From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

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From S ong t o P r i n t

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Allan Hoagwood FORTHCOMING TITLES Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson

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Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

Rom a n t ic Pse u do -S ongs

Terence Allan Hoagwood

10.1057/9780230105706 - From Song to Print, Terence Hoagwood

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From S ong t o P r i n t

FROM SONG TO PRINT

Copyright © Terence Allan Hoagwood, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13 978–0–230–60983–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoagwood, Terence Allan, 1952. From song to print : Romantic pseudo-songs / Terence Allan Hoagwood. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) ISBN 978–0–230–60983–9 (alk. paper) 1. Music and literature—History—19th century. 2. English poetry— 19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3849.H49 2010 782.4⬘3—dc22

2009027143

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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All rights reserved.

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For Treasure Hoagwood

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List of Figures

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

1 Romantic-Period Poetry and the “Sweet Power of Song”

1

2 Sir Walter Scott, “Ballad Deception,” and Romantic Pseudo-Songs

23

3 The “Cool Medium” of Sydney Owenson’s The Lay of an Irish Harp

45

4 Contradictory Arts: Moore’s Irish Melodies

71

5

“It Gave Them Virtues Not Their Own”: Byron’s Hebrew Melodies

105

Conclusion: L.E.L.’s Pseudo-Songs and the End of Romanticism

129

Notes

141

Bibliography

177

Index

189

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C on t e n t s

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

A Spanish Lady Title-Page of Miss [Sydney] Owenson, The Lay of an Irish Harp “Ancient Irish Harp.” Frontispiece in A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music Sir John Stevenson, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” Edward Bunting, “The Maid of the Valley” Thomas Moore, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” Illustration for Moore, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” First Page of Moore’s “Sublime Was the Warning” First page of Henry Russell's “The Orphan Ballad Singers” The Orphan Ballad Singers Title-Page engraving for The Troubadour

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11 46 47 78 79 80 82 101 132 133 137

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Figu r e s

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Rapid developments in the print trades in nineteenth-century Britain represent a vast change in industrial, economic, and broadly cultural terms. As the scale of publication increases—mechanized production, larger distributions, larger profits, greater numbers of publications— the nature of printed works and the modes of consumption change, too. Newer media (e.g., typography) replace older forms (e.g., singing to the harp). As Marshall McLuhan pointed out long ago, the old medium itself becomes the content of the new one: movies can come to be about books; engineered recordings are about live performances. This book studies one example of mediatic imperialism: the typographical simulation of songs and of entire bodies of previously folk activities including actual singing. As chapter 1 points out, written forms of songs often supplemented and even replaced the actual singing of those songs many centuries before typographical industries commodified the process so hugely, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries these two processes—the industrializing of music and the commodification of those industrial products— accelerated noticeably. As the medium of print extirpated the antecedent medium of sound, it also exploited its illusion. Poets, publishers, and reviewers often call typographical words “melodies.” At best, printed words are silent substitutes for sounds, but often those professional producers of words take advantage of that substitution. Like paper money (also a typographical development of the same period, and a more controversial and less charming one), the orally performed ballads, lays, melodies, and songs of the folk proliferated in signs and symbols as they disappeared in fact. Modern simulacra took their cultural place. From the earliest written record of an Old English song, Caedmon’s hymn, in English poetry scripts were never really sounds though their scriptorial avatars said and say that they are—what exists is not the song of the shepherd Caedmon from the occasion of the bir-scippe, from which he hid because he feared he could not sing, until an angel endowed him with the gift of sacred song. Rather, what exists is a scribal transcription of the Venerable Bede’s verbal

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P r e fac e

P r eface

record, in Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, with Bede’s Latin surrounding the Old English verses that he attributes to a shepherd named Caedmon. The singing shepherd is a character in a written work. Outside Bede’s narrative (in Latin), there is no indication that Caedmon ever existed. In all odes, in the fictitious singing of ancient and Early Modern pastoral poetry, the songs of Petrarch, the Piper’s Songs of Innocence and the Bard’s Songs of Experience, Lyrical Ballads, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Sydney Owenson’s entirely typographical Lay of an Irish Harp, the so-called Irish Melodies, and, among the vestiges of ancient poetry, the Song of Solomon, Psalms, and the pseudo-songs of Moschus, Bion, Theocritus, Anacreon (translated into English poetry by Thomas Moore), that which is script or typography is presented as if it were sound, of which it is at most a prescription (like a printed score) or a lexical imitation, like Moore’s poems. Sometimes what is sold as song is rather a set of references to music in the silent and total absence of it. The audible, bodily, and emotional spontaneity associated with music casts a wide net for customers, wider, apparently, than typographical records of abstract thought. In the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens writes in a poem (not a song) that “Music is feeling, then, not sound.” In the hypermediated, hypermarketed world of which Todd Gitlin has recently written, it is feeling rather than information or ideas that is marketed most vigorously and effectively. However, nineteenth-century writers frequently develop a selfconscious and self-undermining theme that many of their predecessors did not: in contrast to writings by Solomon, Moschus, Caedmon, and Petrarch, many of the pseudo-songs discussed in the present book make a theme of their own simulative status. When writers and publishers sell pseudo-songs as if they were songs, sometimes poets develop this “not-really” theme critically, even while they exploit the illusion. Calling attention to their modern medium, writers and publishers sometimes place their supposedly antique content at a distance. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin point out an important paradox: when media multiply conspicuously, the illusion of immediacy is marketed more and more aggressively. The more totally mediated a “song” is, the more the immediate appeal of feeling is invoked in its advertisement. Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation discusses helpfully the multiple media whose transformations amount, in themselves, to a large part of the spectacle on offer. Part of the spectacle is that which is visible through the window; but another part is the window itself. And it is the window that is for sale.

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xii

xiii

In Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Walter Scott includes modernized verses produced by Scott’s assistants, a monographlength treatise on ancient minstrelsy, new imitations of supposedly antique styles, and new poems about the glories of (nonexistent) antique ballads. Chapter 2 in the present book examines the printed production of 1802 in some detail, explicating its pseudo-sonority and the rhetorical form of its imaginary conjuring of songs which are not songs. Chapter 3 shows how the pseudo-songs of Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) furnish other examples of the nostalgic and folkloric theme in the typographical culture of the period. Owenson’s Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies appeared in 1805, three years after Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; her The Lay of an Irish Harp; Or, Metrical Fragments and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, published in 1807, one year before the publication of Moore’s Irish Melodies, is not a collection of songs at all, but rather part of the marketing campaign for a novel. The trope of nostalgia, in the forms of Romantic historicism and its commercially viable commodities, is allied to the increasingly self-conscious fictitiousness of the commodity culture. Writers as well as printers and publishers make speculative investments in the typographical celebration of pre-typographical forms of expression. Two centuries before digital media begin to replace print products, Romantic-period pseudo-songs can show us how typography simulated and replaced earlier periods’ folk songs. Usually, this substitution of print products for actual sounds appears under the marketing banner of cultural preservation. Romantic-period pseudosongs perpetrate and also lament the loss that they bring about under the category of gain. Byron reverses the modus operandi of his friend Moore, allowing a musician to compose pseudo-Hebraic tunes for verses that Byron had written on non-Hebraic subjects and without a thought about music. However, despite this reversed polarity, in Hebrew Melodies Byron reproduces the mirage of musical integrity even while his poems indicate the artifice of illusion in which he is engaged. The popular success of Hebrew Melodies and many other pseudo-songs reveals the power of the rhetorical mirage of music to overcome the fact of its unreality. The genre of pseudo-songs is large even among the canonical works of Romanticism, and so are the problems of remediation that they represent. The present book discusses examples from Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many other poets: musical references have only a typographical relationship to actual sonority while they have enjoyed, nonetheless, two centuries of appreciation for their own

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P r eface

P r eface

music just as if they had some, substituting signs of songs for the (absent) songs themselves. Non-canonical examples filled the streets and the printed advertisements for print products: Thomas Eldon’s the Sensitive Plant: A Glee for Three Voices (1790), the anonymous Three London Cries plus “A Bloody Murder” (1775), The Universal Songster; or, Museum of Mirth (1829), The Apollo; or, Harmonic Miscellany: Containing English, Scotch, and Irish Songs, Ballads, &c. &c. With the Music (1814), Thomas Campbell’s Ye Mariners of England, Old Joe, Buffalo Gals (183[?]), and the ever-popular and oft-reprinted Babes in the Wood. William Laffan has recently helped to illustrated the relationship of song with commerce, and likewise the typographical transformation of that relationship, in his edition (2003) of The Cries of Dublin Drawn from the Life by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, 1760: that book reproduces graphical simulations of street-singers. Sean Shesgreen’s Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (2002) narrates the migration of cries from street-songs to broadsides to nineteenthcentury books. This movement among media is noticeable across different social and economic classes, as Dave Harker documents amply and lucidly in his Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (1985). As the following chapters illustrate, a critical awareness of that industrial project becomes a theme within the Romantic-period works themselves. The mirage of music is one example of many commercial illusions fostered in the age of mechanical reproduction. Pictorial multimediation resembles the typographical simulation of song, in the same period and in the same industrial context. In the nineteenth century, steel-plate engravings, lithography, and electrotypes constitute a many-sided project for the replacement of autographic media with mechanical simulations. In the period of mass production the faux ekphrasis amongst the illustrated annuals came to be the principal venue for English poetry; illustrations and portraits among Byron’s works and Rogers’s Italy illustrate the industrial form of the aesthetic illusion in the period of investment capital. At the same time, writings on the aesthetics of multiple media in the periodical press of the Romantic period (Repository of the Arts, La Belle Assemblee, Literary Souvenir) offer remarkable anticipations of Adorno’s arguments in Aesthetic Theory about art in a commodity culture. The present book’s final chapter articulates a theory of mediatic simulation and its relationships with the fictions of capital.

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xiv

Three years ago, Marjorie Perloff, then President of the Modern Language Association, recommended as the annual conference’s theme “The Sound of Poetry.” Learned associations affiliated with the MLA, including the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association under the leadership of Marilyn Gaull, in turn proposed that general topic to their membership. I was honored to be a member of one of two panels convened by James McKusick, President of the WordsworthColeridge Association, to present papers at the MLA Convention (in Philadelphia) that were specifically related to the conference theme. From my presentation arose first the article, “The Textualizing of Sound: Romantic-Period Pseudo-Songs” [The Wordsworth Circle, 38, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 100–4], and then the present book. During the years of research and writing for this book, I have received financial support from the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University, the Department of English at Texas A&M, and the Office of Honors Programs at Texas A&M, and I thank those agencies and their leadership (specifically James Rosenheim, Paul Parrish, and Kurt Ritter). In addition to the large, learned, and responsive audience at that MLA in Philadelphia in 2006, I have also had the benefit of helpful and encouraging dialogues in connection with other presentations: at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, at colloquia at the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M, and at a colloquium of the Textual Studies Working Group at Texas A&M. I thank those scholars and those groups’ leaders, and specifically Maura Ives, Robert Boenig, Susan Egenolf, Charles Rzepka, and (again) James Rosenheim. Among the scholars from whom I have learned so much—about the topics of this book and about Romanticism and its scholarship— that none of my books, including this one, would have been the same without them, five whom I would like to acknowledge here are (in alphabetical order) Marilyn Gaull, the late John Howard, Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann, Daniel P. Watkins, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Working with Kathryn Ledbetter on a previous book,

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

Acknow ledgments

“Colour’d Shadows”: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century Writers, taught me much about research and writing in the history of the book, and for that I am permanently grateful to Professor Ledbetter. Finally, I mention with deep gratitude that, from the inception of this project (in Philadelphia) to its conclusion in this book’s present form, Treasure Hoagwood has not only discussed with me the issues and the works (including musical works) that are studied in this book; she has also helped me to gather and to analyze the materials and their meanings in ways that have substantially improved the whole.

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xvi

Rom a n t ic-P e r iod Poe t ry a n d t h e “Sw e e t Pow e r of S ong”

Pseudo-songs have an ancient history. For example, Herbert J. Levine has written of the evolution of Psalms from instrumental music to singing accompanied with “harp and timbrel, cymbals and lyre,” and then to the silence of texts: “in deference to those exalted memories [of David’s musicianship], the rabbis who constructed classical Judaism forbade instrumental accompaniment of worship”; “the Psalms took on new life as scriptural lessons, a development that also took place within the early centuries of Christianity.”1 Eric Werner points out that, in the fourth century, John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, had stated the advantage of the psalms’ musical component in terms of what would now be called “escapism”: such singing had the power “to keep the mind free from the happenings of daily life.”2 When the Psalms became scripts rather than musical performances, their association with music (by means of references to music rather than music) persisted. Obviously, the social function of pseudo-songs changes drastically over historical time and in differing cultural spaces, but both of these early developments persist into the British Romantic period, where the genre flourishes in a new and commercially successful way: it appears in the shift from orality to writing, paradoxically conceived as a means of honoring orality; and the genre entails an appeal to inner feelings as a pleasing alternative to reality. Without any musical activity on his own part, for example, Byron produced Hebrew Melodies in 1815, comparing his own collection of pseudo-songs with The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English

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Chapter 1

From Song to Pr int

Meter, a set of verse imitations of the Psalms by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and others.3 If the Psalms were already pseudo-songs long before 1547, when the first edition of Sternhold and Hopkins’ imitation appeared, the popular and oft-reprinted imitations of them are themselves subject to imitation many times before Byron imitates them. Hallett Smith discusses the sixteenth-century “vogue” of translating the Psalms into English poetry,4 and of course the practice did not end in the sixteenth century.5 John Milton’s paraphrases of Psalm 114 (in pentameter couplets) and Psalm 136 (in tetrameter couplets), written in 1624, were followed in 1648 by his verse paraphrases of Psalms 80–88, in which, as John Shawcross points out, Milton follows Sternhold and Hopkins in the use of the ballad stanza (plus a rhyme of lines 1 and 3 in each stanza).6 In 1653, Milton paraphrased eight more of the Psalms, this time using a variety of meters including elegiac stanzas for his paraphrase of Psalm 8, which is not elegiac in the least. Milton’s imitations of the Psalms are also imitations of earlier imitations of the Psalms.7 These paraphrases of Psalms are legible poems rather than audible songs, as were the Psalms themselves in classical Judaism; in contrast, the live performance of Milton’s Comus preceded its publication with musical accompaniment that had been composed by Henry Lawes.8 Like the pastoral pipes, lyres, and singing in “Lycidas,” and like the “new song” in the Psalms and then, derivatively, in the Book of Revelation, cited in turn by “Lycidas,” the music in Milton’s paraphrases of the Psalms is present only through reference. Many eighteenth-century versions of psalmic literature imitate each other as well as the original Psalms. In 1719, Isaac Watts published The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament;9 in 1781, John Mycalls published an American revision of Watts’s book. In 1785, Joel Barlow published his revision of Watts’s book: Dr. Watts’ Imitation of the Psalms of David, Corrected and Enlarged. In 1801, Timothy Dwight imitated the imitations again.10 In all of these imitations of imitations, as in Psalms themselves, there is no music, but only verbal reference to it. Like biblical Psalms and their imitations, ancient pastoral poetry arose as a metapoetic form in the first place, using the language of oral song as a metaphor for written poetry. Bion’s fifth idyll (written, so far as surviving records suggest, in the third century BCE), begins, If sweet my songs, or these sufficient be Which I have sung to give renown to me,

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2

Rom a n t ic-P er iod Poet ry

3

While writing replaces orality, this metaphorical substitution (“songs” for “poems”) reverses on its verbal surface what was taking place. After Bion’s death, Moschus’s third idyll (the “Epitaph of Bion”) repeats the metaphor, calling attention to the difference between silent letters and absent sounds: Hyacinth! Prolong The sad, sad woe thy lettered petals keep; Our minstrel sings no more his friends among— Sicilian Muses! Now begin the doleful song. (316)

Imitation and reproduction are already themes in this poem and in this genre, as Moschus writes of Bion in the role of Orpheus, and he writes of Bion’s influence on other poets: “still among the reeds does Echo feed / On Bion’s minstrelsy” (317). Bion and then Moschus, who writes of his precursor Bion as an analogy of Orpheus, are imitating Theocritus, and subsequent writers of pastoral through the Romantic period imitate the mise en scene from all three and from many other predecessors. In Theocritus’s sixth idyll, he presents a locus classicus of the singing contest. Virgil (Eclogues) and Spenser (Shepheardes Calender) imitate Theocritus specifically:12 Daphnis and Damoetas by a fountain sung their ditties sweet. But Daphnis first (to whom it did belong As challenger) began the pastoral song. (225)

The initiation of the “song” under the conditions of competition are developed in Theocritus as they were to be, later, by Bion, whose pastoral persona expresses anxiety about gaining “renown.” Theocritus’s persona replies to Lycidas, I, too, am a mouth-piece eloquent Of the dear Muses; and all men esteem, And call me minstrel good. (227)

The eighth poem (“August”) in Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) repeats the trope of competition in the quest for

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I know not: but it misbeseems to strain At things we have not learned, and toil in vain. 11

4

From Song to Pr int

In this Aeglogue is set forth a delectable controversie, made in imitation of That in Theocritus: whereto also Virgile fashioned his third & seventh Aeglogue. They choose for umpere of their strife, Cuddie a neatheards boye, who having ended their cause, reciteth also himsefe a proper song, whereof Colin he sayth was Authour.13

Spenser’s pastorals present other themes, including religious controversy (as Milton was later to do in Lycidas), but their continuity with classical pastorals is rather a matter of these two themes— the competition among poets (soi-disant singers) and the making of artificial imitation into a theme of the poetry. In relation to the Romantic-period’s pseudo-songs, the ancient and early-modern examples also furnish precursor treatments of another theme that becomes important in the industrial-revolution setting of the Romantic writers. As W. W. Gregg observed in 1906, pastoral poetry customarily presents “a contrast, implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of civilization.” Greg also indicates the Romantic pertinence of this artificial nostalgia: pastoral poetry represents “the reaction against the world that is too much with us.”14 Thus, the theme of artificial competition in an economy of poets (“singers”) is coupled paradoxically with a reaffirmation of the vanished values of innocence and simplicity: ancient pastoral is characterized by “optimistic simplicity, its denial of reality by simplifying confusion and complexity to an irreducible orderliness.” According to S. K. Heninger, the fictitiousness of that simplicity was manifold from the beginning of pastoral: Theocritus, for example, “simulated a Doric dialect to suggest genuine rusticity.”15 Without any direct influence of Theocritus, and in the commercial context of the industrial revolution, the dialects later simulated by Robert Burns and John Clare (for example) evidently carry on a long tradition of forged authenticities. Two sorts of pseudo-songs proliferate in the Romantic period: those that, like many of the lyrics by Burns and Clare, are sold as if they were songs when they are entirely scriptorial or typographical objects; and those that refer to music and use rhetorical resources to conjure imaginary musical effects, without pretending to be, really,

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recognition for the poem (the soi-disant song). The Shepheardes Calender also calls attention to the imitative nature of the enterprise:

5

music. For example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s small poem beginning “Music, when soft voices die” praises music precisely when there is none. The poem’s speaker says that music, like rose leaves after the rose has died, and like the odor of a violet after it has vanished, has no actual existence but only a psychological afterlife “in the memory.”16 Writing reduces music to the idea of music where no music is. The poem’s explicit statements about mortality repeat in different metaphors the story of what happened to music: at the poems’ close, love slumbers on “thy thoughts” when “thou art gone.” Shelley thus writes a story of one medium (voice) succeeded by another (“thought”), and the pattern is reproduced in the entirely verbal form of the work. As Walter J. Ong writes (though he does not mention Shelley), “the dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text.”17 In its first published form, the poems’ two stanzas are defined by its physical spacing. Grammar organizes the text: the poem consists of two sentences, each consisting of two independent clauses, and each repeating the pattern of something passing out of existence (music, odors, rose leaves, and a person) to be followed by a merely imaginary afterlife (“in the memory” or “within the sense” or in “thy thoughts”). The only existence of the “thought” in the poem is of course verbal. Furthermore, the textual history of the poem makes clear how totally the poem is a work of script and print, although its reception history involves discussion of the poem in terms of music, which it never was. Irving Massey points out that the poem, unpublished in Shelley’s lifetime but surviving in Shelley’s notebook, consists of the two stanzas that Mary Shelley later printed in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, but Mary Shelley reverses the order of the stanzas to make the poem begin with the word “Music.”18 In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s manuscript, music is only one hypothetical example of a lovely thing that vanishes, the other examples being the odor of a violet and rose leaves. The foreground emphasis of music is Mary Shelley’s doing, and not the poet’s. Further, Mary Shelley supplies a title that the poet did not (“To------”), endowing the work with the appearance of a love song, which, as Donald H. Reiman points out, it is not.19 Often in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers apparently confuse textual and typographical products with actual music. My point is not that commentators have been mistaken about the poem, but rather that, like Shelley’s “With a Guitar to Jane,” his poem “Music, when soft voices die” is an especially clear example of a printed text which, internally, is about the absence of music, but which, externally, becomes an apparently convincing illusion of the

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music whose absence it declares in plain English. In 1992, Marshall Brown writes enthusiastically of “With a Guitar, To Jane,” preferring its (nonexistent) music to the text: “perhaps music may come closer to adequacy than more denotative expressions” when a poet wishes to express “a truth without corrupting it in the utterance”; perhaps “a tone is better than a word.”20 Perhaps it is, but Shelley’s poem is a work of written or printed words, though some evidently enjoy the words as a musical antithesis to words. Pseudo-songs during the nineteenth century include periodical publications: for example, from February 1855 to August 1858, Mary Cowden Clarke published a monthly column in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular entitled “Music among the Poets and Poetical Writers,” consisting entirely of excerpts from typographical poems. None are lyrics from actual songs, although musical scores (from other compositions) often appear in articles on pages adjacent to Clarke’s excerpts of poems. These bibliographical facts have theoretical implications: writing not of Clarke but of Shelley’s “With a Guitar, To Jane,” which Shelley addresses, “Ariel to Miranda,” Barry Weller says aptly that “the poem’s presence in a book or even its inscription on a sheet of paper imprisons Ariel, as unconstrained song, in another form of the tree” in which Ariel is imprisoned in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 21 In this reading, the poet prefers the spontaneous, natural, and free song to the artificial and silent print-product. As printed commodities grow more numerous in the nineteenth century, poets often exploit that nostalgic preference amongst a customer-base that had become “a reading nation.” 22 Three of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s books—The Improvisatrice, The Troubadour, and The History of the Lyre—are popular examples of the topic of music (with no music) sold in celebration of personal emotion, typically a pleasing melancholy. Shelley’s manuscript poems about music were not commercial projects, but Mary Shelley’s publication of them, after Shelley’s death, very obviously was a money-making endeavor. According to Richard Holmes, when the widowed Mary Shelley returned to England in 1823, single-handedly responsible for raising her son Percy Florence Shelley, her financial insecurity was considerable: she underwent negotiations with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, receiving from him a £100 annuity in 1824. She also published an edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, but Sir Timothy threatened to cancel the annuity unless she withdrew that work from publication, which, compliantly, she

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did. 23 William St. Clair writes that, in preparing the four-volume Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley “brought [the poet] into the mainstream . . . He was no longer the author of a notorious banned poem . . . Mary Shelley made Shelley acceptable by diluting the message . . . Mary told no lies but she took no risks.” Mary Shelley was apparently concerned that her son should inherit family money, which he did, in 1844, whereupon, “rich at last, Mary Shelley was able to live a life of some comfort and she stopped writing.”24 In canonical and non-canonical verse alike, sometimes the same poet who writes of the superior beauty and truth of music elsewhere contradicts that notion. 25 In Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, when the heroine Cythna is imprisoned, she says that she wove signs in the sand to make “elemental shapes” of her thoughts, and she says that Pythagoras dimly taught this structural shaping of thought as “the key of truths” (The Revolt of Islam, vii, 280–85). Ronald Tetreault suggests that here Shelley celebrates the shared features of language and music rather than (as Weller suggests) lamenting their difference: Tetreault writes that Shelley “links language to music as keys to unlock hidden significance.” In this account, both text and music offer a pleasing disengagement from reality and a mini-vacation in wishful fantasies: “the ‘subtler language’ of both music and poetry detaches the auditor from nature and immediate circumstances,” Tetreault writes, replacing “the world into which we are cast with a world that projects desirable probabilities.”26 In Alastor, the solitary Poet imagines a “veiled maid,” and, as Jerrold E. Hogle points out, the imaginary maid transposes “’the voice of his own soul’ into ‘music long’ as he interweaves remembered ‘sounds of streams and breezes.’” Then, the poet transposes these sounds again, into a multi-media illusion: quoting Alastor, Hogle calls it a “fanciful ‘web / of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.’”27 Here again, as Tetreault has said of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley’s poem transposes the audible into the visible (or the reverse), and then celebrates both forms of expression as “deceptive figure[s].” The Poet fosters them precisely for their temporarily pleasing appearance in preference to what Tetreault calls “nature and immediate circumstances.” Elsewhere too, Shelley’s poems include statements that associate music with pleasing untruths: in the first act of Prometheus Unbound, while the Titan is chained, Ione speaks of the beauty of approaching spirits, and then she characterizes these “spirits” as a metaphor for her

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Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aëreal joy, and call the monster, Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.28

While desolation sends music into deluded people’s “Dream visions of aëreal joy,” neither the desolation nor the joy belongs to nature (earth or air), but instead the spirit associates music with wish-fulfillment fantasies. In Act Two of Prometheus Unbound, music is again contrasted with reality when Panthea speaks to Asia of her dream; this time, the dichotomy of music/language is associated with the dichotomy of dream/waking: I am made the wind Which fails beneath the music that I bear Of thy most wordless converse; since dissolved Into the sense with which love talks, my rest Was troubled and yet sweet, my waking hours Too full of care and pain. (64).

At least in the examples considered so far, Shelley’s poetic speakers might prefer the pleasures of live music to the imprisonment of print (“Music, when soft voices die” and “With a Guitar, To Jane”), or they might represent the illusions of music negatively (Alastor, Prometheus Unbound), but in all of these instances the speaker’s references to music foreground its unreality or illusions, its comforts and pleasures not really being there. In all of these texts, there is no music, but only reference to it. It is the absence that counts. In contrast, other poets of the period apparently celebrate writing as if it not only referred to music, but as if it were music, and as if absence were not a problem in such representations. Marilyn Gaull points out that, in his poetic “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence (1789), “the Piper, following the advice of an angel, takes a ‘rural pen,’ and ‘stained the water clear’ to write his songs, communicate them

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own voice under the influence of such beauty. What they say (or what she says) includes the following:

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abroad so that ‘every child may joy to hear,’ not read.” This transposition is the opposite of that sad movement that Shelley laments in “Music, when soft voices die,” and opposite, too, of the melancholy loss that Weller identifies in “With a Guitar, To Jane.” Gaull asks this trenchant question about the imaginary “songs” that Blake’s poem mentions but which it does not actually contain: “If the children can’t write or read, why bother to write them down at all?”29 Features of Blake’s poem complicate this multi-media mix-up. The poem survives only in different sets of relief-etched prints, most of them watercolored after the printing, some copies bearing gold ornaments, and some including forms drawn partially or wholly in ink.30 The “Introduction” presents the poem’s language in the center of a page whose left and right sides are filled with vignettes—four on each side—whose narrative content is not illustrative of the text’s narrative. The page alludes visually to church windows and to illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, as Andrew Lincoln points out, showing that the striking visual form of the work is not subordinated to the text.31 The visual form contradicts the narrative’s claim to be a song. As Marilyn Gaull suggests, the narrative that claims to be a song also contradicts itself by claiming to be a script that is somehow adequate for the enjoyment of the sound of music. In a very different style and mode of production, poems by Felicia Hemans produce a rhetorical mirage of music, sometimes with pictorial accompaniment. “A Spanish Lady,” first published in The Literary Souvenir for 1827, accompanies an engraving by J. H. Robinson after a painting by G. S. Newton (see figure 1).32 Though scholars have recently discussed this poem’s “objectifying woman-as-ornament and the ideological content that, with or without Hemans’s cognizance, it promulgates,”33 its treatment of the theme of music requires comment. Characteristically for Romantic pseudo-songs and typically for her own work, obsessed as it is with the stereotyping of gender,34 “A Spanish Lady” uses the trope of music to achieve what Hoagwood and Ledbetter have called the “objectification [of ] the woman to a figurine” and to “detach her from the world to desire no more than her own incarceration in prefabricated feeling-states.”35 The fictitious Spanish lady’s objectification is partly a function of the pictorial accompaniment to the rhetorical music, depicting in the Spanish lady’s face a solipsistic absorption in her own inner feeling; but it is also a product of Hemans’s rhetoric of female presentation: She touched the silver strings, while her dark eye Grew to more perfect beauty, when the sigh

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The lady “sang so touchingly that it betrayed / Those sad deep thoughts which haunt a youthful heart.” The transmediation (putting language for musical sound) is self-conscious: “Her song found words.” It is also citational and generic: the artificial construction of the “love and sorrow” is evident in the use of quotation to represent the song: “it was like ‘the sweet south.’” Not only do the borrowed words betray a mechanical feature of the composition, but furthermore the rhetoric undermines its own claims: if it is like the “sweet south,” it is not the sweet south; if the song’s sound is a representation of “sad deep thoughts,” there are no sad deep thoughts present. The termination of the poem as a conspicuous but unannounced fragment also calls attention to its textual form even while it refers to the accompanying imitation of a painting imitating a fictitious musical performance. The word “sweet” genders the music and reduces it to the supposed emotions that are themselves represented as selfabsorption, and that word (“sweet”) is recurrent motif in Hemans’s works as well as her reputation.36 Almost forty years ago, Gillian Beer wrote about the “tension between the art of poetry and the other arts of music, sculpture, representation, as they are explored in the odes” of Keats.37 Beer’s cogent argument is about tension and debate among concepts of the arts; the development of that topic requires no dwelling upon the fact that the odes contain no music even when they simulate it. Keats’s oft-quoted remark, “O for a life of Sensations, rather than of Thoughts!”38 might suggest that his poems are not only about the concepts of music or other sensory things, but that they are themselves, somehow, examples of sensation. Keats’s well-known remark about a “Pleasure Thermometer” might likewise encourage the confusion of concepts about sensation with sensation itself.39 When Helen Vendler writes of the “Ode to a Nightingale” as “an experiment in thinking about art in terms of pure, ‘natural,’ nonrepresentational music,”40 the difference between a song and a statement about a song seems to disappear: Vendler writes about “the essentially vacant, if transfixing, song of the nightingale,” even referring to the “bird’s song without words.” The lore of Keats’s interest in the poetry of music and in the soi-disant music of verse includes, from the beginning, the trope of the pseudo-song, as in the frequent references to Thomas Chatterton’s

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Past from the chords, sweet as it loved the hand Ruling their music with such soft command.

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Figure 1 A Spanish Lady. Engraving by J. H. Robinson after a painting by G. S. Newton. In The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), p. 119.

forgeries of late-medieval songs in The Rowley Poems (1777). In biographical memoranda, Benjamin Bailey records that Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the

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Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella:— Come with acorn cup and thorn Drain my hertys blood away; Life and all its good I scorn; Dance by night or feast by day.

Bailey writes that “the first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses.”41 Neither Bailey nor Keats indicates that the “great charm” of Chatterton’s pseudo-songs is diminished at all by the fact that they are forgeries. Bailey also records his understanding of Keats’s simulation of melody via the sounds of vowels: One of his favourite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels . . . Keats’s theory was . . . that the vowels should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony.

Bailey points out that Keats constructed lines in Endymion according to that plan of simulating melody by way of vowel sounds, but the practice comes to an even better-known fruition in the odes of 1819 that were published (or re-published) in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). In “Ode to a Nightingale,” developing the metaphor of music, Keats frequently arranges the accented syllables to follow a high vowel with a low one (“bEAded bUbbles”) or a low vowel with a high one (“pURple-stAIned”), or he makes a pattern of high-low-high-low (“FAde fAR awAY, dissOlve.” Because “Fade far” is a spondee, the alternation of high and low vowels among the accented syllables is exact. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” some lines interchange high and low vowels to create, in the silence of reading, a simulacrum of song: here, low-high-highlow-high (“Thou fOster-chIld of sIlence and slOw tIme”) and here middle-low-high-low-high “In TEmpe Or the dAles of ARcady.” The variety, as Bailey observed in a general way, imparts melodic shape to the silent (typographical) sentences.

