flâneuse as idle, smart-set lounger, but the flâneuse of the streets, enjoying the sustenance of her club in between shopping, working, and going to a private view.”17 Other negative qualities linked to the flâneur, such as ocular aggression, equation of women with prostitutes, attitude of superiority, arrogant outlook, and general detachment, also likely led to Levy’s rebuff of a virtually identical copy. In contrast to the problematic flâneur, “Ballade of an Omnibus” is constructing a new kind of character who could be termed a New Woman flâneuse, an individual incorporating certain positive aspects of the flâneur theorized by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin while rejecting inappropriate others.18 As the poem reveals, the New Woman flâneuse shares those writers’ notions of a mobile watcher, one who, as Benjamin described, considered the street as a “dwelling” that made a flâneur “as much at home” there “as a citizen is in his four walls.” This flâneur privileged sight over sound, Benjamin maintains, for public vehicles brought passengers together with a novel intimacy. To Baudelaire, “the perfect flâneur” is a “passionate spectator” who takes “immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement,” much like Levy’s speaker does. In effect, the female persona is melding public and private spheres, thereby undermining the constraints of the latter. Baudelaire also touched on the relevant concept of concealment, wherein the flâneur is situated “at the centre of the world” but can “remain hidden from the world,” and he “rejoices in his incognito.”19 The same traits could apply to a New Woman flâneuse as just discussed, yet this figure upends the male writers’ exclusive gendering of flânerie as masculine, dismantles the belief that this spectator objectifies the females encountered, disrupts the flaneur’s association with aimless leisure, and offers a modicum of authority in a male-dominated society. Levy’s flâneuse belies Baudelaire’s notion, as Griselda Pollock puts it, that women “were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm” and “did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch.” In presenting a case for the late-century flâneuse, Parsons notes that women’s presence in the public spaces of London had occurred decades earlier and indicates that women, not only men, scrutinized the city.20 Moreover, Deborah Epstein Nord speaks of “a new urban vision” by Levy and others “in which they struggled to become subject and observer rather than object and observed.”21 Levy’s poem, Alex Goody comments, “celebrat[es] the joys of the city while undermining the traditional gendering of the urban

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observer and challenging the authority of the flâneur.” Along those lines, Parsons points to “gender ambiguities” that positioned the flâneur as “a site for the contestation of male authority rather than the epitome of it.” As Elizabeth Wilson asserts, “[t]he flâneur represents masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization.”22 Riding the omnibus certainly contributed to a New Woman’s ability to subvert gender boundaries and enabled her to act convincingly as a flâneuse. As Parsons remarks, a woman rider would be protected from invasive gazes and menace below, experiencing “independence amid a crowd and shelter from the appropriating gaze of others” while “observ[ing] the city without threat on the street.” Nevertheless, a female could not completely escape male scrutiny, for she would be vulnerable at the stop before the vehicle arrived, as one passenger related. Although she was wearing modest clothing as “a respectable young woman,” wrote Dorothy Peel in her autobiography, “there was scarcely a day when I, while waiting for the omnibus, was not accosted.” Once on the omnibus and occupying a lofty post, however, the New Woman would be comparatively difficult to observe by pedestrians, appearing rather blurred as she passed by. Furthermore, the New Woman would likely blend into the mass of other passengers as she peered forth. In terms of perspective, the street observer would be at a disadvantage, since in looking upward the facial characteristics of the travelers would be somewhat distorted; for the New Woman with her panoptical viewpoint, such would not be the case. Indeed, she experienced a novel form of observation that added a modern twist to the notion of marginality. Though the New Woman was culturally consigned to a marginal position, as an omnibus spectator peering downward from its margins she gained a degree of power in occupying the high ground. Additionally, an 1891 series in Lady on “London Locomotion” claimed that women riding atop the vehicle compelled men—“the sterner sex”—“to take refuge inside!”23 The New Woman flâneuse finds the city a nurturing environment, especially for a writer, that inspires creativity, heightens awareness, and enables access to a wealth of experience and people. The city fosters not only an attentiveness to sight, as Baudelaire said of the omnibus, but also to sound, for the flâneuse is immersed in the various sense experiences that the metropolis generates. Without the city, Levy’s poetry implies, the New Woman would suffer a barren and bleak existence. With increasing numbers of women turning to the city for employment, study, and other pursuits, Levy’s version of a flâneuse was neither apocryphal nor nonexistent.

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Unlike the flâneur’s aloof response to the city as a detached observer, the speaker of “Ballade of an Omnibus” becomes an intrinsic part as a constant presence, both in the summer months when she occupies the top of the omnibus and “[i]n winter days of rain and mire.” Further evidencing her integration within the city is the fact that “[t]he ‘busmen know me and my lyre” throughout the omnibus routes. Her meanderings bring enduring satisfaction as she “mark[s]” her surroundings. The verb in this context attests to a measure of power, for through her lyre, a traditional reference to poetry, the speaker can make her “mark.” Like the earlier predicate choice of “mount,” this active verb imparts the speaker’s sense of authority. In its denotations, “mark” refers to observation and taking notice, which the omnibus’ apex facilitates through the speaker’s flâneuse status; “mark” indicates that one is plotting a course, with the implication that the speaker is determining her own movements; and “mark” means that one can designate value, suggesting the speaker’s entitlement to make weighty judgments. In its noun form, “mark” denotes a boundary, which the speaker is redrawing as a New Woman. The subsequent excerpt accentuates earlier thematic concerns. The scene whereof I cannot tire, The human tale of love and hate, The city pageant, early and late Unfolds itself, rolls by, to be A pleasure deep and delicate. An omnibus suffices me.

The speaker’s control as an observer rather than an observed is amplified by the stanza’s reference to the city “scene,” and the absent trace of the homonymic “seen” buttresses the point. Also reinforcing observation is the vocabulary selection of “pageant,” a spectacle to be watched. As Isobel Armstrong asserts, the “essence” of a pageant “is movement and change,”24 which accords with the city’s trait of vibrant activity. Armstrong adds that the association of “pageant” with “a passage of living, of physical movement, was current in the late nineteenth century.” Coinciding well with the minstrel speaker is Armstrong’s comment that “music is inseparable from the pageant.”25 The poem’s pageant occurs “early and late,” with the oblique reference to the extensive omnibus schedules positioning the speaker as a presence inextricable from the city. Omniscience is conveyed since the pageant “[u]nfolds itself,” as if London is revealing itself

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to a mighty presence while “roll[ing] by.” The speaker “cannot tire” of the view, which affirms her attachment to the metropolis, and “tire” in its noun form, as a component of the omnibus, strengthens the bond. The speaker’s self-designated function as a minstrel wielding her lyre meshes smoothly with the poem’s formal qualities. The titular “ballade” establishes a structural linkage in that this form of early French poetry numbered troubadours among its adherents and was frequently accompanied by music. Like the traditional ballade composition, Levy’s poem follows the sequence of three ababbcbc stanzas and a four-line envoi, although in “Ballade of an Omnibus” the final stanza varies from the conventional bcbc to an uncustomary acac. Levy’s alteration of the envoi pattern signals a modernization of the structure that reflects the New Woman’s own modification of tradition. An additional change to the envoi is Levy’s dedicatory address to “Princess,” which presents a gender switch from the customary “Prince” to announce the New Woman’s assertion of influence poetically as well as culturally. Like the Pindaric odes it resembles, the ballade form could express grand, solemn sentiments; Levy’s ballade attains such loftiness in raising the New Woman to unaccustomed heights, both figuratively and literally.

Creativity and the City The inclusion of the lyre in a verse about an omnibus also reinforces the connection between creativity and the city that would be so alluring for a New Woman writer. Levy’s guidebook further promotes the association in “A March Day in London,” which traces the eventual conversion of imaginative energy that initially cannot be harnessed productively. The poem examines the transformation of the speaker, presumably a poet, from creative aimlessness to the prospect of achieved potential through her embrasure of the city. In the opening stanza, the speaker sees only bleakness in scanning the cityscape. The east wind blows in the street to-day; The sky is blue, yet the town looks grey. ‘Tis the wind of ice, the wind of fire, Of cold despair and of hot desire, Which chills the flesh to aches and pains, And sends a fever through all the veins.

