Felicia Hemans

date

1793-1835

How does Amy Gates describe Hemans’ use of the body in her 2013 PHD THESIS translating the dead

2013 - “uses the corporeal form as a link between the private sphere of domesticity and death and the public domain of memorial”

How does Paula Feldman describe Hemans’ collection Records of Women, and Other Poems (1828) in her edited edition of it

1999 - “Nearly every poem … describes a corpse or the anticipation of one”

Does Hemans have connection to Wordsworth

Met Wordsworth during 2 week stay at Rydal Mount in June 1830 - WW both complimentary of Hemans, describes her conversation ‘full of sensibility’ in letter to Samuel Rogers but later suggests to George Huntly Gordon that he found her too elaborate. writes verses in honour of her after her death.

Date - The Forest Sanctuary and Other Poems

1825

What is The Forest Sanctuary about

tells the story of Spaniard fleeing the inquisition and taking refuge with his young son somehwere in the Americas. The ocean appears throughout as a force of displacement and alienation - connected throughout with the death of Leonor.

How is Leonor’s Sea burial introduced

sense of dislocation, isolation

narrator recalling graves of family in distant homeland then recalls the “blue, lone, distant main […] sweeping high o’er one gentle head - ye rest not here”

How is Leonor remembered on account of his sea burial

in echoes “as moans the ocean-shell”

What is the significance of this depiction of sea burial

connection with Charlotte Smith?

Sense of sea as formally breaking down the comforted allotted to grief through earth burial. sea does not leave a stable space for memory, only associations and similes - poetical tangle.

In what collection is The Grave of a Poetess published

Records of Woman: With Other Poems 1828 - collections that emphasises womens places in history and potential posterity, suggests women as hsitorical figures.

What does Harriet Kramer Linkin suggest Hemans is seeking through writing in the genre of address poems

2017 - “ultimately seeks to secure her own reception via the poem’s citational network”

Brandy Ryan - life and death for elegiac poet

2008 - “if life is a kind of death for the woman poet, then death provides a kind of life and allows the elegist finally to connect directly with her predecessor.”

What does Hemans’ note to the text suggest

identifies the addressee - interest in scenery of Woodstock ‘on account of it haing been the last residence of the author of Psyche’

mentions river and ‘the ruins of an ancient abbey … partially converted into a church … throw their mantle of tender shadow over it’.

WHat does Wu (1997) suggest about Hemans’ connection to Tighe’s grave

visited the grave once in APril 1831 - describes the funeral statuary and suggests ‘That place of rest made me very thoughtful’

WHat is significant about Hemans’ choice of an epigraph for this poem

in french, means ‘Don’t pity me; if only you knew how much suffering this tomb has spared me!’

taken from Germaine de Stael’s 1807 novel Corinne, or Italy.

Connections between Stael and Tighe outlined in 1811 by Anna Maria Porter in poem “Lines written after reading the ‘Corinne’ of Madame de Stael, and the ‘Psyche’ of the late Mrs. Henry Tighe.”, suggesting them as kindred poetic spirits. suggests intertwined sense of poetic composition - established connections that Hemans is playing in choice not to explicitly name Tighe.

Date of Mary Tighe’s Psyche: or the legend of love

1805

allegorical poem, spenserian stanzas. rendition of folk tale of Cupid and Psyche, recorded in Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. allusions made to Spenser’s Fairie Queene.

Importance of opening line “I stood beside thy lowly grave”

sense of relationship, female ownership of grave. direct address supposes Tighe as a fully realised being.

connection with closing line “And joy the poet’s eye” - claiming autonomy and agency.

line 2 “Spring odours breathed around” - what does this suggest

the first line of Tighe’s final poem ‘On Recieving a Branch of Mezereon Which Flowered at Woodstock December 1809’

“Odours of spring, my sense, ye charm”

significance of Mezereon as Tighe’s final poem and a poem anticipating her death, concluding posthumous edition of Psyche, with other Poems published anonymously 1811. Parallels - The Grave of a Poetess concludes Records of Women.

Hemans describing Tighe’s mind as a shrine - sense of loss but also later return to natural beauty as anaesthetic to such loss. emphasis on woman not poet as shrine for poetry - feminine power, intensifies not substitutes poetic value. lines 14-16

“Thou in whose woman’s mind/ The ray that brightens earth and sea,/ The light of song was shrined”

Sense of Hemans possessed by Tighe = intertextual communities - 31-2. Turns Hemans perspective away from pessimism of loss.

