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Poetry with some Prejudice
Pat Shepherd’s after dinner talk at the Conference
included a feast of well chosen and presented poetry loved and used by Jane Austen, from
which these are extracted.
The Austen family were addicted to poetry writing. They would burst
into verse to celebrate family happenings, to accompany gifts. Jane’s brother James
was the most prolific writer, about 40 of his poems being still extant. Mrs Austen was a
poet from a very early age, and in her later years, after a serious illness which was
treated by an apothecary called Bowen, she wrote the following:
Dialogue between Death and Mrs Austen.
Says Death ‘I’ve been trying these three weeks or more
To seize an Old Madam here at number four,
Yet I still try in vain, tho’ she’d turned of threescore,
To what is my ill success oweing?’
I’ll tell you, old Fellow, if you cannot guess,
To what you’re indebted for your ill success;
To the prayers of my Husband, whose love I possess.
To the care of my Daughters, whom Heaven will bless;
To the skill and attention of Bowen.
I must risk the wrath of some members by saying I don’t think
Jane’s poetry particularly good, though in the following verse we can recognise her
sense of humour:
On the marriage of Miss Camilla Wallop & the Rev HenryWake.
Camilla, good-humoured and merry and small
For a husband was at her last stake;
And having in vain danced at many a Ball
Is now happy to jump at a Wake.
In her only surviving piece of serious verse she mourns the death of
her friend, Mrs Lefroy, who was killed while riding on Jane’s birthday. Though her
grief was undoubtedly genuine, the work seems to me too conventional and forced; I quote
only the two opening verses and the final one:
To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy, who died Dec 16 – my Birthday. Written 1808
The day returnes again, my natal day;
What mix’d emotions with the Thought arise!
Beloved friend,’ four years have pass’d away
Since thou wert snatched forever from our eyes.
The day, commemorative of my birth
Bestowing Life and Light and Hope on me,
Brings back the hour which was thy last on earth.
Oh! bitter pang of torturing Memory!
...
Fain would I feel a union in thy fate.
Fain would I seek to draw an omen fair
From this connection in our Earthly date.
Indulge the harmless weakness - Reason, spare.
Jane herself realised that her genius was for the novel, not poetry;
when Sir Walter Scott began to write novels, she complained that he had …
no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not
fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet and should not be taking the bread out of
other people’s mouths.
Who were the poets current in Jane’s lifetime? Among others,
Scott, Cowper, Byron, Coleridge and Shelley. In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published
the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and started the great shift to the Romantic
period. As many have commented, Jane Austen’s taste ran more to the 18th century, but
she was quite familiar with the works of the Bad Lord Byron - as who was not? In Persuasion
we have the bereaved Captain Benwick referring to The Giaour and The Bride
of Abydos, reciting with ‘tremulous feeling’ to Anne Elliot verses which
reflect his emotions:
from The Giaour, by Byron
The cold in clime are cold in blood,
Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
That boils in Aetna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
and all that I have felt, and feel
Betoken love - that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.
from The Bride of Abydos by Byron
By Helle’s stream there is a voice of wail!
And woman’s eye is wet - man’s cheek is pale:
Zuleika! last of Giaffir’s race,
Thy destined lord is come too late:
He sees not - ne’er shall see thy face!
…
He was thy hope - thy joy - thy love - thine all,
And that last thought on him thou couldst not save
Sufficed to kill;
Burst forth in one wild cry - and all was still.
Peace to thy broken heart, and virgin grave!
That Anne feels something self-indulgent in his performance is shown by
her gentle suggestion:
she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say,
that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who
enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly,
were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly. Persuasion, Ch.14
Her instinct is proved correct when his ‘undying’ love for
the late Fanny Harville starts to transfer itself first to Anne, then finally to Louisa
Musgrove. A clear case of being in love with his own emotions.
In Sense and Sensibility Marianne Dashwood reveals a similar
fervour regarding poetry; she complains of Edward Ferrars’ reading of Cowper as being
‘spiritless’ and ‘tame’. and wonders how Elinor can listen so calmly.
Again, in Sanditon, the words of Sir Edward Denham about Scott and Burns, and
Charlotte’s reply reinforce our sense that Jane Austen had decided reservations about
an over-emotional response to poetry.
Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon:
‘But Burns – I confess my sense of his pre-eminence Miss
Heywood. – If Scott has a fault, it is the want of passion. – Tender,
elegant, descriptive – but tame. – The man who cannot do justice
to the attributes of woman is my contempt. Sometimes indeed a flash of feeling seems to
irradiate him – as in the lines we were speaking of –‘Oh! Woman in our
hours of ease’ – But Burns is always on fire. – His soul was the altar in
which lovely woman sat enshrined, his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is
her due.’