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The initial reference to the east wind sets the stanzaic tone with the echo of this disturbing and unnatural zephyr feared in Bleak House. The speaker cannot make sense of London, for she recognizes only distortions and antipodes. The city’s hue diverges from the firmament’s actual color, as if London itself transforms natural beauty into urban grime in a departure from an ordered natural world. As such, London breaks apart a sense of stability in its relentless presentation of binarisms. To the speaker, London lacks equilibrium with the perceived oppositions that oscillate at extremes and produce unresolvable bewilderment, as if the metropolis is functioning as a pathetic fallacy. Psychologically detached from the city rather than assimilated within it, the speaker cannot cure her own confusion about the proper path for imaginative satisfaction. The speaker’s inability to direct her creative energy becomes apparent in the second stanza, as do the agitation and enervation that such a failing generates. From end to end, with aimless feet, All day long have I paced the street. My limbs are weary, but in my breast Stirs the goad of a mad unrest. I would give anything to stay The little wheel that turns in my brain; The little wheel that turns all day, That turns all night with might and main.             (emphasis added)

The speaker’s wanderings on “aimless feet” resemble those of a desultory flâneur in Baudelarian terms, rather than the determined steps of a motivated poet, or the titular “march” indicative of decisive movement. In one of its connotations, “paced” evokes a trapped animal continuously ambulating but unable to breech the confines of its cage, and the speaker’s anxious motion imparts her inability to proceed forward unencumbered in her stifled state. The references to the endlessly revolving wheel of her mind provide another indication that the speaker has neither found direction nor been integrated into the city, metonymically designated by its own multitude of wheels. In the brief third stanza, the speaker labors to understand herself, asking “What is the thing I fear, and why?” before reiterating the poem’s opening dismay about the east wind and determining that “the world is all awry.”

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In the gap between the third and fourth stanzas, however, the speaker makes a dramatic shift, just as the poem’s time frame switches from the unsettling daylight to a far more comforting night. The nocturnal change carries a gender component that helps to explain the speaker’s altered judgment to a recognition of the city as a site of promise. The poem builds on the traditional designations of the sun as masculine and the moon as feminine, and the gender associations are mapped onto the speaker’s transformation. The diurnal stanzas reflect an inability to discern her creative path in a masculinized poetic vein wherein she would write as an imitator. Instead, the nighttime imagery suggests that the speaker is recognizing that her poetic place can be found in following her original thought and moving away from controlling masculine modes of expression, as would a New Woman charting unexplored creative territory. The stanza opening is infused with light imagery, with its conventional intimation of poetic inspiration; light is provided not by the masculine sun but repeatedly by the inspiring illumination found in the nighttime: The gas-lamps gleam in a golden line; The ruby lights of the hansom shine, Glance, and flicker like fire-flies bright;           (emphasis added)

With the night comes the cessation of the troubling imagery in the poem’s first two lines. The wind has fallen with the night, And once again the town seems fair Thwart the mist that hangs i’ the air.

Despite the wind’s absence and the city’s altered appearance, the stanza’s final line announces that the speaker has not totally resolved her vexed situation. The remaining mist hints that her creative potential has not yet been reached but she can now recognize its promise. Her positive response to the nighttime city reveals unaccustomed comfort with it as she realizes its beauty and its allure for a New Woman poet. The final stanza underscores the difficulty of achieving the realization and the toll it has taken, yet it points to a rebirth awaiting the speaker.

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And o’er, at last, my spirit steals A weary peace; peace that conceals Within its inner depths the grain Of hopes that yet shall flower again.

The poem’s formal structure provides an interesting gloss on the thematic trajectory. The abbreviated middle stanza of three lines, departing from the previous six- and eight-line stanzas, signals a turning point in its opening line with the speaker’s question about the source of her fear. The next stanza of six lines begins the speaker’s recognition of the city’s beauty and functions as a balance to the dire initial stanza of the same length, leading to the concluding quatrain that augurs fulfilling change. Reinforcing the hopeful note is the quatrain’s final line, which varies from the previous eight syllables of the stanza by appending an extra syllable that carries emphasis.

Country Versus City The guidebook’s characterization of the metropolis as a life force becomes especially arresting in “The Village Garden,” which reconfigures the impression of a detached country life from sedate and comfortable to a stifling and inert existence. The first three quatrains of the six abab stanzas present the garden, a conventionally feminized space with its connection to the domestic realm, as a lethargic site reminiscent of the Odyssean setting of Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters.” Levy’s introductory stanza is also infused with an aura of passivity. Here, where your garden fenced about and still is,   Here, where the unmoved summer air is sweet With mixed delight of lavender and lilies,   Dreaming I linger in the noontide heat.           (emphasis added)

Similarly, Tennyson’s sailors arrive in a land of “languid air … [b]reathing like one that hath a weary dream” where “it seemed always afternoon” (ll. 5, 6, 4). Later, they muse that “warm airs lull us” with “half-dropped eyelid still” (ll. 2–3), and they protest that “[w]e have had enough of action, and of motion” (l. 150). As an enclosed space, Levy’s garden also becomes a static environment, an impression that the next two stanzas compound

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in depicting the past as indistinguishable from the present, for both eras seemingly exist simultaneously. Indeed, the flowers that gather at the garden’s boundaries appear like reactionary sentinels warding off change. Of many summers are the trees recorders,   The turf a carpet many summers wove; Old-fashioned blossoms cluster in the borders,   Love-in-a-mist and crimson-hearted clove. All breathes of peace and sunshine in the present,   All tells of bygone peace and bygone sun, Of fruitful years accomplished, budding, crescent,   Of gentle seasons passing one by one.

“The Village Garden” passage again echoes “The Lotos-Eaters,” whose characters exist in “[a] land where all things always seemed the same!” (l. 24) and that is replete with “flower and fruit” (l. 29). Voicing the same mood of Tennyson’s weary travelers, Levy’s speaker remarks, “Fain would I bide.” Unlike the Lotos-Eaters, however, who “will no longer roam” (l. 45), the speaker of “The Village Garden” is stirred by the city’s summons that she had formerly ignored. Now the speaker rejects stasis, unable to resist the lure of a revitalizing urban milieu and its enticing possibilities.        … but ever in the distance   A ceaseless voice is sounding clear and low;— The city calls me with her old persistence,   The city calls me—I arise and go.

The quatrain’s final line references a resurrection that brings movement with its active verbs, which accords with the notion that London stimulates creative energy. The feminine pronoun effectually positions the metropolis as a communal space that would be acceptive of a New Woman. Additionally, the pronoun hints that females are inundating the city, impinging on male dominance there. In its repetitive calls, London expresses a mantra, and the speaker cannot ignore its invitation. The subsequent penultimate stanza suggests that the city provides a degree of security in that an individual becomes part of a moving human stream, subsumed within the clamorous metropolitan rhythms.

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Of gentler souls this fragrant peace is guerdon;   For me, the roar and hurry of the town, Wherein more lightly seems to press the burden   Of individual life that weighs me down.

As Goody states, London “offers an escape from the ‘burden’ of individuality, a manifestation of the opportunities for anonymity that the city of modernity offered.”26 For a New Woman, urban anonymity enables her to recede into the background rather than protrude from the foreground wherein she could be readily judged as an anomaly. With her desire to leave the garden, the speaker is rejecting a feminized place and heading to one generally associated with males participating in civilizational activity. “Between the Showers,” part of a roundel trio in the collection, entails a reversal of sorts from “The Village Garden,” for the guidebook poem argues that the beauty of the city deserves praise, as does the vitality of metropolitan space. In the first two stanzas, the city and country merge through nature imagery as the New Woman flâneuse traverses London. Between the showers I went my way,   The glistening street was bright with flowers; It seemed that March had turned to May         Between the showers. Above the shining roofs and towers   The blue broke forth athwart the grey; Birds caroled in their leafless bowers.

The characteristic vigor and mutability of the city emerge seamlessly in the concluding quatrain as “[h]ither and tither, swift and gay, / The people chased the changeful hours.” Moreover, the poem’s form calls attention to London as a locus of modernity that the guidebook again presents as an enticement for the New Woman. As Rikky Rooksby asserts, the roundel follows the pattern established by Algernon Charles Swinburne, which reworked the French roundeau by subtracting two lines from the former thirteen-line format and altering the position of the refrain.27 Like the Swinburne model, Levy’s roundel includes a refrain appearing in the fourth and final lines that is derived from the opening line. Elizabeth Ludlow points out that “[t]he roundel form in particular expresses life in flux,”28 and thus it provides an apt structure for conveying the city’s activity. Besides the urban energy, the poem reveals another positive element

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for the New Woman flâneuse as she engages with the crowded atmosphere. Unexpected and fortuitous encounters occur in the teeming metropolis, which can foster connections among strangers as the speaker recalls that “you, you passed and smiled that day.” Such a chance meeting takes place in “London in July,” through which the guidebook alludes to the stimulating possibilities of unforeseen encounters and the freedom to pursue them. The four-stanza verse follows an abab structure beginning with iambic tetrameter and alternating with trimeter. The poem’s rhythm is appropriately characterized as a “marching” one since the speaker will encounter the beloved when walking in the street. At the beginning of the poem, the lonely lover unhappily wanders, with this speaker’s dismay illustrated in part by a pathetic fallacy indicating that “dusty-brown” rather than vibrant green trees are populating the metropolis in the summer. Whether the speaker is male or female is ambiguous, further complicated by the fact that every individual encountered “wear[s] one woman’s face.” If read as a flâneur, the speaker is essentializing women in making them virtually interchangeable and lacking an individual identity. If read as a flâneuse, the speaker carries a determined passion in which all passersby insistently remind of the female beloved. The situation accords with Parsons’ comment about ambiguity undermining the notion of an all-powerful flâneur, leaving open the possibility that such supposed authority can be challenged by a New Woman flâneuse. Moreover, through the likelihood of a female speaker, the guidebook alludes to another concern of New Women—sexuality. In this poem, the erotic component entails same-sex attraction, giving voice and recognition to a desire deemed transgressive by conservative Victorians. Within the city, the poem suggests, a New Woman could pursue her amorous interest, regardless of the biological sex of the object, in an anonymous context that evades harsh scrutiny. As the poem progresses, the speaker decries the city’s “intricate maze,” portrayed as a “[w]ide waste of square and street.” Nevertheless, the town holds forth the promise of a desirable meeting with the cherished Londoner, whereby “[w]e twain at last may meet!” With this prospect, the speaker immediately shifts to an appreciation of the city in the closing stanza. Therefore, London life becomes so desirable that the speaker, like the beloved, stays in the city after the fashionable season has concluded and other residents have flocked to rural locales. The country, the speaker believes, cannot replace the metropolis.