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marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of Endymion. Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the

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The history of the textual production of Keats’s musical odes, quite as much as the textual history of “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence or Shelley’s “Music, when soft voices die,” makes vivid the fact that the works are texts, even if their readers have often treasured their (nonexistent) music. As Jack Stillinger has explained, Charles Brown and Richard Woodhouse were the most important transcribers of Keats’s poems; Brown made the copy of “Ode to a Nightingale” which is dated May 1819, though Brown lost his copy and so we know of that dating only from transcripts of Brown’s copy that were made by Woodhouse and Charles Wentworth Dilke. George Keats made another copy. A draft of the poem in Keats’s hand survives,42 but Stillinger writes that, like the first published text of the poem [Annals of the Fine Arts, 4 (July 1819): 354–56], “each of the texts before [Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems] 1820 has one or more unique substantive variants.” Oft-disputed textual cruxes aside (e.g., the open question about where the quotation marks belong in the concluding lines of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and therefore who says what to whom), these scriptural and transcriptural complications make it clear that, whatever concepts the text of the ode treats, the ode itself is not spontaneous song, natural sensation, or simplicity of any kind.43 At the time he was preparing the 1820 volume, Keats’s anxieties about his finances prompted him seriously to consider a career change from poetry to a tea brokerage which had been suggested to him by Richard Abbey. A year earlier he had “trouble in procuring the Money” (197) that he had previously offered to Benjamin Robert Haydon. By April 13, 1819 Keats was confessing to Haydon that “my accounts are entirely in my Guardians Power” and that “I find myself possessed of much less than I thought.” By June 17, 1819, Keats reports to Haydon that he has learned from his aunt’s solicitor that she intends to file a bill in Chancery against him, and, in contrast to his prior intention to lend money to Haydon, Keats asks him, “Do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me.” In this same letter to Haydon about his lack of funds, Keats mentions the “Ode to a Nightingale” and says, “My purpose is now to make one more attempt in the Press.”44 When his publishers Taylor and Hessey undertook to publish Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, they urged him to avoid what McGann has called “indecency and political radicalism.”45 Troubled by the hostile reviews of Endymion in the previous year (1818), the publishers evidently acted upon their business model rather than their politics. So did Keats. No commentator has

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made the mistake of accusing Keats of solely low (pecuniary) motives in the production of the book that contains his great odes, but many of the best interpreters have called attention to the extent to which Keats’s financial anxieties were involved: for example, Stillinger writes that poetry in the 1820 volume including “Lamia was to an extent produced with an eye toward popularity and financial gain.”46 Keats’s reasons for that financial anxiety are complicated and sad,47 and Keats’s own critical perspective on the emerging world of industrialized capitalism and the changes in all social relations that it wrought is complex and fascinating.48 The odes in Keats’s volume of 1820 are not only printed and sold within that context, but, furthermore, in these poems Keats uses the trope of music and its illusions to represent its conflicts. The “Ode to a Nightingale” narrates pleasure [“happy in thine happiness” (l. 6)] in terms of a “melodious” location in nature, as the bird sings “in full-throated ease” (l. 10). The second stanza expresses desire for the pleasures of consumption [“O, for a draught of vintage. . . With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purplestained mouth” (ll. 11, 17–18)] but then shifts toward an interest in oblivion whose self-destructive content becomes clear later in the poem: “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen” (l. 19); “I have been half in love with easeful Death . . . / Now more than ever seems it rich to die” (ll. 52, 55). Though the poem’s fourth stanza expresses a wish for “the viewless wings of Poesy,” neither that line nor the poem as a whole is an advertisement for a poetic commodity: as almost all commentators have noticed, the poem contradicts the imagination of the nightingale’s “ecstasy” (l. 58) with the negative experience of the speaker’s life, “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (l. 23) . The speaker articulates the ancient trope of the immortality of art [“The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown” (ll. 64–65)], and at the same time assigns to poetry the role of consolation: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn. . . . (ll. 65–67)

The poem contradicts that consolation: “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” (ll. 73–74). The final stanza calls into question the reality of the “anthem” that the speaker has heard: “was it a vision, or a waking dream?” (l. 80). Like Shelley’s

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“Music, when soft voices die,” a poem that Keats did not know, the ending of the “Ode to a Nightingale” is about the absence of music. Like Shelley’s “With a Guitar, to Jane,” which Keats likewise did not know, the poem portrays negatively a present world from which music is absent. In Shelley’s poem, “deserted Ariel” is silent (l. 26); in the last line of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Fled is that music.” In all of these poems, the references to music speak of something that is gone. I agree with Watkins that “the desire expressed in Keats’s poems for a subjective world of beauty is not a simple denial of material reality, but a struggle with and against it.”49 Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy write cogently that Romantic-period writings that celebrate dreams, fairies, magic, and fantasy often constitute, even in their anti-realism, a critique of “the grey, prosaic and inhuman reality of industrial capitalist society.”50 In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the references to music designate precisely the difference between music and what is present (i.e., the words of the song). Whether or not the poem criticizes capitalist society as whole, as Lamia does, in the same volume,51 the poem criticizes the illusion of musical “ecstasy,” on the grounds that the music is not really there. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats writes again about pleasure [“happy, happy” (l. 21)] and “ecstasy” associated with music [“pipes and timbrels” (l. 19)]. Just as the “Ode to a Nightingale” includes an apparent commercial advertisement for itself [praise of “the viewless wings of Poesy” (l. 33)], the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” claims that its own silence and pseudo-songs generally are preferable to real music: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (ll. 11–12). In this ode, as in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the third stanza affirms the timelessness of artificial beauty (Keats repeats the phrase “for ever” five times within the stanza) as a relief from sublunary suffering: “breathing human passion” is “high-sorrowful,” and the nonexistent music depicted on the urn is “far above” it (ll. 28–29). Though “old age shall this generation waste,” the urn will remain, albeit “in midst of other woe / Than ours” (ll. 46–47). The music that is merely depicted in the urn’s “Cold Pastoral” (l. 45), like the ancient music of the nightingale, has the advantage of immunity from “woe,” but it has also the disadvantage of nonexistence. Both odes end with statements that suspend judgment—open questions about unreality at the end of “Nightingale” and a sentence about limited knowledge at the end of “Grecian Urn.” The odes’ contradictory claims for “ecstasy” or “woe,” warmth or cold, fancy or the world “where men sit and hear each other groan” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 24) present a conflict suspended in the troubled representation of

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music that is not there. The relationship of these contradictions to commodity culture warrants reflection. The resort to printed commodities in the Romantic period entails what Theodor Adorno calls “the forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously”:52 rather than a spontaneous pouring-forth of one’s soul, industrial capitalism tends to encourage calculations. As Keats knew from his readings in The Examiner, in the post-Waterloo years paper money and the “national debt” represented financial fictions that, according to William Cobbett among many others, deserved demystification.53 Like other writers for The Examiner, Keats was “explicit in drawing analogies between verbal art and the wiles of political and economic deception,” as I have said elsewhere.54 The system of monetary symbols is caught up with the symbolic systems of poetry in several ways: both industries (monetary and poetic) present the illusion that something valuable is present where it is not. Rather than simply selling “an afterimage of magic as consolation for disenchantment,”55 as Adorno says of other art, Keats’s musical odes “accent the once hidden element of being something made, something produced.”56 To foreground the fictitiousness of a desired object is to raise doubts about its value. Critique of the illusory content of art “becomes an objective element of art itself.”57 As Keats knew from the commercial success of the Chatterton forgeries and the pseudo-songs of Thomas Moore, that genre was one example of a profitable fictitiousness. Pseudo-songs are wrought by the enterprising but “deceiving elf” of an imagination for sale (“Ode to a Nightingale,” l. 74).58 The publishers of the book in which Keats’s odes appeared in 1820, Taylor and Hessey, also published John Clare’s first book of poetry, also in 1820. Clare admired the poetry of Keats, and further, as Paul Chirico has recently written, Keats’s example was “crucial” in the formation of Clare’s own “awareness of reception” of poetry, and specifically ways in which “its linguistic artifice constructs the . . . experience of its implied audience.”59 That artifice takes often a musical or pseudo-musical form: Jonathan Bate writes that Clare was “caught between an ambition to become a poet of the printed kind, as represented by Thomson, and an allegiance to that oral tradition which he described in one of his poems as ‘The whole of music which his village knows’”: according to Bate, Clare was “fascinated” by “the folk songs of the village,” and “by the time he came to keep a journal in 1824–25, Clare had been writing down song and dance tunes for several years.”60

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In 1818 Clare compiled, but did not publish, a book of music “which he entitled A Collection of Songs Airs and Dances For the Violin,” in which he “transcribed over 250 tunes” including hornpipes, military marches, dances, and ballads. In Clare’s first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) the second of three sections is entitled “Songs and Ballads.” In both projects—the unpublished transcriptions and the published “Songs and Ballads” — Clare was consciously participating in a tradition of printed poetry marketed as songs. Robert Bloomfield, for example was a workingclass poet whose Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802) “showed how the kind of material that Clare knew from pedlars’ broadsheets and village tradition could be polished into poetry for a more genteel public.” Burns, too, “inspired Clare to imitation.”61 Clare imitated others’ work, despite the marketing image of Clare as an original, untutored, and therefore authentic poet. For example, though Clare’s poem “The Meeting,” printed in Taylor’s introduction to Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), became a song when Haydn Corri composed music for it (the song was performed by Madame Vestris at Drury Lane later in the same year), in its previously printed form, “The Meeting” had been accompanied by “a defensive acknowledgement of its resemblance to a lyric by Burns.” Byron’s Hebrew Melodies “were a model for Clare.” (Bate 444). James Beattie’s The Minstrel was a model for Clare’s The Village Minstrel, for whose title-poem Taylor “rejected ‘Village Mistrelsy’ as being ‘too like ‘English Minstrelsy’—a Compilation of Sir Walter Scott’s which did not sell.” Bate writes that the “phrase did not sell was enough to make Clare himself reject ‘Minstrelsy.’” 62 Before the rejection of Clare’s suggested title, “Village Minstrelsy,” and before Clare’s settling on the title The Village Minstrel, the poem had borne the entirely nonmusical title, “The Peasant Boy”; in this instance, all of the minstrels and minstrelsy are matters of post-hoc packaging. Some of Clare’s imitative pretences were more extreme: Bate writes that in 1825 Clare placed for publication “a lyric he pretended had been written by the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell,” with a letter by Clare, in The Every-Day Book, edited by William Hone. Editor James Montgomery published “more of Clare’s ‘imitations of seventeenth-century poets” in The Sheffield Iris, though “unlike Hone, Montgomery suspected that Clare had really written the lyrics himself.” Clare confessed “to his fraud,” for which, as Bate says, “he had a venerable precedent in Chatterton’s pseudomediaeval poetry.” Bate says that Clare “played the literary game of

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trying to make magazine editors believe that the poems were authentic lost manuscripts, but he did not for a moment believe that he was Marvell,” though later, in the 1840s, in an asylum, “as his affective disorder grew more severe he came to believe that he was Lord Byron.”63 In 1825 Clare’s submission to Montgomery “bore all the hallmarks of a literary hoax. He invented an obscure collection of poetry by ‘Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Suckling, Sir Henry [sic] Wooten, Harrington, &c.,’ and claimed to have found an MS on the flyleaf,” as Alan Vardy has said.64 Chirico suggests that Clare’s admirers and detractors alike have “exaggerate[d] his cultural naivety,” and Chirico emphasizes Clare’s “pragmatism” amidst the “publishing trade of the 1820s and 1830s.” While reviewers hoped “for a noble savage,” Clare “rework[ed] antecedent texts into his own descriptions,” accumulating “textual debts and literary imitations” which include “covert quotations.” 65 Those among Clare’s poems which he entitled “Songs” include obviously imitative texts. In a note on one of Clare’s “songs” that begins, “A seaboy on the giddy mast,” Eric Robinson and David Powell report that “’The Sea Boy on the Giddy Mast’ is the title of a song in A Garland of New Songs.” Clare’s “Song: O wert thou in the storm” derives, according to the same editors, “from Burns’s ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast.’”66 In his “Introduction” to Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), publisher John Taylor presents Clare (regrettably, Chirico says67) as a “peasant poet” in the genre of Robert Bloomfield, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Ann Yearsley, and Stephen Duck. Clare’s “songs” are part of that marketing imagery. Clare mediates between oral culture and written forms, jotting into his journals some gypsy tunes in musical notation, and later entitling one of his notebooks A Collection of Songs Airs and Dances For the Violin. Like Clare’s use of “vulgar dialect” in his poems,68 the generic representation of his peasant status and his folkloric interest in songs accords with a rhetorical image of Clare as an uncultivated example of an antique culture, innocent of modern artificialities. Accordingly, Clare’s poetry was “suited to the taste of a detached, well-heeled, complacent, nostalgic readership” (Chirico 170). As Vardy’s chapter entitled “The Marketplace” indicates vividly, that nostalgic image was a marketing illusion, and Clare’s “songs” were cannily placed in the service of a sales campaign.69 In 1825, James Power, the publisher of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, wrote to Clare asking for permission to publish one of Clare’s “songs” (“The Banks of Broomsgrove”) which Power wanted to join

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to a musical composition by John Barnett (Vardy 112). Clare agreed on the condition that he be paid; he wrote that the musical publication might “go a great way to make a book popular.” James Hessey, a partner of Clare’s publisher John Taylor, advised Clare about the asking price (“5 guineas, even 10”). Vardy observes justly that “Clare did not have to compose songs to be remunerated,” and another advantage of the musical scheme was that, “as the songs became popular, more people would buy the poems” (112–13). Whether the fact was evident to buyers and reviewers of Clare’s work or not, Clare’s correspondence is often about the commercial advantages of his “songs.” 70 In 1820, Clare had written (in a letter to Markham Sherwill) that “I have this 7 weeks been weaving up a quantity of Song & Ballad stuff for a celebrated composer in London which I understand will come out in a vol after the form of the ‘Irish Melodies.’”71 Turning texts into “songs” may be a matter of labeling, but it is also, often, a matter of writing about songs, as Keats and Shelley (who were not musicians, as Clare was) were doing at the same time. If Clare somewhere sang the poem “Songs Eternity,” it may then have been “a song about the essence of song,” as Mark Storey says it is; but in its published form, in The Rural Muse (1835), it is a purely textual product that offers propositions about music rather than music.72 The poem contrasts “Mighty songs that miss decay” (l. 21) with “Crowds and citys” that “pass away” (23). Clare’s poem disparages books (as Wordsworth’s poems sometimes disparage them) in contrast to the natural songs of “the blue cap tootle tee” (l. 33) which had “Sung to adam and to eve” (l. 35). Like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which accords to the bird’s song longevity that stretches from ancient to contemporary time, Clare’s “Songs Eternity” locates the transcendence of time in both natural forms (birds and bees) and in the artifice of song. In contrast to the “Ode to a Nightingale,” Clare’s poem culminates not in doubt but rather in the happy confidence that “Nature’s universal tongue” (rather than God) “Said live and be and they [songs] have been / For ever” (ll. 53–60). Though the poem’s propositions about song are not, really songs, the poem’s versification includes a metrical form that, like prosody in general, owes its precision to the medium of script while producing, in written form, a rhythm-effect reminiscent of actual rhythm. Each of the poem’s six stanzas consists of ten lines, and with only three small exceptions of a syllable each,73 in sixty lines, each stanza replicates a uniform metrical pattern. Each odd-numbered line of each stanza is a headless tetrameter (e.g., “What is songs eternity”—iambic except for the omitted, initial, unstressed syllable); each even-numbered line

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consists of two accents, either an amphimacer (“Come and see,” line 2) or spondee (“Sigh sigh,” line 8). Rhythm by syllable-count and phonetic stress is of course the medium of scriptorial and typographical poetry, but, as vocalists know, the rhythm of a song in performance is not governed so completely by such narrowly repetitious phonetic schemes; as prosodists including Keats and Shelley knew, the system of phonetic repetition is an analogue of audible rhythm but not, really, music. If Clare’s “Songs Eternity” suggests that “the way to the vision of truth is through nature,” as Storey suggests,74 Landon’s pseudo-songs suggest the opposite: she writes that “the earth and sky, / Are picture both and poetry.”75 From the beginning, her poetry is about the confounding of nature and artifice. Her poetic career began with the writing of poems about pictures, and her pictorial poems both exemplify and criticize the falsehoods of art. Her early poetry, first published in the Literary Gazette, included poems about medallions and other artifacts for sale locally. Landon sold poems to The Keepsake (from 1828 onward), mostly poems written to accompany engravings. Hired to compose “poetical illustrations” to accompany engravings in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-book, in 1832, she also edited that annual from 1832 to her death in 1838, and she wrote almost every poem that appeared in all of those annual volumes.76 Landon’s pictorial poems characteristically have no referent other than an engraving, which is already an imitation of a painting. As F. J. Sypher points out, Landon goes so far as to publish poems satirizing her own practice of writing poems to accompany pictures for commercial purposes: “Macao,” written in 1832 for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book for 1833, says, “I must write something for my readers” about “a port in China,” but her “invention falters”; “What on earth can I find to say, / Of a pagoda?”77 Such satirical self-consciousness differs drastically from the ordinary seriousness of ekphrasis. Landon’s pictorial poems are often skeptical antagonists of illusionism of all sorts, ekphrastic and otherwise, and so too are her poems about songs: in the title poem of her second book, The Troubadour (1825), the poem’s narrator explains what young Raymond the troubadour has not yet discovered: I know not whether Love can fling A deeper witchery from his wing Than falls sweet Power of Song from thine. Yet, ah! The wreath that binds thy shrine, Though seemingly all bloom and light, Hides thorn and canker, worm and blight.78

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Sypher writes that, “in The Troubadour, the story is a slender thread, on which the poet hangs a series of decorative songs”;79 if so, the poem also makes a critical issue of the falsehood of that decoration, even while Landon constructs it for hire.80 Her multimedia theme, whether exploitative, critical, or both at once, often takes the form of textual productions in the guise of songs but without any singing: the “Improvisatrice” is a fiction about a singer; the “troubadour” is a fiction of a musician; the eponymous “Golden Violet” is a fictitious prize awarded to a fiction of a troubadour. The hall-of-mirrors effect that is so evident in her poems about pictures is apparent, too, in her pseudo-songs about the falsehood of song. Of the two varieties of pseudo-songs discussed in this chapter— texts that pretend to be songs, and poems including The Troubadour which conjure imaginary music via rhetoric—the latter flourishes in later generations. Lancelot’s singing in “The Lady of Shalott” is an obvious example in the Landon tradition, and Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861) is a monument to the rhetorical mirage of songs where no songs are. Palgrave’s anthology is also a schoolbookish monument of literacy and the industrial promulgation of literacy, under the sign of the orality whose gravestone it represents. In the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier” rehearses in early modernism the Romantic-period tropes that Landon and Shelley, among others, had codified a century earlier. Like Shelley’s “Music when soft voices die,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier” reduces music to feeling, “not sound,” and assimilates music’s temporality with other metaphors, until it is not music but rather an idea: The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.81

Like Landon’s poems about music, Stevens’s poem produces a mirage of passion and contradicts it with blunt tokens of loss which undermine the faux beauty: Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping.

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Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Thus, Stevens’s poem claims great value for the immateriality of its imaginary object. Here, this Romantic-period motif is strangely mixed with another Romantic-period motif about which it is silent: the material conditions (industrial production, marketing strategies, and commerce) that generate that illusion of value.

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but rather in an entirely mental space and in a reverential advertisement for itself:

Si r Wa lt e r S c o t t, “Ba l l a d Dec e p t ion,” a n d Rom a n t ic Pse u do -S ongs

Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border represents itself as a negotiator across several borders, including the boundary of orality and literacy, and then the crossing into the farther country of typographical commodities. These crossings, advertised as acts of preservation, may be, rather, acts of destruction: Walter J. Ong writes that “oral habits” were “effectively obliterated in English, for the most part, only with the Romantic Movement.”1 As Ong’s aggressive vocabulary indicates, his metalinguistic account includes a negatively critical argument about the cultural effects of literacy and its technologies: “writing . . . is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialistic activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself.”2 Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border makes a theme of imperialistic activity in the narratives it includes, and the book also performs a different kind of imperialism: in Scott’s lengthy and learned discourses about its supposedly oral contents (which are typographical contents) he converts border balladry to a monument of things past. When Scott packages the narrative poems for his English-language audience, he removes the Scottish folk songs into a geographical and historical distance from the nineteenth-century readership. The medium is imperialistic, and not only the burden of the songs. Hardly resembling Scott, William Blake makes a curiously similar statement in the small poem prefixed to Jerusalem, but in mythological terms: in Sinai, God gave “To Man the wond’rous art of

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Chapter 2

From Song to Pr int

writing.”3 In Blake’s poem, the invention of writing is a matter of imposition of laws carved in stone. In Blake’s works early and late, the deity who issues commandments is the “mistaken Demon of heaven,” the “Selfish father of men.”4 In his own voice as well as his poems, Blake writes that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,”5 preemptive and imperialistic enough to shout his territorial imperative “Even from the depths of Hell” (Jerusalem, plate 3). Innocence communicates via piping tunes and singing aloud, as in the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence; but in contrast, in Blake’s prefatory poem in Jerusalem, the technology of writing is among the tools of tyrants, and Blake responds: “Therefore I print; nor in vain my types shall be.” If the art of writing is a cruel imposition, then Blake’s saying so, paradoxically by printing his “types,” is among his means of resistance. Like Blake, Ong is self-conscious about the fact that he writes critically about writing. The apparent contradiction is widespread in the Romantic period: for example, Scott, who is surely, in almost every way, a drastically different sort of writer and thinker from Blake, repeats the paradox of using writing as a means of ostensibly cherishing and preserving orality while replacing it. Scott presents the extremely bookish volumes of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border as an effort to preserve, fondly, an almost-vanished orality; and he does so precisely in the technology that displaces that orality: “I may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving.”6 Often in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Walter Scott writes in nostalgic terms: “Where the pen and the press are wanting, the flow of numbers impresses upon the memory of posterity the deeds and sentiments of their forefathers” (1: 156). Scott’s account of the Border ballads appeals to popular primitivism: in “rude and wild” societies, minstrels record in poetry and music “the history, the laws, the very religion, of savages” (156); and, harmoniously, his rhetoric values nature and authenticity: “Verse is naturally connected with music” (156); “the primitive poet,” Scott claims, “in reciting his productions, falls naturally into a chant or song” (1: 4); and “the savage, after proving the activity of his limbs in the chase or the battle, trains them to more measured movements, to dance at the festivals of his tribe, or to perform obeisance before the altars of his deity” (Scott, “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry,” 1: xl1). Scott writes that he “has been obliged to draw his materials chiefly from oral tradition”; the “pipers, of whom there was one attached to each Border town of note, . . . were

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the great depositaries of oral, and particularly of poetic, tradition” (1: 164–65). Scott describes his own practices of collecting and reproducing the ballads in terms that claim those same values of sentimentality, natural authenticity, primitivism, and nostalgia: he reports that he collected the ballads “many years ago, during his early youth” (1: 167), while wandering among “shepherds . . . and aged persons, in the recesses of the Border mountains”; these were people who “remember and repeat the warlike songs of their fathers” (1: 166). According to Scott, historically the Borderers of the ballads were mostly bandits and blackmailers who remained untouched by the diffusion of learning in the sixteenth century; “the tale of tradition, the song, with the pipe or harp of the minstrel, were probably the sole resources against ennui, during the short intervals of repose from military adventure” (1: 155). Claiming thus to have gathered the ballads from the surviving itinerants in the mountains, Scott characterizes his editorial practices in this way: “No liberties have been taken, either with the recited or written copies of these ballads, further than that, where they disagreed . . . the Editor . . . has uniformly preserved what seemed to him the best or most poetical reading of the passage” (1: 167). Instead, as T. F. Henderson points out, Scott engages in “ballad deception,” as Bishop Percy had done in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765): Henderson shows that Scott introduced “words, phrases, lines, and occasionally even stanzas of his own” (xviii). In 1803 Scott publishes a new edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, including more of what, in the table of contents, he candidly calls “imitations of the ancient ballad”; in 1830 he writes an “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” (4: 1–60); but in the first edition of supposedly authentic ballads, Scott prints four “imitations of the ancient ballad,” two of them written by John Leyden and two by Scott. Furthermore, among the “historical” and “romantic” ballads, supposedly gleaned from aged shepherds in the mountains, forgeries appear (see Henderson’s edition, 1: xxvii). As influential and widely admired as Scott’s Minstrelsy has been, the work joins a long history of printed simulations of folk songs, works that are forgeries in two senses: editors feign authentic folk origins for their own writing or for other modern works, and they pretend that literary texts are “songs.” In Scott’s Minstrelsy as in the books he imitated, “much of the so-called traditional ballad versions is purely spurious and often fabricated of set purpose” (Henderson, 1: xxvii, xxxii).

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S i r Wa lt e r S c o t t

From Song to Pr int

In “Sir Patrick Spens,” Scott himself wrote the fourth stanza (Henderson, 1: 225n.). James Hogg, one of Scott’s assistants, wrote most of the version of “Battle of Otterbourne” that Scott prints in Minstrelsy (1: 284n.). According to Henderson (1: 240–41), “Auld Maitland,” included in vol. 1 of the Minstrelsy, is a forgery by Hogg; perhaps he incorporated ingredients from existing fragments, but Hogg “was to all intents and purposes” the writer of the piece printed in the Minstrelsy as an authentic, ancient ballad.7 The entire text of “Lord Ewrie” is a forgery by Richard Surtees, another of Scott’s assistants (1: 364n.), and so are “The Death of Featherstonhaugh” (2:110) and “Barthram’s Dirge” (2: 143). Henderson concludes that Scott himself wrote three stanzas of “Jamie Telfer” (2: 1n), and likewise four stanzas of “Kinmont Willie” (2: 57). Scott wrote portions of “Lord Maxwell’s Goodnight” (2: 178–79). “The Battle of Philiphaugh” is “clearly modern,” according to Henderson, though Scott introduces it with circumstantial and legendary historical details, stating that this ballad “is preserved by tradition in Selkirkshire” and that it “coincides accurately with historical fact” (2: 213). Like other collections of national songs, Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is addressed (and dedicated) to an elite audience, even while its subject-matter emphasizes the primitive social origins of the ballads among illiterate bandits, blackmailers, and shepherds. Scott dedicates the two-volume collection (1802) to Henry, Duke of Buccleuch; the first edition cost a guinea in boards. Dave Harker has shown that this contradiction—packaging the demotic for sale to the elite—has a long history: “when the Court of Charles I patronized Italian music, part of a nationalistic reaction came in the form of a spate of Drolleries and Garlands of English songs aimed at the polite end of the market.”8 James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scottish Poems Both Ancient and Modern (1706–11) prints “songs” with no music, as Scott was to do, and Watson’s project appealed to polite society’s “vicarious enjoyment in ‘low’ life and character” (Harker, 8). Scott writes of Watson’s collection in an essay that he added to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1830, “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry and on the Various Collections of Ballads of Britain, Particularly Those of Scotland” (1: 24). There, Scott also writes of Allan Ramsay’s collection entitled Evergreen, crediting Ramsay for printing “the most ancient Scottish historical ballad of any length now in existence” (1: 24); Ramsay also published Scots Songs (1719). The volume entitled Collection of Old Ballads (1723–25), attributed to Ambrose Phillips, likewise includes

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no music, though it does include “pseudo-‘Scotch’ songs” (Harker, 7). According to Joseph Ritson, one of Scott’s sources for the Minstrelsy, “the history of Scotish poetry exhibits a series of fraud, forgery, and imposture, practiced with impunity and success.” 9 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border confirms Ritson’s observation: of the ballads in Minstrelsy, Henderson writes that several are not ballads; “others are comparatively modern; a few are forgeries by Surtees; some are in part forgeries,” and most “bear but a very imperfect resemblance to the original ballad” (1: xxi). As I have suggested, the difference that literacy and typography make in the reproduction or imitation of oral work is a theme to which Scott recurs repeatedly in the Minstrelsy. Scott writes that ancient Celtic music and poetry were changed, in Scotland, by the advent of literacy and by the widespread adoption of the English language in Scotland. He observes that “of manuscript records of ancient ballads, very few have been yet discovered,” and that “it is probable that the minstrels, seldom knowing either how to read or write, trusted to their well-exercised memories” (1: 21). The modern collections of ballads include works in “imitation of the ancient ballad” (1: 25). Scott openly acknowledges and even praises this artifact of literacy and typography, calling the modern poem “Hardyknute,” which Allan Ramsay published in Evergreen, a “beautiful imitation” (1: 25). The conventional deceptions of printed and reprinted “songs” warrant separate emphasis. Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20) is dedicated to “Right Honourable the Lords and Ladies.” D’Urfey prints lyrics that can be sung to common tunes, and he pirates previously printed songs by others (see Harker, 5). In 1725, William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius: A Collection of the Best Scotch Songs uses some of Ramsay’s tunes without acknowledgement (Harker, 12). James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760) preceded his more popular and influential forgeries of the soi-disant “ancient” Poems of Ossian (1761–63). The first of the epics of Ossian, Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books (1762), begins in a strangely modern and defensive way, affirming the authenticity of the “ancient” work and denying that it is a forgery. In his preface, Macpherson writes that veneration is often bestowed on ancient writers and works and that “this consideration might induce a man, diffident of his abilities, to ascribe his own compositions to a person, whose remote antiquity . . . might well answer for faults which would be inexcusable in a writer of this age.”10 Macpherson claims that “an ingenious gentleman” suspected that the

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Ossian poems had been forged for that reason, until he actually read the book; “when he had read it, his sentiments were changed. He found it abounded too much with those ideas, that only belong to the most early state of society, to be the work of a modern poet.” While, oddly, Macpherson himself thus introduces the suspicion of forgery, he also exculpates himself in an indirect way: “it would be a very uncommon instance of self-denial in me to disown them, were they really of my composition.”11 Though Thomas Chatterton’s forgeries of the Rowley poems were less popular than the Ossian poems, upon first publication, they were frequently mentioned and more widely admired among Romanticperiod readers and poets. When Percy was consulted about the authenticity of the Rowley poems, in 1773, he determined that they were modern fabrications. In 1789, Robert Chambers wrote to Percy that Chatterton’s “falsification” was “clumsy and unskilful”;12 “it is admitted, I think, by all, that some of the verses which have been printed as the compositions of Rowley and others of the 15th century were really written by Chatterton” (778). The predecessor of whom Scott writes most lengthily in his “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry” is Percy, whose Reliques, Scott says, “must always be held among the first of its class in point of merit, though not actually the foremost in point of time” (1: 28). Scott calls Joseph Ritson “the most formidable” of the critics of Percy, and he identifies two sets of issues that Ritson had raised: Ritson questions Percy’s account of the ancient minstrels, their status and practices; and he also criticizes “the liberties which Dr. Percy had taken with his materials, in adding to, retrenching, and improving them, so as to bring them nearer to the taste of his own period.” Scott uses a rhetoric of mediation in his essay “On Popular Poetry.” He writes of “the high character” of Reliques and of “the rank and respectability of the author” (1: 28), and on the next page he writes that “it cannot be doubted that [Ritson’s] structures on the disregard of Percy for purity of text were more than justifiable” (1: 29n.).13 In the first edition of Reliques, Percy included “An Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in England,” in which he defines “minstrels” as “an order of men in the Middle Ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang to the harp verses which they themselves ‘composed’ ” (quoted by Scott, 1:29). Against that proposition, “Ritson made a determined opposition,” Scott writes; Ritson “contended, and probably with justice, that the minstrels were not necessarily poets, or in the regular habit of composing the verses which they sung to the harp” (1:30).14 Noticing that Percy revised his claim

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in the fourth edition of Reliques to claim only that minstrels sang verses “composed by themselves or others,” Scott then articulates his own compromise: “on the one hand it seems too broad an averment to say that all minstrels were by profession poets,” but “on the other it is extravagant to affirm that men who were constantly in the habit of reciting verse, should not frequently have acquired that of composing it” (1: 30). Scott’s position is closer to Percy’s, emphasizing the imaginative power of the minstrel considered as “a highly gifted individual,” a poet, rather than merely a musician: “Above all, to attain the highest point of his profession, the poet must have that original power of embodying and detailing circumstances, which can place before the eyes of others a scene which only exists in his own imagination” (1: 4). Scott calls the minstrel a “bard” or “poet” as if those three terms were synonyms. The minstrel, he writes, has a “high and creative faculty”: the “arrangement of words into poetical rhythm . . . is so closely connected with the art of music, that an alliance between these two fine arts is very soon closely formed” (1: 4). The controversy over the social and political status of medieval minstrels is important for the political themes of the Minstrelsy. On this set of issues, Scott agrees largely with the views of the conservative Percy “as qualified in the fourth edition of his Essay” (30). There Percy writes that, “so long as the spirit of chivalry subsisted, [minstrels] were protected and caressed” by kings.15 Percy prepared that fourth edition in 1794, when the Burkean “spirit of chivalry” was controversial while the Treason Trials were going forward in London. One year earlier, Scott had served as a lawyer in court prosecuting Joseph Gerrald, Maurice Margarot, Thomas Muir, and Thomas Palmer, all for sedition in connection with their advocacy of democratic change.16 At an event called the British Convention, those reformers had spoken in favor of universal suffrage and annual parliaments, in contrast to the monarchy and the aristocracy in whose service Burke had developed the rhetoric of chivalry. That aristocracy was also important for Scott’s career. In 1794, when fear of the French Revolution and radical movements in Britain was high, Scott joined a violent group that attacked proponents of democracy with clubs. Sutherland writes that “excessive and bloodthirsty reaction to any sign of popular uprising was to be a regular feature of Scott’s politics,” and in 1794 “Scott was mad with military zeal.”17 In Scotland, a Treason Act and a Sedition Act were passed in 1795. After the French attempt to invade Ireland in 1796, Scott helped to arrange the formation of a cavalry force in Edinburgh, the “Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons,” for which Scott wrote

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a “War Song” (“To horse! To Horse!”).18 It was in connection with this project of the Light Dragoons that Scott met Henry Dundas (later Lord Melville), “the principal dispenser of Scottish patronage,”19 and the Duke of Buccleuch, both of whom arranged Scott’s appointment as Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, a position with few duties and a salary of ₤250. What J. G. Lockhart calls Scott’s “patriotic enthusiasm” and what Sutherland terms his “pliability to authority” apparently had something to do with his ambitions and also with his interest in the “spirit of chivalry.”20 In 1794, Percy’s use of that phrase echoed Burke’s phrase, “chivalrous spirit,” from Reflections on the Revolution in France (116). The rhetoric of chivalry is a recurrent theme in Burke’s book: “the age of chivalry is gone . . . the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience.”21 Percy writes that the skill of minstrels “was solicited by kings; and they were everywhere loaded with honours and rewards” (23); “honours were paid to Poetry and Song . . . at least so long as they retained their ancient manners and opinions” (23). Burke writes that “the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty . . . freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny,” but “when ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated” (116). The supposedly folkloric nostalgia in Percy and in Scott looks different, perhaps, in the context of the French Revolution and of British reaction. Though the Minstrelsy is a collection of dozens of poems by many (frequently unknown) hands, from the beginning and throughout all five editions that were published in Scott’s lifetime, he organized the materials to present a coherent development: from the first edition (2 vols., 1802) onward, the collection begins with historical materials by Scott; the first set of texts are “Historical Ballads,” whose factual bases in Scottish history are elucidated in heavily annotated introductions and notes; the second set of texts, the “Romantic Ballads,” are also presented as authentic, ancient ballads, but they are less tethered to historical fact, including accounts of fairies, elves’ arrow-heads, Robin Goodfellow, and other popular superstitions. The final set of poems, “Imitations of the Ancient Ballad,” dispense with historical authenticity altogether, including professedly artificial imitations of ballads, and not ballads. In this way, the two-volume first edition (1802) and the three-volume editions (1803, 1806, 1810, and 1812) tell a story of increasing fictitiousness: narratives of supposedly historical fact are succeeded by supposedly authentic relics of a superstitious

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culture, and the work concludes with admittedly faux ballads, referring to neither historical realities nor historical origins. Scott writes self-consciously, and remarkably like a lawyer (which he was), about the relationship between forgery and imitation: in his “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry” (added to Minstrelsy in 1830), Scott observes that, if there be any critic still of opinion, like poor Ritson, whose morbid temperament led him to such a conclusion, that the crime of literary imitation is equal to that of commercial forgery, he ought to recollect that guilt, in the latter case, does not exist without a corresponding charge of uttering the forged document, or causing it to be uttered, as genuine, without which the mere imitation is not culpable, at least not criminally so. (1:38)

While Scott is apparently facetious about the criminality of literary imitations, he is also evidently serious about the effect of literacy upon his ancient materials: there are few surviving manuscripts of ancient ballads, he writes, probably because the minstrels, most of whom were illiterate, trusted their memories; “the press, however, at length superseded the necessity of such exertions of recollection, and sheaves of ballads issued from it weekly” (1: 21). Scott writes that the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon language to the Celtic arose in part from its having been “considerably refined” by having been “long since reduced to writing” (1: 17). As a result, “while the music continued to be Celtic in its general measure, the language of Scotland, most commonly spoken, began to be that of their neighbours, the English” (1: 16). This historical consideration helps Scott to introduce the episode of Percy’s forgeries or unacknowledged additions and emendations in the Reliques, returning to the topic of fictitiousness and falsehood: “such freedoms were specially taken with the poems published from a folio manuscript in Dr. Percy’s own possession . . . having many of the leaves mutilated, and injured in other respects, by the gross carelessness and ignorance of the transcriber” (1: 37). Percy, Scott says, “did not hesitate to repair and renovate the songs which he drew from this corrupted yet curious source” (1: 37). The same is, again, true of Scott’s conduct as editor of the Minstrelsy. Like the topos of chivalry, this fondness for fictitiousness is also a feature of Burkean rhetoric. Writing of the French Revolution and of other democratic revolutions that he feared might follow, Burke laments that “all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which

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made power gentle, and obedience liberal” are to be dispelled; Burke writes that those illusions had “incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society,” but now “all the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, . . . are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion” (114). Both the historical and romantic themes in Minstrelsy rehearse and exemplify this Burkean conservatism. In the narrative content of several of the ballads in Minstrelsy, both the fondness for fictitiousness and the reflexivity of verse about verse are part of a conservative political campaign. As in many other Romantic-period works, Scott’s Minstrelsy uses the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, with its beheading of Charles I, as an analogy for the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its beheading of Louis XVI.22 Plays involving assassinations were often prohibited on London stages because analogies between contemporary conflicts and ancient episodes were transparent.23 Though we know that the supposedly seventeenth-century ballad entitled “The Battle of Philiphaugh” was a modern work when Scott printed it, it is not at all clear who wrote it; but Scott’s own use of historical analogies, in his large and Burkean project, includes the historical essay that he prefixes to the poem, framing the narrated conflict in terms of incendiary uprisings, widely understood at the time as analogies for Paris during the Reign of Terror, but also riots— feared and sometimes real—in Scotland where Scott had joined the counter-revolutionary forces. In his introduction to “The Battle of Philiphaugh,” Scott writes of the “revolutionary torrent” in Scotland during the English Civil War. Narrating a visit of Charles I to Scotland, he writes that all regarded the house of Stuart “as the source of their honours, and venerated the ancient hereditary royal line” (2: 204). Among others, he says, the Marquis of Montrose “endeavoured to recede from the paths of ‘rude rebellion’ ” (2: 205); he “espoused the falling cause of royalty” (2: 205). In the service of the king, Montrose assembled an army of the Highland clans and “like a torrent from the mountains,” he “commenced a rapid and brilliant career of victory” (2: 205). Montrose led his army southward, hoping to bring “to the support of Charles the sword of his paternal tribes” (2: 207). In that mission, Montrose “finally encamped upon the field of Philiphaugh” (2: 208). Here, he was surprised by the larger army of General David Lesly. Montrose retreated. In Scott’s account, this defeat reversed Montrose’s sequence of victories decisively, and he was unable afterward to achieve any successes against the rebelling Covenanters.