‘I have read several of Burns’ poems with great
delight,’ said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak, ‘but I am not poetic
enough to separate a man’s poetry entirely from his character, – and poor
Burns’ known irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his lines. – I
have difficulty depending on the truth of his feelings as a lover. I have not faith
in the sincerity of the affections of a man of his description. He felt and he
wrote and he forgot.’ Sanditon, Ch.7
When we meet our heroine, Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey,
her naive susceptibility to the Gothic novel is foreshadowed in Chapter 1; we are told
that she is familiar with six literary quotations; four of these are misquoted but not, I
suspect, by Jane Austen. This carelessness does suggest that Catherine has acquired these
fragments, not from a genuine love of poetry, but because they are desirable in the eyes
of society, like a little skill in music, a small dabble with a paintbrush. Mrs Elton is
quick with the odd quotation; she quotes from Gray’s Elegy, from John Gay,
from Milton in a fashion which caused Ronald Blythe, editor of the Penguin Emma to
write:
She is a gifted debaser of art who reduces each quotation to a
sentimental cliché.
Emma herself denies the Shakespearean edict that ‘the course of
true love never did run smooth’, a splendid irony when we consider that she is in the
process of ruining Harriet Smith’s love-life and indeed, compromising her own. So
some of Jane Austen’s creations reveal weaknesses in their response to poetry.
What of those characters who show a less emotional, more rational, more
18th century attitude? We are told that Jane’s favourite poets were Scott, George
Crabbe and William Cowper. When Fanny Price expresses disappointment in the chapel at
Sotherton, Mr Rushworth’s estate, she refers closely to Scott’s Lay of the
Last Minstrel:
from The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Scott
Full many a scutcheon and banner riven,
Shook to the cold night-wind of heaven,
Around the screenéd altar’s pale;
And there the dying lamps did burn,
Before thy low and lonely urn,
0 gallant chief of Otterburne!
…
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there be, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured and unsung.
The poem I would like to quote from Crabbe is a part of The Parish
Register. To me it has an almost Chaucerian flavour:
from ‘The Parish Register’, George Crabbe (1754 - 1832)
Part 3 - Burials.
Next died the Widow Goe, an active dame,
Famed ten miles round, and worthy all her fame;
She lost her husband when their loves were young,
But kept her farm, her credit, and her tongue:
Full thirty years she ruled, with matchless skill,
With guiding judgment and resistless will;
Advice she scorned, rebellions she suppressed,
And sons and servants bowed at her behest.
Like that great man’s, who to his Saviour came,
Were the strong words of this commanding dame;-
‘Come’, if she said, they came; if ‘go’, were gone;
And if ‘do this’. - that instant it was done:
Surely that portrait would have delighted the creator of Lady Catherine
de Bourgh!
And so we come to the favourite, William Cowper; most of the extracts
are from his long blank verse poem, The Task, from which Mr Knightley quotes –
what better recommendation could we ask? One of the great names in landscape gardening, a
popular activity among the landowners of Austen’s time, was that of Capability Brown,
who is not totally approved by Cowper:
from The Task, by William Cowper
Lo! he comes –
Th’ omnipotent magician, Brown, appears.
Down falls the venerable pile, th’abode
Of our forefathers, a grave whisker’d race,
But tasteless. Springs a palace in its stead,
But in a distant spot; where more expos’d it may enjoy
th’advantage of the north
And aguish east, till time shall have transform’d
Those naked acres to a sheltering grove.
He speaks. The lake in front becomes a lawn,
Woods vanish, hills subside, and vallies rise,
And streams, as if created for his use,
Pursue the track of his directing wand,
Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,
Now murm’ring soft, now roaring in cascades,
Ev’n as he bids.
Elizabeth Bennet’s reaction to the grounds of Pemberley reflect a
similar preference for a natural, rather than contrived landscape:
Pemberley House ... was a large, handsome stone building, standing well
on rising ground and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; – and in front, a stream
of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial
appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted.
Ch 63
A similar feeling for nature is shown by Fanny Price when Rushworth
proposes changes at Sotherton; she says, ‘Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does it
not make you think of Cowper? Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited’.