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And who cries out on crowd and mart?   Who prates of stream and sea? The summer in the city’s heart—   That is enough for me.

The desirability of the city for the New Woman also informs the guidebook’s roundel “Out of Town,” though not in an eroticized configuration. The poem initially establishes the country as an idyllic locale: Out of town the sky was bright and blue,   Never fog-cloud, lowering, thick, was seen to frown; Nature dons a garb of gayer hue,          Out of town. Spotless lay the snow on field and down,   Pure and keen the air above it blew; All wore peace and beauty for a crown.

The city, however, bears telling scars. Its sky is “marred by smoke, veiled from view” and its snow is “trodden thin, dingy brown.” One is reminded of Alice Meynell’s description in London Impressions of a “smirched and spotted town” with “half-sunshine of a characteristic London day.”29 Nevertheless, the poem’s metropolis is depicted like an unforgotten lover, as the speaker experiences “strange unrest at thoughts of you” when ensconced in the country. London’s energy has fully imbued the speaker, for she becomes agitated in merely recalling the city’s existence.

Endless Movement The guidebook’s characterization of the city as a nexus of vitality fascinating to a New Woman threads through another roundel. “Straw in the Street” refers to the dampening of noise for a dying individual by reducing “the sound of the wheels and feet.” In contrast to the fading victim, the city takes on the trappings of a living being, where in the street “the pulses of London beat.” Movement seems ceaseless while “[t]he hurrying people go their way.” As Meynell asserted, “In regard to movement, the scenery of the streets has no likeness to anything in nature” and “the crowd moves all ways.”30 The sounds of the passersby in the poem create their own rhythm, a staccato tone signaled by the active verbs and the repetition of the conjunction, for the individuals “[p]ause and jostle and pass and

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greet.” The roundel in its opening line also alludes to the speaker’s presence as an unnoticed flâneuse who can “pass” as she walks the avenue, another advantage to urban life intimated by the guidebook. Movement of another sort informs “London Poets (In Memoriam).” Not only does the speaker physically traverse the city, she also represents innovative poetic pioneers assuming the literary mantle from previous generations. Levy’s guidebook thus makes a compelling argument in positioning the city as a site of artistic stimulation and promise. The sonnet begins by chronicling the speaker’s musings on poetic predecessors who had “trod the streets and squares where now I tread” as a flâneuse. The octave then describes the earlier poets’ passage through the city “[w]ith weary hearts, a little while ago.” Dismal urban imagery mirrors those authors’ struggles, with adjectives depicting the city equally applicable to the poets both physically and psychologically. When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow Clung to the leafless branches overhead; Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red In autumn; with a re-arisen woe Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow; And paced scorched stones in summer:—they are dead.               (emphasis added)

Indeed, the vocabulary delineates the vagaries of the poetic process: elusive inspiration, recurring dismay, fruitless effort, obscured thought, increased frustration, recurring difficulty, unchanneled energy, and painful endeavor. In noting as the octave concludes that these poets are deceased, the stanza ushers forth the sestet’s identification of the speaker as their literary heir. The speaker draws a comparison between herself and the memorialized poets, which suggests that she shares their struggles as a literary descendant. “The sorrow of their souls to them did seem,” the speaker avers, “[a]s real as mine to me, as permanent.” The poem’s final line clears the path of the speaker as poetic successor, for “[n]o more he comes, who this way came and went.” The comment echoes the poem’s initial line, wherein the speaker is literally following in her predecessors’ footsteps as she walks through the places where the deceased poets had traveled. Yet the speaker devises an untrodden creative path, replacing the deceased poets who “came and went.”31 Their literary dominance, the statement

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indicates, has passed; in their stead, the New Woman poet is bringing a unique voice to literature in place of “[t]he half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.” The speaker serves as a representative of New Women whose work brings a dramatic shift in poetic endeavor, a validation of women’s poetry as part of the literary heritage. As Vadillo states, the sonnet entails “a poetic manifesto for London-based women poets who understood the key role of the city as both a poetic archive and a place for signification and being.”32

London’s Darker Side With all of the salutary aspects of London life that Levy’s guidebook has presented, a deep concern imbues “Ballade of a Special Edition.” Assertions of danger associated with London life could certainly stifle New Women’s entry into the city, and Levy’s guidebook addresses those fears, framing them in part as determined efforts at discouragement. Women were depicted as invaders in a rather fraught essay by Janet Hogarth. She decried a “monstrous regiment of women,” which she warned at century’s end could “spread throughout the length and breadth of this city of London.”33 The New Woman and other females undoubtedly faced a host of risks— but so did men, albeit sometimes in different manifestations. A male, for example, would not encounter the warnings in multiple publications to avoid gazing at men in the streets so as to deflect unwanted attention. Certainly a host of Victorian literary writings deeming London as menacing formed a dismaying picture. Henry James, for instance, appraised London as a “delightful city” but also found it “dreadful.” Mr. Hyde hears “the low growl of London” in a setting “like a district of some city in a nightmare.” Dorian Gray would travel through “grey, monstrous London” and find himself in an area like “the black web of some sprawling spider.” In his lengthy Mysteries of London, G. W. M. Reynold recounts “a labyrinth of dwellings whose very aspect appeared to speak of hideous poverty and fearful crime.” James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night,” which was especially familiar to Levy since she referenced it in her 1883 essay on the author, included an array of unnerving descriptions of London such as “the baleful glooms” of the streets (l. 85), nights resembling “termless hell” (l. 116), “gloom abysmal” (l. 179), and “lanes [that] are black as subterranean lairs” (l. 181). Levy said in the essay that “[m]ost of us at some time or other of our lives have wandered in the City of Dreadful

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Night; the shadowy forms, the dim streets, the monotonous tones are familiar to us.”34 Deploying the tactics of fright and flight, opponents of the New Woman who resented her inroads could cast the city as such a perilous locale that it would be foolhardy for her to reside, work, or study there. Extreme harm, even death, was postulated. Goody asserts that the 1888 Ripper tragedies “coalesce[d] the associations of sexuality and danger in the urban terrain, producing a heightened sense of sexual menace pervading the streets of London.” Goody also cites “[t]he media’s role in producing ‘narratives of sexual danger’” as “fundamental” in creating the daunting picture of the city; moreover, “[t]he motif of the newsboy’s cry … seems to embody more generally the dangers of the opportunities offered by the city.”35 The London Plane-Tree guidebook counters this phenomenon in “Ballade of a Special Edition,” which castigates a newspaper seller shouting about crime and violence as he wanders the streets. He can be read as a kind of mouthpiece in the opening three ababbcbc stanzas, an emblem of all males who strive to intimidate the New Woman. So disturbing are the seller’s cries that “[h]is hoarse note scares the eventide” as he traffics in “slaughter, theft, and suicide.” He acts not merely as “the herald” but also as “the friend” of disaster, with his proclamations fueled by metropolitan villainy. Much of the poem relates the catalog of disturbing events that the seller relishes in promoting fear. The poem reveals, however, that his pronouncements are not based firmly in fact but are exaggerated to cause consternation, for “[h]is tale of horrors incomplete, / Imagination’s aid is tried.” The final acac stanza, formally divergent from its predecessors, accentuates the harsh judgment on the seller’s attempts to generate alarm, castigating him in unsparing epithets as a diabolical prevaricator. Fiend, get thee gone!   no more repeat   Those sounds which do mine ears offend. It is apocryphal, you cheat,   Your double murder in Mile End.

A New Woman, then, would do well in treating a newsboy’s cries and a publication’s content with skepticism. Although dangers certainly existed, so did efforts to sensationalize events and to convince the New Woman that London was to be avoided, not embraced.

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As this poem and the others analyzed in this essay demonstrate, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse would have provided valuable information to an advanced woman considering visiting or residing in the fin-de-­ siècle city. Its advantages, Levy’s guidebook argues, far outweigh any perceived flaws. London held forth a promise of unaccustomed independence, creative productivity, female community, liberating mobility, cultural immersion, and a host of other benefits. Amy Levy’s “urban Muse,” to quote her volume’s epigraph, points the way to a fulfilling existence for those who would also trod the “paven ground.”