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Scott portrays the rebels negatively: “Lesly abused his victory, and dishounoured his arms, by slaughtering, in cold blood, many of the prisoners whom he had taken” (2: 211). Whoever wrote the poem that Scott is here introducing, the royalist sentiment is expressed in Scott’s voice (so to speak). The introduction’s historical references, and therefore the book’s reality-effect, are achieved in part by its citation of historical works: for example, Scott writes that a particular fact has not escaped “an ingenious modern historian”; that is, Montrose’s “final defeat, at Dunbeath, . . . nearly resembles in its circumstances the surprise at Philiphaugh,” and this resemblance “throw[s] some shade on his military talents.—LAING’S History” (2:213). The book to which Scott refers is Malcolm Laing’s The History of Scotland, from the Union of the Crowns on the Accession of James VI to the Throne of England, to the Union of the Kingdoms in the Reign of Queen Anne, published in London by A. Strahan in 1800. Like Scott, Laing was a historian, and his citation, like others in the Minstrelsy, serves to authenticate the poetic material in a factual ground. Simultaneously, the apparatus of annotation and quotation distances the poetic material from the voice of the editor who does all of the citing: rather than cultivating an immediate and personal tone, the scholarly apparatus places panes of museum glass between the reader and the verse.24 In this way, the sheer textuality of the project is emphasized even while claims for primitive authenticity adorn the (sometimes forged) verses. Scott surrounds them with modern introductions, footnotes, and scholarly disputation. The charming illusion that the primitive past is present behind that museum glass depends upon the modern construction of the cabinet, and the reality of artifice cultivates the faux primitivism. Like the social and economic class distinctions that Harker emphasizes, this learnedness of the Minstrelsy calls upon the appeals of a modern, sophisticated, antiquarian pose; it is a discourse of the parlor feigning a discourse of the rugged mountains. 25 With his annotations to the text of the poetry, too, Scott increases the artificial effect of the learned rhetoric, even while ostensibly authenticating the poetry’s ancient origin. The fourth stanza of “The Battle of Philiphaugh” reads as follows: When they came to the Shaw burn, Said he, “Sae weel we frame, I think it is convenient That we should sing a psalm.” (2:215)

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Scott adds a footnote: “Various reading: ‘That we should take a dram.’ ”26 The irony of treating a psalm and a dram as alternative readings is obvious: the meaning of the speaker, the stanza, or the poem is not fixed; emphasizing the variety of contradictory readings, Scott calls attention to the textuality of the poem and to his own activity as its editor. In addition to Scott’s nine-page introduction to the five-page poem, and in addition to the footnote that I have just quoted, Scott adds three explanatory endnotes to the poem, the third of them reporting a “tradition” or legend about the poem’s subject-matter, “transmitted to me by Mr. James Hogg,” and Henderson writes of the anecdote, “the story must be mere fiction.” The reflexivity of Scott’s verses and prose about verse and prose sometimes produces a hall-of-mirrors effect. For example, after his long historical introduction in the first volume of Minstrelsy (133pp. in 1802), Scott prints six appendices (though he added a seventh in later editions); the sixth of them does not print Collins’s “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland Considered as the Subject of Poetry,” but instead Scott presents three “Supplementary Stanzas to Collins’s Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands” (1: 197). These stanzas, written by William Erskine (who later became Lord Kinnedder, a judge of the Court of Sessions) are “intended to commemorate some striking Scottish superstitions, omitted by Collins in his ode upon that subject” (Scott, 1: 197). Scott reports that Erskine’s stanzas “were first published in the Edinburgh Magazine, for April 1788.” Collins’s ode was unpublished in his lifetime, first appearing in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1788, twenty-nine years after Collins’s death, but in the Transactions the poem is fragmentary, as was the surviving manuscript. In 1789, John Bell published another version, anonymously corrected, completed, and supplemented. 27 In Minstrelsy, Scott prints Erskine’s stanzas to supplement Collins’s poem again. Collins had addressed the ode to James Home, a Scottish writer from whom he apparently learned some Scottish folklore. Like Collins’s poem, Erskine’s supplementary stanzas printed in the Minstrelsy call upon Home to make narratives and music: to “tell” (stanza one) of a Scottish belief in the spectral apparition of a person shortly to die, or to sing and play upon a “brisk viol” about a belief in Brownies (stanza two), or to “wake that wond’rous lay” of “treacherous fairies” who steal infants from “thoughtless matrons” (1: clxvi–clxvii). Scott includes a footnote: “For an account of the fairy superstition, see Introduction to the Tale of Tamlane, Vol. II. P. 174” (1: clxviii).

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That introduction is an essay (eighty-eight pages) entitled “Fairies of Popular Superstition,” learnedly annotated. Thus, Erskine’s supplement to Collins’s poem about antique superstitions is in turn supplemented by Scott’s own essay on superstitions which is printed as (in turn) a supplement to Scott’s version of “The Tale of Tamlane,” which includes some of Robert Burns’s emendations to a folk song (a version of which Burns sent to Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum) and some lines from several other texts. This sort of kaleidoscopic intertextuality characterizes the Minstrelsy as a whole, including the ancient and supposedly ancient ballads. However, like the “literary imitations” included in the third and final volume, Erskine’s supplementary stanzas to Collin’s poem is an especially vivid example of Scott’s metatextuality, making the construction of “songs” into the literal topic of the texts. So too, John Leyden’s “Scottish Music: An Ode” is no song but rather a highly literary text about music. Displayed more prominently than Erskine’s poem (which appears in an appendix), Leyden’s ode opens the central volume of the Minstrelsy. While “Scottish Music” is fully as intertextual as Erskine’s poem, it does not announce all of its literary relationships quite as explicitly. Its first stanza calls upon Ianthe, a “sweet syren,” to “breathe again / That deep, pathetic, powerful strain” (2: 293), recalling, among many other obvious examples, John Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” whose opening calls upon a “Muse” to “join thy voice unto the Angel quire,”28 or Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” which begins with a “tuneful voice” calling upon all earth to “Arise” in song,29 and which, like Leyden’s “Scottish Music,” proceeds into a survey of ancient forms of music and into praise of the power of music. Leyden writes that music like Ianthe’s song soothed slain Celtic warriors in the paradise of Flathinnis (2: 293), and he writes of the “plaintive music of the dead” (2: 294). Dryden’s “Song” narrates the wonder of Jubal’s brethren when he blew his powerful shell, and then a “soft complaining flute” sounds a dirge. In the third stanza of “Scottish Music,” Leyden narrates a supposedly Hindu legend: moved emotionally by music, people recall a blessed prenatal existence (2: 294). Leyden’s lines anticipate the fifth stanza in the “Ode” (later “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”) that Wordsworth wrote two years after the first publication of Leyden’s “Scottish Music: An Ode”: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

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In the note on this poem that he dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, Wordsworth says that “a preexistent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations,” though he does not mention India or Hindu mythology. Instead, Wordsworth invokes a classical context, observing that the concept of a preexistent state is “an ingredient in Platonic philosophy.”31 Both Leyden and Wordsworth call attention to a popular and cross-cultural context for the concept of preexistence, and both refer to music (e.g., “joyous song,” in the third stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode”). Leyden relates the concept to theory of music as Wordsworth, later, does not, but both use a metaphor of incarceration: sunk beneath the morning star, We left our parent climes afar, Immured in mortal forms to mourn. (2: 294) . . . trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy . . . (Wordsworth, in Golden Treasury, 303)

However, Leyden’s poem is metapoetic as Wordsworth’s is not: in what amounts to an advertisement for the volume in which his poem appears first, Leyden mentions specifically some of the poems that follow in the Minstrelsy: “The Lass of Lochroyan,” “Brown Adam,” and “The Gay Goss Hawk” (2: 294–95); Scott adds notes to the poem identifying the location of the cited songs in the volume. Scott’s own contributions of “literary imitations” in the Minstrelsy include “The Eve of St. John,” which was first printed in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s collection of tales by many hands, Tales of Wonder, which was published in multiple editions in 1801, one year before the publication of the first edition of the Minstrelsy. Scott indicates that he has added new materials to the poem in the Minstrelsy version, to increase its propriety “in a work upon border antiquities.”32 Though Scott does not acknowledge the contradiction, he does state explicitly that this verse tale, added to authenticate the work on poetry of the border between Scotland and England, is “founded upon a well-known Irish tradition” (Minstrelsy 1803, 2: 336).

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The second of Scott’s “imitations of the ancient ballad” included in the first edition of the Minstrelsy is “Glenfinlas, or Lord Ronald’s Coronach,” which had likewise appeared in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder. A story of seduction and murder, “Glenfinlas” develops, though less vividly, a dual theme—salacious and cautionary at once—that appears amongst the supposedly ancient ballads, too. Two hunters spend a night in a remote hut; “pleasure laughs” in their eyes; they drink (whiskey, Scott says, though the poem does not specify the beverage). One of the hunters says, What lack we here to crown our bliss, While thus the pulse of joy beats high? What, but fair woman’s yielding kiss, Her panting breath, and melting eye? (Minstrelsy 1803, 2: 413)

To allay frustration and make fantasy come true, one hunter tells another, “Touch but thy harp” (2: 413). Later, and inexplicably, “Untouch’d, the harp began to ring” (2: 417); at this point, a maiden arrives, and “All dropping wet her garments seem; / Chill’d was her cheek, her bosom bare” (2:417). Moved by the appearance of the maiden, and by her plea for help, one of the hunters bends “o’er his harp” and “he flung /His wildest witch-notes on the wind” (2: 421). Scott’s own moral tag clarifies the moralistic contrary to this story of intended debauchery: “One of the hunters was seduced by the syren”; in the morning his comrade “found the bones of his unfortunate friend, who had been torn to pieces and devoured by the fiend” (2: 408). The woman who was an intended victim, upon whose bare bosom the huntsman had low designs, turns out to be a fiend, which somehow moralizes the entire story, albeit in a misogynistic way that is reminiscent of Coleridge’s Christabel. Likewise in Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” a lady appears to a “knight-at-arms,” and she is as beautiful as “a faery’s child.” She has mysteriously “wild” eyes, and after an episode of kissing and love’s sleep, she turns out to be demonic, holding the lover “in thrall” and having had a history of leaving even kings, princes, and warriors “pale” with “starved lips.” These victims of her magical cruelty furnish the poor hero with a “horrid warning.” These simultaneously prurient and moralistic themes are characteristic of the contradictions in Scott’s work. The balladry of the border, in Scott’s account, is courtly and even regal, yet it concerns bandits and killers. As Scott represents it, the balladry is part of the culture

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of the common folk, yet it is somehow the heritage of the aristocrats to whom Scott dedicates the volumes. The balladry is ancient; the balladry is improved in modern imitations. Scott finds positive things to say of Percy’s concept of the minstrel as a favored genius amongst royalty and aristocracy, and he finds other positive things to say of Ritson’s account of the minstrels as vagrants; they are gifted, individual creators, and they are beggars repeating handed-down materials. The hunter indulges primitive appetites (and in this project, the harp helps); the hunter is punished. That same doubleness of appeal characterizes Scott’s versions of the supposedly ancient ballads as well as his literary “imitations” of them. His editorial commentaries, too, often cultivate the same contradictory attractions of prudery and prurience. Perhaps the most extreme example is the “Romantic” ballad, “The Bonny Hynd” (Monstrelsy 1803, 2: 322–27), which Scott introduces in this way: “It was originally the intention of the editor to have omitted this ballad, on account of the disagreeable nature of the subject” (322). Without compromising the propriety of his project, but while actually reaffirming his vigilant decency, Scott manages to advertise its salaciousness. Scott then offers the dual excuse that he wishes to honor the reality of folk culture while simultaneously deploring its vulgarity: “Upon consideration, however, it seemed a fair sample of a certain class of songs and tales”—and thus Scott appeals to the factual basis of history. However, these tales are found to be “turning upon incidents the most horrible and unnatural”; and so Scott dips again into the prurient appeal. Then, he extricates his rhetoric from low motives precisely by asserting the refinement attendant upon class superiority: with such horrible tales, he says, “the vulgar in Scotland are greatly delighted” (322). Scott does not scruple to reproduce tales of “incest, parricide,—crimes, in fine, the foulest and most enormous” (322–23). Scott’s purported introduction to “The Bonny Hynd” turns into a contradictory excuse for including the tale at all. “Delicacy,” he says, “precludes the modern bard from the choice of such impressive and dreadful themes” (323); and “there can be little doubt, that the more important cause of virtue and morality is advanced by this exclusion” (323). Publication of tales of “enormities” “has been . . . found to encourage those very crimes, of which it recorded the punishment” (323). Having established the perniciousness of publishing foul tales, and having declared this one (“The Bonny Hynd”) foul, Scott forthwith prints it. “The ballad has a high degree of poetical merit” (323).

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In Scott’s version of the poem, an unnamed “she’ spies “a gallant squire” who says, directly enough, “Give me your maidenhead” (325). A row of asterisks indicates real or imaginary omitted material. Then, the “she” mentions to the squire that “bairns” may ensue from what occurred during the ellipsis; she asks what is the squire’s name, and he replies that he has been long over the sea, but his name is “Jack Randal,” which leads to distress because she is the daughter of Jack Randal’s father (326). Discovering their unintentional incest, she draws a knife and kills herself; the squire buries her. His father finds him grieving over the grave of the “bonny hind,” and advises him not to worry—“What needs you care for your bonny hind? / For it you needna care” (327). Scott leaves the song without the endnote commentary that he places after many of the ballads, perhaps because his introduction has established how morally deplorable the tale is, and how likely it is to be injurious upon its readership, as a rationale for presenting it. I have suggested that the three-part structure of the Minstrelsy presents a narrative of increasingly fictitious writings: “historical” ballads in the first volume are followed by “romantic” ballads in the second volume which are followed by “imitations of the ancient ballads” in the third volume, added to the second edition in 1803. However, as we have seen, in the first edition (1802) both Leyden’s “Scottish Music: An Ode” and two of Scott’s “imitations of the ancient ballads” appear in the second volume, officially preceding the “imitations” though they are “imitations.” What makes Scott’s versions of the historical ballads, the romantic ballads, and the modern imitations coherent with one another is the factitiousness of the contents of all three volumes, under the sign of authenticity. Whether one interprets this factitiousness as fraud (as Henderson does, calling it “ballad deception”) or whether one credits Scott with postmodern wit and complexity (as McGann does), one of the strange features of the Minstrelsy, throughout, is the extent to which Scott puts on view the artificial fabrication of the very work in which he speaks (so to speak) of historical factuality; and he does so in part by means of fictitious authentication. An excellent example is “Sir Patrick Spens,” a ballad that Scott knew from Percy’s Reliques from the time he was thirteen years old (Henderson ed., 1902, 1: ix) and which he nonetheless excluded from Minstrelsy in 1802 and in 1803, placing it first among the “Historical Ballads” that make up the first volume in 1806. In his introduction to the poem, Scott points out that, in 1806, it is “well known” from its publication by Percy, and Scott reports that it has “been inserted

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in almost every subsequent collection of Scottish songs” (Henderson 1: 215). The differences among the multiple versions of the poem amount to an external instance of the theme of factitiousness, and one that is repeated microcosmically in Scott’s editorial practices. To compare three versions that are historically and textually important is to unfold many layers of contradictions and what I have called fictitious authentication, with Scott very much at the center of the story. In Percy’s headnote to “Sir Patrick Spence” [a “Scottish Ballad” that he includes in his collection of “English Poetry” (71)], he indicates that he takes his text of the poem (consisting of eleven stanzas) “from two MS copies transmitted from Scotland,” and he presumes, apparently without any evidence whatsoever, that the poem records an historical event: In what age the hero of this ballad lived, or when this fatal expedition happened that proved so destructive to the Scots nobles, I have not been able to discover; yet am of opinion that their catastrophe is not altogether without foundation in history, though it has escaped my researches. (71)

When Robert Jamieson publishes “Sir Patrick Spence,” he acknowledges gratefully that he has received the text of the poem (a version of eighteen stanzas) “from a Ms. copy transmitted from Scotland, for which I am indebted to the editor of the ‘Border Minstrelsy.’ ”33 In the same year (1806), Scott publishes the poem himself, in the third edition of the Minstrelsy, in a version of twenty-six stanzas, indicating in his introduction to the poem that he is hereby producing a more complete version than either Percy or Jamieson had produced. Strangely, Scott adds in 1821 a note about his own generosity toward Jamieson in the matter, while, at the same time, claiming superiority for his text over Jamieson’s and even admitting that he achieved this more “complete” version by withholding source material from Jamieson. Scott writes, it seems to have occurred to no editor, that a more complete copy of the song might be procured. That, with which the public is now presented, is taken from two MS. copies, collated with several verses, recited by the editor’s friend, Robert Hamilton.34

Then Scott adds a note advertising his philanthropy: “That the public might possess this curious fragment as entire as possible, the

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editor gave one of these copies, which seems the most perfect, to Mr. Robert Jamieson, to be inserted in his collection” (Minstrelsy 1821, 1: 3n.). When Jamieson had done so, Scott then inserted a yet more “complete” version in his own collection. This was not the first time that Scott engaged in what, to treat it non-judgmentally, one might call double-dealing: in the summer of 1800 he met with Jamieson because he had learned that he, too, was preparing a collection of Scottish songs, and he wanted to “talk over the proposed publications & as far as possible prevent the possibility of interference.”35 Jamieson reports that “Mr. Scott, at that time, intended to confine his work, with very few exceptions, to the Border Raid ballads,” whereas Jamieson had a collection of romantic ballads and ballads originating from the north and east of Scotland; “it was hoped, that the two publications would interfere very little with each other” (Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, vi). Among the songs that Scott agreed not to publish in Minstrelsy, but then published in Minstrelsy, Jamieson lists “The Gray Goss Hawk,” “Brown Adam,” “Jellon Græme,” “Willie’s Ladye,” “Rose the Red and White Lilly,” “Fause Foodrage,” “Kempion,” and “Cospatrick” (with the title “Gil Brenton”) (vii). Sutherland writes bluntly and justly that Scott simply broke his agreement with Jamieson. Sutherland concludes that “it was sharp practice.”36 Other oddities checker the history of “Sir Patrick Spence.” Scott repeats almost verbatim Percy’s unsubstantiated claim that he had the text “from two MS copies transmitted from Scotland,” but neither Scott nor Percy ever identified the mss. or their sources. Henderson’s well-educated guess is that Scott “must have known” David Herd’s manuscript collection, assembled in the course of Herd’s preparation of The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (Edinburgh, 1769) and Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (Edinburgh, 1776).37 Herd’s published version of “Sir Patrick Spence” is a reprint of Percy’s 1760 version except that, in 1769, Herd named the hero “Sir Andrew Wood”; in 1776 he restored the name “Sir Patrick Spence.” Henderson implies, though he does not say, that Herd’s ms. may be one of the two ms. on which Scott bases his text (1:220). No evidence exists to identify Percy’s two manuscripts of the poem or Scott’s two manuscripts of the poem. The similarity in their claims has the look of postmodern humor— intertextual, self-referential, and unshackled by the burden of reality outside the text. Problems related to extra-textual reference and the possibility of factual knowledge are raised as themes by Percy and Scott alike. Where Percy admits that he can find no evidence that the ballad records

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From Song to Pr int

any particular historical event, but that he nonetheless believes that it does so, Scott goes further: he supplies the historical event very specifically. With no apparent evidence that the poem refers to any such thing, Scott simply asserts that, upon the death of Alexander III in Scotland in 1285, Sir Patrick Spence was sent to Norway to fetch Alexander’s granddaughter, Margaret, who had married Eric, King of Norway. Scott adds a characteristically pleasing reference to the union of England and Scotland: “Edward I. conceived the idea of matching his eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, with the young Queen of Scotland,” i.e., Margaret; “The plan was eagerly embraced by the Scottish nobles” (Minstrelsy 1821, 1: 4–5). Scott writes, in 1806, as if he were celebrating the 1707 Act of Union.38 The difficulties in connection with Scott’s explanation are some incongruous facts: the king sends Sir Patrick to Norway in the poem, whereas the king was already dead in the historical narrative of Alexander III; and there is no evidence linking the story of Sir Patrick with Alexander, Margaret, or the year 1285, other than Scott’s own references to Norway (in the poem and in his introduction to it). Jamieson’s version of “Sir Patrick Spence,” which is professedly based upon whatever it was that Scott had sent him, mentions Norway, but Scott is the first to develop that reference into a pseudo-historical account of the poem’s supposed reference. Scott writes and adds to the poem some of his own stanzas about Norway, which he presents as part of the ancient text, though Scott himself wrote them (Minstrelsy, ed. Henderson, 1: 225 and n.). Sutherland indicates that the first edition of the Minstrelsy sold out within one year, earning for Scott a profit of £78 10s; Scott sold to Longman the copyright for the second edition in the following year for £500, “which, since the ballads were in the public domain, was cool enough.”39 After the commercial success of the Minstrelsy, Scott imitated and repeated some of its features in later narrative poems that earned him much more. The elaborate apparatus of historical and pseudo-historical annotation in the Minstrelsy was shortly imitated in the 1805 Lay of the Last Minstrel: for example, in the 1809 edition of that poem, which Scott offers as a wholly fictitious narrative, he includes 140 pages of historical notes at the back of the volume (e.g., “The family of Harden are descended from a younger son of the laird of Buccleuch, who flourished before the estate of Murdieston was acquired by the marriage of one of those chieftains with the heiress, in 1296”).40 The Lay of the Last Minstrel earned £770 for Scott; Edgar Johnson says that “in the entire history of English poetry there had never been anything like the popularity of

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the Lay.”41 In an untitled and unlabelled prefatory note in the 1809 edition of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott writes that he intends “to illustrate the customs and manners, which anciently prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland” (vii), which is what he had done in the Minstrelsy, his first commercial success. After the even greater success of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, “Constable offered [Scott] a thousand guineas for his next, as yet unwritten, poem.”42 Marmion (1808) sold even better than The Lay of the Last Minstrel.43 In 1810, upon the publication of The Lady of the Lake, Scott received 2,000 guineas in copyright and (with additional income from profit-sharing and other arrangements with Ballantyne) Scott earned approximately £10,000.44 The Lady of the Lake sold 30,000 copies in one year.45 The size of Scott’s press runs and the ensuing profits helped to foster the demand and the production of his own later work, and it was the Minstrelsy that inaugurated that success for Scott. Further, his success also fostered increasing interest in the publication of national melodies, including those to which I turn in subsequent chapters of the present book. The internal examples of fictitiousness in the Minstrelsy and its successors—forgeries sold as ancient ballads, capricious and perhaps even random historical notes, professed imitations mixed with putatively authentic ballads, and throughout the project the admiration of orality in the act of eliminating it—match the external instances of simulation involved in the production, including Scott’s striking an agreement with Jamieson which he violated forthwith. The Minstrelsy was not only a successful and influential product in the multi-mediated environment of the Romantic-period pseudosongs; what McGann has called “Scott’s Romantic postmodernity” may be even more clear and more intelligible now, in our own era of simulated entertainments, with its own reasons for thinking about the relationships of fictitious amusements and false economies.

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S i r Wa lt e r S c o t t

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Th e “C ool M e di u m” of Sy dn e y O w e nson’s T H E L A Y O F A N IR ISH H A R P 1

Lady Morgan may have been the first Anglo-Irish writer to espouse Irish nationalism, 2 but considerable evidence indicates that her literary ambition and appeal were much more Anglo than Irish. She achieved great fame with her popular novel The Wild Irish Girl (published in London in 1806), and in London she impersonated that book’s heroine, Glorvina, at parties of the English aristocracy.3 She purchased a faux Irish harp (it was small and painted green), and played it at the parties of the English nobility; a schematic image of an Irish harp appears in Owenson’s frontispiece in 1807 (see figure 2; for a more detailed image made in Owenson’s lifetime, see figure. 3). In her Memoirs, Lady Morgan writes that she also danced at the Vice-regal Lodge for the amusement of the Duchess of Northumberland.4 In 1807 the Duke and Duchess of Bedford attended a performance of her operetta The First Attempt, the Duchess wearing a Glorvina bodkin, which was a commercial trinket sold as part of the marketing plan for The Wild Irish Girl.5 For commercial reasons she played (in Mary Campbell’s words) “the living incarnation of one country for the entertainment of the other”(1). Leith Davis has recently stated the point trenchantly: “Owenson’s reliance on Irishness as costume and as performance . . . merged into representations of Irishness as a commodity, as Owenson, her book, and her paraphernalia became consumer items on English markets.”6

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Chapter 3

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Figure 2 Title-page of Miss [Sydney] Owenson, The Lay of an Irish Harp (London: Richard Phillips, 1807).

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Figure 3 “Ancient Irish Harp.” Frontispiece in A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, Containing a Variety of Admired Airs Never Before Published and also the Compositions of Conolan and Carolan Collected from the Harpers &c. in the Different Provinces of Ireland, Adapted for the Piano-forte (London W. Power, n.d. [1796]).

From Song to Pr int

For the interpretation of Owenson’s publications, including her poetry, the word “markets” is important to keep in mind. As Claire Connolly has pointed out, The Wild Irish Girl “went through seven editions in two years and sparked off a ‘media event’ ” that involved the sale of Irish-themed commodities for English customers.7 In fact, in prefaces to her books and in her memoirs, Owenson publicized her own commercial success, and, in doing so, as Jacqueline Belanger has observed, “Morgan appeared to reviewers to reduce authorship to its most basic economic terms”; she participated vigorously in “an increasingly commercial literary culture.”8 After her commercial success and social celebrity in London, Owenson married an English lord, and then in 1812 she wrote a novel about an Irish woman novelist who “trade[s] upon the materials” that Ireland “furnishes.” The novel’s title-character admits to “turning my patriotism into pounds, shillings, and pence.”9 What Belanger says of The Wild Irish Girl and Florence Macarthy can be said with equal justice of The Lay of an Irish Harp: Owenson “exploited controversy to improve sales of her work.”10 In 1830, an anonymous reviewer in Monthly Review refers to the marketing project of Lady Morgan’s work in a way that calls into question her putative Irish patriotism: Most strange it is, that one who sets out as a democrat—as a vindicator of the original equality of men; one who denounces occasionally the barriers which corrupt society has set up between classes of human beings,—strange to say that she should be among the idolaters of aristocratic distinction.11

Owenson’s negotiations with English publishers for the publication of The Wild Irish Girl reveal a grim pecuniary determination. Richard Phillips had published her novel The Novice of St. Dominick (4 vols.) in 1805, and then, in April 1806, he offered her ₤200 for The Wild Irish Girl. Rather than reply to what Phillips represented as a generous offer, Owenson wrote to another publisher, Joseph Johnson, asking for more money than Phillips had offered. Johnson offered her ₤300, whereupon Owenson inaugurated some acrimonious correspondence with Phillips. That publisher expressed resentment about what he viewed as her unprincipled business practices. For a while, Phillips reiterated his offer of ₤200, but after more negotiations through an intermediary (Joseph Atkinson, to whom Owenson later dedicated The Lay of an Irish Harp), in May 1806, Phillips agreed to pay ₤300 for the book12 As her acquaintance Thomas Moore was shortly to do, Owenson cooperated in a marketing campaign that included what would now

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be called commercial tie-ins and product-placements: hence the little green harp and the costumes she acquired for use in aristocratic revelries. This campaign involved not Irish patriotism, rebellion, or women’s rights but rather commodification of Irishness.13 Owenson called the public’s attention to the fact that she “lived with the Lady Harringtons, Asgills, and all sorts of great official English ladies.”14 Julia M. Wright points out aptly that Sydney Owenson’s father, Robert Owenson, “often performed the ‘stage Irishman’ (a comic stereotype for theatre-goers),” and “like her actor-father, she exhibited the Irishness that the English aristocrats expected—an Irishness with which she was not particularly comfortable, politically or personally.”15 Campbell suggests that, in Dublin, the theater was an English institution: “It depended upon the patronage of the alien occupiers, reflecting their taste and manners, and taking its standards from London.”16 Sydney Owenson did often pose as a rebel Irish nationalist; but the English ruling class did not evidently regard her as a danger—the English government awarded her with a pension. As Lionel Stevenson has observed, “The dreariness of Dublin and the laudations of London tempted them [Lady Morgan and her husband Sir Charles Morgan] to leave Ireland permanently, but the question of expense deterred them until 1837” when “Lord Melbourne, on the solicitation of Lords Morpeth and Mulgrave, had granted her a pension of three hundred pounds a year. Within a few months the Morgans had left Ireland for ever,” and, “having so long and loudly decried absenteeism, Lady Morgan was sometimes blamed for her desertion of Ireland.”17 In fact, however, England had always been where she located the business-end of her ambitions, including her poetry. The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807) was one part of the publishingand-sales strategy that Owenson and Phillips devised around the novel The Wild Irish Girl. Phillips paid ₤100 for the ms. of The Lay of an Irish Harp without reading the poems,18 having written to Owenson about promoting the Irish theme profitably: “The world is not informed about Ireland, and I am in the situation to command the light to shine”; quoting that passage, Campbell also comments: “Phillips . . . might have been demonstrating his radical sympathies, but he was also acting on a shrewd commercial hunch.”19 He wrote to the novelist: “A series of letters on the state of Ireland, the manners and characters of its inhabitants, &c., &c., would be well read in the Monthly Magazine, would be worth as much to me, and would afterwards sell separately.”20 That suggestion came to fruition in Owenson’s Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, Written in Connaught

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(London: Phillips, 1807) and in two books referring to Irish music: Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards (1805) and The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807). Her father had been a professional singer in London as well as an actor, and when Sydney Owenson was working as a governess in Ireland, the musician and composer Sir John Stevenson was giving music lessons to her charges at the time.21 He befriended her, and she studied and practiced music over a period of years, acquiring enough facility to sing and to play at parties. In a letter to a friend, Owenson writes of her work on Hibernian Melodies, referring to “national airs, so tastelessly and so shamefully neglected” and saying that “I am endeavouring to collect some of the best and least-known, and to put English words of my own to their wild and plaintive strains.” A young musician was hired to transcribe fiddle-tunes that Robert Owenson played at home, and Owenson composed “words of my own” to pass for “imitations and translations” of ancient songs.22 She writes candidly of the inauthenticity of her soi-disant Irish music, indicating her interest in the modern musical style that Sir John Stevenson (who was soon to compose the musical arrangements for Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies) was imitating from German composers at the time:23 Owenson writes, “Under the influence of Sir John Stephenson, even ‘Carolan and the bardi tribe’ were forgotten.”24 In her memoir, Owenson records her delighted impressions of a “music party” that was held during a visit to Ireland by Thomas Moore, who had been working the market in England where he had become “the guest of princes, the friend of peers.” When, at Stevenson’s request, Moore sang “Friend of my Soul,” Owenson’s sister’s “tears dropped like dew” until Moore “rushed off to the bowers of the jolly, handsome, and very popular Countess of Antrim, a wealthy peeress.”25 From the beginning, Owenson’s pecuniary interests are evident: writing to her father at the time she became a governess (1800), she reports that she has written two novels, and “if I had time and quiet to finish them, I am sure I could sell them, and observe, Sir, Miss Burney got three thousand pounds for Camilla.”26 The projects of commerce and publicity came to entail the purveyance of falsehood, as many commentators, then and now, have pointed out: Emily Morse Symonds writes in 1902 that Owenson’s inability or unwillingness to deal with facts has led to biographical errors and confusion. Referring to Owenson’s book of poems (1801), Symonds observes that “she tells us that her father had printed a little