“Th’ immortal spirit woke, and wrought/ Within my thrilling frame.”

37-8 - “the shadows of the tomb are here,/ Yet beautiful is earth!” = how does this redirect the pessimism at the ending of Tighe’s Psyche

in Psyche, speaker mounrns that she is buried “consigned to dark oblivion’s silent tomb” and unable to see “visionary scenes” of Psyche.

anxiety around endings and legacy - what remains of the poet - particularly the female poet

line 41-2 “Here a vain love to passing flowers/ Thou gav’st”

Hemans suggesting Tighe also left behind memoria of sorrow - ideas around female poetic noise

Lines 44-45 “thou hast left sorrow in thy song,/ A Voice not loud, but deep!”

lines 47-8 “The glorious bowers of earth among,/ How often didst thou weep!” - how does this recall Tighe’s Psyche

Psyche opens with Psyche weeping in a bower

QUestion in final stanza that suggests anxieties around memorial and legacy - lines 48-9

“Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground/ Thy tender thoughts and high?”

Optimistic remainders that Hemans leaves the reader with - interesting division of woman and poet. doubling?

“peace” in the woman’s heart

“joy” in poet’s eye

WHat other address poems does this poem stimulate

Letitia Landon’s Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans 1835

Elizabeth Barrett’s Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon and SUggested BY Her Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans 1835 - Barret chastises Landon and impl Hemans for mounring dead and questions value of elegy.

What is the significance of metre in The Grave of a Poetess

metre recalls the ballad form – alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter but Hemans instead chooses rhyme of elegiac quatrain echoing th abab rhyme made famous by Thomas Gray in ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ 1751. First line substitutes normal iambs for powerful spondee locating authority in speaker  ‘I stood beside thy lowly grave’ = Hemans retains power of 1^st person. Standing not sitting or kneeling

When was The Childs Last Sleep published

first in Friendships Offering in 1826 and then in Records of Woman 1828

What is the poem’s subtitle and what is the significance of this

‘Suggested by a monument of Chantreys’ = details an ekphrastic subject.

original placement in Friendships Offering placed the poem on a page adjacent to a depiction of the monument.

What is the opening line of the poem and how is this significant against the foregroudning of funerary sculpture

“Thou sleepest - when wilt thou wake, fair child?”

suggests child is alive.

The Graves of a Household dates

first published 1825

What is The Graves of a Household about?

the death of her brother Claude, one year younger than she, in Kingston Canada in 1821.

in TGoH - Hemans suggesting dissolution of Graves contrast emphasis on simultaneity in opening lines “side by side … one home”

“Their graves are severed far and wide,/ By mount and stream and sea!

TgOH _ Sea burial

“The sea, the blue lone sea hath one,/ He lies where pearls lie deep;/ He was the loved of all, yet none/ O’er his low bed may weep.”

SIgnificance of Hemans’ closural remark “Alas, for love, if thou wert all”

she is exposing the failure of her domestic ideology - if domestic love is all, the destruction of love leaves life without purpose and meaning.

Anne Mellor Romanticism and Gender about TgOH and Hemans’ domestic ideology

1993 “home becomes a paradise lost that can never be regained, a place which cries out to the prodigal”

Date Properzia Rossi

Records of Woman 1828

WHo is Properzia Rossi and how does Hemans use her

16th C female sculptor, poet, musician from Bologna. using her last work, basso relief of Ariadne to roman knight, ibject of affection who is indifferent to it - intermingling of art and life. This functions as an effigy for Rossi, and in turn effigy for Hemans (dissatisfying rel w hub, resulting in seperation)

PR - desire to leave trace

“I would leave enshrined/ something immortal of my heart and mind/ That yet may speak to thee when I am gone”

PR - imperatives

“awake, not yet within me die … my spirit, wake! … Live!! In thy work breathe out, that he may yet … perchance regret/ Thine unrequited gift.”

PR afterlife

“I shall not perish all”

PR organic growth of art

“The bright work grows/ beneath my hand, unfolding, as a rose”

PR mould and self

“Thou art the mould/ wherein I pour the fervent thoughts, th’untolf,/ The self-consuming!”

PR name and music - power of senses and aurality. images of art intertwined with turmoil of one’s own history. BUT also anxiety about oral memory - not long lived, not sustained.

“Yet I leave my name -/ As a deep thrill may linger on the lyre … awhile to live”