Watson/Tomson Verses Rosamund Marriott Watson additionally applauded elements of London existence that Levy found so attractive. Like Levy, Watson was immersed in the city and counted the British Museum Reading Room among her interests. Twice divorced, Watson later resided with another man, though remaining unmarried, during her unconventional life as a New Woman. Watson praised Levy’s work in a review, which Linda K. Hughes characterizes as “both a tribute to her friend and a defense of New Woman poets— like herself.”36 Watson produced several verses about London under the pseudonym Graham R.  Tomson in A Summer Night and Other Poems (1891) that coincided with Levy’s approbation of urban energy. “Of the Earth, Earthy,” for example, articulates a preference for the London milieu even over the expectations of heavenly life. In the first of four stanzas, the speaker expounds on the celestial realm in glowing terms, noting the presence of “white-winged angels on a shining stair” and “seas of sapphire round a jasper throne.” The differences between these glorious sites and the earthly world that Londoners embraced are startling as the speaker notes the city’s far different characteristics in the stanza’s continuation. Give us the spangled dust, the turbid street; The dun, dim pavement trod by myriad feet, Stained with the yellow lamplight here and there; The chill blue skies beyond the spires of stone:

Only one description of the urban scene is even remotely positive with the glittering quality of the dust, but even that reference is problematic, since dust denotes worthlessness, burial, and confusion. Turbidity holds several

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unsavory definitions, such as muddiness, impurity, confusion, and opacity. So bleak is the street’s surface that its depiction requires two resounding adjectives (“dun, dim”), with their consecutive single syllables resembling a haunting drumbeat. Rather than suggest a desirable illumination, the gaslight taints the street upon which it falls. Coldness, sharpness, and hardness epitomize the view above the pavement. Yet the ugliness of the site is countered in the subsequent pair of lines completing the stanza, for the incessant movement of crowds turns the city into a vigorous, living being with the rhythm of its robust heartbeat: “The world’s invincible youth is all our own, / Here where we feel life’s pulses burn and beat.” The second stanza catalogs London’s antipodal characteristics and credits them with fueling the city’s vitality. Here is the pride of Life, be it foul or fair, This clash and swirl of streets in the twilight air; Beauty and Grime, indifferent, side by side; Surfeit and Thirst, Endeavour and Despair, Content and Squalor, Lassitude and Care, All in the golden lamplight glorified: All quick, all real, hurrying near and wide.

A distinct alteration in the effect of the gaslight distinguishes the stanza from its predecessor, for the stained light has metamorphosed into splendid radiance. With the concluding colon of the penultimate line, the relentless dynamism of the city gains credit for the illuminative change. London seems like a cacophonous musical composition in the next stanza, with the city’s oppositional elements creating an irresistible sound. Life and Life’s worst and best be ours to share, Charm of the motley! undefined and rare; Melodious discord in the heart o’ the tune, Sweet with the hoarse note jarring everywhere!

In the closing two-line stanza, the city as a life force again receives fervent praise, “for Life is Life’s best boon.” London’s diversity, mutability, and indefinability present an exceptional scope of humanity, and a conglomeration of components produces a genuine depiction of contemporary existence. Indeed, London as a locus of changeability and movement is

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conveyed not only through the content of the poem but also through the dramatic variation in stanza length, following a sequence of nine, seven, four, and two lines. Tomson’s “In the Rain” also highlights London’s vitality and crowds, employing rainfall as a unifying image that brings together the city’s varied elements rather than depict the metropolis as a series of oppositions. As seen through rainfall, the city is marked not only by motion but also by polyphony. Rain in the glimmering street— Murmurous, rhythmical beat; Shadows that flicker and fly; Blue of wet road, of wet sky, (Grey in the depths and the heights); Orange of numberless lights, Shapes fleeting on, going by.

Instead of the dustiness found in “Of the Earth, Earthy,” this picture of London describes the roads as shimmering, and a sonorous melody replaces the discordant urban tone. Contributing to the impression of harmony, the road and sky display identical hues, which establish a connection between humanity and the cosmos. The stanza conveys animation, with the steady beating of the rain, the fluctuating and hastening shadows, and the swift pace that transforms bodies into mere shapes. The short lines produce a rhythmic staccato effect that matches the bustle. Like “Of the Earth, Earthy,” this poem depicts the broad mixture of passersby, who take on varied and varying appearances. Figures, fantastical, grim— Figures, prosaical, tame, Each with chameleon-stain, Dun in the crepuscle dim, Red in the nimbus of flame— Glance through the veil of the rain.

As in the previous stanza’s reference to “shapes,” the noun “figures” suggests the crowds proceeding along the urban terrain. Perhaps, as Vadillo notes, the speaker is an omnibus passenger observing the scene below, or as Hughes additionally posits, a “transgressive flâneuse” in an impressionistic milieu.37 Changing tints characterize the bodies in totality, as if the

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crowd obscures individuality and the human mass peers through the rainfall as if one entity. The motifs of progression, coloration, and melody continue in the next stanza, which add to the sense of a unified whole. Rain in the measureless street— Vistas of orange and blue; Music of echoing feet, Pausing, and pacing anew.

With the seeming infinitude of “the measureless street,” the stanza illustrates the enormous scale of the metropolitan terrain as it is trod by numberless pedestrians. The repetition of the colors designated in the opening stanza again creates an impression of harmony between the pavement and the firmament. Furthermore, footfalls connect with nature, for the rain’s “rhythmical beat” in the first stanza links with the aural traces of urban walkers. The final line mimics the sound, with a brief halt indicated by the comma and succeeded by a reestablished tread. The motifs defining the poem thus far infuse the next stanza and maintain the unifying effect as well. Rain, and the clamour of wheels, Splendour, and shadow, and sound; Coloured confusion that reels Lost in the twilight around.

Although the noise of a passing conveyance may seem to disrupt the mellifluous sound that has prevailed, the apparent discord instead creates “splendour,” and the sibilants in the line turn the clangor into metropolitan music. The flitting shadows of the first stanza reappear, as does the duskiness of the second stanza. Not only does coloration continue, even the disarray takes on movement like the city’s trekkers. A line consisting only of an ellipsis precedes the next three stanzas, signaling a shift in thought. The poem turns from the vibrancy of the London scene to the speaker’s imagined death. In subsequent stanzas, the speaker rests inert in a dark burial site but vows to return to the city on another rainy evening. Deeply embedded in the speaker’s being, the metropolis continues its desirable hold. With the return comes a reacquaintance with the urban shadows, crowd, liveliness, and diversity.

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When I lie hid from the light, Stark, with the turf overhead, Still, on a rainy Spring night, I shall come back from the dead. Turn then and look for me here Stealing the shadows along; Look for me—I shall be near, Deep in the heart of the throng: Here, where the current runs rife, Careless, and doleful, and gay, Moving, and motley, and strong, Good in its sport, in its strife.

Another elliptical line appears before the concluding stanza, in this instance revealing that the city is so compelling that the speaker wishes never to leave. Ah, might I be—might I stay— Only for ever and aye, Living and looking on life!

The sentiment reminds of the preference in “Of the Earth, Earthy” for the incessant commotion of city life over the prospect of heavenly life. Indeed, the final stanza of “In the Rain” resembles a prayer, as if the speaker is beseeching an unidentified deity to sustain, without cessation, the incomparable urban existence that the speaker finds so enthralling and enticing. “Aubade” adopts a different perspective by presenting London as it gradually awakens with the arrival of morning. In a garden setting, the sounds of nature and of humans emerge and intertwine. Deep in the gloom of the garden the first bird sings: Curt, hurried steps go by Loud in the hush of the dawn past the linden screen, Lost in a jar and a rattle of wheels unseen Beyond on the wide highway:—

The city garden resembles precious gems in “the jewelled gloom,” with “[s]plendours of opal and amber.” Sight and sound are joined by another sense experience, that of smell, with the “[s]cent of the dark, of the dawning, of leaves and dew.” The poem reads not only like an encomium to

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dawn but also seems like a call to embrace the city. “Clear is your voice in my heart, and you call me—whence?” the speaker wonders before seeking direction. “Come—for I listen, I wait,—bid me rise, go hence.” Tomson also pursued her approbation of London, under the name Rosamund Marriott Watson, in “A Song of London,” which appeared in Vespertilia and Other Verses (1895). Composed of five abcb stanzas, the poem resonates with Levy’s “The Village Garden” by preferring the city to the country, in this case employing ballad rhyme with its links to the rural realm in presenting London’s advantages. The ballad form of Watson’s verse matches the title, since the ballad was traditionally sung. In modern times, the ballad could be adopted to characterize current scenes. Although the streets are repeatedly colored grey in the poem and included in alternating stanzas, the designation does not carry a negative tone because the hue is countered by London’s allure. The poem begins with the positive image of sunlight falling upon the roadways and includes floral imagery to present London’s own attractions in contrast to a rural setting. The sun’s on the pavement,   The current comes and goes, And the grey streets of London   They blossom like the rose.