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volume of her poems, written between the ages of twelve and fourteen. This book seems to have been published, however, in 1801, when the author must have been at least one-and-twenty.”27 Lionel Stevenson agrees: Her biographical “record” is not “set entirely right by the rather copious autobiographical writings which she published at various times, for these were coloured by the two predominant traits of her nature—personal vanity and dramatic imagination.” Further, “even for the date of her birth, the standard works of reference disagree by as much as sixteen years . . . ”28 Fitzpatrick (1859) says that she was born in 1778.29 An obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine (1859) says 1783. Wright accepts the date of 1783, apparently because a friend of Lady Morgan’s had said that she had first published a book at the age of seventeen, which would agree with her Poems having been published in 1801.30 About that volume, Campbell writes that Owenson’s father recruited subscribers. and then “there appeared Poems dedicated by permission to the Countess of Moira.” Owenson “later referred to this first book as Poems by a Young Lady between the age of twelve and fourteen, claiming for it a rare precocity, and at the same time obscuring the question of her age.” Campbell’s judgment of the poetry in that book is helpful in relation to The Lay of an Irish Harp as well: the poems, “all forty of them, are for the most part facile imitations of eighteenth-century favorites—with all the attendant vocabulary of ‘pensive thought,’ ‘bowers’ and ‘cots,’ . . . a fair imitation of what was in vogue.”31 In The Lay of An Irish Harp, Owenson recycles poems from that first volume of 1801. Phillips, who had published an English edition of the 1801 volume after its Irish publication, would have been likely to have recognized the poems if he had read the manuscript of The Lay of an Irish Harp in 1807, but, as I have mentioned above, he did not read the manuscript before publishing it. The recycled poems in The Lay of Irish Harp highlight Owenson’s fondness for artificial portrayals: she reprints without acknowledgment “The Picture” (a poem about a portrait of her father) and “Love’s Picture” (which she claims to have written when she was fifteen). As Stevenson points out, she recycles, too, the theme that “she had never yet been in love” while she also “tries to be the conventional romantic young lady.”32 However, without denying or overlooking the commercial character of the book, and without ascribing all of its significance to personal, authorial intention (as if poetry were necessarily autobiography), I will suggest that The Lay of an Irish Harp does develop important themes, not only in artful ways but in ways that are obsessed with artifice. The machineries of economics (and specifically the machineries of

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publication and sale) have much to do with the content and character of the poems. It may help to put the point in the reverse way: The Lay of an Irish Harp contains no music whatsoever, though it refers often to music; the book may reveal nothing much about Ireland, and it is very doubtful that it reveals much about Sydney Owenson personally, but it reveals much about the literary and commercial cultures in which the book was made and distributed. Without apparent or significant effects on the literary culture of the time (in contrast to The Wild Irish Girl, which it helped to sell), the book is intentionally or unintentionally an instructive example of the historically specific style of poetry that it represents and reproduces, and it is an example, too, of the much larger economic and social anxieties and forces that it makes visible. Aside from its title, The Lay of an Irish Harp includes only one poem claiming Irish national thought or feeling (“The Irish Harp,” which is the first poem in the volume), and then forty-seven other poems that have nothing to do with Irish politics, patriotism, or the rights of humanity. These are poems of personal sentiment (feigned or otherwise); they are poems in the rhetorical style called “sensibility.”33 As I have mentioned above, the title-page bears an engraving of a harp beneath a willow tree on a small island (see figure 2), so that the packaging—title and vignette—announce deceptively the volume’s Irishness, as does its first poem, perhaps creating the impression that the book will represent Irish topics and issues. In fact, ninety-eight percent of the poems do nothing of the sort, and that contradiction is significant—even thematic—in the volume as a whole. The title-page is followed by a three-page dedication to Joseph Atkinson, “Treasurer of the Ordnance in Ireland,” expressing, as Owenson’s books commonly do, her Anglo-Irish appeal. Owenson’s novel O’Donnel: A National Tale, for example, is dedicated “To His Grace William Spencer Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, High Steward, Lord Lieutenant, &c. &c.,” and that dedication goes on to boast that the Duke’s “vast Possessions in Ireland place him among the first of her great English Landholders.”34 Campbell writes justly of the evident contradictions between Owenson’s fictional rhetoric and her actual business-model: “Her public life and social career in many ways seem to run counter to the sentiments expressed so strongly in her work.” Campbell points out Owenson’s “social climbing,” her “sycophancy to the English aristocracy,” saying that Owenson “danced a jig in the drawing rooms of the oppressor. Like Thomas Moore . . . Sydney Morgan [sic] has been accused of taming the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuffbox.”35

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Signs of self-conscious preciosity appear everywhere in The Lay of an Irish Harp. Beneath the title-page engraving, two mottoes appear:

Metonymically, “Miss Owenson” (those are the words immediately prior to the mottoes) is represented as a true butterfly; further, she can reproduce a phrase in French. The title-page announces that the volume consists of “trifles,” and that fact counts as its appeal. Likewise, in her “Prefatory Sketch,” Owenson apologizes for the frivolity and even triviality of her poems: they are “avowedly inconsequent”; they are “metrical trifles,” “among the last and least of . . . bagatelles” (viii). The book is not political, but “professedly amusive” (x); and, like the obvious goal of “amusive” commodities today, the professed goal of Owenson’s project is the making of money: the book is “an object of pecuniary consequence” (x). “The Irish Harp. Fragment I” begins with an epigraphic quotation from the forger of “Ossian” poems, without noting that it is a forgery: “Voice of the days of old, let me hear you.—Awake the soul of song” (1). Owenson’s note to the title of the poem refers not to Irish politics or colonial oppression, but rather the “enthusiasm incidental to my natural and national character” which led her to visit a festival at Connaught where she had hoped to hear Irish harps “played in perfection” but where she was instead “infinitely disappointed.” Owenson defines the poem’s central concern in distinction from patriotism or political purpose: the decline of harp music, she writes, “is obviously unimpeded by any effort of national pride or national affection” (1–2).36 The first stanza of the poem poses three questions, and while it might be interpreted in terms of political history—Campbell, for example, writes that ““I was moved by her love for Ireland and her radical opinions to want to write about her in the first place” (ix)— the evidence of the actual book including Owenson’s explanatory notes suggests that it refers to sentiment about the music itself: Why sleeps the Harp of Erin’s pride? Why with’ring droops its Shamrock wreath? Why has that song of sweetness died Which Erin’s Harp alone can breathe? (1)

The second stanza says that Irish music is simple, wild, sweet, and sad, and the third refers to its putative magic, in a way that calls

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Trifles light as air. Shakespeare. Vrai papillon de Parnasse. La Fontaine.

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And yet its sadness seem’d to borrow From love, or joy, a mystic spell; ‘Twas doubtful still if bliss or sorrow From its melting lapses fell.

That theme of contrary moods or meanings is continued in the next stanza: For if amidst its tone’s soft languish A note of love or joy e’er stream’d, ‘Twas the plaint of love-sick anguish, And still the “joy of grief” it seem’d.

Here, the equation of music with personal feeling (rather than, say, principles or a political cause) is quite explicit. The same equation, with the same oxymoronic rhetoric, appears in the book’s eleventh poem, “The Spanish Guitar” (53). In contrast, the fifth stanza of “The Irish Harp” does refer to political history, but it is the history of the sixteenth century: ‘Tis said oppression taught the lay To him—(of all the ‘sons of song’ That bask’d in Erin’s brighter day) The last of the inspir’d throng. . . . (3)

While that stanza might appear at first to refer to Turlough Carolan, widely known as the last of the great Irish harpers and composers for the harp, in fact the harper in that stanza is apparently fictitious: Carolan was born in 1670,37 whereas Owenson’s note on the poem places him in “the reign of Elizabeth” (4). The fictitious bard “drew from Erin’s woes their source” (4), and while he “sung the ills that flow / From dire oppression’s ruthless fang” (6), the oppression was Danish, not English, and it was in the sixteenth century that the oppression “deepen’d every patriot woe” (7). One might suppose that the common substitution of historically removed characters (conquering Danes) furnished Irish writers with a figurative vocabulary for representing the occupying English in Ireland; as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, Moore writes in that way in Irish Melodies, and in Hebrew Melodies Byron uses biblical characters and episodes as figures of contemporary English political life.

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attention to the music’s ambiguity, its susceptibility of contrary interpretations:

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However, in the Lay of an Irish Harp, no internal evidence suggests any such a thing, and neither does the relevant external evidence, which indicates instead her flattering the English colonizers until she joins them by marriage. Owenson concludes the poem with a note on the phrase, “Erin go brach,” calling it “a national exclamation,” but she says that it served as a “rallying point” for “many an Irish heart” only “in less felicitous times” (7). In contrast, the more felicitous present in which Owenson writes is characterized by the munificent English approbation of Irish commodities in which Owenson participated by producing the book and by performing on her faux Irish harp at the homes of the English aristocracy. Neither in the poem, nor in the book, nor outside it, in the marketing campaign, does any evidence suggest Irish nationalism, rebellious antagonism toward the English colonizers, or interest in women’s rights. Again, it is not my argument that Owenson had or had not feelings of Irish patriotism, or that she did or did not admire the Act of Union, but that, rather, the reality of her publications and her promotion of them contradict the supposition of revolutionary intent. The second poem of the collection, “La Rose Fletrie,” also mentions the song entitled “Erin Go Brach,” but only to say that the song moves her with sweetness. (Owenson’s poem is about a lover who gave a beloved a rose, but the love and the rose have both faded, though the beloved will nonetheless remember the giver).38 For postcolonial readers, the poem’s final stanza is susceptible of a metaphorical reading that takes the rose for Ireland and its fading as a national demise under colonialism, but, as the critical consensus about Owenson’s poetic proclivity suggests, the stanza is perhaps rather a statement of the sort of reductively personal application that characterizes the poetry of sentiment and sensibility, as McGann has said:39 . . . the rose which thus wither’d with thee, From thy cares may recover its bloom, And that love which thine eye again pledges to me Will still share with the rose the same doom. (12)

Later in the volume Owenson uses again the story of perished love, but in a way that does not remotely suggest an aisling (a visionary poem of nationalistic reference), though its personalistic fiction is emphasized clearly enough: And if some tender pangs I cherish’d, From thee I caught the pleasing anguish;

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From Song to Pr int But when with thee those sweet pangs perish’d, I felt them in my bosom languish. (“L’amant Mutin,” 84)

My memory at this moment supplies me with innumerable poems addressed to the Rose. Among the most beautiful are, I think, one by Anacreon, so elegantly translated by Moore; one by Sappho, one by Usonius, one by Francisco de Biojo (Parnasso Espagnol), one by Camoens, one by Bernard le Jeune, one by Cowper, two by Mestastasio, one from the Persian, and one by a German poet (whose name has escaped recollection) beginning, “Der fruhling [sic] wird nunbald entweichen” (12n.).

Clearly, the mention of Moore has no special Irish content: Moore’s first Irish Melodies did not appear until 1808, a year after the publication of The Lay of an Irish Harp, and his translations from Anacreon were never perceived as Irish, particularly, though they were often condemned critically for their personal immorality. Further, Owenson’s note is not only defiantly sophomoric and casual (in the first sentence, especially), but also goes on to dilute the reference to Moore among parallel references to English, Italian, Persian, and German poets who are not evidently associated with any interest in Irish nationalism. Similarly, later in the volume Owenson includes the poem, “Concette (Imitated from the Italian),” consisting of four tetrameter couplets in a fictitious male voice affirming that the speaker is dying for unrequited love (78). These lays are not really from “an Irish harp”; obviously she is not really male, or Italian, or dying from unrequited love. Despite the fictitious appeals to reality in Owenson’s pages (especially in her notes and prefaces), and despite the appeal of that reality-effect in terms of postcolonialism, what the poems in this volume reveal is the fictitiousness of that effect. As in the pseudo-songs that I have discussed in previous chapters, the pseudo theme spreads from the simulation of music to other and often larger instances of unreality in the print products and commercial culture of the period. The third poem in The Lay of an Irish Harp, “To Mrs. Lefanue,” is about the speaker’s gladly remembering the time, in her youth, when she sang a “national air” that is identified in a note as “Edmund of the Hill”(17). The speaker sings the song to the sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, upon meeting that lady. The poem is ostensibly personal in its references, referring to the speaker’s immaturity

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Owenson’s note to “La Rose Fletrie” seems at first to invite an association of the rose with nationalism by citing Thomas Moore:

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and her gratitude for the titular subject’s wit and kindness. Though Owenson does not say or even hint the fact, the song that she mentions in her note certainly had some potential for political resonance: its lyrics refer to Edmund Ryan, an Irish criminal who, according to legend, shot a tax collector in a dispute over a peasant’s cow. Ryan defied Cromwell after the Battle of the Boyne, though the price on his head was rescinded after he performed favors for an Englishman.40 The poem (and it is worth remembering that The Lay of an Irish Harp is a London publication, and not an Irish one) contains no suggestion of that legend whatsoever: My heart overflowing, and new to each form Of the world, I sought thee, nor fear’d to offend By unconscious presumption: oh sure ‘twas some charm That thus led me to seek in a stranger, a friend! Yes, yes, ‘twas a charm of such magical force As Reason herself never wish’d to repel, For it drew its sweet magic from Sympathy’s source, And Reason herself bows to Sympathy’s spell. (15)41

“Vive la Platonique” confirms both the defiantly sophomoric character of the work and also the reductively personal range of reference: ‘Tis true, not many winters’ snows Have fall’n upon my life’s fresh flow’r: But feelings that should last an AGE, With me, were wasted in an HOUR. . . . . . . . Then let me be thy tender friend, Thy mistress since I cannot be: Thou’lt soon forget thou’rt not belov’d, And I! I’m not adored by thee. “Twill be the chastest, sweetest, tye That round two hearts was ever twin’d; Than friendship ‘twill be warmer still, Than passion ‘twill be more refin’d. (20–22)

My point is not simply the obvious one, that this poem is not an Irish song, nor even songlike; rather, the conventional misunderstanding of Plato’s Symposium (as if that dialogue were about the virtue of being a “tender friend” without “passion”) removes the subject-matter to bookishness, and so do the French quotations with which Owenson

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annotates the poem: “Thus Montesquieu is surprised to find he could love at thirty-five; while St. Aulaire wrote his last amatory verses at ninety!—‘Anacreon moins vieux,’ says Voltaire, ‘fit des biens [sic] moins jolies chosés’ [‘When Anacreon was less aged, he made less pretty things out of that which is good’]” (20). “The Drawing-Room,” dedicated to Owenson’s Anglo-Irish cousin Lady Crofton, follows “Vive la Platonique,” and this poem restores at least the topic of music (though no music). Here Owenson complains of the parlor-parties at which she performed her “Irish Girl” act: that sad medium, dull and chill, Of gayless revels, heartless joys, Wears not ecstatic pleasure’s air To me; ‘tis nought but din and noise. (25)

In contrast to conventional celebrations of music’s natural, spontaneous, and authentic expression of feeling, Owenson’s poem represents that particular venue of music—the drawing-room of aristocratic festivity—negatively. In the next stanza, however, the poem personalizes the metaphor of music in conventional, internal, emotional terms: But oh! The heart some think lies still, Resembles most my lute, whose string Breathes not (Eolian-like) untouch’d, Nor vibrates to each insect’s wing. But when the sympathetic touch Calls forth the magic of its wires, How soft, how tender is the strain Each trembling, thrilling, chord respires! (27)

As she does often in this collection, here Owenson reiterates the equation of music with feeling, a trope that personalizes (and therefore shrinks) the reference of the “songs.” In the next poem, “The Dream. To My Sister,” Owenson manages that personalistic reduction in an entirely different and even contradictory way. The speaker writes of the difference between “private feeling” which she claims for herself and “public attention” which she disavows while courting it; she distinguishes between “the heart” from which she claims to write and “the world” which she claims to forget while writing for it The poem introduces a dream: Yes! ‘Twas a cheery dream that stole Its vision o’er my sleepless soul.

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In a note keyed to that last line, Owenson writes: Of the tye which binds me to this dearest object of my heart’s best affections, I may say with Tasso, “—Conforme era létate; Ma il pensier; piu conforme.” It is perhaps scarcely justifiable to force a detail of private feeling on public attention, but Nature will sometimes get the start of Authorship, and she who writes from the HEART, may insensibly forget she is writing for the world. (30)

The metatextual fiction is transparent: she states that she writes for the world in the same sentence that suggests that she forgets the world while doing so. Owenson’s quoting Tasso bespeaks an interest in authorship rather than “nature,” while her sentence states the opposite. That contradiction—intentionally or otherwise—is a theme of this entire book. In this way, the book is about its own artificiality. Sometimes that artificiality is lamented: in the next poem (“Fragment VII”), the lyric speaker regrets having lost the immediate passion of youth: In life alone each transport was possest: But now, in life alone no charms I view— And oh! Time, Hours, and Love, how chang’d are you! (37)

In contrast to “Vive la Platonique,” which values the absence of natural passions, this poem laments that absence. The poem and, to a large extent, the book are about absence—of the imaginary music of the harp, of authentic feeling in music, of passion, of meaning. Characterizing the poetry of sensibility in this way, McGann writes of Helen Maria Williams’s “Sonnet to Love”: “the melancholy of the poem signals only a loss of meaning” (141). One textual signifier of that loss is the fact that “the poetic field generates textual residues. . . . dead, (in)human forms (words, images, ideas) that reflect, by their own emptiness, the life they are for ever losing.”42 That observation is apt for Owenson’s “Fragment VII,” which begins as so many of the poems in The Lay of An Irish Harp do, with a textual fragment out of its context linguistically, nationally, and otherwise, serving as

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Methought that wand’ring wild with thee (As oft in childhood’s careless glee We fondly stray’d, to danger blind, Our arms, our hearts, as closely twin’d). . . .

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From Song to Pr int

Sans esperance—et meme sans desires Je regrettais lés sensible plaisirs Dont la douceur enchanta ma jeunesse Sont il [sic] perdu? Desais-je sans retour[.]43 (35)

Obviously enough, de la Fare’s lines do not pertain to the “Irish” theme that Owenson’s book has claimed, nor to the “harp” theme. The explicit content of the quoted verse is loss. These lines are a textual presence only, masking their emptiness with a recycled fiction of personal feeling in the absence of persons. Like Owenson’s poems which they are made to annotate, these lines mark the (imaginary) life that is lost in the textual presence of the alien (and alienated) signifiers. Here and everywhere in The Lay of an Irish Harp, Owenson develops the binary opposition of that which is personal, authentic, and natural, as opposed to that which is public and artificial; characteristically in these poems, explicit statements denote a resolution of that binary in favor of the natural while the fact of their production and their actual (linguistic) features reveal the opposite. “The Violet” follows “Fragment VII,” dedicated “To her who sent me the Spring’s first Violets.” The rhetoric of the poem undermines the apparent appeal to nature and to personal feeling, reproducing the ancient and modern equation of flower and woman: “dear is the friend whom the blossom resembles,” both “sweet” and “retiring” (40); but even before the poem reproduces that weary trope, Owenson’s arrangement of the work contradicts its appeal to feeling and to nature by placing an Italian epigraph atop it (a quotation from Tasso referring to violets). Further, Owenson’s note to the poem (38–39) reaffirms the spontaneous and emotionally driven role that earlier poems had claimed, eschewing scientific knowledge of plants in favor of what is in “my heart”; “rather a sentimental than a scientific florist, at ‘all times, all seasons, and their changes,’ a garden has for me an indescribable charm!” (38n). In a Wordsworthian way, Owenson’s note refuses to murder the flower by dissecting it: Let the philosophic naturalist ascertain the constituent properties of the plant; let him deny it sensation, or endow it with irritability; let him limit the nice boundary, or trace the delicate shades of discrimination which divide the animal from the vegetable world, or mark

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an epigraph for Owenson’s poem. The language of Owenson’s quotation from the Marquis de la Fare is about the loss of its (nominal) reference, which is natural, authentic, and not there:

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the almost imperceptible degrees of sensation which separate man from the sea-nettle. But without being deeply studied in Linnaeus, or knowing scarcely more of Bonet, Ludwig, or Zunguis, than the titles of their works, the winter’s solitary snowdrop, the spring’s early violet, the summer’s first rose, and the autumn’s last carnation, speak to my heart a language it understands, which Nature dictates, and Science could scarcely improve. (39n)

Apart from the conventional opposition of nature with its language of the heart as opposed to science with its knowledge of the facts, that passage is so thoroughly citational that its own rhetoric contradicts its claim to the innocence of immediate feeling. The note concludes with a (mis)quotation of Thomas Gray’s conclusion to his “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “If ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise” (39n). The poem is in large part a texture of citations, including silent citations, not only of Gray’s poem but also of the inherited trope of woman as flower, blushingly shunning “Ev’ry too glaring beam of the too ardent sun” (40) and remaining “meek, modest, lovely” (40). Ireland and its harps are absent; what is present are the dead letters of sentiment and sensibility. This text too is a trope of such absence. Again, it is not my argument that these meanings, including the artifice about artificiality and the tropes of alienation and absence— are intentional. The entire trope of authorial intention requires a personalistic assumption of autonomous agency which the book’s meanings undermine. The extent to which the printed volume bespeaks the agency of the publisher Phillips and the marketing campaign surrounding The Wild Irish Girl contradicts the authentic, personal voice of feeling to which the poems’ always-already fictitious speakers lay claim; and so, too, the conventionality of the sentimental signifiers contradicts the assertions of spontaneity. All the while, the publication of the book and its appeals to the public, including the notes and the “Prefatory Sketch,” contradict the printed disavowals of any appeal to the public. The ninth poem (only two stanzas long), “To Mrs. C_N_LLE,” contains no more music or song than its predecessors, but it does refer to them: Whilst over each lay thou didst flatt’ringly hang, In triumph I cried, “ ‘Tis all mine,” Unconscious ‘twas thou didst inspire as I sang, And in fact that the lay was all thine. Then take it—but oh! Still be present the while, When another that lay shall respire;

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From Song to Pr int For at least I have felt ‘tis the spell of thy smile That alone can the songstress inspire.44

This little impromptu was written on the back of some songs presented to a friend, who ever lavished on the composer that smile of encouraging approbation which, to the conscious inferiority of timid talent, is the sweetest inspiration, and without which even genius shrinks back upon itself spiritless and languid. (42)

The diction—“little,” “impromptu,” “timid,”—belittles this poem as the “Prefatory Sketch” belittles the volume, characterizing it as “the last and least of . . . bagatelles” (viii). Shrinking from including song(s), instead the poem refers to their material (paper) form (“on the back of some songs presented to a friend”). While the second stanza is not about the song so much as it is about what inspires the “songstress,” the explanatory note shifts the subject of discussion again, this time onto “approbation” of the composer (i.e., Owenson’s persona) and appreciation of her “genius.” The point in not vainglory or boasting: on the contrary, the persona belittles herself; but it is a text about a self, albeit a fictitious one, and not about nationalism (for example), or rebellion, or public life, which Owenson’s personae have already repudiated. The tenth poem in the Lay of the Irish Harp, “The Boudoir: To **********,” begins by establishing the binary opposition of sensibility: “thou may’st come,” says the speaker to an imaginary addressee, but do so When Twilight drops her mystic veil, And brings the anxious mind’s repose, And leaves the sensient heart to feel. (45)

As in earlier poems in the collection, the “mind” is anxious, but the “heart” would rather “feel.” The intransitive use of the verb “feel”—as if it did not matter at all what one “feels,” so long as one does “feel” or at least says so—expresses the enclosure of a self in its feelings about itself, in contrast to the normal (transitive) usage of “feel,” which connects the subject to an object. The object is not only absent from the line: it is absent from the poem’s values. Similarly, the earlier poems in the volume have dismissed the “public” in favor of

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To these stanzas Owenson affixes a reality-effect by including the following note:

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Yet turn not towards the flaunting bow’r That echoes to the joyless laugh Of GOSSIP DAMES, nor seek the hall Where Riot’s sons her goblet quaff. (46)

The opposite of the drawing-room festivities is the intimacy of the boudoir: Fear not to meet intruders there, Thou’lt only find my harp and me, Breathing perhaps some pensive song, And waiting anxiously for thee. (46)

The parlor is public: the sound there is a “joyless laugh.” Consistently with the conventional equation of music with personal feeling, here in “The Boudoir” both intimacy and emotion are matters for “my harp and me.” The association of music with sentimentality is complete in the rhetoric of this text, though, again, as in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, it is only the topic of music that is introduced into the work, and not music: And round my harp fresh buds I’ll twine, O’er which departing day has wept; As wildly soft its chords I’ll touch As though a sigh its chords had swept. (47)

In a more extended way, “The Spanish Guitar” develops both the equation of music with personal sympathy and the disappearance of the instrument, music, and reality under the total flood of putative emotions. That disappearance of reality is the progress of the poem. At the beginning, however, a 260-word note establishes a reality-effect: Owenson writes that she bought the guitar from a peasant when she was “traveling through a small town in the north of Ireland.” The peasant had received it from a traveling Spaniard as payment for lodging. But even here, in the introductory note, sentiment overwhelms the merely apparent interest in factuality: “The human heart, ere time has chilled its glow, or experience regulated its pulse, overflows with

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the “personal,” and the knowledge of science in favor of the feelings of the heart. “The Boudoir” presents first a parlor-party as “Vive la Platonique” had done—negatively:

From Song to Pr int

an ardour of affection often indiscriminate in its object, undefinable in its nature, and even independent of sympathy” (49–50). In the first stanza, the guitar has been neglected, ‘ev’ry tuneful number / Latent and still” (49); but in the second stanza, the speaker tells the guitar that it was not always abandoned: it had accompanied “matin hymn” and “midnight serenade.” Emotion again appears as the meaning of music: the lover’s wish and the rival’s anguish both claimed aid from the guitar (50). In the third stanza, the guitar disappears into citation: it once sounded “of vanquish’d Moor, of Saracen subdued, / Of Roncevalle’s immortal feats” (51). So far, we have heard no music (even in the fiction), but only its legend; and the fourth stanza develops the theme of absence again: the master of the guitar must have been a sad youth “Far from his native land,” abandoned by all “but by thee and heaven”; the imagined youth was “Of all bereft but thy care-soothing lay” (51). In a recurrent pattern, the tropes of absence precede the disfavor and the disappearance of reality altogether: in starlight or twilight, “I’ve woo’d thy tones to aid my vision’d dream” (53). As in earlier poems in the volume, this disappearance of external reality is accompanied by the rhetorical signals of sentimental convention—here, nature, passion, fancy, feeling, and a mere vision of bliss in the absence of bliss: Oh then to NATURE’S touch be sacred still! To HER I consecrate thy soothing pow’r; Let passion, fancy, feeling, wake the thrill That gives to bliss each visionary hour. (55)

A comparison with a later and more widely-read poem may help to indicate just how conventional those typographical indices of sentimental convention were and are: in the Literary Souvenir for 1827, Felicia Hemans’s “A Spanish Lady” recycles the common topics of Owenson’s poems including “The Spanish Guitar”: sighs, sweet chords, a personified instrument that has feelings for and with the lady, trembling, timid, blushing, love and sorrow, sad deep thoughts, and a youthful heart.45 The poem that follows “The Spanish Guitar” is “Spleen,” in which the speaker wishes to devote her feelings, which are “bosom’d treasures,” to Apathy. These feelings are “departed joys and dying pleasures” (56), all of which “were but illusions” that “cheated while they charmed the dazzled mind” (56). To the best of my knowledge, Keats was not aware of Owenson’s “Spleen” or “The Spanish Guitar” when he wrote “Ode to Psyche” or “Ode to Melancholy,” and so the verbal

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Then come! And thou shalt be my god supreme, And I will worship at thy gloomy shrine; Nor from the light of memory shall beam One ray, to shew that bliss or joy were mine. (Owenson, “Spleen,” 57)

Compare Keats’s lines: Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.46 Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her Sovran shrine. . . . 47

The poem that Owenson places immediately after “Spleen” also anticipates Keats’s poetry: addressed to “Fancy” rather than to melancholy or spleen, Owenson writes, Oh come! But come not as thou late wert wont, With faded blush, and matted locks unbound, Chasing my foot-steps in each dreary haunt, And scattering rue and deadly night-shade round. (59)

Again, I do not know that Keats had read Owenson’s poetry, but his parallel passage appears in “Ode on Melancholy”: No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer they pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade. . . . 48

Apart from the verbal repetition of “nightshade,” both the meter and the negative injunction preceding the nightshade [“come not” (Owenson) and “go not” (Keats)] are common to these poems, perhaps illustrating both topical and rhetorical conventions that circulate in the period’s pseudo-songs as well as its odes. Like so many other poems in The Lay of an Irish Harp, “The Sensitive Plant” (87) uses a note to create an illusion of factual reference, a textual stage on which to enact a professed fantasy: “This little impromptu arose from observing a sprig of the Sensitive plant dead

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similarities may express conventionality (the convention of sentiment) rather than influence:

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“Every vegetable as well as the Sensitive Plant shrinks when wounded,” says the Naturalist. But SENTIMENT, unwilling to relinquish the delicate attribute of its own sweet shrub, replies to Science, “It is true; but in other plants, even when wounded, the motion is too slow to be perceptible; while the vibration of the Sensitive Plant, even to the faintest touch, is as quick as it is visible.”

The poem that this note introduces then dispenses with the illusion of factuality altogether, preferring signifiers of textual fantasies: Proud of thy sensient pow’rs, the breast Of Emily, with rival pride, Thou sought’st, but drooping there, confest That sensient pow’r surpass’d, and died. (88)

“The Sensitive Plant” does not contain the first appearance in this book of the flower-on-the-breast motif: “To-morrow” (85–86) precedes “The Sensitive Plant,” and uses the imagery to lament emptiness in different terms: I. VISIONS of fleeting pleasure! Spare,oh! Spare me! Hence! Shades of many a bliss, and many a sorrow; In vain from this cool medium would ye tear me, With joys indeed to-day—but, what to-morrow? II. For every blessing your possession brought me Left in its absence still a kindred sorrow, And tho’ to-day with many a joy you sought me, You’d leave me, lost to every joy, to-morrow. III. Like this rich flow’r, which now in sweet decay Droops on my breast its head in seeming sorrow; For though its beauties charm each sense to-day, My breast will only wear its thorns to-morrow.

The vanishing-acts in that poem are numerous: joy vanishes before tomorrow; the flower decays; its sorrow only seems; and in a note to line 3, about the “cool medium,” Owenson quotes Alexander Pope. 10.1057/9780230105706 - From Song to Print, Terence Hoagwood

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on a very feeling and affectionate bosom” (87n). Another note on the same page reiterates the opposition of sentiment and science, already developed in “The Violet,” much earlier in the volume:

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Though Owenson does not identify the poem, the line appears in “Eloisa to Abelard”: “A cool suspence from pleasure and from pain.” In Pope’s poem, Eloisa’s line refers to “Thy life” as “a long dead calm of fix’d repose.”49 “To-morrow” is also preceded by an epigraph from Dante: “Nessun maggior dolore, che recordarsi [sic] del tempo felice, nella miseria” (85). [“There is no greater sorrow than remembering a happy time, in misery.”] Though Owenson does not identify the source of that quotation, it appears in the Inferno, Canto 5, in Francesca’s confession of her illicit love for Paulo. Dante’s passage is already meta-textual, as Francesca narrates her having read with Paulo the story of Lancelot until the wicked book stimulated their impermissible desires to adulterous and incestuous action. Owenson’s self-conscious reflexivity reflects an already reflexive text about a text. (The same is true of Byron’s “Francesca of Rimini,” his translation of this same episode.50) Beyond the fictive loss signified in those quoted sentences and in the sentences of Owenson’s poem, the frequency of citation itself designates again the pastness of the fiction, the recycling of now-inanimate words and images. Again with or without personal, authorial intention, at the level of the poems’ narrated fictions and also at the performative level where Owenson reproduces linguistic units from absent sources, the poem is about what is not there. “The Picture” also represents absence and loss, and once again in reference to multiple media; whereas the poetic language of earlier poems including “The Irish Harp” refers to music, here textual and pictorial media are mentioned, both of them serving as sites of decay: Oh yes! This brow is his, broad, candid, fair, That speaks the true, the guileless, honest soul; But o’er the spotless transcript morbid Care And Time (of late) their withering fingers stole. (93)

In other instances, as in “The Spanish Guitar” and “Fancy,” where playful imagination brings flowers and breathes its “frolic spirit o’er my careless hours” (58), poems’ speakers summon illusion for the pleasure of it: one calls upon sleep to Sooth to forgetfulness my care-worn mind, Dispel awhile each sad prophetic fear, And mem’ry in thy gentle thralldom bind, And steal this sigh, and chase this starting tear; And call the mimic Fancy to thy aid, With all her frolic, illusory train; 10.1057/9780230105706 - From Song to Print, Terence Hoagwood

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From Song to Pr int

The recycling of “Fancy” and her “frolic” is only one among many recyclings: as Fitzpatrick points out, this poem appeared six years earlier (as “The Picture” did, too) in Owenson’s 1801 volume, Poems. Here, in 1807, both poems consort with “the Irish Harp,” if only because the title-page and the marketing project call for that motif. What survives the recycling, and what emerges as a theme in the 1807 volume, is the preoccupation with artifice, replication, illusion, and (whether it is lamented or welcomed) the absence of the extra-textual referent, or the real. The world, the public, her father, and her fictitious characters are—and are said to be—signifiers in the poems’ verbal dreams. The topic of music (but no actual music) reappears in a recycling of the prayer for ease for the “vot’rist” of this or that figment: as the “vot’rist” of “Sleep” asks for “rosy visions” to “cheer” her (106), so too the speaker of the untitled Fragment XXIX ends his disavowal of music with a prayer to “Indifference,” asking for “ease.” An earlier speaker had worshipped at the “gloomy shrine” of “Spleen” (57), but in Fragment XXIX the speaker introduces the abandonment of rapture, bliss, and thrill by setting aside his lyre: HERE, Iris, pr’ythee take my lyre, No more its pathos or its fire Shall wrap me in delusive bliss, Its chords my flying fingers kiss, Nor to its sweet responsive string Her song of soul thy mistress sing. . . . (116)

Like the volume as a whole, this poem turns decisively into the “cool medium” of silence: I offer at thy shrine What (oh Indifference!) ne’er was thine, The raptured sigh, the glowing tear, The fervid hope, the anxious fear, The blissful thrill, the anguish’d woe, The freezing doubt, the feeling glow; Nay, take the ling’ring wish to please, But give, oh! give thy vot’rist ease. (117–18)

The poem that follows that prayer to indifference is “The Minstrel Boy,” another recycled poem, this one an elegy for Thomas Dermody,

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With rosy visions cheer thy vot’rist maid, With welcome treach’ry steal her bosom’s pain. . . . (“Sleep,” 106)

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an apparent orphan whom her father had brought home when Dermody was eleven or twelve and who wrote, even then, admired poems. For years he exchanged poems and letters with Sydney Owenson until he died (at the age of twenty-seven) in London, by all accounts dissolute, diseased, and impoverished, in 1802.51 Sydney Owenson published an elegy about him in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine,52 and five years later she publishes it again in The Lay of an Irish Harp. However, this time she does not mention Dermody at all, and the poem lacks the customary note of explanation, thus suppressing the reality-effect to which her annotations are prone. In the poem, it is not only death but also (again) indifference that cools the medium of the verse: the world each finer transport chill’d That stole o’er feeling’s nerve or fancy’s dream, And when each pulse to Hope’s warm pressure thrill’d, Experience chased Hope’s illusory beam. Too oft indeed, by Passion’s whirlwind driven, Far from cold Prudence’ level path to stray, Too oft he deem’d that light “a light from heaven” That lured him on to PLEASURE’s flow’ry way. (121)

Despite the minstrel’s music, silence wins decisively: void of consolation, elegiac or otherwise, and leaving the minstrel boy anonymous to the end, the poem concludes consistently with the untitled Fragment XXIX that precedes it, but more extremely. Despite his love of the lyre and song, and despite the favor of the muse, when cherish’d Hope reposed its soul Upon a new-born certainty of joy, Death from the arms of pending pleasures stole, And years of promis’d bliss, the Minstrel Boy. (124)

Shortly after that truncated elegy of the nameless minstrel, Owenson’s book returns to the frivolity of the musical parlor-party, its aristocrats, their advantageous sponsorship of her writing, and her self-professed melodic trifles. A note to the title “Canzona” introduces the poem: Trifling one evening at the piano forte, I accidentally produced a simple melody that pleased me, and, before I left the instrument, adapted to it the few ideas to be found in the above fragment. It was a maxim of one of the ancients, that no pleasure was so dangerous as that which proceeded from the approbation of a friend: and the partiality with which this little unprovisatore [sic] effort was received in the limited

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Th e “C o ol M e di u m ” of S y dn e y O w e ns on

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From Song to Pr int and social circle to whom it was first sung, induced me to publish and dedicate it to her whose taste and sanction procured it a reception in the world it could never otherwise have obtained—

Under that social cover, however, “Canzona” returns to the language of “The Minstrel Boy,” and more largely to the volume’s theme of the sentimental flight from the world. “Canzona” challenges and perhaps repudiates the judgments about “prudence” and “pleasure” that “The Minstrel Boy” expresses. The poem begins with a question: I Oh! should I fly from the world, Love, to thee, Would solitude render me dearer? Would our flight from the world draw thee closer to me, Or render thy passion sincerer?