This was not a new thought from the poet; the same idea is expressed in an earlier poem, The
Poplar Field:
The Poplar Field by William Cowper
The poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer, and sing in the leaves
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
The novels suggest that Jane certainly preferred the country-side to
city life – she did not want to live in Bath, any more than Anne Elliot did. The
charming villains, the Crawfords, come from London to corrupt the peace of Mansfield Park.
I have to admit the Gardiners also come from London, but not the fashionable part! And
Cowper expresses some criticism of London in The Task (p415):
... where has commerce such a mart,
So rich, so throng’d, enlarged, and still
Increasing London? Babylon of old
Not more the glory of the earth, than she,
A more accomplished world’s chief glory now.
She has her praise. Now mark a spot or two
That so much beauty would do well to purge;
And show this queen of cities, that so fair
May yet be foul, so witty, yet not wise.
It is not seemly, nor of good report,
That she is slack in discipline. More prompt
T’avenge than to prevent the breach of law.
That she is rigid in denouncing death
On petty robbers, and indulges life
And liberty, and oft-times honour too
To peculators of the public gold.
That thieves at home must hang; but he that puts
Into his overgorged and bloated purse
The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.
…
God made the country, and man made the town.
What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threatened in the fields and groves?
We know of Jane’s reluctance to dedicate Emma to the Prince
Regent because of her dislike of his character; the following comments on heroes and kings
in The Task would, one imagines, meet with her approval:
We love
The king who loves the law, respects his bounds
And reigns content within them. Him we serve
Freely and with delight, who leaves us free.
But recollecting still that he is man,
We trust him not too far. King, though he be,
And king in England too, he may be weak
And vain enough to be ambitious still,
May exercise amiss his proper pow’rs,
Or covet more than freemen chuse to grant:
Beyond that mark is treason. He is ours,
T’administer. to guard, t’adorn the state,
But not to warp or change it. We are his,
To serve him nobly in the common cause
True to the death, but not to be his slaves.
The less dedicated members of the clergy too come in for Cowper’s
criticism:
from The Task, by Cowper (p428)
I venerate the man, whose heart is warm,
Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life
Coincident, exhibit lucid proof
That he is honest in the sacred cause.
To such I render more than mere respect,
Whose actions say that they respect themselves.
But loose in morals, and in manners vain,
In conversation frivolous, in dress
Extreme, at once rapacious and profuse,
Frequent in park, with lady at his side,
Ambling and prattling scandal as he goes,
But rare at home, and never at his books,
Or with his pen, save when he scrawls a card;
Constant at routs, familiar with a round
Of ladyships, a stranger to the poor;
Ambitious of preferment for its gold,
And well-prepar’d by ignorance and sloth,
By infidelity and love o’ th’ world,
To make God’s work a sinecure; a slave
To his own pleasures and his patron’s pride.
Some people have said that Jane does not treat all members of the
clergy respectfully. Certainly Cowper’s words, ‘his patron’s pride’
lead us directly to Mr Collins and Lady Catherine. I believe that living so closely to the
church and its affairs would inevitably make such a shrewd observer look with eyes
unclouded by an automatic reverence for the clergy and their doings.
The slave trade is mentioned a couple of times in the novels; Mrs Elton
accidentally discloses some of her ‘trade’ origins when Jane Fairfax compares
the situation of a governess with that of a slave. More seriously, the wealth and comfort
of Mansfield Park is based on the sugar plantations of Antigua. Cowper states - even
shouts - his opinion:
from The Task, by Cowper (p 418)
... My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day’s report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart
It does not feel for man. The nat’ral bond
Of brotherhood is sever’d as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour’d like his own, and having pow’r
T’inforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And worse than all, and most to be deplored
As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man? And what man seeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s
Just estimation priz’d above all price,\
I had much rather be myself the slave
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home. - Then why abroad?
The final selection shows Cowper’s own feelings about being a
poet; - a glimpse into the creative thought processes of the poet whom Jane Austen, that
supreme creative artist, revered above all others:
from The Task by Cowper, p 426.
There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know. The shifts and turns,
Th’expedients and inventions multiform
To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms
Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win -
T’arrest the fleeting images that fill
The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast,
And force them sit, till he has pencil’d off
A faithful likeness of the forms he views;
Then to dispose his copies with such art
That each may find its most propitious light,
And shine by situation, hardly less,
Than by the labor and the skill it cost,
Are occupations of the poet’s mind
So pleasing, and that steal away the thought
With such address, from themes of sad import,
That lost in his own musings, happy man!
He feels th’anxieties of life, denied
Their wonted entertainment, all retire.
Such joys has he that sings.
Pat Shepherd
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