As in the poet’s other verses, London is a spirited site with the stream of people traversing its streets. The second stanza also opens with sunlight, which becomes a coronet upon the metropolis, as the promise of London is proclaimed. Crowned with the spring sun,   Vistas fair and free; What joy that waits not?   What that may not be?

The stanza carries an implicit comparison of city life to rural residence in presenting the urban panorama as offering “vistas,” a term customarily associated with vast bucolic scenery. In designating the vistas as “free,” the stanza alludes to the liberating character of London as implicitly opposed to the stifling environment of the countryside. The final two lines intimate that there are no limitations to the prospects London offers, which would resonate especially with a New Woman seeking to direct her own path through life.

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In the remaining three stanzas, the beauties of nature that define the countryside are counterpoised against the city and found less compelling than the city’s “grey streets.” The stanzas take on the trappings of an argument, with the first two lines lauding the country and the subsequent pair elevating London. The blue-bells may beckon,   The cuckoo call—and yet— The grey streets of London   I may never forget. O fair shines the gold moon   On blossom-clustered eaves, But bright blinks the gas-lamp   Between the linden-leaves. And the green country meadows   Are fresh and fine to see, But the grey streets of London   They’re all the world to me.

With the preference for London articulated in each stanza’s final lines, the argument is settled with the validations of the city acting as conclusions. Alliteration plays a part in the argument, with its presence in the first and third stanzas of the passage highlighting the natural rural attractions. In each case, the third line carries the prosaic response about “grey streets” that leads to the reason they are more desirable than the picturesque countryside. Departing from the pattern, the second stanza counters the persuasive alliteration with London’s version, which in its description of the gas-lamp mimics the city’s compelling sounds with the striking /b/ cadence. The poem’s final line allows no disputation in presenting the city as everything that the speaker seeks. Also in the Vespertilia collection, “London in October” depicts the city as a nexus of beautiful parts foregrounded by the autumnal setting wherein “the green leaves fade, the gold leaves fall.” As “autumn goes wandering,” it transforms the streets into mesmerizing aesthetic objects. A still enchantment widens over all, Painting the streets with vague autumnal dyes    Like ancient tapestries; Touching to fantasy unfelt before The motley hoardings’ many-coloured lore;

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Rather than signal total sadness, “this sweet hour that flies” augurs the prospects of a new year. The emphasis on coloration continues through the poem to augment “the glamour of the London street,” and the urban resplendence is additionally amplified in the concluding lines through the gem-like attributes and mythic allusions. Thine are our hearts, beloved City of Mist Wrapped in thy veils of opal and amethyst, Set in thy shrine of lapis-lazuli, Dowered with the very language of the sea, Lit with a million gems of living fire— London, the goal of many a soul’s desire! Goddess and sphinx, thou hold’st us safe in thrall Here while the dead leaves fall.

Like the Tomson/Watson verses discussed earlier, “London in October” seems like a love song to the metropolis and its glories. For a New Woman considering urban life, these poetic accolades, coupled with the Levy guidebook, present London as an inspiriting, liberatory, and fascinating place that seemingly extends limitless opportunities for erudition and growth. Speaking from their own experiences as entrenched city dwellers with a breadth of metropolitan knowledge, Levy and Watson could craft insightful verses that likely would lead a New Woman to consider London life not only tempting but even irresistible. The poetry effusively and effectively counters the negative depictions of the city penned by other writers to offer the New Woman the prospect of a rich and rewarding existence attainable nowhere else.

Notes 1. Isabella Ford, On the Threshold, 887; George Gissing, The Odd Women, 22; Amy Levy, The Romance of the Shop, 80; George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, 124. 2. The idea that Levy “celebrates” the city has become a truism of criticism on her collection. 3. Arthur Symons, “Modernity in Verse,” included in Studies in Two Literature, 188, 198; Linda Hunt Beckman, “Amy Levy: Urban Poetry,” 209; Ada Wallis, “The Poetry of Amy Levy,” 162. 4. Beckman, “Amy Levy: Urban Poetry,” 207. A friend, Clementina Black, said that Levy left her residence infrequently, Deborah L. Parsons notes,

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but the multiple calendar entries of her activities occurred over the extensive period of a year. Moreover, Parsons surmises that “Black’s statement would seem slightly exaggerated, as Levy obviously had some freedom as a member of both the British Library Reading Room and the University Women’s Club.” Parsons adds, however, that “the scenes that frequently occur in her urban poems and novels—walking in the streets, the bus ride, listening to the street-hawker—would have been rare events for Levy herself and perhaps unsurprisingly prompt moments of concentrated imagination” (Streetwalking the Metropolis, 88). 5. Levy, “Women and Club Life,” 532. The names of women readers, compiled by Susan David Bernstein, also include Vernon Lee, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Beatrice Potter Webb, and Eleanor Marx (“Radical Readers at the British Museum,” paras. 4–6). 6. Levy, “Readers at the British Museum,” 453. For details on the Reading Room, see Bernstein’s “Reading Room Geographies of Late Victorian London” and “Radical Readers at the British Museum.” 7. Levy, “Women and Club Life,” 532, 536. 8. Ibid., 537. 9. Critics have also commented on the likeness of the plane-tree and Levy’s speaker. For example, Vadillo asserts that “Levy prompts the reader to recognise that an analogy exists between the experience of the plane-tree and that of the woman poet” (63), noting that “the plane-tree and the woman poet both seem to be reflecting (i.e. reproducing) the other’s action” (Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 63–64). Bernstein describes “Levy’s arboreal imagery” as “champion[ing] this hybrid tree as a sign of resilience, even as a metaphor for the female bard, a flourishing spinster and New Woman, of late-Victorian London” (“Recycling Poetics,” 101). 10. Alex Goody states that in the penultimate stanza, “[t]he uncertain referent of the pronouns here—the ‘her’ … could easily refer to any of the subjects of the poem—[that] further interconnects speaker, tree, and city, breaking down the singularity of each and opening all the subjects up to each other” (“Passing in the City,” 165). 11. Virginia Blain notes that “[t]he ballade form was revived in England in the later nineteenth century by a group of poets that included Andrew Lang.” Blain adds that Lang’s Ballades in Blue China appeared in 1880 and 1881, with the refrain found in the latter version. Blain explains that in the “Old French verse form, the most common type of ballade comprises three eight-line stanzas (rhymed ababbcbc) and a four-line envoi (bcbc)” (Victorian Women Poets, 346). 12. Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century, 6. 13. Ibid., 314.

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14. Beckman advises that the upper seating for the omnibus appeared in the century’s penultimate decade (Amy Levy, 138). A 1929 letter sent to a London newspaper by Levy’s sister, along with a copy of the poem, said that “[t]he writer was among the first women in London to show herself on the tops of omnibuses. She excused herself to her shocked family circle by saying that she had committed the outrage in company with the daughter of a dean, who was also the granddaughter of an Archbishop of Canterbury” (Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 39). 15. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City, 92; Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 62. 16. Along these lines, Janet Wolff states that “[t]here is no question of inventing the flâneuse: the essential point is that such a character was ­rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (Feminine Sentences, 47). Deborah Epstein Nord notes that although “the possibility, if not the reality of female spectatorship begins to emerge” (185), “the flâneuse, the leisurely stroller and street spectator, did not yet exist in reality” (Walking the Victorian Streets, 184). 17. Levy, “Women and Club Life,” 536; Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 113–14. 18. Critics have also referred to various Levy speakers in the collection as flâneuses, although not postulating the specific notion of a New Woman flâneuse. 19. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 37, 38; Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 9. 20. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference, 100; Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 5. In the fin de siècle, Judith Walkowitz remarks that “[a]n ability to get around and self-confidence in public places became the hallmarks of the modern woman” (City of Dreadful Delight, 68). Lynda Nead indicates that “women of all classes and identities [were] tracing paths and lives in the spaces of the city,” and these individuals need not be considered “passive victims of a voracious male gaze”; rather, “they can be imagined as women who enjoyed and participated in the ‘ocular economy’ of the city” (Victorian Babylon, 71). 21. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 184. Instead of “the characteristic practice of the authoritative flâneur,” Parsons identifies a different mode of observation associated with marginalized individuals that offers an “alternative metaphor for the urban observer” (Streetwalking the Metropolis, 6). 22. Alex Goody, “Passing in the City,” 166; Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 5–6, 6; Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 109. 23. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 97; Peel quoted in Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 262, 125.