In the event, when “each cold law of prudence was banish’d,” then “thrillingly sweet was each pleasure we stole.” To the extent that the poem returns to the world from the private bliss of the parlor, the boudoir, or the interior of one’s private and pulsating bosom, it claims to do so in the interest of these private thrills, and the same can be said for The Lay of an Irish Harp as a whole: Then Fly, oh my love! To the world back with me, Since the bliss it denies it enhances, Since dearest the transient delight shar’d with thee, Which is snatch’d from the world’s prying glances. . . .

The contradictory status of the poem is clear: the stanzas and their statements (or pseudo-statements) are not “snatch’d from” the world’s glances but placed before them as conspicuously as Owenson and her publisher Phillips could arrange. The publicity of these “Visions of fleeting pleasure” is draped in the guise of personalism (rather than for example, Anglo-Irish politics), though it also wears an Irish costume, as Owenson did herself when she went to London to sell the book. The calculated publicity and the “cool medium” of the printed verse contradict the warmth of its rhetorical passions, and its Irish harps are as silent as the typography which is their only mode of existence.

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To the Lady Charlotte Homan (126)

C on t r a dic t ory A rt s: Moor e’s IR ISH ME LODI E S

One of Thomas Moore’s early publications (1797) was an imitation of Macpherson’s forgeries of early poetry, the Ossian poems. Howard Mumford Jones connects this literary work with a letter on Irish politics by Moore that had appeared in the same periodical as the imitation of Ossian, and the thematic parallels are evident: the Ossianic imitation declaims, in bardic tone, Sad is the sleep of Erin, and her dreams are troubled and gloomy. Her enemy has come—he has come in the hour of her slumber, and his hand has stolen the emerald from her brow; but Erin has not awakened—no! she still sleeps. .

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Bloody is the field where she lies, and her garments are weeping with blood—for the wounds of her sons are streaming around her, and the ghosts of her heroes are moaning for vengeance!1

Moore’s letter on Irish politics is addressed “To the Students of Trinity College,” and it is anonymous, attributed only to “A Sophister”: Alas! Our afflicted country! How long will her green plains be dyed with the gore of butchery, and obscured with the ashes of conflagrations! When will she profit by the lessons so brilliantly exhibited to her eyes, and which she has been so slow, so very slow in learning? Oh, when will “the Nemean Lion” rise from his trance, and shake off the vermin that engender on his crest?2

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Chapter 4

From Song to Pr int

The conflicts that these pieces mention were urgent at the time: a year before Moore’s “Letter to the Students of Trinity College” appeared, Wolfe Tone, aided by James Monroe, persuaded the French to send an army to Ireland (under Hoche); their invasion achieved nothing. In 1797, another invasion threatened, and mutiny occurred in the British fleet. William Orr was hanged “for being a United Irishman.” The United Irishmen was the illegal group that had founded the periodical that published Moore’s prose-poem and his letter.3 Ten years later, Moore had moved to London and befriended the Prince of Wales and as many English aristocrats as he could meet. He had also published popular poems in the English market, and he had served His Majesty as Registrar of the Vice-Admiralty Court in Bermuda (the Naval Prize Court, where the Registrar adjudicated piracy and booty, taking a portion for himself). Then, Moore’s Irish Melodies appeared, a popular contribution to the multiple projects of national melodies (chiefly Celtic in theme) which arose in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 The many volumes of Irish Melodies have sometimes been appreciated as an expression of Irish patriotism in the context of Ireland’s colonization: for example, Daniel O’Connell spoke of Moore’s works in such terms in 1832, in an address to the Dublin Political Union: “I attribute much of the present state of feeling, and the desire for liberty in Ireland to the works of that immortal man—he has brought patriotism into the private circles of domestic life.”5 However, as Leith Davis has justly observed, William Butler Yeats (among others) did not read Irish Melodies as a sincere political project, but instead Yeats characterized Moore and his work as “merely an incarnate social ambition.”6 The history of the production and reproduction of Irish Melodies includes many expressions of ambitions, perhaps social aspirations, as Yeats wrote, and perhaps Irish nationalism (sometimes), though that case is not consistent or clear. With rare exceptions, the ambitions, the contents, and the performances of Moore’s Irish Melodies are contradictory in apparently artful ways. Despite their apparent simplicity, calculated for great popularity among English audiences for much of the nineteenth century, the complexity of Irish Melodies (which amounted to a complicated and ongoing publication project over a period of thirty-eight years) may be the most impressive achievement of Irish Melodies at the aesthetic level. In contrast to their musical reputation, Moore’s Irish Melodies are a verbal work rather than a musical composition. Moore’s poems sold at first with musical scores by others (first Sir John Stevenson and later Sir Henry Bishop). Those musical scores were labeled Irish and traditional, but

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they are modern and European in their forms and styles. The audience of Irish Melodies was predominantly English rather than Irish; nationalism is a much slighter theme than some politically motivated responses to Irish Melodies have indicated. Though most of Moore’s poems in Irish Melodies cultivate a sentimental appearance, his poems are distinguished by the art or craft of equally effective but antithetical appeals. Further, their artistry makes a theme of its own surfacedepth contradictions, in which the human voice disappears beneath (false) appearances, and the silent lyrics exemplify the impoverishment of meaning that they lament. Irish Melodies consists of at least four separate publication-projects: first, a sequence of ten separately published “Numbers” (1808–34). Each of these volumes includes Moore’s lyrics, scores by Stevenson (and then, for the later Numbers, by Bishop), and lists of traditional Irish tunes on which the modern scores are supposedly based. These volumes were published by the brothers William and James Power (“Printed and Sold at J. Power’s Music Ware-House 34 Strand, and at W. Power’s Music Ware-House, 4 Westmoreland Str. Dublin.”7 The third of these Numbers includes Moore’s “Letter on Music.” Irish Melodies appeared again in an entirely different format, in small octavo volumes of the poems alone, without musical scores or lists of traditional tunes, “Printed for J. Power and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown”: the first of these small editions of the poems without music appeared in 1821, the sixth edition appeared in 1825, another in 1849, and yet another printing appeared in 1852, the year of Moore’s death. Subsequent printings continued afterward.8 The octavo volumes reprint Moore’s “Letter on Music” and many of the “Advertisements” from the earlier volumes. In a third set of publications, Irish Melodies also appear as a separately titled section in editions of Moore’s Poetical Works from 1841 onward, first from Longmans in London, and then in a variety of printings in England, the United States, and elsewhere. These printings lack the music by Stevenson and Bishop, as the octavo editions had likewise done, and they frequently include some but not all of the Irish Melodies in different and inexplicable orders. A fourth form of publication appeared in 1846, an edition (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans) containing 124 poems “Illustrated by Daniel Maclise,” with a preface by Moore, no music or list of tunes, and reprints of earlier advertisements and the “Letter on Music.” None of these four sets of publications—the original ten “Numbers,” the small octavo collections, the sections entitled “Irish Melodies” in the Poetical Works, and the edition illustrated by Maclise—agree in their contents or their order.

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T h o m a s M o o r e ’s I R I S H M E L O D I E S

From Song to Pr int

There is no definitive edition, but (apart from posthumous printings and foreign editions) all of these different works entitled Irish Melodies have both Moore’s authority and also independently executed work by others (numerous artists, for example, and the musical composers). Irish Melodies is less a literary work than a kaleidoscope of corporate, multimedia productions. Moore was eighteen when his Ossianic piece appeared in the Press early in 1798; one year later, he left Ireland for London, and, as I have suggested, the Irish Melodies were begun after nine years spent cultivating a literary life in England. Biographical materials, including Ronan Kelly’s excellent recent biography, help to make clear some of the differences between the obscure juvenile writings and the later commercial successes of Irish Melodies. When Moore first arrived at Trinity University (at age fifteen), the British Crown was seeking to control the violence of the secret society called the Defenders. The government intercepted Wolfe Tone’s correspondence with the French from whom he sought military aid. In 1796, the Indemnity Act and the Insurrection Act intensified British suppression of Irish violence: the death penalty was attached to the swearing of illegal oaths, for example, and habeas corpus was suspended. French warships arrived in Ireland, but could not land in bad weather and retreated. In the year in which Moore’s imitation of Ossian appeared in the Press, his friend Robert Emmet left Trinity without a degree and disappeared “deep into the radical underground”;9 Emmet was subsequently imprisoned for three years and then executed.10 The rebel leader Edward Fitzgerald was hunted by British troops and shot in his bed, and he died in prison. Martial law was imposed in Dublin. Open rebellion erupted, leaving 30,000 people dead in the summer of 1798. As Kelly aptly and grimly puts the point, “bodies of rebel dead were draped on bridges over the Liffey as warnings.” Wolfe Tone was arrested and sentenced to death, but committed suicide before the sentence could be executed; his corpse was hanged and then beheaded in a Dublin Street.11 In less than a year after the rebellion and the public displays of the dead in Dublin, Moore left Ireland, ostensibly to study law at the Middle Temple. Kelly observes that Moore’s concern for money and for “fashionable living would dominate his next forty-odd years of letter-writing.”12 Moore cultivated the acquaintance of Joseph Atkinson, a playwright and absentee Treasurer of the Ordinance in Ireland for His Majesty; he sought the favors of Lord Moira, friend of the Prince of Wales and a supporter of the Act of Union. According to Kelly, Moore, the former rebel, “never uttered a word of criticism.”13 Jones writes that, in London, 1799–1801, Moore stops mentioning

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Irish nationalism in his letters and other writings, and that Moore’s poems from these years in London “exhibit none of those veiled allusions through which Celtic poets have spoken secretly to Irish patriots.” Jones characterizes this change in Moore’s writings as a “turning away from the patriotic theme” in favor of the Epicurean posing of Moore’s loosely translated Odes of Anacreon (London, 1800) and his fictitiously entitled Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (London, 1801).14 Moore dedicated the first edition of Odes of Anacreon to the Prince of Wales. Sir John Stevenson composed songs for the Anacreon poems, and for this contribution (and specifically for “Give me the harp of epic song”) he was knighted by Lord Hardwicke, the first Lord Lieutenant of Ireland after the Act of Union. Moore’s Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little was “commercially profitable,” in contrast to the “shabby demand” for his poetry (particularly Anacreon) in Ireland.15 In letters home, Moore boasted of his popularity among the English at their “great parties.”16 Lord Moira, friend of the Prince of Wales, informed Moore of the award of the position as Registrar of the Naval Prize Court in Bermuda. Emmet’s rebellion had occurred when Moore was celebrating his new post as a servant of the Crown. Less than one week later, Moore sailed for America, and Emmet was hanged and beheaded. In 1806, two years before the publication of Irish Melodies, James Carpenter published Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems in London. In large part, this volume represents Moore’s experiences in Bermuda and the United States (his fourteen months abroad for the Bermuda position included a four months’ tour of the U. S.). Like his letters from this time (September 1803–November 1804), the poems and notes in this volume express political commitments very different from those of his radical youth seven years earlier. Moore wrote for the book, but then canceled, the following passage: In the ferment which the French Revolution excited among the democrats of Ame[rica] and the licentious sympathy with which they shared in the wildest excesses of Jacobinism, we may find [?] one of the sources of that vulgarity of vice, that hostility to all the graces of life, which distinguishes the present demagogues of the United [States] and has become indeed too generally the characteristic of their countrymen.17

Moore’s descriptions of the United States often express racism: the coach from Richmond to Washington “takes twelve passengers, which generally consist of squalling children, stinking negroes, and

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T h o m a s M o o r e ’s I R I S H M E L O D I E S

From Song to Pr int

republicans smoking cigars!”18 Moore’s poems in the 1806 volume express clear hostility to republicanism or democracy and particularly to French Revolutionary thought: “That Gallic garbage of philosophy, / That nauseous slaver of these frantic times, / With which false liberty dilutes her crimes!”19 Visiting the then-capital of Virginia, Moore writes, “This Norfolk . . . is a most strange place; nothing to be seen in the streets but dogs and negroes, and the few ladies that pass for white are to be sure the most unlovely pieces of crockery I ever set my eyes upon.”20 In a poem addressed to his sister (“To Miss Moore”), he writes of the republican “dream on which I’ve dwelt / From boyhood’s hour” which “fade[s] and flee[s] / At touch of stern reality!” Cogently, Jones observes that Moore is here repudiating less the reality of the U.S. than “his own republican history.”21 The reversed polarities of Moore’s political affiliations (and perhaps the political proclivities of his customers and interpreters) are not the only contradictions that confound interpretation of the Irish Melodies. As I have suggested, the poems’ inorganic relationship to the music that was published with them also complicates interpretation, and so does their convoluted publication history, which changes and reconfigures their meanings over a long period (1808–46). The first publication of the first part (“Number”) of the Irish Melodies is a thin folio volume with an elaborately engraved title-page that bears no date; the book appeared in April 1808. The publishers, James Power and William Power, were in the music business rather than the literary trade: having repaired instruments successfully, James opened a shop selling instruments and song-sheets, making a partner of his brother William. For Irish Melodies, their plan was to publish Stevenson’s modernized versions of Irish tunes with lyrics by several poets; however, the first and second parts, with Moore’s lyrics, were so successful that the publisher, Power, engaged no other poet for the project.22 The intended customers for songbooks including Thomson’s Select Collection, which the first Irish Melodies sought to imitate, was principally English women—“Ladies,” as Harker observes, who sought “texts fit to be sung in polite society.”23 The first piece in the first Number (1808) is entitled “Introductory Piece for Two Performers on one Piano Forte,” and it consists of four “airs” in a musical score by Stevenson with no lyrics: the “airs” are identified as “Carolan’s Concerto” (presented in E-flat), “The pleasant Rocks” (in B-flat), “Planxty Drury” (in E-flat, attributed to Carolan), and “The Beardless Boy” (in C-minor, the relative minor for E-flat). Like Bunting before him, but even more extremely, Stevenson ignores the modal music of Irish harp-pieces in favor of the European

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diatonic scales and the relatively new instrument (the piano) which was increasingly popular in prosperous households. Both Bunting and Stevenson cover the modernity of their scores with signs (like the name, Carolan) misleadingly invoking the authority of traditional musical forms.24 Two years later, defending this substitution of modern and popular forms for the traditional forms of Irish folk music, Moore add the prefatory “Letter on Music” to the third Number of Irish Melodies, praising modern improvements of music over the limited resources of traditional, folk forms, even while the entire project of Irish Melodies depends on an appeal to the charm of indigenous musical culture. The first work by Moore in the first Number is the lyric for Stevenson’s musical arrangement of “Go Where Glory Awaits Thee,” a song adapted from the “AIR—Maid of the Valley” (9). Like the subsequent lyrics in the volume, this one first appears in the engraved sheets of Stevenson’s musical setting (7–8; see figure 4). Stevenson rewrites the melody of “Maid of the Valley” from Bunting’s transcription of 1796 (see figure 5).25 On the leaf immediately following the second and last sheet of the music for this song, Moore’s lyrics appear as a separately printed poem (see figure 6). The first sheet of music illustrates some important features of Stevenson’s work in the volume as a whole and in the subsequent numbers as well. The seven introductory measures include eight meretricious thirty-second notes and four measures consisting entirely of sixteenth-notes, mostly repetitious arpeggios. In contrast, in Bunting’s arrangement of 1796, the sixteenth-notes usually form triplets which count for one in the ¾-time, and Bunting’s arpeggios are obvious but not redundant. In Stevenson’s version, when the melody begins (with the lyrics), the harmonic structure is one of the most ordinary progressions: tonic, subdominant, and return to the tonic (in this case, mediated by the relative minor, Dm)—the progression of the beginning of the popular tune to Robert Burns’s “Loch Lomond,” for example, or Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” In the modal forms of traditional Irish music, as Flood explains, the subdominant is not available: the fourth note in the diatonic scale is simply not included in the pentatonic scale of the old Irish modes.26 Moore’s lyric is presented typographically in a form that is conventional for songbooks—verses are arranged to fit all three stanzas on one page facing the music, and in an order that honors the use of a piano-paying singer, rather than the sequence of ordinary two-column printing. However, the composition of the lyric shows a purely verbal artistry: each of the three thirteen-line stanzas is written

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Figure 4 Sir John Stevenson, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee.” In Stevenson and Moore, Irish Melodies, First Number. (London: J. Power, and Dublin: W. Power, 1808), p. 7.

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Figure 5 Edward Bunting, “The Maid of the Valley.” In A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music . . . Adapted for the Piano-Forte (Dublin: W. Power, n.d. [1796]), p. 22.

in perfect trochaic trimester, with the third, sixth, and thirteenth line (in each stanza) forming an exception (iambic trimeter), and the tenth line a five-syllable (tail-less) trochaic line, rhyming with the other exceptional lines (lines 3, 6 and 13), uniformly in each stanza. The exceptions to the trochaic meter are therefore not exceptions, but rather parts of the mechanically repeated metrical pattern in all three stanzas. This syllabic pattern is linguistic rather than musical. Stevenson follows Moore’s meter by dotting the first note in several measures to accommodate the falling rhythm: the division of labor, whereby Moore sent Stevenson the lyrics, and then Stevenson composed the music, shows in the determining role of the prosody. This feature of metrical regularity, counting by syllables, displays Moore’s classical education more than it reproduces features of folksongs: in the lyrics of English and Celtic folksongs, the meter of the language is not perfectly regular; the accents count, rather than the syllables (see, for example, Jamieson’s “Sir Patrick Spence,” discussed in chapter 2 in the present book). Moore’s stanzas for “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” are written in the voice of a female lover; she asks the presumably male beloved to remember her when he is far away. Again, as Davis suggests in relation

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Figure 6 Thomas Moore, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee.” In Stevenson and Moore, Irish Melodies (London: J. Power, and Dublin: W. Power, 1808), p. 9.

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to some of Sydney Owenson’s poems, a poem of a woman’s love might be read as an allegory that personifies Ireland.27 As I shall be showing below, some of the poems in Irish Melodies evidently personify the homeland in that way; but nothing in the text of “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” motivates such an inference. Instead, the poem is written to permit and even to encourage its customers to understand it as a sentimental love-poem: the conditions under which the beloved should remember the female speaker have no political content whatsoever: “When . . . . praise thou meetest/ . . . Dearer friends caress thee;/ . . . at eve, thou rovest/ . . . as summer closes,/ . . . When . . . Autumn-leaves are dying . . . should Music . . . To thy heart appealing, / Draw one tear from thee” (9). Colonial and post-colonial critics can surely find political and cultural analogies in the poem’s language for the condition of many an Irish emigrant in the years after the Act of Union: so many wealthy and powerful Anglo-Irish had moved to London that greater glory (and greater profits) awaited poets there than in Ireland, where (according to Moore) the market for Moore’s work was “shabby.” From the viewpoint of a melancholy expatriate, Ireland’s calling upon the lover of songs to remember her might be obvious; and among Moore’s contemporaries that nationalistic subtext might have been obvious, too; but in the first Number of the Irish Melodies the poem is wrapped in signifiers of a very different kind: the label atop the poem, “AIR—Maid of the Valley, “ and the last seven lines of the poem are not about nationalism but about music itself, which is the kind of commodity that “Go Where Glory Awaits Thee” is, when it arrives on the London market in 1808. When Moore reprints the poem in 1846, with an engraving of Maclise’s illustration but with no music whatsoever (see figure 7), the visual image restores martial content to the work, showing a knight with spear, armor, and sword. The illustration also installs a conservative interpretation, suggesting that the melancholy concerns a Burkean attitude about the age of chivalry. In the first edition “Go Where Glory Awaits Thee” is followed by “War Song. Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave,” labeled as lyrics to accompany the “AIR—Molly Macalpin”: “the days of the hero are o’er” but “enough of its glory remains on each sword / To light us to victory yet!” (10). Moore’s footnote identifies the hero in question, simultaneously establishing the Irishness of the subject-matter and distancing the event from uncomfortably recent violence: “Brien Borombe, the great Monarch of Ireland, who was killed at the battle of Clontarf, in the beginning of the 11th century,

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T h o m a s M o o r e ’s I R I S H M E L O D I E S

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Figure 7 Illustration drawn by Daniel Maclise and engraved by C. G. Lewis, for Thomas Moore, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee,” in Irish Melodies (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), p. 1.

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after having defeated the Danes in twenty-five engagements” (10n.). Owenson’s note to “The Irish Harp” villainizes antique Danes rather than living English customers, though her note refers to the sixteenth century rather than the eleventh; but Moore stops short of insisting, as Owenson does, that both the narrated conflict and its sentiment, summed in the phrase “Erin go brach,” refer only to distant and “less felicitous times” than the present (Lay of an Irish Harp, 7). In contrast, in the happy days after the Act of Union, Owenson marries Lord Morgan (1812), who was the personal physician to the Prince of Wales, and years earlier Moore had dedicated a book of poems to the Prince (1800). For Owenson’s poetry in 1807 and Moore’s in 1808, the patriotic violence in Ireland is represented as a matter of some centuries in the past. Nonetheless, in contrast to Owenson’s poem, Moore’s heated rhetoric lingers on some common topics that Moore’s poem shares with patriotic journalism of the years immediately preceding the Rebellion, including slavery, chains, and blood: referring to Mononia (which Moore’s note glosses as “Munster”), Moore writes: Mononia! When Nature embellish’d the tint Of thy fields, and thy mountains so fair, Did she ever intend that a tyrant should print The footstep of Slavery there? No, Freedom, whose smile we shall never resign, Go, tell our invaders, the Danes, That ‘tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine Than to sleep but a moment in chains! Forget not our wounded companions, who stood In the day of distress by our side; While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood, They stirr’d not, but conquer’d, and died! (9–10)

In the musical score for “War Song,” as in “Go Where Glory,” Stevenson uses a chord-progression from English folk music, this time in the key of G, beginning with the major chords C D G: this song, too, could be sung to the tune of Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” but the tune that Stevenson inscribes for it begins on the subdominant (as does the American folksong, “On Top of Old Smoky”). The prosody of Moore’s lyric is again noteworthy for the regularity of its anapests: apart from four opening iambic feet (“The foot,” “No Free,” “Go tell,” “They stirr’d”), the anapests are unruffled by any rhythmic variety.

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In contrast, in the illustrated edition of 1846, “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” is not followed by a poem about a battle, but rather by “Remember Thee”; this poem did not appear at all in 1808, but Moore added to the seventh Number of Irish Melodies in 1818. In 1846, the reason for its placement after “Go Where Glory” is evident: the first poem in the volume ends “remember me,” and in the 1846 printing the second poem begins, “remember thee?” (4). Like the regularity of the anapests, this verbal tagging is a lexical and bookish technique for the presentation of the work, . Some of the common topics that Moore had used in the 1808 edition appear again in the later poem, “Remember Thee,” but here the softer rhetoric closes with language of affection, this time evidently addressed to a feminine personification of Ireland: Remember thee? Yes, while there’s life in this heart, It shall never forget thee, all lorn as thou art; More dear in thy sorrow, thy gloom, and thy showers, Than the rest of the world in their sunniest hours. Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea, I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow, But oh! could I love thee more deeply than now? No, thy chains as they rankle, thy blood as it runs, But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons— Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird’s nest, Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast.

In the first edition and likewise in the illustrated edition of 1846, the third poem is “Erin! the Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes,” which is linked to the preceding poem in both volumes by a direct address to Ireland. In 1808, the lyric is preceded by the label “AIR— Aileen Aroon,” naming a song that had been sung in productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III (in 1731) and Julius Caesar (in 1743), 28 though Moore’s version omits all drama in favor of a stationary pose amidst generalizations (see below). In the music-free edition of 1846, the first page is almost entirely pictorial, with the first six lines of the poem appearing at the bottom of the page below a large, barebreasted female personification of Erin bent over a harp, her bowed head and curving hand rhyming visually with the topmost curve of the harp’s frame. In Maclise’s design, the hemisphere of the rainbow repeats the hemisphere of the setting sun, and the large S-curve of the female body repeats the S-curve of the harp. In 1846, this

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illustration literalizes and centralizes the “breast” that concludes the preceding poem. In Moore’s text which appears alone on the page in 1808, the exercise in prosody is conspicuous, though it is masked in 1846 by two printing-decisions: the breaking of the poem into two pages, and the dominance of the nearly-full-page illustration. In eight of the twelve lines of the poem, Moore uses an initial trochee facing an iamb to produce an anapestic effect: “Erin! the tear,” “Blend like the rain-,” “Shining thro’sorr-,” “Sadd’ning thro’ pleas-,” “Weep while they rise,” “Erin! thy sil-,” “Erin! thy lang-,” “Till, like the rain” –. All of the shorter lines (trimeter and dimeter) end with iambs. The mixed meter is thus systematically arranged, with the precision of typographic form, though it mimics the looser syllabification of oral verse (e.g., folk-songs): I ERIN! The tear and the smile in thine eyes Blend like the rainbow that hangs in thy skies; Shining thro’ sorrow’s stream, Sadd’ning thro’ pleasure’s beam, Thy sons, with doubtful gleam, Weep while they rise! II Erin! thy silent tear never shall cease, Erin! thy languid smile ne’er shall increase, Till, like the rainbow’s light, Thy various tints unite, And form, in Heaven’s sight, One arch of peace!

In Irish Melodies, That “arch of peace” is followed by a poem that, in the nineteenth century and now, has been understood to refer to Robert Emmet’s execution.29 OH! BREATHE NOT HIS NAME AIR:—The Brown Maid. I OH! breathe not his name—let it sleep in the shade Where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid! Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed, As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head!

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That the lamentation is “silent” suggests the buried life of the poem: Emmet is not named, tears for him are silent, and “in secret” the rebellion subsists in “memory.” This claim about memory may endow the previous iterations of memory (“Oh! then remember me,” “Remember the glories”) with nationalistic connotations, but it is a strangely quiescent sort of politics, content with weeping and with confining the thought or the feeling “in our souls,” rather than imitating (for example) Brien the Brave.30 Perhaps the first clause— “OH! Breathe not his name”—should be understood as the voice of Moore’s prudence counseling his own rebelliousness to lie low; but the external evidence of his vigorous vocalizations for his patrons among English lords might suggest another interpretation of the burial of the Irish rebel that the poem records. To judge from its title, the next poem in the original sequence certainly sounds like a love-song: “When He Who Adores Thee”; alternatively, Kelly aptly cites Horace Twiss in the Quarterly Review for 1812, referring to the poem’s “political allusion,” and reports that “Moore would later insist that Lord Edward Fitzgerald was his subject,” though others “have assumed it was Emmet.”31 In this politicized reading of the poem, the statement about “a life that for thee was resign’d” (Irish Melodies 1808, 21) refers to Fitzgerald’s death in the rebellion of 1798 or to Emmet’s equally patriotic death in 1801. The poem refers to happy “lovers,” who “shall live / The days of thy glory to see”; “But the next dearest blessing that Heaven can give / is the pride of thus dying for thee!” For Twiss and the readers of the Quarterly Review, the poem praises Emmet (or Fitzgerald) for dying proudly for Ireland. In the parlor-parties where Moore performed the poem (to the tune of “The Fox’s Sleep”), or upon the pianoforte of the anonymous amateur musicians for whose purchase the first edition was designed, the happy lovers and the days of glory, like the title phrase, “When He Who Adores Thee,” may have been calculated to evoke a more personal drama.32 Like the “secret” reference in the immediately preceding poem, the contradictory meanings of “When He Who Adores Thee” are achieved by craft, and its possibly multiple motives are moot. “When He Who Adores Thee” has one footnote (21), and it is a remarkable one: “These words allude to a story in an old Irish 10.1057/9780230105706 - From Song to Print, Terence Hoagwood

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II But the night-dew that falls, tho’ in silence it weeps, Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps; And the tear that we shed, tho’ in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

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manuscript, which is too long and too melancholy to be inserted here.” Elsewhere, Moore cites his sources specifically enough: for example, one of his notes refers to “WALKER’S HISTORICAL MEMOIRS OF IRISH BARDS, page 134” (39) to gloss a line about the long hair of Irish men who wore it in a cut called “Coulins.” A note for “Dear Harp of My Country” (first published in the sixth Number of Irish Melodies) cites Walker and also “MISS BROOKE’S Reliques of Irish Poetry” (1846 ed., 260n.), and such citations are frequent in his annotations. In contrast, in the note to “When He Who Adores Thee,” the reference is doubly empty: the “old Irish manuscript” is not identified, and Moore does not even indicate, however summarily, what the story might be to which he refers. Even if such a story existed, it does not exist on the page, where it is exactly an example of absence. Moore installs a mysterious tale, without there being one; it is “old” and “Irish” and unspeakably moving, though it does not need to exist in order to impart its antique aura to the work. In this way, the verbal device resembles the Irish music, which is not present either—Stevenson’s scores are quite modern, and soon enough even those disappear when Moore republishes Irish Melodies without melodies of any sort. The poem that follows introduces another sort of absence: the entire poem is about what is not present, but what is said to have been “once,” though “No more” (23). Tara was legendarily the seat of Irish kings prior to the sixth century A.D., and so the absence might appear ancient, except that its lamentation here is present in 1808. The poem begins with another, subtler emptiness as well: The Harp that once, thro’ Tara’s halls, The soul of Music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled. . . . (23)

What that sentence actually asserts is not that harps that once hung on Tara’s walls made music; they emitted “The soul of Music” rather than music; and now it is “as if” the harp and, further, “that soul” has vanished. Twelve centuries ago, the “soul” of that which was not there went away. The poem then turns to the present: So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory’s thrill is o’er; And hearts, that once beat high for praise, Now feel that pulse no more! (23)

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No more to chiefs and ladies bright The Harp of Tara swells; The chord, alone, that breaks at night, Its tale of ruin tells:— Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes. . . . (23)

In contrast to some of his earlier work, including the Ossianic “Sad is the sleep of Erin” with which the present chapter begins, this poem offers no call to action or hope, but melancholy resignation, rendered charming by the antiquity of its ostensible materials and the mysterious allure of the “old Irish” story. Immediately, the tone shifts: the next poem in the sequence, “Fly Not Yet,” broaches no historical, political, or public theme whatsoever, but purely Anacreontic treatment of women and wine: the poem mentions the beauty of “maids who love the moon,” and their “soft attractions,” as well as goblets, joy, “woman’s heart and looks” which “kindle [in the] night,” until morning breaks upon “beaming eyes” that “sparkle” (31). Though Moore advertised Irish Melodies in national terms—“the design appears to me . . . truly national”33 — many of the poems, including “Fly Not Yet,” are less than that. There are indications that this switch from nationalistic to amorous topics does not result simply from Irish Melodies being a random assemblage of lyrics that Moore happened to have ready: as late as 1846, when the poems are gathered into the lavishly illustrated edition, “Fly Not Yet” also follows a nationalistic song, “Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave” (8). Themes do connect many of the songs—the importance of remembrance, the sense of “glory” (always gone), and absences of kinds innumerable; but this juxtaposition of politically or (at least) historically grounded poems with amorous effusions characterizes the entire project. “Oh! Think Not My Spirits Are Always As Light” is another song of apparently personal statement about whether the “heart-beaming smile of to-night / Will return with to-morrow to brighten my brow” (32). The poem’s positive rejoinder to the melancholy reflection that “No, life is a waste of wearisome hours” is the Anacreontic suggestion, “send round the bowl, and be happy awhile.” In this poem, however, Moore embeds a phrase that, with an interpretative stretch,

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As Owenson had done in “The Irish Harp,” Moore composes a lament for the disappearance of the old Irish instrument and its music, but, in contrast to Owenson, Moore also makes explicit the analogy between Irish music and Irish political independence:

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might refer to a larger, national sense of loss: in the second stanza, some “have wept o’er the dream they believ’d.” But the ending of that stanza returns to the rhetoric of the personal (“Love” and “Friendship”) rather than, for example, liberty and equality. Another dimension of “Oh! think Not My Spirits” reveals another sort of contradiction: sold as a song (“AIR—John O’Reilly the Active), this poem reveals its basis in the technology of writing rather than singing, in a remarkable way. In both of its twelve-line stanzas, the anapestic tetrameter is perfect, without variant feet after the occasional and conventional iambs introducing the lines, except that, in each of the symmetrical stanzas, the third foot of the fifth line is an iamb: “No, life is a waste of wearisome hours,” and “But they who have lov’d the fondest, the purest” (32). Remarkably, the only metrical variants in the poem, inside the lines, occur in the same foot of the same line of the respective stanzas. As in the metrical system of “Erin! the Tear,” here again the prosodic fact represents a sort of precision that belongs to the slow technology of writing, where the line is taken out of the flux of time so that the tinkering can be exact and repeatable. “Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin With Sorrow I See” returns to the language of Irish patriotism, though the poem is set during the reign of Henry VIII (39n.). It is a monologue of an exile: Tho’ the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me: In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam. (39)

Here again the anapestic tetrameter is perfect with one variant foot (an iamb) in the stanza, and aptly enough that variant’s abruptness marks the stanzas main theme: “In exile.” Likewise, in the second stanza, the one metrical variant (again an iamb) again marks the stanza’s central idea, which is that the exiled lovers will be “Less rude” than the English enemy who exiles them: To the gloom of some desert, or cold rocky shore, Where the eye of the stranger can haunt us no more, I will fly with my Coulin, and think the rough wind Less rude than the foes we leave frowning behind. . . .

The final stanza links the image or idea of music (the harp) with both the personal beloved and the national theme, as this poem, like

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“Oh! Think Not My Spirits,” manages the dual address to audiences of Irish patriots and love-lorn parlor parties: referring to the beloved’s “gold hair,” the speaker says that, in flight with her, he will not “dread that the cold-hearted Saxon will tear / One chord from that harp, or one lock from that hair.”34 A note accompanies “Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore,” announcing its legendary basis. In contrast to his note to “When He Who Adores Thee,” this one also specifies its source: This Ballad is founded upon the following anecdote:—“The people were inspired with such a spirit of honour, virtue, and religion, by the great example of BRIEN, and by his excellent Administration, that, as a proof of it, we are informed that a young Lady of great beauty, adorned with jewels and a costly dress, undertook a journey alone, from one end of the Kingdom to the other, with a wand only in her hand, at the top of which was a ring of exceeding great value; and such an impression had the Laws and Government of this Monarch made on the minds of all the people, that no attempt was made upon her honour, nor was she robbed of her clothes or jewels.”—WARNER’S HISTORY OF IRELAND, Vol. I, Book 10. (40n.)35

This reassuring legend serves, in its fictive way, to counter the invidious stereotype of uncivilized and violent Irish men who, in the nineteenth century, were too often portrayed in brutal terms; for example, in 1875 Julian Charles Young wrote of Moore himself that in 1809, before he married Elizabeth Dyke, Moore “accompanied her to her lodgings” and, contrary to her expressed wishes, pursued his ardor in such an extreme way that she threw herself out of a window “and fell on the pavement, bruised, mutilated, and insensible.”36 In contrast, in the comforting fable of Moore’s poem, a knight who sees the lady traveling with her gems and her gold ring on display asks her, “Lady! Dost thou not fear to stray, “So lone and lovely, thro’ this bleak way? “Are Erin’s sons so good or so cold “As not to be tempted by woman or gold?”

She replies, “Sir Knight! I feel not the least alarm; “No son of Erin will offer me harm: “For, tho’ they love woman and golden store, “Sir Knight! They love honour and virtue more!” (40)

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In the fable, Ireland’s men prove worthy of her confidence: “safety lighted her round the Green Isle,” and the poem ends in benevolence: “bless’d for ever is she who relied / Upon Erin’s honour and Erin’s pride!” It is not my intention to treat this fable as a reversed reflection of the poet’s own oft-questioned behavior, but rather to suggest that the fable’s obvious and extreme fictitiousness, with the authority of an antique anecdote, might—and perhaps ought—to call into question the reality-effect that the volume’s putative authenticity seems calculated to produce for an English market. The concluding song of the first Number of Irish Melodies closes the volume with a personal story rather than the political theme, and the story is personalized even more by Moore’s accompanying notes, which I reproduce here with the poem: The Meeting of the Watersa AIR:—The Old Head of Denis I.. There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.b Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart! II. Yet it was not that Nature had shed o’er the scene Her purest of crystal and brightest of green: ‘Twas not the soft magic of streamlet or hill; Oh! no—it was something more exquisite still:— III. ‘Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near, Who made ev’ry dear scene of enchantment more dear; And who felt how the best charms of Nature improve When we see them reflected from looks that we love. IV. Sweet Vale of Ovoca! How calm could I rest, In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best, Where the storms which we feel in this cold world should cease, And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace! a “The Meeting of the Waters” forms a part of that beautiful scenery which lies between Rathdrum and Arklow, in the county of Wicklow;

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From Song to Pr int and these lines were suggested by a visit to this romantic spot, in the summer of the year 1807. The rivers Avon and Ovoca. [Both notes are Moore’s.]

With another interpretative stretch, the “storms which we feel in this cold world” and the contrasting wish for “peace” might suggest a national theme. In the second Number of the Irish Melodies, Moore includes a note to his poem “How Oft Has the Benshee Cried,” in which he voices his newly found English patriotism: “Without losing that Irish character which it is my object to preserve throughout this Work,” he writes, “How Oft Has the Benshee Cried” refers “to the sad and ominous fatality, by which England has been deprived of so many great and good men, at a moment when she most requires all the aids of talent and integrity.”37 In the fourth Number (1811), Moore includes his more jovially patriotic poem, “The Prince’s Day,” of which his note says that the poem was written “for a fête in honour of the Prince of Wales’s Birth-day, given by my friend, Major Bryan.”38 In this poem, Moore writes, “hope shall be crown’d, and attachment rewarded” (74), while a “spirit” shines through “each suffering part” of Erin, “And now smiles at their pain, on the Prince’s Day!” (74). The apparent sarcasm also acknowledges that venal opportunism flourishes in “the Green Isle” which the Prince “loves” (74). The contradictory registers of the Irish Melodies thus include Anacreontic hedonism, professions of personal friendship and longing, and political implications which are themselves contradictory. In the “Prefatory Letter to the Marchioness Dowager of D_____” (in the third Number), Moore calls attention to the entirely different registers of feeling and subject among the songs, claiming for that variety the authority of history: “our music is the truest of all comments upon our history. The tone of defiance, succeeded by the languor of despondency—a burst of turbulence, dying away into softness—the sorrows of one moment lost in the levity of the next” (1). To manage the conflicting tones and statements amongst (and even within) the poems requires the craft of diplomacy as well as the artistry of verse: Moore’s prefatory letter, for example, claims Irish patriotism for the poems’ “touches of political feeling,” but, to allay suspicions of “dangerous politics,” he denies that “every effort for Ireland” is necessarily “hostility toward England” (3). To produce Anacreontic hedonism and—sometimes in the same poem—the vigorous rhetoric of political defiance, while maintaining a prudent cover-story of loyalty, is surely among the rhetorical or even poetic feats of the Irish Melodies.

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Yes, Erin, thine alone the fame,— Or, if thy bard have shared the crown, From thee the borrow’d glory came, And at thy feet is now laid down. Enough, if Freedom still inspire His latest song, and still there be, As evening closes round his lyre, One ray upon its chords from thee. (1846 ed., 216)

The collected edition of Irish Melodies in 1846 ends with “Lay His Sword By His Side,” which mourns a slain patriot: Should some alien, unworthy such weapon to wield, Dare to touch thee, my own gallant sword, Then rest in thy sheath, like a talisman seal’d, Or return to the grave of thy chainless lord. But, if grasp’d by a hand that hath learn’d the proud use Of a falchion, like thee, on the battle plain,— Then, at Liberty’s summons, like lightning let loose, Leap forth from thy dark sheath again! (218)

In contrast, the concluding poem in 1808 (“The Meeting of the Waters”) indicates that Irish Melodies is a work of emotions about personal relationships; the lament for Stevenson in 1834 indicates that it is a work about music or even a work of music; and the final poem of 1846 indicates that it is about a defeated freedom-fighter and a cause that might rise again. Collectively, the multiple versions multiply the bases of appeal. The first eight lines of “Oh! Blame Not the Bard” (first published in the third Number of Irish Melodies) apologize openly for the poet’s retreat into poetry of personal pleasure: OH! blame not the bard, if he fly to the bowers, Where Pleasure lies, carelessly smiling at Fame; He was born for much more, and, in happier hours, His soul might have burn’d with a holier flame. The string, that now languishes loose o’er the lyre, Might have bent a proud bow to the warrior’s dart; And the lip, which now breathes but the song of desire, Might have pour’d the full tide of a patriot’s heart!

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These disparate frames of reference persist throughout the entire ten-volume project. The tenth Number (1834) includes a patriotic lament for the death of Stevenson, in “Silence Is In Our Festal Halls”:

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We may suppose this apology to have been uttered by one of those wandering bards, whom Spenser so severely, and perhaps truly, describes in his State of Ireland, and whose poems, he tells us, “were sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their natural device, which gave good grace and comeliness unto them, the which it is great pity to see abused to the gracing of wickedness and vice, which, with good usage, would serve to adorn and beautify virtue.”

The second stanza of “Oh! Blame Not the Bard” indicates that the reason for the hedonistic retreat is the apparently final defeat of the good cause, as Ireland dies: But alas! for his country—her pride is gone by, And that spirit is broken, which never would bend; O’er the ruin her children in secret must sigh, For ‘tis treason to love her, and death to defend. Unpriz’d are her sons, till they’ve learn’d to betray; Undistinguish’d they live, if they shame not their sires; And the torch, that would light them thro’ dignity’s way, Must be caught from the pile, where their country expires!

At this point, despair is succeeded by hope, by means of counterfactual (and even anti-factual) inspirations; since we do not, and cannot, then let us imagine: Then blame not the bard, if, in pleasure’s soft dream, He should try to forget what he never can heal; Oh! give but a hope—let a vista but gleam Through the gloom of his country, and mark how he’ll feel! That instant, his heart at her shrine would lay down Every passion it nurs’d, every bliss it ador’d; While the myrtle, now idly entwin’d with his crown, Like the wreath of Harmodius, should cover his sword.

However, the poem does not end in that paean to a generalized hope itself, unmoored in realities. Instead, it finds its greatest confidence, solace, and appeal in reference to a reality that is self-evidently present in the hands of the reader: the Irish Melodies themselves.

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In a note to the title of that poem, Moore writes as if the poem were about the antithesis of moral virtue and vice, rather than rebellion and battle:

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But, tho’ glory be gone, and tho’ hope fade away, Thy name, loved Erin! shall live in his songs, Not ev’n in the hour, when his heart is most gay, Will he lose the remembrance of thee and thy wrongs! The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plains; The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o’er the deep, Till thy masters themselves, as they rivet thy chains, Shall pause at the song of their captive, and weep!39

Though the colonizer is relentless and irresistible, and though the Irish may be captives in perpetuity, at least they can make sad songs that will make the conqueror weep; and the gay songs can keep our minds off our intractably actual problems. This may seem like thin consolation on offer, and even thinner rebellion, but the appeal helps to explain the fiction that these poems are music and the subsidiary fiction that Stevenson’s music is somehow ancient and Irish. Moore’s poems about music, like his poems that claim to be music, often work in that same way. For example, “Dear Harp of My Country” (the last poem in the sixth Number of Irish Melodies) states that patriotism and fighting are over, absent; no longer can such things be attributed to the speaker or his performances. Though love, gladness, and “wild sweetness” once characterized “the warm lay” he played, too often only sadness has come from singing about Ireland’s struggles, and he gives up: DEAR Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee, The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long, When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee, And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song! The warm lay of love and the light note of gladness Have waken’d thy fondest, thy liveliest thrill; But, so oft hast thou echoed the deep sigh of sadness, That ev’n in thy mirth it will steal from thee still. Dear Harp of my country, farewell to thy numbers, This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine! Go, sleep, with the sunshine of Fame on thy slumbers, Till touch’d by some hand less unworthy than mine. If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover, Have throbb’d at our lay, ‘tis thy glory alone; I was but on the wind, passing heedlessly over, And all the wild sweetness I wak’d was thy own.40

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Even so, the “Island Harp” and its supposedly attendant “thrill” are verbally present in the poem that openly denies them. The first poem in the seventh Number—and therefore the poem that follows “Dear Harp of My Country” in the first published sequence—is “My Gentle Harp,” likewise reflexive about the poetry, likewise pretending that the poetry is harp-music, and likewise stating despair for the cause of freedom while simultaneously referring to “pleasure’s thrill.” The poem begins, “My gentle Harp” has “spoken” of “slavery”; once “An hour of peace and triumph came”; but “even then, while Peace was singing,” only tears came to the harp of Erin. Like “Oh! Blame Not the Bard,” “My Gentle Harp” questions the hedonic impulse of music: “who can ask for notes of pleasure” when Erin is hopeless? But, again like the earlier poem, this one voices a surrender of the cause of freedom. The speaker addresses his “drooping Harp”: how shall I, who love, who bless thee, Invoke thy breath for Freedom’s strains, When ev’n the wreaths in which I dress thee, Are sadly mix’d—half flowers, half chains? [6th ed. (1825), 147–48.]

The poem that began with a blaming of the pleasure-principle, represented as an unworthy goal, thus passes through a melancholy recognition of defeat, to emerge with a celebration of the very pleasure-principle that it began by denying: But come,—if yet thy frame can borrow One breath of joy—oh, breathe for me, And show the world, in chains and sorrow, How sweet thy music still can be; How gaily, ev’n mid gloom surrounding, Thou yet canst wake at pleasure’s thrill— Like MEMNON’S broken image sounding, ‘Mid desolation tuneful still!

Irish Melodies uses the metaphor of the harp to represent poetry, even while the image of the harp helps to package the volumes for sale to amateur musicians. Literalized on title-pages from 1808 onward, as likewise in Bunting’s 1796 volume, Owenson’s 1807 volume, and many others’ books in the genre of “national songs,” the image appears in most pages of the 1846 edition illustrated by Maclise. In its metapoetic function as a symbol of Ireland, as opposed to its function as an advertisement for actual music, the harp has contradictory

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functions: joy, as we have seen, and the silence of despair, and thenagain pleasure. In one of the most popular of Irish Melodies among folksingers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, “The Minstrel Boy” (first published in the fifth Number), the harp’s music is not offered as a pleasing alternative to political despair; instead, in “The Minstrel Boy” the linkage of harp and country is so strong that to give up the cause of the country is also to give up the harp entirely. Here, there is no resort to personal pleasure as compensation for defeat, but instead death is the only alternative to freedom: The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you’ll find him; His father’s sword he has girded on, And his wild harp slung behind him.— “Land of song!” said the warrior-bard, “Tho’ all the world betrays thee, One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee!” The Minstrel fell!—but the foeman’s chain Could not bring his proud soul under; The harp he lov’d ne’er spoke again, For he tore its chords asunder; And said, “No chains shall sully thee, Thou soul of love and bravery! Thy songs were made for the pure and free, They shall never sound in slavery!” [6th ed. (1825), 105.]

In contrast to Owenson’s poem of the same title, which has personal reference to Thomas Dermody, lamenting his death by dissolute habits rather than any national issues, Moore’s poem “The Minstrel Boy” refuses the appeal of pleasure if its price must be the suffering of chains. As we have seen, however, the “Harp” poems that follow “The Minstrel Boy” reentangle the flowers with the chains. Financial matters are also braided amongst the flowers and the chains, and to such an extent that Jones concludes that “the faults of the Irish Melodies are patent: they are too facile, too shallow—to sum it up in a word—too commercial”41 Jones is surely right about the commercial character of the project, though shortly I will be suggesting that the poems in Irish Melodies achieve both complexity and depths of meaning precisely by way of their contradictions. In 1808, Moore collected a total of ₤50 for the first two Numbers of Irish Melodies (Kelly 174), but in 1811 that project became much more profitable to him: he settled with the brothers Power upon

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a payment of ₤500 per year for his writing of songs, apparently to include all of his poetry connected with music—perhaps chiefly the Irish Melodies (Jones 104; Kelly 220), but the brothers Power deducted from that sum the ₤50 per year that they paid Stevenson for his musical arrangements.42 Moore’s concern about money did not abate. When he was revising the verbal text of Irish Melodies in December 1818, because James Power planned “to stereotype the whole Work,” he also received from Longman “a Bond to Miss Anastasia Moore’ [his daughter] for £515—the dear Mother [Moore’s wife, Bessy] will be so glad to get this.”43 Moore writes of his concern about increasing the distribution of his work (arranging, for example, an American edition of his Anacreon); and he expresses interest in the ornamental packaging of his work (commissioning woodcuts, for instance, for the American edition of Anacreon). He monitored published reviews of Irish Melodies, recording in his journal his distress about Leigh Hunt’s negative review in The Examiner (132) and recording his satisfaction that the Quarterly Musical Review had published two articles “most warmly laudatory, on my National Melodies & Seventh Number of the Irish” (131–32). After arranging in 1818 for the joint publication of his works by James Power in Dublin and Longmans in London, Moore engaged in sometimes acrimonious negotiations, as, for example, dispute about whether Moore or Power should pay the £50 fee to the composer and arranger, Sir Henry Bishop, for the eighth number of Irish Melodies (134).44 Within this frame of financial concerns, Moore’s 1810 “Prefatory Letter to the Marchioness Dowager of D——,” first published in the third Number of Irish Melodies and later and frequently reprinted as the “Letter on Music,” takes on additional meanings. He begins by flattering the Marchioness, one among many Anglo-Irish aristrocrats who relocated to England: “Though your Ladyship has been so long absent from Ireland, I know that you remember it well and warmly—that you have not allowed the charm of English society, like the taste of the lotus, to produce oblivion of your country” ([1]). That account might refer equally to his own opportunistic relocation to London, or perhaps Sydney Owenson’s similar and lucrative expatriation. Moore defends Stevenson’s musical compositions, admitting that their scale (including the “interval of the fourth”), the use of counterpoint, and the use of harmonies, did not appear early Irish music (2). He argues that modern music is after all superior to the music of Irish antiquity (1–2), and admits (or boasts) of “profiting . . . by the improvements of the moderns” (3). He also

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defines his market: “there is no one who deprecates, more sincerely than I do, any appeal to the passions of an ignorant and angry multitude”; he writes that Irish Melodies has “been intended to circulate” among higher orders of customers: “it is found upon the piano-fortes of the rich, and the educated” (4). For its mixture of the rhetorics of personal love and political anger, brightness and darkness braided with sufficient diplomacy to appeal to the English audience that it is calculated to vilify, “The Irish Peasant to His Mistress. Through Grief and Through Danger” (from the third Number) warrants quotation in full, culminating as it does in a reflexive use of the metaphor of “print.” Moore’s poem allegorizes the poet’s ambivalence about beloved Ireland and lucrative England in the familiar metaphor of a loved woman and her rival: I. Through grief and through danger, thy smile hath cheer’d my way, Till hope seem’d to bud from each thorn, that round me lay; The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn’d, Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turn’d; Oh! slave as I was, in thy arms my spirit felt free, And bless’d ev’n the sorrows, that made me more dear to thee. II. Thy rival was honour’d , while thou wert wrong’d and scorn’d, Thy crown was of briars, while gold her brows adorn’d; She woo’d me to temples, while thou lay’st hid in caves, Yet, cold in the earth, at thy feet I would rather be, Than wed what I lov’d not, or turn one thought from thee. Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas! were slaves, III. They slander thee sorely, who say thy vows are frail— Hadst thou been a false one, thy cheek had look’d less pale! They say too, so long thou hast worn those lingering chains, That deep in thy heart they have printed their servile stains— Oh! do not believe them—no chain could that soul subdue, Where shineth thy spirit, there liberty shineth too!

A note to the last line of the poem defuses the “dangerous politics” of “liberty”: “ ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ St. Paul, 2 Corinthians, iii.17.” “The Irish Peasant to His Mistress” may be a love-song on “the pianofortes of the rich,” but its language of slavery and freedom are all the while clear enough, though that political conflict is dissolved in the duplicity of the

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term “spirit,” once a favorite among the revolutionary French but comfortable enough, in its Pauline environment, for piety and for the parlor. “Sublime Was the Warning” first appeared in the second Number (1808), where its topical references are explicit and clear: “Liberty spoke,/And grand was the moment when Spaniards awoke” and arose to seek “revenge from the Conqueror’s chain!” (97). While Liberty adds “to your garland the Olive of Spain,” Moore writes, “Nor, oh! be the Shamrock of Erin forgot.” The dated events are obvious: in 1808 Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne; Spaniards revolted, Britain joined the rebel Spaniards in their fight against the French, and the Peninsular War went on for five years. Moore’s poem appeared within the same year, and in it Moore aligns the cause of Erin and Spain:45 . . . ye men of Iberia! Our cause is the same— And, oh! may his tomb want a tear and a name, Who would ask for a nobler, a holier death, Than to turn his last sigh into Victory’s breath For the Shamrock of Erin and Olive of Spain! (97)

The politics of “Liberty” are complicated by the fact that the Peninsular War was a British military campaign: And forgive even Albion, while, blushing, she draws, Like a truant, her sword, in the long-slighted cause Of the Shamrock of Erin and Olive of Spain!

Though Britain is blamed for truancy in the fight, the poem calls that nation’s fight against France noble and holy though it leads to death (stanza 2). The irony of a rebel of 1798 praising the British army in this way is palpable, and the contradiction appears in compressed form in the multiple references of the word “patriot” in the poem’s final stanza, where the word designates British, Irish, and Spanish patriotism as if they were the same: God prosper the cause!—Oh! it cannot but thrive, While the pulse of one patriot heart is alive, Its devotion to feel and its rights to maintain: Then how sainted by sorrow its martyrs will die! (97)

The arts of contradiction are not only political in their reference, or lack of reference: in the illustrated edition of 1846, thirty-eight

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Figure 8 First page of Thomas Moore’s “Sublime Was the Warning,” in Irish Melodies (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), p. 41. Illustration drawn by Daniel Maclise and engraved by C. G. Lewis.

years after the current events lost their currency, the poem is wrapped in a different register altogether. The corporate production of the poem becomes even more evident: Maclise’s drawing, engraved by C. G. Lewis, wraps the poetry in eros: a Cupid with carefully visible

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genitalia, released from shackles on hand and foot, produces an incongruously Anacreontic tone (see figure 8). Over time, in Irish Melodies the contradiction of political anger by personal affections grows more stark, and is more tightly compressed within a single page, but that contradiction was part of the project from the beginning. Likewise, the early Numbers’ toggling between the rhetoric of slavery and the thrills of pleasure is compressed in the later volume, not only within one bound book but also, often, within one page, as in “Sublime Was the Warning.” By 1846 when the illustrations replace any pretense of musical accompaniment, subsidiary contractions, even within the poem’s political reference, are more easily apparent than they were in 1808 when the book’s purchaser lingered over each single page to practice Stevenson’s score: whether the English are vile conquerors or noble freedom-fighters is a matter of which page, or even which stanza, one is reading at the moment. But the oppositions and polarities are more numerous than even that observation suggests. From the beginning (in 1808), and in many of the poems, an imaginary past of glory is offered in melancholy antithesis to the fallen, present condition of Ireland: one example is “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old” (in the Second Number, 1808) which refers to Malachi, a victorious Irish monarch in the tenth century who repeatedly defeated Danes; such glories are “long-faded” (84). That binary opposition of present and past is sometimes aligned with the binary of sex and politics, or the binary of sex and death. In “Come, Send Round the Wine,” in the same Number, the first stanza voices an anti-philosophical philosophy: “leave points of belief/To simpleton sages and reasoning fools,” preferring “the bright bowl” of wine to “the dust of the schools” (92); the second stanza shifts the register to warfare, referring to a brave soldier whose military allegiance is more important than any agreement in creeds (92). It is not important whether one’s soldier-comrade “kneel not before the same altar with me,” and the speaker would not fly “From the heretic girl of my soul” (92); thus, the poem that rises from celebrating one’s delight in wine to honoring national warfare finds its way back to the personal and specifically amorous theme at its end. In 1846, Maclise’s illustration atop this poem shows three naked children joining hands over a feast of grapes on a toadstool table beneath a tree. The commercially created contradictions are clear: in 1808 Irish Melodies is a book of musical pieces by Stevenson; from 1821 onward it is sometimes a book of songs, but sometimes a book of poems by Moore with no music; and in 1846 is a collection of engravings

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atop verses, in emblematic form. In 1808, the published context is Bunting’s book of harp music; in Moore’s Poetical Works in 1841 its context is Moore’s corpus of other poems. England is Erin’s “enemy” and conqueror in 1797 and sometimes in 1808, but England is also the book’s solicited audience. That fact is legible in the title page (“J. Power’s Music Ware-House 34 Strand”), and it is legible in the means of production as well: the engraved plates of music were made in London and shipped to Dublin for the Irish publication of the Melodies.46 From this point of view—the consideration of the collection’s achievements in terms of the arts of contradiction—the musical anomalies are harmonious with the textual and bibliographical anomalies of the Irish Melodies. The apparent untruth of the claim that the diatonic and harmonized melodies (in two, or three, or sometimes four parts) are old Irish folk songs (which were pentatonic) paradoxically matches the illusion that the Irish Melodies in Longman’s entirely textual volumes are “melodies” of any sort at all, or the later illusion that the lavishly illustrated volume (likewise without a note of music in it) is a collection of songs. The Irish Melodies do not raise folksong to an art-form, but over a productive history of almost forty years they raise the simulation of song to a complex and composite art.

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“It G av e Th e m Vi rt u es No t Th e i r O w n”: B y ron’s HE BR E W ME LODI E S I The anonymous “Essay on Song Writing” in the 1820 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine identifies Byron’s Hebrew Melodies as pseudosongs: “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies . . . are neither Hebrew nor melodies.” They are, however, imitations of Moore’s Irish Melodies, with which the “Essay on Song Writing” compares them invidiously.1 Irish Melodies was an imitation of earlier books of national melodies, including the volumes published by George Thomson and entitled A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs.2 This imitative theme characterizes the early reviews: a more positive response in the British Critic indicates that “these songs . . . stand a fair chance of rivaling in popularity the compositions of his friend Moore, of which indeed they often remind us.”3 The Critical Review says that among contemporaries only Moore equals or excels Byron in the writing of lyrics.4 The relationship of Byron’s work with Moore’s has several dimensions.5 Before the composition of the Hebrew Melodies, Byron had sent Moore verses (“There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away”), saying that “I flatter myself they will pass as an imitation of your style.” Byron says that he “wrote them with a view to your setting them, and as a present to Power, if he would accept the words, and you did not think yourself degraded, for once in a way, by marrying them to music.”6 Moore had not “married” his own Irish Melodies to music, but instead his publishers, James Power and William Power,

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Chapter 5

From Song to Pr int

had hired Sir John Stevenson to do so; and those same publishers hired Stevenson again to compose music for the verses that Byron sent to Moore with that letter. Imitativeness and more generally the theme of inauthenticity characterize not only the early reviews, but also the best twentieth-century accounts of Hebrew Melodies: much of what Thomas L. Ashton says in his excellent commentary on Hebrew Melodies could be said equally aptly of Moore’s Irish Melodies: first, these poems “are not melodies” (ix); in Moore’s case and then Byron’s, the poets write verses and someone else composes music. As in the earlier case of Stevenson’s compositions for Irish Melodies, the music has a faux ethnic and historical character: “not all of the melodies [furnished by the composer Isaac Nathan] were ancient” (ix). Even a glance at Isaac Nathan’s scores makes it obvious that they are not ancient compositions:7 In Nathan’s composition for “Herod’s Lament for Mariamne,” for example, which “has no known source” in any traditional music,8 the vocalist is twice asked to sing ten separate notes in one measure of 2/4 time. In the score for “It Is the Hour,” Nathan calls for ten different notes in the space of one quarter-note. Nathan’s score for “Bright Be the Place of Thy Soul” asks the vocalist to sing twenty-two different notes in one measure of 4/4.9 While improvisation and ornamentation are common in cantors’ performances in synagogues, particularly in Eastern Europe, most of the traditional material consists of simple melodies, especially in Western European synagogues. Instead, Nathan’s compositions present crowded and sometimes extremely ornamental phrases as the melodies, perhaps imitating cantors’ improvisation as Burwick and Douglass suggest,10 but not certainly reproducing the simplicity of the traditional melodies.11 Throughout, Nathan imitates and exaggerates the styles of Haydn, Purcell, and Handel, as commentators have long pointed out.12 Caroline Franklin observes rightly that “the poetry provided the idealization of archaic, ‘authentic’ culture between the gilt-engraved covers of a luxury commodity of genteel literature.”13 Consistently with the tradition of pseudo-songs, Byron’s poems feign both antiquity and musicality. The publication history of Hebrew Melodies also imitates that of Irish Melodies, but in fast-forward: Irish Melodies appeared first with an engraved musical score (1808); then it appeared separately as a collection of poems (1821); and then it was included as a sequence of poems in a collected edition of Moore’s works (1841). So too in April 1815 Nathan published Hebrew Melodies with an engraved score, in a format imitating both the format of the early Irish Melodies and

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Thomson’s Select Collection.14 Then Hebrew Melodies appeared in separate book form as a collection of poems with no music;15 and then they appeared as a sequence of poems in collections of Byron’s poetical works.16 This change in the format of publication indicates the non-musical character of the poems, while the title-pages continue to announce “melodies” in the absence of melodies: as Tom Mole rightly observes, Murray’s publication of Hebrew Melodies “in a format that matched the rest of Byron’s publications helped to accommodate it in Byron’s oeuvre, and this process was furthered by Murray’s plans for collected editions.”17 Murray understood that Byron’s work (albeit entitled Hebrew Melodies) was literary and not musical in its form or in its method of production: “it is not precisely the same thing to have music made to ones poems and to write poetry for Music.”18 During a visit to Sir Walter Scott in 1825, Moore reported that “Lord Byron knew nothing of music.”19 The history of his writing the poems for Hebrew Melodies makes clear how little Byron’s writing had to do with actual music. On September 15, 1814, Byron’s friend Douglas Kinnaird wrote to Byron, saying that Nathan, a composer and Kinnaird’s friend, is about to publish some Hebrew Melodies as they are call’d.—They are the very identical religious airs sung by the Jews, ‘ere our blessed Lord & Saviour came into the world to be the cause of the persecution of these bearded men.—He very properly concludes that, if you would give him a few lines (if only for one air) the sale of his work would be Secur’d & his pocket enrich’d.

Kinnaird informs Byron that Nathan had “already set to a very beautiful piece of composition those six lines in Lara beginning with ‘Night Wanes.’ ”20 In June 1814, Nathan himself had written twice to Byron, asking for verses to print with Nathan’s melodies. Apparently Byron did not reply to Nathan until, in September, Kinnaird asked him to do so. When Byron did send lyrics to Nathan, “these were the poems that Byron had been at work on at various times in the summer and autumn of 1814,” including “Sun of the Sleepless!” (Ashton 17). “It is the Hour,” published in Hebrew Melodies, was actually the first stanza of Byron’s tale, Parisina; Byron did not even revise it when he sent the verse to Nathan to be printed as if it were a song. Byron had previously written (but not yet published) the poem “Francisca”: this poem too he sends to Nathan for the Hebrew Melodies, but he also used it (revised) as the second stanza of Parisina.21 Other supposedly

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Hebrew melodies that were written before Nathan’s correspondence and with no musical or Hebrew content whatsoever include “I Speak Not—I Trace Not—I Breathe Not” and “She Walks in Beauty”; Ashton suggests that “I Saw Thee Weep” was written in 1813 or early 1814, before Byron conceived of any such project as Hebrew Melodies.22 Then, in the autumn of 1814 and winter 1814–15, Byron wrote the other poems that were subsequently to be printed by Nathan.23 Murray published an edition of Hebrew Melodies in May 1815 and included the sequence in two collected editions of Byron’s poetry in 1815. Murray, however, never published “Francisca” as a Hebrew Melody. He never published “I Speak Not—I Trace Not—I Breathe Not” at all. Nathan did not publish it until 1829 (in Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron); later, “I Speak Not” appeared in what McGann calls “a slightly different version” included by Thomas Moore in the first volume of his Life of Byron (1830).24 As Ashton observes, “ready-made lyrics found their way into the Hebrew Melodies.”25 The last of the poems that Byron gave to Nathan, “Bright be the place of thy soul,” had been published by Leigh Hunt in The Examiner (June 11, 1815); then Nathan published it as a separate song sheet; and then Murray published it in Byron’s Poems (1816). Because the contents of early editions of Hebrew Melodies vary (and so do recent editions including Ashton’s and McGann’s), there is not one book entitled Hebrew Melodies that consists of authoritative or definitive contents, but only a possible collation of different tables of contents. All of the editions include overlap with other books of poetry by Byron which have no pretence of musical composition.26 Fictions and falsehoods abound among the different editions: for example, Nathan’s First Number (1815) and Second Number (1816) both indicate on their title-pages that the “symphonies & accompaniments” are composed by “I: Braham & I: Nathan.” Murray’s first edition of Hebrew Melodies reproduces that fiction, indicating in an announcement on a leaf following the title-page that “the subsequent poems were written at the request of the author’s friend, the Hon. D. Kinnaird, for a Selection of Hebrew Melodies, and have been published, with the music, arranged, by Mr. BR AHAM and Mr. NATHAN.” However, in Nathan’s “New Edition” of 1829, published with Fugitive Pieces, he indicates that his Hebrew Melodies had been “harmonized, corrected, revised, and entirely arranged by myself”; Nathan had “consented” to give Braham an “equal share in the publication” in 1815 in exchange for “having [Byron’s] verses sung by the greatest vocalist of the day,” though Braham did not

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fulfill his engagement to arrange any music for the project (Fugitive Pieces, viii). Burwick and Douglass write that John Braham’s “name was signed to all the songs, though he wrote none.”27 Sheila Spector observes that “the name of John Braham, who did not work on the songs, was placed on the title page to increase sales.”28 Nathan’s preface to the “New Edition” 1829 refers to “the musical arrangement of the present edition” (vii) though there is no music of any sort in the volume; Fugitive Pieces reprints (without acknowledgment) matter from Nathan’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Numbers 1–4 (1824–29), which did include the musical arrangements. Whether Braham helped with the musical arrangements in 1815 and then Nathan dispensed with Braham’s contributions, or, rather, Braham never arranged anything (as Nathan claims in 1829), other fictions enter the narrative as well, from the beginning. In Nathan’s first edition (1815), a short preface signed by “I. Braham and I. Nathan” appears: The title under which this work appears before the Public, requires that a few words should be said in explanation of what are the pretensions of the music. “The HEBREW MELODIES” are a Selection from the favourite Airs which are still sung in the religious Ceremonies of the Jews. Some of these have, in common with all their Sacred Airs, been preserved by memory and tradition alone, without the assistance of written characters. Their age and originality, therefore, must be left to conjecture. But the latitude given to the taste and genius of their performers has been the means of engrafting on the original Melodies a certain wildness and pathos, which have at length become the chief characteristic of the Sacred songs of the Jews. Of this feature it has been endeavoured to preserve as much as was consistent with the rythm [sic] of written Music, and the adaptation of the Words. Of the Poetry it is necessary to speak, in order thus publicly to acknowledge the kindness with which LORD BYRON has condescended to furnish the most valuable part of the Work. It has been our endeavour to select such Melodies as would best suit the style and sentiment of the Poetry. I. Braham. I. Nathan. LONDON, April, 1815.