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24. Isobel Armstrong, “Christina Rossetti in the Era of the New Woman and Fin de Siècle Culture,” 22. 25. Ibid., 26, 22. 26. Goody, “Passing in the City,” 164. 27. Rikky Rooksby, “Swinburne in Miniature: ‘A Century of Roundels,’” 251. 28. Elizabeth Ludlow, “Christina Rosetti, Amy Levy, and the Composition of Roundels in Late-Victorian Bloomsbury,” 84. 29. Alice Meynell, London Impressions, 3. 30. Ibid., 7. 31. Levy altered the line from the manuscript version that said, “She comes no more who this way came & went” (quoted in Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 57). Vadillo believes that the original wording “revealed a discursive link between women poets and London. For Levy, … writing the city, writing London, marked a sense of exciting newness, of poetic self-­ discovery and presence” (Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 57). 32. Ibid., 57. 33. Janet Hogarth, “The Monstrous Regiment of Women,” 926. An 1881 essay in The Girl’s Own Paper, for instance, cautioned that “a girl’s conduct is thus very often misunderstood, and she has to pay the penalty” (S. F. A. Caulfeild, “Etiquette for All Classes,” 90). 34. Henry James, “London,” 325; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 49, 62; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 73, 221; Reynold quoted in Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 28; Levy, “James Thomson: A Minor Poet,” 502. 35. Goody, “Murder in Mile End,” 463, 471. Bernstein comments, “Rather than advocating increased restrictions on women’s mobility through the city, the poem seems to assail the tendency of the media to circulate sensationalized accounts of crimes to frighten women from moving through the streets” (“Reading Room Geographies,” second section [“Library Democracy], para. 4). 36. Linda K. Hughes, Graham R., 130. 37. Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism, 148; Hughes, “A Woman on the Wilde Side,” 110.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Speculating on the Future

Glimmers of hope for the future emerge in New Woman poetry, yet uneasy concerns also remain. Several of the verses in the preceding pages touch upon the possibilities for coming generations, but unsurprisingly no consensus arises. The pattern holds true in the poems that will conclude this study, which were chosen because they focus specifically on the prospects for women of the writers’ tomorrow. May Kendall’s “Woman’s Future” certainly announces its agenda with the title and contemplates opportunities and obstacles ahead. Included in Dreams to Sell (1887), the poem contains four eight-line ababcdcd stanzas and a final envoi. Initially, the verse challenges cultural assumptions that women are intellectually inferior and incapable of substantive advancement. The stanza immediately undercuts the contentions and harnesses evolutionary theory to prove that such notions are merely myths. Complacent they tell us, hard hearts and derisive,   In vain is our ardour: in vain are our sighs: Our intellects, bound by a limit decisive,   To the level of Homer’s may never arise. We heed not the falsehood, the base innuendo,   The laws of the universe, these are our friends, Our talents shall rise in a mighty crescendo,   We must trust Evolution to make us amends!

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_8

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Yet the poem turns to a harsh criticism of women who are immersed in shallow concerns that are wholly counterproductive to forward movement. But ah, when I ask you for food that is mental,   My sisters, you offer me ices and tea! You cherish the fleeting, the mere accidental,   At cost of the True, the Intrinsic, the Free. Your feelings, compressed in Society’s mangle,   Are vapid and frivolous, pallid and mean. To slander you love; but you don’t care to wrangle;   You bow to Decorum, and cherish Routine.

Denouncements continue in the succeeding pair of stanzas, which decry “the mind’s inanition,” souls “fed on a plaque,” and “empty and vain” objectives. Instead of such wasteful pursuits whereby “intellect marches o’er them and o’er you,” the speaker demands that the women turn to useful work and intellectual development. The envoi reinforces the admonition and blames “jealous exclusion” for women’s current plight. Yet the future holds great promise, “when our brains shall expand,” and women will assume their rightful place. Dollie Radford presents a case wherein an older woman advises her nieces that she and her peers represent a harbinger of change, even though they held to old patterns of behavior. “From Our Emancipated Aunt in Town,” appearing in Songs and Other Verses (1895) and composed of numerous aab stanzas, asserts that “[t]he old régime has passed away” and has opened space for a successor “being fashioned in a fire.” The aunt feels rather bereft, with her “old ideals blown away” and “all the props I leaned upon” discarded. Wondering about the future, the aunt discerns that “[s]urcharged the air is with the hum / Of startling changes.” Nevertheless, she is among “poor pathetics,” unable to move away from tradition. Her nieces, however, can “take your place / As future leaders.” Rather than scorn her, the aunt cautions, the new generation must recognize that “she prepares your way, / With many another Aunt to-day, / And sends her greetings.” For Emily Pfeiffer, that progress in “[i]ts flux and re-flux” will bring improvements. The sonnet “A Chrysalis” from the 1880s version of Sonnets and Songs adopts the image of a rising sea to project that the “dark caves / Of ignorance are flooded, and foul graves / Of sin are cleansed.” Through evolution, vital advancements will occur.

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And leaning down the ages, my dull ear,   Catching their slow-ascending harmonies, I am uplift of them, and borne more near,   I feel within my flesh—laid pupa-wise— A soul of worship, tho’ of vision dim,   Which links me with wing-folded cherubim.

Addressing specific issues, Amy Levy foresees in “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage” that both institutions will fade away. During Levy’s lifetime, notes Virginia Blain, the poem appeared only in a dozen pamphlets distributed privately; Blain believes that the limited circulation occurred “no doubt because she felt it was too outspoken.”1 Although not identified with the conventional spelling, the “ballad” conforms to the ballade structure with its three eight-line stanzas, an ababbcbc rhyme scheme, and a concluding but unannounced envoi. Levy’s speaker anticipates that belief in the Christian divinity will disappear, “[p]ale and defeated.” Discontent with the institution of marriage will burgeon as “[w]e are no more content to plod / Along the beaten paths.” Rather, individuals will rejoice when marriage also disappears. At that point, the speaker believes that limiting labels as to marital status will no longer exist and single women will no longer be considered “odd.” The scenario, however, will not occur in the contemporary era. Grant, in a million years at most,   Folk shall be neither pairs nor odd— Alas! we sha’n’t be there to boast   “Marriage has gone the way of God!”

Even if dramatic alterations take place, Levy cautions that women may be unable to escape constraints fully, for they have been so shaped by cultural pressures that they may accept new limitations. Included in A London Plane-Tree and Other Verses (1889), “Captivity” employs the plights of two caged creatures, a lion and a bird, in a disconcerting analogy. The animals carry the memories of freedom, despite their confinement, but even if they were liberated they would be unable to shake the bonds that have held them for so long. If the lion were loosed from the fetter,   To wander again; He would seek the wide silence and shadow   Of his jungle in vain.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . If they opened the cage and the casement,   And the bird flew away; He would come back at evening, heartbroken,   A captive for aye.

The poem shifts to the speaker’s situation, but she cannot remember life before becoming confined. Neither a “wild thing nor tame,” she cannot determine where she truly is. The poem ends in uncertainty as the speaker wonders if a country that would truly enable her to be free actually can be found. If not, the speaker fears that constraints will again appear. When the chain shall at last be broken,   The window set wide; And I step in the largeness and freedom   Of sunlight outside; Shall I wander in vain for my country?   Shall I seek and not find? Shall I cry for the bars that encage me   The fetters that bind?

No answer to her questions appears, and the future cannot be fathomed. A fitting discussion to finish this book pertains to Woman Free (1893) by “Ellis Ethelmer,” which traces women’s story from early times, recounting the injustices and indignities imposed upon females by injurious males. “The inklings gleaned of prehistoric hour,” the speaker comments, evidence “woman thrall to man’s unbridled power” (stanza VI). Centuries of mistreatment began in ancient times and fashioned “the chains of primal womanhood” and the “subjugated wife.” Men suffered harm for such oppression as well, however, for the wrongs “clogged in turn man’s power of greater good” (stanza X). The happiness that marriage could generate instead brought to women “a brainless bondage” that only escape from wedlock could correct (stanza XI). A woman was unable to “lead a learned life” (stanza XII), even though the husband “knew her mind / Peer to his own in skill and wit refined.” As a result, later eras would “bemoan / The waste of woman worth that dawned and died unknown” (stanza XIII). Sexual satisfaction, rather than intellectual or emotional attributes,

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provided her worth to the husband. With “aspirations crushed, and aims denied,” a woman could act only with the approval “[o]f him whose mad conceit proclaimed himself her God” (stanza XVII). Women suffered from “carnal servitude [that] left cruel stain” and “wounds of blind injustice” (stanza XXI). The poem stresses the ongoing miseries of women’s servitude and addresses entrapment within the domestic realm: “By cant condoned, man fashioned woman’s ‘sphere,’ / And mapped out ‘natural’ bounds to her career” (stanza XXXVI). Legalities cemented constraints, and women were “[i]n solemn statute ranked with infants, felons, fools” (stanza XXXVII). Nevertheless, the speaker envisions a time when women will gain equality. Until then, men will remain in their own form of enslavement. Moreover, subjugated women can produce “but menial race” (stanza XL). Although “the modern man, at best, / Is tyrant” (stanza XLIII), the entire human species will benefit when women become free,. The “twofold vision” stemming from equal standing brings wisdom that a single perspective cannot attain, providing “[a] clearer concept and a bolder view” through which “diverse humanity shall learn” (stanza XLIX). Ultimately, “[m]an’s destiny with woman’s blended be / In one sublime progression,—full, and strong, and free” (stanza LXII). The need for men to recognize women’s worth and foster rather than stifle their growth certainly resonates with New Woman tenets and objectives. Men and women must work together in an equal partnership for humanity to thrive. It is especially appropriate that the gender identity of the poem’s pseudonymous Ellis Ethelmer remains obscure. The authorship has been variously attributed to women’s rights supporter Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and to her husband Ben Elmy—or to the spouses crafting the poem together.2

Final Thoughts Now that numerous generations have passed since New Woman poets shared their insights, our era has witnessed dramatic changes wrought by our predecessors through their relentless efforts, accompanied by pain and discouragement. Because of the unceasing struggle and extraordinary resilience of individuals who have labored to improve women’s situations, the twenty-first century has seen marked improvements. As advances

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come, of course, so do defeats, but the overall trajectory is heading toward more fulfilling, dignified, and participatory lives. So much more work remains to be done before true equality can be attained in opportunities and endeavors, however, and the lessons of the past cannot be forgotten. The New Woman poets have left us great gifts with their wisdom and fervor, and we can only hope that their work will not have been in vain.