However, that preface was not written by Braham and Nathan, but rather by Douglas Kinnaird, 29 who produced it to replace the preface

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originally written for the volume by Robert Harding Evans: Kinnaird was justifiably skeptical about Evans’s claim that the “Melodies are justly entitled to the originality they claim.”30 Kinnaird’s more cautious preface treats the putative antiquity and originality of the melodies as “conjecture.” However, by 1829 Nathan and Kinnaird had so fallen out that, in his new edition, Nathan refers to Kinnaird in these strange terms: An officious, meddling, half-witted, coxcomical personage, whose incontrovertible good opinion of his own ability, (as a critic in particular) joined to no trifling share of self possession, with more than common stock of impudence, encouraged him to believe that his exquisite society would be agreeable to Lord Byron. . . . Lord Byron did him the honor to be amused at his folly, and occasionally borrow his money . . . This man of lucre, . . . took every opportunity of publishing to the world his intimacy and influence with his Lordship, and succeeded in establishing the rumour, that he was the channel through which I became introduced to the notice of Lord Byron. I suffered the public, (by particular desire) to be deceived. (Nathan, Fugitive Pieces, 91)

Even apart from the question of the antiquity or authenticity of the melodies, and apart from the fact that Byron’s own letters indicate that Kinnaird was indeed “the channel through which [Nathan] became introduced to the notice of Lord Byron,” Nathan’s professed willingness to deceive the public might lead careful readers to keep an open mind about the veracity of some of his published representations. In what is still one of the most useful studies of Hebrew Melodies, Joseph Slater characterizes the composition of the Hebrew Melodies: The writing of the songs was for the most part a work of genuine collaboration in which Byron produced verses to the measure of the original melodies and Nathan made the fittings and added the ornamental symphonies and accompaniments. . . . generally Nathan would play the melodies for his Lordship and ask “to be favored with so many lines pathetic, some playful, others martial, &c.” . . . Occasionally . . . Byron would compose the lines while Nathan waited; more often he would consult with him on a later visit “regarding the style and metre of his stanzas.” (Slater, 80–81)

Slater’s source for those claims and quotations is Nathan’s Fugitive Pieces. Nathan’s account in 1829, which Slater repeats, is not in accord with the facts that Ashton mentions, showing that previously written poems were used in Hebrew Melodies. Furthermore, Nathan’s account contradicts the preface that he signed and published in 1815.31

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Again, as the anonymous “Essay on Song Writing” suggests, one fiction about Hebrew Melodies is the claim that they are songs, and another is the suggestion that these are poems about Jews and Judaism. Correctly, Ashton refers to “the lack of even a vague reference to a Jewish theme” (23) in several of the poems.32 Commenting on “Oh! Snatch’d Away in Beauty’s Bloom,” Nathan writes that “I once enquired in what manner [the poem’s lines] might refer to any scriptural subject” (Fugitive Pieces, 30). The opening stanza of Parisina has nothing to do with Jewish subjects, and neither does “Francisca” or “She Walks in Beauty.” Slater writes that “pious persons who bought the Hebrew Melodies in the expectation of finding sacred poetry by Lord Byron found instead a book almost as secular as The Bride of Abydos.” Slater tallies the poems in this way: “nine of the poems are Biblical in subject but Byronic in treatment; two are love songs; five are reflective lyrics, neither Jewish nor Christian; and five are expressions of what might be called proto-Zionism.”33 In Byron’s poems even the biblical references are about “nationalism rather than religion” (89).34 One of the Hebrew Melodies, “Magdalen,” is vividly anti-Semitic: in it, Jews are scornful, malevolent, doomed, unreclaimed, hating and hated. Apparently written on April 18, 1814,35 the poem blames the execution of Jesus Christ on Jews—“Israel’s swarthy race”—whom the poem represents as having “Stamped on each brow an idiot hatred.” Ashton observes that “Good Friday (8 April) and Napoleon’s abdication (11 April) came one after the other in 1814, and their concurrence perhaps occasioned these lines”36 McGann agrees, suggesting that Jesus in relation to the Jews represents Napoleon in relation to Europe.37 The vehicles of the Hebrew Melodies do have tenors in the Byronic world rather than the biblical one. Referring to those among the poems in Hebrew Melodies that refer to biblical characters and episodes, McGann suggests that Herod, like other characters from the Old Testament, furnishes Byron with “a veiled figura of the Prince Regent”38 In the readings of individual poems that follow, I will suggest, too, that Byron’s poems not only use figurae for political personages and events, but also that the poems sometimes make the activity of figuration itself a hermeneutic subject of the poems.

II “She Walks in Beauty” is the first poem in Nathan 1815 and then in Murray 1815.39 If Byron’s lyrics satirize normal Romantic writing, offering parodic critiques of the Romantic criterion of sincerity,40 then this poem is surrounded by suitable ironies whether Nathan 10.1057/9780230105706 - From Song to Print, Terence Hoagwood

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intended them or not.41 First is the obvious irony of Nathan (and then Murray) beginning Hebrew Melodies with a poem that has nothing to do with Hebrew subject matter. In Murray 1815, the poem appears immediately under the book’s title, Hebrew Melodies, in large capitals. Further, in the engraved score, Nathan prints the first verse twice, with two different tunes (1–2). On the following (typographical) page he places all three stanzas without music, adding a note about the second score for “She Walks in Beauty”: It may be proper to observe, that this Melody does not differ essentially from the preceding, but as both are sung in different Synagogues, and it is difficult to decide upon their respective claims to originality, we have taken the liberty of publishing them separately. (3)

On June 30, 1814, Nathan had written to Byron that he had “with great trouble selected a considerable number of very beautiful Hebrew melodies of undoubted antiquity.”42 What is “undoubted” in Nathan’s letter is “difficult to decide” in Nathan’s note to the first poem in the collection. Ironies of “She Walks in Beauty” are compounded outside the text of the poem and of the book: biographical imputations characterize commentaries on the poem, perhaps because, as McGann has said of Byron’s lyrics, “Lord Byron’s ‘personal life’ is on one hand a fever of passionate intensities, and on the other a cold set of representations: at once a life and a reflection, a self and a text”; and “ ’the real Lord Byron’ becomes a figural form in the poetry.”43 Leslie Marchand identifies the subject of “She Walks in Beauty” as “his cousin Mrs. Wilmot in a spangled dress” (BLJ 4: 97n.). Marchand notes that James Wedderburn Webster wrote a note on a letter by Byron, dated June 11, 1814, indicating that Webster had taken Byron to a party at Lady Sitwell’s house, where he saw Mrs. Wilmot; Webster writes that, at home after the party, Byron drank brandy in a toast to her and, on the following day, wrote “She Walks in Beauty” about her (BLJ 4: 124). Marchand identifies Mrs.Wilmot as the woman (later Lady Dacre) who wrote a play, Ian, that was produced at Drury Lane with an epilogue by Moore. McGann indicates that this identification is incorrect, confusing Byron’s cousin Anne Wilmot with Barbarina Ogle, later Lady Dacre, apparently because Lady Dacre’s first husband was Valentine Wilmot. McGann records that the confusion of these different women is recurrent in studies of Byron and of the poem.44 Confusion about the biographical fiction is multiplied by Nathan, who reports “many conjectures” about the poem: “It is most probable,” Nathan writes, that the poem is about Byron’s half-sister,

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Augusta Leigh: “This opinion is much strengthened, by the anxiety he betrayed whenever the composition was executed in her presence.” Nathan writes of Byron’s “fervent attachment” to his “beautiful” sister (Fugitive Pieces, 3). Nathan goes on to develop a Byron-and-Augusta-theme in his editions of Hebrew Melodies that does not appear in Murray’s editions. “Francisca,” a revised form of a stanza from Parisina, appears only in Nathan’s editions of Hebrew Melodies. In his prefatory note to Parisina, Byron calls attention to the poem’s possibly scandalous content: “I am aware, that in modern times the delicacy or fastidiousness of the reader may deem such subjects unfit for the purposes of poetry” (Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 358). Byron writes that his poem is based on an incident recorded in Gibbon’s Antiquities of the House of Brunswick: “Under the reign of Nicholas III.,” Gibbon writes, “Ferrara was polluted with a domestic tragedy. By the testimony of an attendant, and his own observation, the Marquis of Este discovered the incestuous loves of his wife, Parisina, and Hugo his bastard son”; the incestuous lovers are beheaded.45 In early manuscripts of Parisina, the title-character’s name is Francesca. “Francesca of Rimini” is Byron’s translation of the episode in Dante’s Inferno, Canto 5, in which Francesca narrates her adulterous and incestuous acts of love with Paulo, alleging that their reading together of the story of Lancelot stimulated their passion until they consummated their impermissible love.46 Byron’s poem is not only about sexual love: it is also about the power of fictions. Through Byron’s ventriloquizing Dante ventriloquizing Francesca, it is about the staging of fictions in supposedly real life, and about their selfconscious replication and transposition.47 One transposition of the story of Francesca of Rimini is Byron’s tale of incestuous love in Parisina, drawing upon Gibbon while calling the woman Francesca; in the manuscript of Parisina, she had been named “Francesca.” Another transposition of the tale is the revised version (“Francisca”) in Hebrew Melodies where it appears despite its Italian Renaissance materials. For reasons unknown, Murray’s edition of Hebrew Melodies omits “Francisca” from Hebrew Melodies. In 1815, and in contrast to Nathan, Murray knew that the poem was one stanza of a completely different poem, Parisina. That knowledge, however, can hardly be the reason for Murray’s omission of “Francisca” from Hebrew Melodies, because he knew the same thing about “It Is the Hour” (the first stanza of Parisina) which he does include in Hebrew Melodies in 1815. Whatever the reason might be for Murray’s omission of “Francisca,” one year later Nathan (unencumbered by

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any concern for the coherence of Byron’s poetical works) includes the poem in the Second Number of A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, which appeared one week before Byron left England. Whereas Byron evidently corrected proofs for Murray’s 1815 edition and also for the First Number of Nathan’s A Selection, equally evidently he did not do so for the volume that contains “Francisca.”48 It is only Nathan’s commentary that suggests that Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” is about the poet’s “fervent attachment” to his sister, and he adds that suggestion thirteen years after Byron’s scandal-laden separation from Lady Byron; even in 1816, it is only Nathan’s edition that includes “Francisca” with its doubled reference to incest via Parisina and the episode of Paolo and Francesca. While Nathan was preparing the Second Number of Hebrew Melodies for publication in 1816, John Cam Hobhouse wrote in his diary that he had heard of Byron’s scandalous behavior “in the street.”49 In 1829, Nathan develops the theme further, publishing “I speak not—I trace not” (Nathan’s title) and calling attention to the fact that this poem had “never before appeared in print” (Fugitive Pieces, xxxv). Beneath the poem, Nathan adds his own commentary emphasizing the scandalous character of the poem: Many of the best poetical pieces of Lord Byron, having the least amatory feeling, have been strangely distorted by his calumniators, as if applicable to the lamented circumstances of his latter life. The foregoing verses were written more than two years previously to his marriage; and to shew how averse his Lordship was from touching in the most distant manner upon the theme which might be deemed to have a personal allusion, he requested me the morning before he last left London, either to suppress the verses entirely or to be careful in putting the date when they were originally written. (Fugitive Pieces, 65)50

“I speak not—I trace not” is about suppression of scandal. That effort is defeated by Nathan’s publication of the poem: the speaker (so to speak) says that he will not speak “thy name” because “there were guilt in the fame” (Fugitive Pieces, 64). In his own for-profit project, five years after Byron’s death, Nathan’s commentary dramatizes the “guilt” that was publicly interesting because of Byron’s “fame.” As I have mentioned, Murray’s first edition omits “Francisca” but publishes “From Job,” which Nathan omitted from his Second Number (1816) where he publishes “Francisca.” In Nathan’s version of Hebrew Melodies, the poem of forbidden love replaces a poem “on the sacred

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model” (to quote Byron’s letter to Annabella on his paraphrases from Job).51 Commentators agree that Byron’s taking up biblical subjects is likely to have expressed his wish to cultivate an appearance of conventional propriety during his courtship of Annabella.52 Further, Byron’s poems on biblical subjects were persuasive enough to earn the admiration of Zionists, as I have indicated earlier in this chapter, though, as Leslie Marchand says, in one of the most sensible statements about Byron and religion, Byron “had read enough of Hume and the Voltairian skeptics before he left Cambridge to unsettle his faith in the dogmas of the established religion . . . and to make him an agnostic.”53 Consistently with what McGann explains as Byron’s lyrical art of hypocrisy,54 the poems on nominally biblical subjects in Hebrew Melodies, including “From Job,” place a skeptical backspin on their ostensibly “sacred” subjects; the poems voice doubt and sometimes denial of the worth of piety. What in an earlier chapter I have characterized as Moore’s contradictory art has its imitation in Byron’s poems in Hebrew Melodies, including the unexplained mix of poems with biblical subjects (in Byron’s case) or patriotic (in Moore’s case) with poems having nothing to do with those subjects. In Byron’s pseudo-songs as well as Moore’s, another, more complex contradiction is also at work: within individual poems, skeptical meanings vitiate the ostensible propriety or conviction of the poem’s surface, even while the poem permits those who read while running to enjoy the conventionality of the lyrical surface. “From Job” paraphrases Job 4: 13–21. That passage is not spoken by God or by Job, but rather by Eliphaz the Temonite, one of Job’s friends whose supposed counsel actually torments and offends Job, and whose supposed wisdom the Lord angrily repudiates in chapters 40 and 41. In chapter 40, Eliphaz reports to Job a disturbing “vision of the night” that he had undergone: the vision frightened him with the suggestion that, contrary to moral expectations, all people “perish for ever”—excellent or not, they die without wisdom or reward. Immediately after the passage that Byron paraphrases, in chapter 5 Eliphaz voices the conventional morality that comforts him and relieves his fears: God, he decides, will make the iniquitous to hurt, and he will bring prosperity and peace to those who obey him. Eliphaz’s wishful fantasy is the children’s fable that the Lord rejects in the later chapters. His fear is only a figment that Eliphaz mentions so that he can deny it by affirming his comforting alternative. In contrast, Eliphaz’s dark vision of futility and amorality is all that Byron includes.

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Thus, Byron is able to paraphrase biblical lines, sometimes closely, even while his poem has nothing to do with the moral vision of the biblical version. However, there are also significant deviations from the biblical narrative, and the meanings of those deviations confirm the larger reversal that the poem achieves. In Job 4: 13–14, Eliphaz says, “In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.” In Byron’s paraphrase, A spirit pass’d before me: I beheld The face of Immortality unveil’d— Deep sleep came down on ev’ry eye save mine— And there it stood,—all formless—but divine: Along my bones the creeping flesh did quake. . . . [Hebrew Melodies (Murray 1815), 49]

The biblical lines say nothing of immortality; only Byron brings up that topic. Where a spirit that is “divine” appears in Byron’s passage, the biblical source says only that “Fear came upon me” and then (in verse 16) “I heard a voice.” If Byron did wish to appease piety, as both Ashton and Eisler suggest, his introduction of immortality and divinity might have helped. Further, Eliphaz does not indicate that he was awake for the vision, but Byron insists on it; what is presented as a dream in the biblical source is divinely dictated to the waking speaker in Byron’s poem. In the end (and I emphasize again, it is only the “end” in Byron’s version), humanity are “Creatures of clay—vain dwellers in the dust! / . . . Things of a day! you wither ere the night” (49). In Byron’s version, God says so. What is contradicted by piety in Job is affirmed as divine truth in “From Job.” Removing the mask of Eliphaz, Byron places his anonymous lyric in an undifferentiated voice that contradicts the religious theme that the book cultivates with surface appearances. The pseudo-song is pseudo-religious, too. When Nathan does include “From Job” in Hebrew Melodies, he deletes the title “From Job” (using instead the poem’s first phrase, “A Spirit Passed Before Me”), and he attaches a commentary in which he writes that, in conversation, Byron said that the Book of Job contains “an excellent moral lesson” (Fugitive Pieces, 73), but Nathan does not say what that moral lesson might be. He does not mention that the book contains both the vision of the night and the platitudes of consolation, until at the end of the book the Lord contradicts the consolation. Nathan does not mention that Byron’s poem contains only the vision of the night.

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Nathan’s commentary in Fugitive Pieces makes claims for Byron’s supposed piety that no serious commentator of whom I know has ever credited: he writes that the first stanza of “When coldness wraps this suffering clay,” first published in Murray’s edition of 1815, “clearly prove[s] his belief in the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul” (Fugitive Pieces, 58). Even when speaking of “the immortal mind” (Murray 1815, 30), that poem’s language instead suggests (as Bernard Blackstone has pointed out) the materialistic bleakness of Byron’s later “Darkness”: Before Creation peopled earth, Its eye shall roll through chaos back; And where the furthest heaven had birth, The spirit trace its rising track. And where the future mars or makes, Its glance dilate o’er all to be, While sun is quench’d or system breaks, Fix’d in its own eternity. (Murray 1815, 31)

Blackstone’s outstanding sentence is perhaps the best commentary ever written on that poem: “The ‘it’ which is the immortal mind to begin with has now become one of those pitiable instruments of knowledge which carry a grain of human longing and fear into the desolation of the interstellar spaces.”55 However, Nathan also writes that “Atheism is held in such general abhorrence by every class of civilized society, that scarcely any man dares to avow himself an infidel” (57). When he reprints “Sun of the Sleepless!” (first published in Murray’s edition in 1815), Nathan writes of Byron “as a moralist” who offers “proof of the Supreme Being” (Fugitive Pieces, 80), contradicting the consensus view (in Byron’s lifetime and since) that Byron’s writings suggest “the most painful doubts” on that subject.56 As I have written elsewhere, “chained to the conviction that one must believe something, and determined to forge or find an explanation of experience and the world, Cain [in Byron’s play Cain] dramatizes the deadliness of the wish for certainty.” Surely “the blind presupposition that a coherent truth ought to prevail is conventional enough,”57 and Nathan’s repeated attempts to reassure readers of Byron’s religiosity is perhaps an indication of the power of that conventionality, though it has no plausible foundation in Byron’s writings in prose or verse, including Hebrew Melodies. “Sun of the Sleepless!” was not written for Hebrew Melodies, but excerpted from a longer poem in progress when Byron sought to find

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lyrics to send Nathan in 1814.58 Here is the complete text of that short poem as Nathan reprinted it in Fugitive Pieces, where Nathan affixed his claim that it is “proof of the Supreme Being” though it contains not a word of any such thing. Byron’s poem does recall Eliphaz’s vision of the night, with its culminating assertion of a comfortless and amoral world: Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star! Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far, That show’st the darkness thou canst not dispel, How like art thou to joy remembered well! So gleams the past, the light of other days, Which shines, but warms not with his powerless rays; A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold, Distinct, but distant—clear—but, oh how cold! (80)

A variation on the theme of inevitable failure and meaninglessness, cloaked in a biblical allusion, is Byron’s poem “ ’All Is Vanity, Saith the Preacher.’ ”59 Here Byron’s paraphrase is not close to the original: the speaker in Ecclesiastes 1 is the son of David, king in Jerusalem, who laments that all labor is fruitless (1: 3), inanimate nature lasts forever while all generations of humanity vanish (1: 4–7), and in the pointless repetition of merely natural cycles there is no human satisfaction or even remembrance (1: 8–11). Though the speaker was a king, and though he searched all wisdom, what he found was that “all is vanity and vexation of spirit” and improvement is impossible (1: 12–15). He looks within himself and finds that he has acquired great wisdom, but even wisdom is vexation: “in much wisdom is much grief” (1: 16–18). In Ecclesiastes 2, the speaker turns to material possessions, pleasures, and joys, and finds that the knowledge of mortality renders these things, like wisdom, vain. In contrast, in Byron’s poem, the speaker mentions “wisdom” only once, though Ecclesiastes repeats that word frequently as its main theme; the recurrent motif in the first numbered section of Byron’s poem, which recites what the speaker has possessed and lost, is rather “love” or “beauty” (Murray’s edition of 1815, 28); the second section says that there has been “no hour” of life that has contained “pleasure unembittered” (29). The third section says that spells can restrain serpents from doing harm, but no spells—neither “wisdom” nor “music’s voice”—can charm the (metaphorical) serpent “which coils around the heart” (29). The only “soul” in Byron’s poem is the subjectivity “that must endure” internal torment (29). Pleasure and

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its absence take the place of “wisdom and knowledge” (Ecclesiastes 1: 16) as the central topic of the poem. Just as the Anacreontic poems in Moore’s Irish Melodies are placed in only apparently patriotic packaging, so Byron’s pseudo-song is wrapped in a biblical package but (like “She Walks in Beauty,” “Francisca,” “Sun of the Sleepless!” and other poems in Hebrew Melodies), it is void of religious assertion. In some of the poems, the imaginary object of theological worship is represented with outright hostility: “Jephtha’s Daughter” paraphrases (and abridges) one of the stories of brutal, patriarchal violence in the Old Testament. In Judges, chapter 11, the Ammonites make war against the Israelites. To secure victory, Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering. (Judges 11: 30–31)

Agreeably to this vow, the Lord arranges for Jephthah’s men to kill the Ammonites in “a very great slaughter” (11: 33). When Jephthah returns home, the first one to emerge from his house is his daughter. He expresses distress because of what his vow has obligated him to do, but his daughter says, “do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies” (11: 36). Jephthah does then sacrifice his daughter to repay the Lord for his generous vengeance (11: 39), after granting his daughter’s request for two months to “bewail my virginity” in the mountains, which she does; and then he kills his daughter to placate the god of vengeance; “it was a custom in Israel” (11: 39). Byron’s poem is entirely the monologue of Jephtha’s daughter, in which she encourages her father to keep his promise to kill her, in honor of the Lord who enabled him to kill the Ammonites. In so doing, the poem mentions “Country” as well as “God”: Since our Country, our God—Oh, my Sire! Demand that thy daughter expire; Since thy triumph was bought by thy vow— Strike the bosom that’s bared for thee now! (Murray 1815, 13)

Byron’s poem omits the strange request that she be allowed to bewail her virginity in the mountains, but concludes with her compliant

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When this blood of thy giving hath gush’d, When the voice that thou lovest is hush’d, Let my memory still be thy pride, And forget not I smiled as I died! (14)

As he does in “From Job” and “All Is Vanity,” Byron exposes the inhumanity that is masked in supposedly holy scripture, even while borrowing the cloak of its sacred status to package his own project. This is duplicity with a vengeance, and it is about vengeance. Nathan reprints the poem and adds commentary in Fugitive Pieces: “The number of instances of fabulous history of a similar mode of appeasing the gods appears to refer its origin to Greece, the fountain head of all that is romantic” (9). In a note to that passage, he adds a note about the fictitiousness of the biblical episode: Some of the literati of the present day, whom I have had occasion to consult on this subject, appear to treat the matter altogether as fictitious. There are, however, many homogeneous narratives, recorded by various writers, which give at least strong colouring to the probability of its authenticity, leaving out of question the indiscreet and barbarous rashness of vows so revolting to common humanity, and to all laws of nature, and the improbability of such monstrous sacrifices proving acceptable to the most high and wonderful Architect of the Universe.” (9n.)

Surely this is a different variety of “authenticity” from that which Nathan once claimed for his sacred songs; but then, in the same commentary on “Jephtha’s Daughter,” he retreats into an appeal to figurative language: “the eastern nations, especially the Jews, are peculiarly given to the use of figures, which indeed seem to have originated from the early use of hieroglyphics.” Specifically, “the expression ‘Mountain’ is used for the sanhedrim” (14). By that reading, Jephthah’s daughter bewailed her virginity to the Sanhedrin; but it may be, though Nathan does not say so, that such a possibility fails to deal with the moral heart of the problem in the tale.

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submission, glad that “I have won the great battle for thee, / And my Father and Country are free!” (14). Going so far as to mention her spilled blood (which the account in Judges does not do), Byron’s poem ends,

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If that high world—which lies beyond Our own, surviving love endears; If there the cherish’d heart be fond, The eye, the same except in tears: . . . . . How welcome those untrodden spheres! (Fugitive Pieces, 4)

As Nathan pointed out in 1829, “it is more than probable, that the philosophic doubts [that Byron] has sometimes poetically thrown out, may have given rise to the volumes of calumny and abuse which have been heaped on him”; for example, “the monosyllable (if) with which [“If That High World”] commence[s], would doubtless form the ground of very grave condemnation” (5).60 In Spector’s exposition of the skepticism in “The Wild Gazelle,” she points out that “Byron replaces the idea of God with a personified Mockery, implying the futility of any messianic hope for the future” (“The Liturgical Context,” 402). In addition to that poem’s literal reference to “Israel’s scattered race,” however, the poem also develops a figurative analogy for modern England. In the poem’s first stanza, the wild gazelle bounds, drinks, steps, and glances with its “glorious eye”; in the second stanza the cedars of Lebanon wave; in the third, every palm tree is “More blest . . . Than Israel’s scattered race” because (in the fourth and final stanza) . . . we must wander witheringly In other lands to die— And mockery sits on Salem’s throne. (Fugitive Pieces, 17)

The Congress of Vienna had convened in September 1814; Ashton suggests that “The Wild Gazelle” was written in November or December 1814.61 As Simon Bainbridge has shown, “Napoleon dominated Byron’s imagination like no other contemporary political figure,”62 and after the Congress of Vienna and the restoration of the ancient regime, Byron writes, thus, about mockery sitting upon the throne. Byron’s ambivalence about Napoleon, the “figure of his political hopes and beliefs,” included representations “of the tyranny of

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In at least one poem in the series, “If That High World,” a religious hypothesis is represented as a wish-fulfillment fantasy:

From Song to Pr int

Napoleon’s imperialism”;63 Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig (October 1813) and his abdication (April 1814) are important in Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” as Bainbridge says in reference to that poem’s structure: “the strophic and antistrophic movement of admiration and criticism are ultimately replaced by an epode of future possibility”; but as Bainbridge points out, Napoleon and the future he symbolizes have become imaginary by late 1814.64 Hebrew Melodies is not the only or the most widely read of Byron’s treatments of the restoration of the ancient regime: writing of Childe Harold III, McGann has pointed out that, prior to his visit to Waterloo, Byron had conjured “a vision of the Pleasures of the Imagination,” but his account of that battle and its significance in Childe Harold “is his first explicit and comprehensive—and of course political—critique of Romanticism.” Here, McGann writes, Byron observes “the coda of that pitiful tragedy, the Congress of Vienna and the European Settlement,” a set of events so decisive and so horrible that “he can only raise that self-defense of his ludic cynicism.”65 The overlay in Hebrew Melodies of the ostensibly biblical episodes with contemporary and recent political events in England and Europe is a recurrent strategy in Hebrew Melodies. “On Jordan’s Banks” (which Ashton dates September 1814) alludes to I Kings 19: 18 when Byron mentions the adorer of Baal bowing on Mt. Sinai; the same poem refers to Exodus 32: 15–16 on the engraving of the stone tablets and Exodus 34: 29–35 on the shining of Moses’s face. In the third stanza, however, European as well as Jewish subjection is suggested when Byron writes, “How long by tyrants shall thy land be trod!” [Nathan’s A Selection (1815), 28]. Nathan refers to Napoleon in glossing Byron’s “Thy Days Are Done” (Fugitive Pieces, 39). Franklin writes that, in “Saul,” “Saul is reminiscent of Napoleon, in that he is portrayed at the end of a life devoted to winning many victories against the Philistines, but now in the process of being overwhelmed by their superior forces, and his own mental disintegration.”66 “Vision of Belshazzar” begins with another biblical emblem for current events (the poem was written and published early in 1815):67 “The King was on his throne” (Murray 1815, 33). It ends with a speech of Daniel, in eight lines that (in 1815) might describe Napoleon as well as Belshazzar:68 Belshazzar’s grave is made, His kingdom pass’d away, He in the balance weighted,

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In the relevant episode from the fifth chapter of Daniel, Belshazzar, son of Nebuchadnezzar, “made a great feast to a thousand of his lords,” drinking merrily with “his princes, his wives, and his concubines” (5: 1–3). Amidst the revelry, “fingers” write on the wall. The king sees part of the hand, but not the person who writes. “The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers,” saying “Whoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, . . . shall be the third ruler in the kingdom” (5: 7). All the king’s wise men fail to read the writing and interpret it. The queen advises Belshazzar to summon Daniel, whom Nebuchadnezzar made master of magicians, and whose ability to interpret dreams and writings will enable him, as the queen predicts, to interpret this mysterious writing on the wall. The chapter is obsessed with interpretation:69 Belshazzar tells Daniel that wise men have been brought to him, “that they should read this writing, and make known unto me the interpretation thereof”; and he complains that “they could not shew the interpretation of the thing” (5: 15). But, the king says to Daniel, “I have heard of thee, that thou canst make interpretations” (5: 16). Daniel agrees to read the writing and to “make known to him the interpretation” (5: 17). Daniel’s interpretation (God has numbered and finished Belshazzar’s reign) precedes Belshazzar’s speedy death and the speedily-narrated taking of his kingdom by Darius the Median (5: 30–31). Far more time and space and language are occupied with the task of interpretation, the desire for it, anxiety about it, and above all its importance: the futility of the interpretation for Belshazzar, who has desperately and lengthily demanded it, is narrated with dispatch. In Byron’s “Vision of Belshazzar,” the biblical drinking and concubinage are also narrated, and there is also explicit development of the theme—the importance of interpretation and its doubtfulness: Chaldea’s seers are good, But here they have no skill; And the unknown letters stood Untold and awful still. And Babel’s men of age Are wise and deep in lore;

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Is light and worthless clay. The shroud, his robe of state, His canopy, the stone; The Mede is at his gate! The Persian on his throne! (Murray 1815, 36)

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In contrast, here the fatal outcome for Belshazzar is hardly narrated at all, but only generalized in passing: “The morrow proved it true” (33). That line is followed by the ending that I have already quoted, which is Daniel’s speech (his interpretation of the writing), and not Belshazzar’s death. With perhaps some exaggeration, given the poems’ historical and political themes, Shilstone defines “the overriding concerns of the collection [Hebrew Melodies]” as just two: “the power of music and how it relates to artistic expression in general.”70 While the conventional poetic trope of music’s largely emotional power, discussed in the first chapter of the present book, is perhaps one among many themes in Hebrew Melodies, including the imperial and specifically Napoleonic topics of which McGann and Franklin have written, it is surely a frequent topic in these poems. Moreover, the figurative references to music share some larger concerns with the pseudo-religion of the poems: for example, the preoccupation with artifice, artificiality, and absence, all presented under the empty sign of immediate presence. As we have seen, from May 1815 onward, in Murray’s editions of Hebrew Melodies and then in Murray’s editions of Byron’s collected works, there is no music, but only its name, even while the illusion of its reality is celebrated. “It Is the Hour” (first published in Nathan’s A Selection, 1815) is the final poem in Nathan’s First Number of Hebrew Melodies, and the poem rehearses the familiar association of music with both human feelings and with nature. The poem launches the metaphor of music, conventionally enough, with an image of the nightingale whose “high note is heard,” and likewise “lovers’ vows,” and then “gentle winds and waters” that (metaphorically speaking) “Make music to the lonely ear” (62). The decorative images are so conventional—boughs, flower, dews, stars, twilight, moon—and the poem is so lacking in contrast that the language advertises its own artificiality as a set-piece.71 Coherently with the tradition of pseudo-songs, Byron’s poem honors or parodies the standard rhetoric of personal feeling (in “every whisper’d word” of the lover’s vows) in connection with the sentimentalized natural scenery. In typographical form, however, the poem’s remarkable versification stands out: though the poem is not a sonnet, it does consist of fourteen lines, organized in one envelope quatrain and five couplets. The first thirteen lines are all tetrameter (e.g., “It is the hour when from the boughs,” or “Make music to the

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But now they were not sage, They saw—but knew no more. (33)

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lonely ear”), whereas the last line is perfectly regular iambic pentameter: “As twilight melts beneath the moon away.” This metrical pattern is verbally rhythmical but not musical—the irregularity (one pentameter in a poem of tetrameters) is not a sound-structure that arises from musical performance, particularly from ancient or traditional tunes. As we have seen Moore do in Irish Melodies, here Byron displays an extremely literate skill, packaged as faux orality. In Nathan’s 1815 edition with the unrealistic score for the singing voice, it is a false image of ancient music; in Murray’s 1815 edition a month later, it is a typographical simulacrum of a song; but when the same fourteen-line stanza is packaged as the first stanza in Parisina, it is a set-piece in a simulation of a history. That history is itself afflicted with the vast and destructive power of a religious illusion. Watkins’ account of Byron’s Eastern tales, including both The Siege of Corinth, whose heroine is Francesca, and Parisina, from which Byron extracts two Hebrew Melodies, explains lucidly and admirably that these poems of 1815–16 “show that religion, contrary to what people think, is actually bad for society” (114); the tale’s “portrayal of violence, leadership, wealth, the state, [and] religion” shows “both the power of these values and the willingness of social authority to rely on physical and legal strong-arming when values alone are inadequate to the task of preserving ruling interests.”72 In The Siege of Corinth, the final battle between Christians and Turks is fought inside a church building, “savagely exploding conventional notions of religious innocence” (114). “Venetian artillery had been stored all along beneath the church, in its burial vaults” (115); the power of Christianity is “finally a physical, even military power, though deeply submerged and hidden beneath the eternal smile of the Madonna” (115). To succeed as a pseudo-song in the national-melodies market, both “It Is the Hour” and “Francisca” had to conceal that ironic undermining of both sentimental and religious illusions, in order to appear (in Nathan’s pages and in Murray’s) as a pleasing illusion itself. Like the ironic denial of Eliphaz’s vision of the night in “From Job,” here the disillusioned exhibit is suppressed in the interest of the market for illusions. The fact that the same lines are sold once as sentiment and once as its debunking might furnish a cautionary fable for interpreters. The sentences of “Oh Weep for Those” also develop a theme about music, but in a very different way from “It Is the Hour.” “Oh Weep for Those” was “probably the first of the series which B[yron] specifically wrote as a ‘Hebrew Melody,’ ” as McGann has said,73 and its versification does resemble the structure of a song far more than

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does the prosody of “It Is the Hour.” The poem consists of six closed couplets of iambic pentameter, arranged typographically as three quatrains.74 This structure allows Nathan to compose the melody in pairs that match the couplets (25–26): for example, the first line of the first couplet is given the same melody as the second line of that couplet; the shift to a different melodic phrase occurs between couplets, rather than between quatrains, and all of the lines count the same rhythmically. These techniques mask the bifurcated means of production, rather than laying it bare as Byron and Nathan do (deliberately or not) in “It Is the Hour.” The topic of music is raised repeatedly in “Oh Weep for Those,” and in every instance the theme is absence: “shrines are desolate,” the “land” is only “a dream,” and “the harp” is to be wept for, not to be played; “Zion’s songs” no longer sound, whereas in the past they “seem[ed] sweet”; and the poem expresses a wish that “Judah’s melody” might “once more rejoice,” as that music had once a “heavenly voice” (27) that it has no longer. As we have seen in an earlier chapter of the present book, Moore’s Irish Melodies had also (and previously) developed this troping on the topic of absence via the example of music that is not there—a recurrent theme of the period’s pseudo-songs. In “My Soul Is Dark,” Byron paraphrases a biblical passage about music: “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16: 23). Byron’s version omits God, does not name Saul, refers not to David but “Minstrel,” and omits the happy ending; instead, the speaker rehearses the cliché of music’s soothing power (“string / The harp . . . let thy gentle fingers fling / Its melting murmurs o’er mine ear.”75 In the second stanza, that request is replaced by a wish for a “wild and deep” strain rather than “notes of joy,” as “this heavy heart will burst,” having been “by sorrow nurst.” The poem ends with the speaker’s statement that his heart is “doom’d to know the worst / And break at once—or yield to song” (36). Thus the poem’s second half undermines the happy traditional cliché that is voiced in the first half, even as the poem as a whole transforms the biblical episode that it paraphrases by omitting its happy ending and concluding with doom, breakage, and the open possibility of song that may come. Further, the poem’s two borrowings from Ossian embed the work in the pseudo-song tradition rather than strictly biblical narrative.76 The poem’s last phrase, self-referential for the poem and suitable for the book’s marketing project, is “yield to song.”77

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David reappears as “the Monarch Minstrel” in “The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept,” but here too Byron’s eclectic patchwork is obvious: the poem recalls Moore’s “The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls” at least as vividly as it recalls the Psalms. Again the poetry becomes self-referential as well as a commentary on its own sources: music “softened men of iron mould,” but it also falsified matters: “It gave them virtues not their own” (in Murray’s 1815 Hebrew Melodies, 5, which is this poem’s first published form). The appearance of virtue where there is none, like the appearance of ancient melody where there is none, or like the other absences that are thematized throughout Hebrew Melodies, helps us to interpret Moore’s angry remark about Byron’s imitation of his Irish Melodies: Moore wrote to his publisher, James Power, in the year in which Hebrew Melodies first appeared: “you will find but little of the poetry actually his.”78 The recurrent self-reference of the poems in Hebrew Melodies is sometimes latent, but it is also sometimes overt, as in “The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept.” Byron’s omissions and transformations of his sources call attention to the hermeneutic theme of Hebrew Melodies: even when the poems paraphrase scripture, they also bring about radical changes in meaning, and in that way reinterpret, criticize, or even contradict their ostensible sources. This hermeneutic theme is perhaps most clear in the obsession with interpretation in “Vision of Belshazzar,” but it is also consistent throughout Hebrew Melodies. The poet’s self-consciousness about artificial constructions includes the poems about music. These poems’ veiling, masking, posing, and pretence do not so much conceal meaning (or music) as they expose the pretence of it. The book at first appears to feign musicality, not only in its title but in its harps and its tributes to the power of music in its actual absence. Byron’s “amatory effusion[s]” are packaged as Hebrew melodies,79 but they are so conspicuously not Hebrew or melodies that they signify more abrasively their own false packaging and the poet’s skillful—even artful—dissimulation. If not a critique of the illusion of meaning (or music), Hebrew Melodies achieves, with or without the poet’s communicative intention, and with greater bitterness and irony than Moore had done in Irish Melodies, an exhibition of that illusion.