Notes 1. Virginia Blain, Victorian Women Poets, 355, 354. 2. See Lucy Bland’s Banishing the Beast for a discussion of the authorship (339–40).

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Index1

A Acton, William, 149 Adam, Juliette, 119 Allen, Grant, 5, 67n24 Anderson, Amanda, 153 Archer, Thomas, 149 Armstrong, Isobel, 228 Arnold, Matthew, 139 Auerbach, Nina, 148 Aveling, Edward, 67n22 B Baudelaire, Charles, 226, 227 Beckman, Linda Hunt, 219, 220, 247n4, 249n14 Beer, Max, 215n29 Benjamin, Walter, 226 Bernstein, Susan David, 248n5, 248n9, 250n35

Besant, Annie, 38, 220 Besant, Walter, 6, 224 Bevington, L. S., 31, 34, 36n20, 140, 182, 208–211, 215n30 works; “In and Out of Church,” 140; “My Little Task,” 210; “The Secret of the Bees,” 31; “Ye Poets,” 208, 210 Bewick, Thomas, 76 Billone, Amy Christine, 143n5 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, 110, 136, 138 Black’s Guide to London and Its Environs, 219 Blain, Virginia, 7, 36n17, 139, 200, 214n24, 248n11, 253 Bland, Hubert, 39, 40 Bland, Lucy, 256n2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9

271

272 

INDEX

Blind, Mathilde, 7, 14, 26, 34, 35n14, 36n20, 147, 152–162, 165, 167, 182, 200, 203, 220 works; “The Agnostic,” 26; The Ascent of Man, 152, 157–159, 167, 178n28; “The Forest Pool,” 14; “The Message,” 158–161, 167; “Noonday Rest,” 165, 167; “The Russian Student’s Tale,” 161, 162, 167; “Soul-Drift,” 200, 203 Boos, Florence, 135 Booth, Charles, 178n32 Booth, William, 138 Brady, John H., 219 Briggs, Julia, 38, 39 Bristow, Joseph, 7, 82, 105n2, 105n3, 107n32 Brogan, T. V. F., 184, 186 Brooke, Emma Frances, 68n32 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1, 182, 212 Bulley, A. Amy, 3, 67n22 C Caine, T. Hall, 117, 130, 144n10, 144n14 Caird, Mona, 6, 29, 38, 41–43, 50, 66n3, 67n23, 68n26 Caulfeild, S. F. A., 250n33 Chapman, Alice, 106n23 Chapman, Elizabeth Rachel, 68n30, 150, 153, 161 “Character Note: The New Woman,” 35n4 Clouston, T. S., 5 Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth, 18, 25, 34, 142, 212 works; “Every Man for His Own Hand,” 25; “In Dispraise of the Moon,” 18; “Our Lady,” 142; “Self-Question,” 25;

“Therefore I wrote it, not that men should buy,” 212 Cordwent, George, 59 Craik, Dinah Mulock, 148, 149, 157 Cuffe, Kathleen, 50 Custance, Olive, 33, 34, 71–74, 77, 80–83, 86, 87, 89, 93, 99, 105n2, 105n3, 105n4, 105n12, 106n16, 106n20, 107n30, 204, 205 works; “Antinous,” 73–75, 77; “Autumn Night,” 83; “Glamour of Gold,” 88, 90, 92; “Love’s Firstfruits,” 87, 88; “A Madrigal,” 77, 78, 80; “A Pause,” 90, 92; “A Sleep Song,” 86–88; “The Snow,” 204, 205; “The Song Spinner,” 205; “The White Statue,” 75–77; “The White Witch,” 81–83 D Darmesteter, James, 181, 185, 213n13 Davis, William A., 177n10 de Certeau, Michel, 225 Diedrick, James, 162, 178n26, 178n28, 178n29 Diniejko, Andrzej, 109 Dixie, Florence, 43 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 72, 74, 82, 83, 86, 87, 105n2, 105n12, 106n18 E Eastwood, M., 3 Ellis, Havelock, 2, 73 Ely, M. Lynda, 199, 214n18, 214n22 Ethelmer, Ellis, 254, 255 Woman Free, 254

 INDEX 

F “Fallen woman,” background on, 147–152, 177n20 Field, Michael, 7, 24, 33, 71, 95, 103, 104 works; “Metrum Praxillae,” 103, 104; verse XIV from Long Ago, 95 Fitzsimons, Eleanor, 41 Ford, Isabella, 217 G Galvin, Elisabeth, 39 Gillington, A. E., 33, 103, 107n39 “Nocturnes,” 103 Gillington, M. C., 33, 80, 99, 100, 102 works; “Intra Muros,” 102, 103; “The sea-weed rises,” 102; “The Tryst of the Night,” 99 Gissing, George, 217 Glaser, Ben, 214n20 Goody, Alex, 226, 234, 239, 248n10, 250n35 Gore-Booth, Eva, 22, 32, 34, 206, 207, 215n27 works; “Clouds,” 32; “To a Poet,” 206–208; “The Repentance of Eve,” 22 Gosse, Edmund, 5 Grand, Sarah, 4, 6, 43, 57, 67n23, 68n26, 68n32, 114, 150 Greenslade, William, 109 Grundy, Sydney, 4 Guimarães, Paula, 178n29 H Harper, Charles G., 2, 5 Harrington, Emily, 196, 214n18, 214n21 Harris, Frank, 106n18 Harris, Jose, 109 Harvey, H. E., 3, 6

273

Hawksley, Julia M. A., 6 Hawley, John C., 215n28 Heaney, John, 60 Hewitt, Emma C., 4, 5 Hickok, Kathleen, 68n28, 148 “The Higher Education of Women,” 35n11 Hogarth, Janet E., 6, 238, 250n33 Holman, C. Hugh, 118 Homer, 186 Hopper, Nora, 33, 61 “A Marriage Charm,” 61 Houston, Natalie, 115 Huggins, Cynthia E., 213n13 Hughes, Linda K., 6, 54, 58, 61, 69n36, 74, 99, 106n19, 144n23, 240, 242 Hutchinson, Jonathan, 59 J Jackson, Holbrook, 72, 82, 83, 105n6 James, Henry, 238 Jamieson, Herbert, 3 Japp, Alex H., 114, 144n10, 144n12, 144n14 Jeune, Mary, 150–152, 154, 158, 177n10 K Keble, John, 187 Kendall, May, 20, 34, 36n19, 137–140, 217, 251 works; “Church Echoes,” 138; “In the Toy Shop,” 20, 36n19; “Legend of the Maid of All Work,” 137; “Otherworldliness,” 140; “The Sandblast Girl and the Acid Man,” 137; “Woman’s Future,” 251 Kennedy, Benjamin Hall, 119 Kubiesa, Jane M., 148, 177n20

274 

INDEX

L Lang, Andrew, 223, 224, 248n11 Lasner, Mark Samuel, 77 Ledger, Sally, 3, 35n1, 66n1 Le Gallienne, Richard, 72, 73 Leighton, Angela, 6, 7 Levy, Amy, 7, 33, 34, 36n20, 65, 71, 93, 94, 173, 182, 208, 217–220, 222–227, 229, 232–234, 237, 238, 240, 245, 247, 247n2, 247–248n4, 248n5, 248n6, 248n9, 249n14, 249n18, 250n31, 253 works; “Ballade of an Omnibus,” 223, 226, 228, 229; “Ballade of a Special Edition,” 238, 239; “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage,” 253; “Between the Showers,” 234; “Borderland,” 93, 94; “Captivity,” 253; “To Death,” 208; “In the Night,” 94, 95; “James Thomson: A Minor Poet,” 250n34; “London in July,” 235; “A London Plane-Tree,” 218, 220; A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse, 93, 218, 240, 253; “London Poets (In Memoriam),” 237; “Magdalen,” 173; “A March Day in London,” 229; “Out of Town,” 236; “The Piano-­ Organ,” 223; “Readers at the British Museum,” 248n6; The Romance of a Shop, 217, 247n1; “Straw in the Street,” 236; “The Village Garden,” 232–234, 245; “Women and Club Life,” 248n5; “Xantippe,” 65 Liggins, Emma, 151, 178n22

Linton, Eliza Lynn, 2, 4 Livesey, Ruth, 105n5, 144n23 Logan, Deborah Anna, 158 London and Its Sights, 219 Ludlow, Elizabeth, 234 Lynch, Hannah, 179 M Maddison, Arthur J. S., 149 Maltz, Diana, 137 “Manly Women,” 4 Marriage, background on, 37–38, 42–43, 50, 59, 68n30, 69n36 Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, 67n22 Matheson, Annie, 34, 135, 136 “A Song for Women,” 135, 136 McKerlie, Helen, 5 Meredith, George, 68n26, 217 Meynell, Alice, 7, 33, 35n14, 71, 96, 100, 106n15, 198, 214n21, 236 works; “The Visiting Sea,” 96, 98; “Winds of the World,” 198, 214n21 Mighall, Robert, 250n34 Moine, Fabienne, 143n5, 144n8 Moore, Doris Langley, 39, 41, 58 Moore, James R., 24 Morris, William, 137, 138 Mortimer, Geoffrey, 68n32 Motherhood, 27–30 Murphy, Patricia, 107n34, 107n37 N Naden, Constance, 15, 16, 19, 24, 25, 36n16, 36n18 works; “The Lady Doctor,” 16; “Love’s Mirror,” 19; “Love versus Learning,” 15, 16; “The Nebular Theory,” 24

 INDEX 

Nead, Lynda, 249n20 Nesbit, E., 13, 14, 27, 33, 34, 37–43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57–61, 66, 66n2, 66n5, 67n22, 132, 134, 175, 176, 211 works; “The Adventurer,” 54; “At the Feast,” 132, 134; “Baby Song,” 27; “Bridal Ballad,” 59, 60; “The Ghost,” 52; The Husband of To-day,” 54, 58; “A Last Appeal,” 134; “Lullaby,” 27; “Microcosm,” 60; “Quieta ne Movete,” 57, 58; “Refugium Peccatorum,” 175; “The Temptation,” 58; “To a Young Poet,” 211; “A Tragedy,” 50–52; “Under Convoy,” 47; “Vies Manquées,” 13; “The Wife of All Ages,” 56; “The Woman’s World,” 43, 47, 51, 68n25 Newcastle, Edgar, 150 New Woman, description of, 2–7 Noble, J. Ashcroft, 5, 114 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 226, 249n16 O Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey, 36n22 Oliphant, Margaret, 5, 6 Osler, William, 59 P Parker, Sarah, 73, 105n3, 105n4, 105n12, 106n20 Parsons, Deborah L., 226, 227, 235, 247–248n4 Paston, George, 67n23 Pater, Walter, 73, 82, 205, 214n17

275

Pearson, Karl, 5, 6 Pfeiffer, Emily, 34, 36n20, 167, 168, 171, 182, 200, 214n24, 252 works, 171, 172; “Aspiration I,” 200, 203; “A Chrysalis,” 252; “From Out of the Night,” 167, 168; “A Protest,” 171 Pollock, Griselda, 226, 249n20 Poverty, background on, 110, 137, 138 Prins, Yopie, 7, 213n6 Probyn, May, 14 “Ballade of Lovers: Double Refrain,” 14 Pulham, Patricia, 105n2, 105n3, 106n20 Q Quilter, Harry, 66n3 R Radford, Dollie, 28, 33, 34, 35n14, 36n24, 63, 71, 97, 100, 105n5, 106n15, 131, 144n23, 202, 203, 206, 217, 252 works; “Because I built my nest so high,” 203; “A Bride,” 63; “From Our Emancipated Aunt in Town,” 252; “In Yonder Bay,” 97–99; “My Songs,” 206; “Song,” 98; “To-night,” 202; “Two Songs,” 131; “What Song Shall I Sing?,” 28, 36n24 Rappaport, Erika Diane, 249n23 Reynolds, Margaret, 6, 213n3 Richardson, Leeanne Marie, 28, 36n24, 214n26

276 

INDEX

Robinson, A. Mary F., 23, 24, 34, 35n14, 36n20, 172, 174, 179–187, 190, 194, 195, 197–199, 204, 208, 212, 213n6, 213n13, 214n14, 214n16, 214n17, 214n18, 217, 220 works; “Adam and Eve,” 23; “Art and Life,” 192, 194; “The Barrier,” 179; “The Bookworm,” 180; “Celia’s Home-Coming,” 180; The New Arcadia and Other Poems, 172, 181; “An Oasis,” 180, 213n3; “A Reflection,” 190–192; “Rosa Rosarum,” 181; “A Search for Apollo,” 190; “The Scape-Goat,” 172, 174, 181; “Song,” 194–196, 199; “The Sonnet,” 185, 187, 188, 190 Robinson, Bonnie J., 36n19 Rogers, Scott, 149, 178n35 Rooksby, Rikky, 234 Roston, Murray, 148 Roud, Steve, 107n39 Rudy, Jason R., 164 S Sappho, 182 Schaffer, Talia, 7, 96 Scheinberg, Cynthia, 65 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60 Schreiner, Olive, 38, 67n24, 220 Seaton, Beverly, 36n15 Sewell, Brocard, 73, 74, 105n3 “Sex versus Sex,” 35n8 Sharp, Mrs. William, 102 Sharp, William, 102, 115, 117, 120, 129, 144n12, 144n13, 181 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 198 “A Short Account of the London Magdalene Hospital,” 177n6, 178n36

Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 21 “Love in Disguise,” 22 Sigerson, Dora, 18, 21, 33, 35n14, 65, 66 works; “The Awakening,” 18; “The Skeleton in the Cupboard,” 65 Skene, Felicia, 149 “Some Women Poets,” 67n7 Sonnet, theories of, 114–115, 117, 129–131, 144n12, 144n13, 144n14 Southern, Isabella J., 31, 33, 34, 110, 112, 114–118, 121, 124, 127, 129, 131, 134, 143n5, 143n7, 217 works; “The Evolution of Womanhood,” 112; “He That Loveth His Life Shall Lose It,” 116, 119; “The Nineteenth Century,” 129; “Of Children,” 127; “Of Selfishness,” 120; “Of Sympathy,” 121, 123, 125, 134; “A Selfish Paradise,” 118; “The Spectre of Want,” 126; “The Thirst for Knowledge,” 110, 111, 113, 144n8; “The Transformation of Pain,” 125; “Vicarious Suffering,” 123, 125 Stead, W. T., 154, 178n22 Stetz, Margaret D., 38, 66n5, 77 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 250n34 Stott, Annette, 177n20 Stutfield, Hugh E. M., 4, 6 Symonds, John Addington, 129, 195, 197 Symons, Arthur, 179, 219 T Tennyson, Alfred, 46, 232, 233 Thain, Marion, 36n16, 36n18, 180, 213n2 Thomson, David, 109, 110

 INDEX 

Thomson, James, 238 Thornton, R. K. R., 36n16, 36n18, 180, 213n2 Tomson, Graham R., 30, 240–247 works; “Aubade,” 244; “In the Rain,” 242, 244; “London in October,” 246, 247; “Of the Earth, Earthy,” 240, 242, 244; “On the Road,” 30; “A Song of London,” 245 Trollope, Anthony, 150, 154, 156 Trudgill, Eric, 148, 178n22 Tynan, Katharine, 29 works; “The Fairy Foster-Mother,” 29; “Maternity,” 29; “Talisman,” 29 V Vadillo, Ana Parejo, 7, 35n14, 36n20, 214n17, 225, 238, 242, 248n9, 250n31 “The Victorian Age,” 143n1 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 73 W Waddington, Samuel, 114, 144n10 Walkowitz, Judith, 249n20 Wallis, Ada, 247n3

277

Watson, Rosamund Marriott, 7, 17, 34, 35n14, 217, 240–247 “Hic Jacet,” 17 (see also Tomson, Graham R.) Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 114, 130, 144n10 Webb, Sidney, 110, 117 Webster, Augusta, 3, 8, 10–12, 14, 29, 35n14, 36n20, 147, 182 works; “Farewell,” 10–12; “In After Years,” 11; Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet-Sequence, 29; “Once,” 8, 9, 12 Wells, H. G., 40 Wesley, John, 116 Whitney, Michelle L., 107n30, 205 Wilde, Oscar, 73, 74, 80, 82, 106n18, 154, 159, 160 Wilson, Cheryl, 214n14 Wilson, Elizabeth, 227 Winn, James A., 184 Wolff, Janet, 249n16 “A Woman of the Day,” 68n30 Woolf, Virginia, 182 Y Yates, Michael, 107n39