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L .E .L .’s Pse u do -S ongs a n d t h e E n d of Rom a n t ic ism

In the fourth annual volume of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (1835), for which Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote poems to accompany preexisting engravings, she begins with a verse introduction: And has my heart enough of song To give these pictured lines The poetry that must belong To what such art designs? ([1])

The third stanza answers affirmatively, connecting both “feelings” and “nature” with the artifice of “song”: Ah, yes: a thousand sympathies Their general birth-place find, And nature has a thousand links To beautify and bind. I deeply felt that song should make One universal link, Uniting, for each other’s sake, All those who feel and think.

The fourth stanza introduces a theme of artifice and unrealities: The poet’s lovely faith creates The beauty it believes; The light which on his footstep waits He from himself receives.

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His lot may be a weary lot, His thrall a heavy thrall, And cares and griefs the crowd know not, His heart may know them all.

When the poem approaches its close, the speaker associates truth with affliction, delight with fantasy. The speaker associates the delight and fantasy with song, though affliction characterizes its construction: True, that with weariness and wo [sic] The fairy gift is won, And many a glorious head lies low, Ere half its race be run; And many a one whose lute hangs now High on the laurel tree, Feels that the cypress’s dark bough A fitter home would be— ([2])

The poet who delights auditors “Regrets the price he pays”; his “fame is bought by feverish nights, / By sacrifice and pain”; but “past delights” belong to “phantasie” rather than truth ([2]), and “His fate is song” ([3]). The poem closes with a stanza that asserts the unreality of the delight and of the art that represents delight: ‘Tis his upon the landscape’s bloom A deeper spell to cast; ‘Tis his, beside the ruined tomb. To animate the past. And let him think, if his own sphere Too visionary seem, Life’s dearest joy, and hope, and fear, What are they each?—a dream. ([3])

Landon’s preface mentions that this is the first volume of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book to publish music with some of the poems: “The Orphan Ballad Singers” (13–15), “Ivy Bridge” (28–30), and “Cottage Courtship” (40–43) include musical scores by Henry Russell, engravings of paintings that are used as illustrations of the

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That echo of Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (“O Lady! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does nature live”1) introduces lines about struggle and suffering undergone by “the poet”:

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music, and poems by Landon, which she produced to illustrate the engravings. (“The Orphan Ballad Singers” is accompanied by an engraving by W. Gill, after a painting by J. Romney; “Ivy Bridge” is an engraving by T. Allom after a painting by W. LePetit; and “Cottage Courtship” appears as an engraving by E. Smith after a painting by Thomas Stothard.) Writing of L.E.L.’s poem illustrating “Cottage Courtship,” Glenn T. Dibert-Himes points out “incongruities between the engraving [which depicts a happy suitor] and the poem,” which expresses the courted woman’s suspicion and resistance, 2 and he says further that “the score’s unexpectedly light and airy sound yields yet another paradoxical contrast to the poem’s harsh tone” (172). The multiple means of the work’s production help to explain the incongruities: painter, engraver, poet, and composer did not work together. Perforce, Landon wrote rapidly (she wrote almost every poem in Fisher’s Drawing-Room Scrap-book, in addition to her other, prolific work), and she complains: “It is not an easy thing to write illustrations to prints, selected rather for their pictorial excellence than their poetic capabilities.”3 The different components of the work are incoherent in more ways than one. In the 1820s, the readership for the literary annuals was the same as it had been for George Thomson’s collections of national melodies for which he hired musicians including Beethoven and poets including Joanna Baillie to forge supposedly folk songs: the intended customers were middle-class women, and principally young women.4 As I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, Thomson specifically asked Beethoven to produce arrangements that would be simple enough for the young ladies who were learning the piano and to whom the literary annuals would be given, particularly at Christmas.5 Henry Russell’s score for “The Orphan Ballad Singers” surely satisfies that requirement (see figure 9). For example, the piece opens with an introduction of eight measures consisting mainly of octaves in the right hand, like a practice-piece. The engraving invites sentimentality in a number of ways, including the pictorial centrality of the well-behaved dog and, overall, the simplicity of the V-shaped design representing the human figures, repeated by the V-shape of the sky above the alley (see figure 10). One child faces the viewer of the picture, and all five of the other human figures (plus the dog) face that child. Apart from the scrap that the child holds, which is perhaps a copy of a ballad, there is no musical content in the designs, and none of the children sings. The picture mutes but includes the ragged surroundings in the alley. From these pictorial elements, Landon constructs a tale.

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Conclusion

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Figure 9 First page of Henry Russell’s “The Orphan Ballad Singers,” with lyrics by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (London: Fisher, Son and Co., 1832), p. 13.

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Figure 10 The Orphan Ballad Singers. Engraving by W. Gill, after a painting by J. Romney, in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (London: Fisher, Son and Co., 1832), facing p.13.

Consistently with the juvenile subject-matter, Landon’s poetry contains elements as simple as the music: consisting almost entirely of one- and two-syllable words, the poem is written in tetrameters in alternating rhyme: Oh weary, weary are our feet, And weary, weary is our way; Thro’ many a long and crowded street We’ve wandered mournfully to-day. My little sister she is pale She is too tender and too young To hear the autumn’s sullen gale, And all day long the child has sung. (15)

Having established the poverty and homelessness of the children, the poem goes on to narrate the death of the singing girl’s father: She never met her father’s eyes, Although they were so like her own;

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The third stanza narrates the death of the mother: on the night that she heard of her husband’s death at sea, “My mother never raised her head; / How strange, how white, how cold she grew!” (15). Only “a broken heart” is mentioned as her cause of death. The fourth stanza reasserts the children’s homelessness and dispossession: We have no home—we have no friends, They said our home no more was ours; Our cottage where the ash-tree bends, The garden we had filled with flowers. . . .

The lost Eden of the nurturing home is remembered for “The sounding shells our father brought,” and for bees in summer and golden honeycomb in winter. In the final stanza, the poem’s speaker mentions the wind and rain in which the children now wander without shelter, and she says, “I only wish to see again / My mother’s grave, and rest and die.” In the poem’s final four lines, the speaker returns to the topic of music, not for pleasure or even consolation, but to intensify the children’s suffering: Alas, it is a weary thing To sing our ballads o’er and o’er: The songs we used at home to sing— Alas we have a home no more!

Like the verse introduction to this volume of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrapbook, and like other poems of Landon’s, as we shall see, “The Orphan Ballad Singers” disenchants the topic of music, even while it ornaments it with Russell’s score and with Gill’s engraving after Romney’s painting. The poem narrates the change from song as a joyful expression to song as an additional burden for those who suffer real loss. Referring to Landon’s The Troubadour and treating the topic of song as a metaphor for poetry, commentators have pointed out this recurrent pattern in Landon’s work, in which the commercial pursuit of poetry produces disillusionment, “toil,” “care,” and “wrong.”6 In Landon’s numerous treatments of poetic careers (The Improvisatrice,

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In some far distant sea he lies, A father to his child unknown.

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The Troubadour, The History of the Lyre, The Golden Violet), the binary opposition of carefree past and afflicted present becomes a metaphor for the contrast between the lovely illusions of poetry’s beautiful imagery—its “colour’d shadows,” as Landon writes in The Troubadour (69–70)—and the literary industry in which Landon worked. The pattern and the theme are not unique to Landon’s long, narrative poems that are interspersed with pseudo-songs: as the verse introduction and “songs” in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book indicate, Landon’s short works also participate in the recurrent motifs: a reflexive theme (writing about her own professional practice), and a narrative of illusion followed by its contradiction in mundane struggle. The Troubadour begins, “Call to mind your loveliest dream” (3). “Dream” is a favored word in the poem, used as an epithet of beauty. Here it conjures the lovely surrounds of the castle in Provence where Raymond, a young lord, “last of a proud race” (9), enjoys “restless dreams / Of future deeds and future fame”—presumably martial achievements—“But there were other dearer dreams” as well, because he is a “young poet” (10). He lives with his lovely niece, Eva. His brother Amirald (her father) has departed, having joined the Crusades after his beautiful wife (Eva’s mother) disappeared. Raymond “was the world of [Eva’s] young heart”—though childish, she had for him “Somewhat of a woman’s deeper feeling” (27). She feels “her bosom’s rush” and display’s “that crimson blush” when she sees him. On one such occasion, and much like a character in a musical comedy, Raymond breaks into song: in his “Ballad,” Raymond sings of a knight who rides into battle for a lady but who returns dead, while “A hundred harps their welcome rang” (31). En route to a battle to defend the lovely Clotilde, lady of nearby Castle Clarin, Raymond overhears the song of another young knight: in the song, a knight sings that his lady’s “colours dance upon my crest” (56) as he rides off to battle and to his death and “the downfall of our line” (57). This sad story is decorated, however, by music: “But I heard the music sweep” (57). The knight in the song of the knight sings to the memory of his beloved: though “never again / Will thine ear listen to the strain” of his song, he hopes that she will not weep. Meanwhile, Raymond, who overheard the song of the knight about the song of the knight, “thought on that song next day” (58). The recursiveness of the songs—that is, songs about songs within songs) may be, as Theodor Adorno has suggested in a general way, a sign of the industrial production of culture:7 in the period of mass-production, the maker of a song about a knight is more likely to re-make a song about a song of a knight. The poem’s borrowings

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Conclusion

From Song to Pr int

from other poets represent an industrial recycling of prefabricated materials and standardized, professional methods: the review in The Monthly Magazine mentions borrowings from Byron (233), imitation of an unnamed source (234), and “versification of an old tradition mentioned in Russell’s Tour through Germany” (234). When Raymond and his fellow knights return to Clarin, “music and perfume swept the air” (67); the knights are welcomed by Lady Adeline, Clotilde’s beautiful daughter, and after an evening of gorgeous festival during which Raymond admires Adeline inwardly but ardently, in his nocturnal solitude he sings a “Serenade” (74–76), “Beneath the ladye’s lattice.” On the following day Adeline commands him: “thou shalt sing / Some legend of the fair and brave” (81), which he does obediently: accompanying himself with a lute, he performs “Elenore,” a verse narrative in which Princess Elenore is not permitted to marry her lover because he is far beneath her state; she elopes with him in a small boat: this scene is depicted in the title-page engraving of The Troubadour in 1825 (see figure 11). The escape in love leads to another Edenic fantasy of nature, presented in a systematic contrast with her artificial palatial past: And where was Elenore? her home Was now beneath the forest dome;— A hundred knights had watch’d her hall, Her guards were now the pine trees tall: For harps waked with the minstrel tale, Sang to her sleep the nightingale: For silver vases, where were blent Rich perfumes from Arabia sent, Were odours when the wild thyme flower Wafted its sweets on gale and shower. . . . (91).

As he sings, Raymond’s heart is a fit “altar” for “love’s morning sun” to shine upon (97), but “Adeline loved him not” (99). This circumstance leads the narrator of the Troubadour to affirm, “It was not form’d for length of bliss, / A dream so fond, so false as this” (101). The ambiguity of “this” is wonderful: the poem is about a dream as false as Raymond’s fantasy of loving Adeline, or a dream as false as his song “Elenore,” or a dream as false as The Troubadour. Songs continue to develop the theme of falsehood: the next “song” in The Troubadour is entitled “The Last Song,” though it is not the last song in the tale: again in solitude, Raymond sings a song eschewing the deceptive allure of Adeline, with her “false look, false hope, and falsest love!” (124).

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Figure 11 Title-page engraving for The Troubadour, second edition (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1825). Drawn by J. M. Wright and engraved by J. Mitchell.

A ballad entitled “The Proud Ladye,” sung by a fictitious old harper, is an embedded pseudo-song that is framed to recall the popular imagery of minstrelsy in Scott’s books. In the ballad (215–19), many knights woo a lady (a representation of Adeline) for her land and for her gold, but most for her loveliness. She tells the suitors to ride a horse around a “steep and lofty wall.” Some refuse the dangerous trial, but more attempt the feat and die. When a young knight arrives with whom she is smitten in love, she asks him not to ride on the wall, but he does, and he alone is successful. Then, however, he scorns her offer of love: the honor of battle is the only honor for which he cares,

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Conclusion

From Song to Pr int

and he will not “honour the eyes / Of any ladye there” (218). His brother had died in her cruel trial of riding the wall; he says, “I laugh to scorn thy love and thee.” The proud ladye loses her beauty and becomes a nun (219). “The Song of the Troubadour” is the last pseudo-song in The Troubadour (237–43). At a tournament over which Eva presides, Raymond, in the guise of a troubadour, wins the great prize, a golden violet, for his song. He sings of a young man who lived alone in a low valley, “dream[ing] away my care” (237); he had withdrawn to that isolation to “forget how in the world / Snakes lay amid roses.” He wanted “to forget my once distress”: “False foes, and yet falser friends . . . Pleasures known but by their wings,” and afflictions including money: “Gold’s decrease, and health’s decay, / I will fly like these away” (237). The song presents this character’s solitary location with Edenic features: the motif is the familiar binary opposition in pastoral poetry, contrasting Arcadian beauty with the civilized life of falsehood. The singer prefers a life “amid the shrine of leaves,” “wild roses,” “jasmine,” “an azure lake,” “honey bees,” and the other familiar appurtenances of pastoral retreat (238–41). The character in the song reflects that poetry is the “least earthly” gift “left / Of the gems of Paradise” (241), and he resolves to die, leaving “One low mournful dirge” to tell of his sorrow and his fate (243). Thus, all of the embedded pseudo-songs in the poem undermine the conventional surface of loveliness that they invoke. At the same time, their apparatus of musical tropes joined with romance protects the poetry’s appeal according to the advertised standards: for example, the anonymous reviewer in The Monthly Review writes that The Troubadour has “a charm which awakens many delightful associations,” and the reviewer notices Landon’s “ ‘ivy-mantled’ castles, her forest shades, her fragrant climate, her high-born, graceful, and impassioned women, and crowning all, her early devotion to the witcheries of poetry and music.” Although there is actually no music in the work, readers impressed by such charms “never think of inquiring to what extent such an age existed in reality, or how far it was the mere creation of romance.”8 In this way, Landon’s pseudo-songs exemplify common features of the genre in the Romantic period. Coming late as they do in that period, they also help to illustrate the progression that the genre undergoes historically. In the poetry trade, music often disappears under its typographical simulation. The imaginariness of the music is part of its charm, its sales appeal. While bringing about this evanescence of actual song—the turn from song-sheets to entirely letterpress

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commodities—the pseudo-songs of Moore and Byron make a theme of their own emptiness and absence, treating lyrically the emptiness and absence in their narrative situations; so too do Landon’s pseudosongs, both with and without musical scores.. Like both Moore’s work and Byron’s, and also like the pseudo-songs of Scott, from his contributions to Lewis’s Tales of Wonder through his many editions of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Landon’s poems that affect musical reference also invoke the charm of faux exoticism: historical and geographical removal are forged, to add to the allure of the faux songs themselves. The common topics of spontaneity, impulse, and truth of feeling are in evidence in Landon’s nonmusical fabrications of music. Landon produces pseudo-songs of two varieties that flourish in the period: one type (illustrated by George Thomson’s collections, by Irish Melodies, and by Hebrew Melodies) involves poems accompanied by unrelated music by somebody else, in printed scores; and the other type (Sydney Owenson’s Lay of an Irish Harp, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, and Keats’s odes) has shed in advance even the pretence of actual music, to proffer its typographical simulation alone. Landon’s poetry, then, like the pseudo-song tradition at large, is a retail project in false impressions. However, like Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Landon’s poetry undermines its own meretricious illusions with enough subtlety that the undermining does not impede sales. Her poetry’s appeal to personal feeling is as relentless as Wordsworth’s: in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth announces that his own goal is that “pleasure should be imparted” and “that they who should be pleased with them would read them with more than common pleasure.”9 Wordsworth announces that “I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I should please” (vi). Like pseudo-songsters from the beginning of the tradition, Wordsworth claims for his “ballads” both “nakedness and simplicity,” perhaps “somewhat less naked and simple” than traditional ballads, but still “capable of affording pleasure at the present day” (xxix). The preface to Lyrical Ballads is practically obsessed with “pleasure”: . . . words metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind as he who is sensible of the extent of that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure. (xxx) . . . meter is hence enabled to afford much pleasure. (xxxiii) . . . the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures. . . . (xxxiv)

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Conclusion

From Song to Pr int

Wordsworth was not alone, and not unusual, in that appeal to the subjectivity of pleasure within a commercial enterprise. McGann writes of Felicia Hemans’s poetry that her earliest volumes (1808, 1812) were prepared for a small coterie; “least of all were these books written for money.” That statement about apparent motivation is equally applicable to Byron’s earliest work; “like Byron, however, [Hemans] eventually became much interested in the monetary value of her poetry.”10 From the beginning, McGann shows, Landon was fully engaged with the “market character” of the literary institutions in which she worked. For Landon and for her Romanic-period predecessors, pseudo-songs very generally bring the rhetorical power of musical illusion to bear upon a campaign for readers’ “pleasure.” In the same period, the sales-pitch of fictitious music does not shirk the charge of illusion but rather celebrates its power to please: the favorable and anonymous review of Landon’s The Troubadour in The Monthly Review claims that In truth, it is of little importance, so far as the pleasure of the imagination is concerned, whether our impressions . . . are founded on history, or legend. It is enough for the poet to know that we possess such impressions, no matter from what source they are derived; and all that he has to think of is, how they are to be allied with new inventions of a kindred character. (229)

All of the poets discussed in this present book achieve the doubleness of the mirage and the awakening from its false charm. While they exemplify the commercial exploitation of deceptive appearances, they also expose that practice, even, as in Landon’s case, returning tenaciously to a critique of their own participation in the institutions that their work criticizes. Perhaps in contrast to the poetry’s customers, in this instance the poet evidently does care whether “our impressions” are founded on figments or not. During a crucial time in the history of shifting media, Romantic pseudo-songs reveal and exploit the complex artistry of simulation. That revelation is one of their gifts.

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1. Romantic-Period Poetry and the “Sweet Power of Song” 1. Levine, Sing unto God a New Song: A Contemporary Reading of the Psalms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 2. 2. Werner, The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church during the First Millennium (New York: Columbia University Press and Ktav, 1959–84), 2: 52. 3. Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English Meter [new ed.] (1562; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1812). Byron mentions this book in connection with his own Hebrew Melodies, in a letter to Thomas Moore, 4 November 1815: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: John Murray, 1975), 4: 330. 4. Smith, “English Metrical Psalms in the Sixteenth Century and Their Literary Significance,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, 9, no. 3 (May 1946): 249–271. 5. For an informative account of sixteenth-century imitations of the Psalms in English poetry, and for a defense of the imitativeness of particular examples and of the genre as a whole, see Zim Rivkah, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 6. Shawcross, The Complete Poetry of John Milton, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 213n. For an account of these paraphrases of Psalms in terms of the political conflicts in which Milton was engaged at the time, see Margaret Boddy, “Milton’s Translation of Psalms 80–88,” Modern Philology, 64, no. 1 (August 1966): 1–9. In Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Mary Ann Radzinowicz shows how, in Paradise Lost and then again in Paradise Regained, Milton uses the variety of genres and versification that characterize the Psalms. 7. Douglas Bush, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); and Shawcross, The Complete Poetry, 4. 8. See Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Composed at several times. . . . The Songs were set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lawes Gentleman

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No t e s

Notes

of the Kings Chappel, and one of His Maiesties Private Musick [sic] (London: Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moselcy, 1645); and see Milton’s sonnet, “To My Friend Mr. Henry Lawes,” in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, 210. 9. Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply’d to the Christian State and Worship ( London: J. Clark, R. Ford, and R. Cruttenden, 1719). 10. Isaac Watts and Joel Barlow, Dr. Watts’ Imitation of the Psalms of David, Corrected and Enlarged (Hartford: Printed by Barlow and Babcock, 1785); Timothy Dwight, the Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Adapted to the Christian Use and Worship By I. Watts . . . a New Edition, in Which the Psalms Omitted by Dr. Watts, Are Versified Anew, in Proper Metres (New Haven: Samuel Wadsworth, 1821). See Rochelle A. Stackhouse, The Language of the Psalms in Worship: American Revisions of Watts’ Psalter (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997). 11. J. Banks, trans. The Idylls of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, and the War-Songs of Tyrtaeus . . . with Metrical Versions by J. M. Chapman (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 305. 12. The extent of the pastorals’ imitation and replication is greater than I can suggest briefly: for example, referring to “intermediate continental sources,” T. Harrison, Jr., writes that “there is little or no direct evidence of Spenser’s direct acquaintance with his ultimate classical originals” [“Spenser, Ronsard, and Bion,” Modern Language Notes, 49, no. 3 (March 1934): 139]. 13. Spenser, Argument of “August.” The Shepheardes Calender, ed. Risa S. Bear . This edition is a corrected transcription of the facsimile by John C. Nimmo (London, 1895), which reproduces the British Museum copy of the first edition of 1579. 14. W. W. Gregg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London: Bullen, 1906), 4, 6. See also John Stevenson, “Arcadia Re-Settled: Pastoral Poetry and Romantic Theory,” Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 629–638; and Lore Metzger, One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.) 15. S. K. Heninger, “The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22, no. 2 (April 1961): 254, 255. 16. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To—,” in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley [ed. Mary Shelley] (London: John and Henry Hunt, 1824), 214. In other editions, this poem is sometimes entitled “Music, When Soft Voices Die.” 17. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; rpt. London: Routledge, 1988), 81. 18. Irving Massey, “Shelley’s ‘Music, When Soft Voices Die: Text and Meaning,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 59

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

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(1960): 430–38. Judith Chernaik transcribes and analyzes the inconclusive textual evidence in The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972), 281–84. Chernaik also points out that “Music, when soft voices die” shares imagery with “Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici”: “they have to do with the analogy between the vibrations of feeling and those of sound and odor, the relation of physical cause to nonphysical effect” (175). Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 149. Marshall Brown, “Unheard Melodies: The Force of Form,” PMLA, 107 (1992): 465. Weller, “Shakespeare, Shelley and the Binding of the Lyric,” Modern Language Notes, 93, no. 5 (December 1978): 918–19. I refer to a title phrase from William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Quartet Books, 1974), 732. William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 491–92. Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, 157. Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 107. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 52. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Promethueus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts with Other Poems. (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820), 58. Marilyn Gaull, “The Speaking Face of Things and the Bride of Quietness,” an essay in manuscript, as I write this chapter. I thank Professor Gaull for permission to quote her essay. Eleven copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and two copies of Songs of Innocence alone are available for comparison on the William Blake Archive < www.blakearchive.org>, where, in addition to the photographic reproductions, descriptions of the images and transcripts of their texts are available. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Andrew Lincoln (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) includes excellent reproductions and commentary on both images and texts. Joseph Viscomi’s deservedly influential study of Blake’s illuminated books emphasizes valuably the extent to which material and visual features of Blake’s work (as opposed to conceptual meanings or philosophical intentions) determine their production and form: Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Anon. [Felicia Hemans], “A Spanish Lady. From a Picture by G. S. Newton, Esq.,” in The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry

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Notes

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Notes and Romance, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green; and John Andrews, 1827), 120. The engraved image of Newton’s painting appears on 119. Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, “Colour’d Shadows,” 37–38. See Tricia Lootens, “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, ‘Internal Enemies,’ and the Domestication of National Identity,” PMLA 109 (1994): 238–53. Hoagwood and Ledbetter, “Colour’d Shadows,” 38. For a discussion of Hemans’s faux sweetness and its publicity, see Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 8, 11 (where sweetness appears as “sanctimonious melancholy”), 27, and passim. Leighton also writes of the “ostentatious mechanics of Hemans’s writing” (12) and of the “new audience of women” which furnishes the “key to Hemans’s [commercial] power” (13). That power exhibits a concern for “providing sums of money,” in Hemans’s own phrase (quoted by Leighton, 14), “a subject which Hemans studiedly avoids in her poetry, in an effort to keep up a front of respectability unsullied by financial need” (14). According to Leighton, Hemans’s mechanical manufacture of illusions of feelings (“dream of passion”) illustrates “femininity as an aesthetic pose” (26). Leighton also discusses the setting of some of Hemans’s poems to music, by her sister, Harriet Hughes (14). The standard source on Hemans’s life is Harriet Hughes, The Works of Mrs. Hemans; With a Memoir of Her life, by Her Sister. In Six Volumes (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons; London: Thomas Cadell, 1839); and see also Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans. With Illustrations of Her Literary Character from Her Correspondence, 2 vols. (London and New York: Saunders and Otley, 1836). Gillian Beer, “Aesthetic Debate in Keats’s Odes,” Modern Language Review, 64 (1969): 742. Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 37. Keats, letter to John Taylor, 30 January 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Gittings, 59–60. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1983), 116. Bailey, quoted by Sidney Colvin, John Keats, His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame (1917), reproduced in The Life and Work of John Keats 1795–1821 . Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 50, 243. See Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 58–62; Miriam Allott, The

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

145

Poems of John Keats, 1970, 537–38n.; Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, 171–73; Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems, 247; Jerome McGann, “Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,” Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979): 1008; Theresa M. Kelley, “Keats, Ekphrasis, and History,” in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213. Recently Paul Sheats has concluded reasonably that the ode’s phrase, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” a phrase whose interpretation is vexed by different punctuation in the Annals and in the 1820 volume, has “provoked a range of interpretation so wide as to elude determinate meaning” (“Keats and the Ode,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95. Keats, Letters, ed. Gittings, 342–43, 197, 173, 208, 261. McGann, “Keats and the Historical Method,” 1016. Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), 474. For accounts of the Keats family and its financial problems, see Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), passim; and Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 357, 405, and passim. Keats was the eldest of four siblings, whose father died when Keats was eight years old; his mother left to marry another man, leaving the children with their grandparents. Keats struggled most of his adult life to gain access to family funds in the hands of executors. He underwent apprenticeship as an apothecary to earn a living, was involved in legal proceedings attempting to gain access to the estate of his dead younger brother Tom at a time when his other younger brother George was asking for money, became guiltily involved in financial crises of his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, which he was ultimately unable to relieve before Haydon’s suicide, contemplated becoming a ship’s surgeon rather than a poet, for the sake of income, wrote plays and lyrics for plays in the (ultimately defeated) hope of generating income, and hoped that his poems (1820 onward) would be both popular and profitable in a way that would warrant his devotion of his time and labor to poetry. Robert Gittings’s excellent Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) indexes the letters concerned with finances, informatively. See Daniel P. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 10–11 and passim. For an account of Keats’s writing in the context of theories of money, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, “Keats, Fictionality, and Finance,” in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 127–42. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination, 11.

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Notes

Notes

50. Sayre and Lowy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique, 34 (1984): 49. 51. See Terence Allan Hoagwood, “Keats and Social Context: Lamia,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 29 (1989): 675–97. 52. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, and trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 1. This work was first published in German in 1970, one year after Adorno’s death. 53. Cobbett, Paper Against Gold (London, 1817), 8–9; anon., “Mr. Pitt— Finance—Sinking Fund,” a review of An Inquiry Concerning . . . the National Debt, by Dr. Hamilton, in The Examiner, January 19, 1817, 36–37. 54. Hoagwood, “Keats, Fictionality, and Finance,” 129. 55. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18. 56. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 26. 57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 22. 58. For an account of Keats’s response to Chatterton, see Motion, Keats, 68–69; and for an account of Keats’s knowledge of Moore’s poetry, his imitations of it, and responses to it, see Jonathan Bate, “Tom Moore and the Making of the ‘Ode to Psyche,’ ” The Review of English Studies, N.S. 41, no. 163 (August 1990): 325–33. 59. Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 18, 34–49. 60. Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 93–94. 61. Bate, John Clare, 95, 104, 121. 62. Bate, John Clare, 166, 444, 221. 63. Bate, John Clare, 301, 414–15. 64. Vardy, John Clare: Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 119. 65. Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader, 5, 1. 66. A Garland of New Songs. (Printed by J. Marshall at Newcastle upon Tyne, 1810–1817); the note by Robinson and Powell appears in John Clare, ed. Robinson and Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 495n. 67. Chirico, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader, 6. 68. Vardy, John Clare: Politics and Poetry, 56. 69. George Deacon’s informative book not only transcribes Clare’s collection of songs, both lyrics and tunes: the book also offers an argument about Clare’s “deep involvement with the folk tradition of his native village” that reaffirms the marketing fiction (of an untutored and authentic peasant poet) that Clare and his first publishers constructed [George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983), 10], even while Deacon’s own admirable scholarship makes the ensuing contradictions quite evident. For example, Deacon quotes lines from a manuscript by Clare referring to music

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70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

147

(a peasant “humming scraps his father sung before”) and to orality in general (remembrance “handles down” music “From mouth to mouth thro ages”; while these lines are script and only script, Deacon presents them as an example of orality; and while these lines are evidently autographic compositions by Clare, Deacon discusses them as demonstrating an “oral tradition” rather than referring to one. Deacon writes well of Clare’s imitations and forgeries of both songs and poems, and he transcribes a letter from Clare’s early publisher Edwin Drury advising Clare to imitate lyrics by Robert Burns (62–63). Drury sent Clare a copy of Percy’s Reliques and advised him to imitate lyrics from that collection, too. Like Clare’s forgeries of poems by Andrew Marvell, the “imitations and ‘forgeries’ ” of lyrics that were already imitations of other and earlier lyrics are ordinary products of the modern typographical industry, and they are ordinary commodities in the commercial culture in which, as books by Chirico and Vardy make clear, Clare was cannily participating. Vardy, John Clare: Politics and Poetry, 113. For the correspondence between Clare and Power, see The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 348. Vardy also cites ms. letters to Clare from Charles Hodgson, an “entrepreneur” who proposed a commercial plan for publishing Clare’s songs (113). Letters of John Clare, ed. Storey, 85. See Storey, The Poetry of John Clair (New York: St. Martin’s, 1974), 149. Storey’s excellent discussion of the poem’s meanings appears 149–51. The three exceptions are “When floods covered every bough” in stanza four, lacking the initial stress; “Said live and be and they have been” in stanza six, which is wholly iambic), and the one-accented final line of the poem, “For ever.” Storey, The Poetry of John Clair, 150. Landon, The Improvisatrice (1824), in Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, A New Edition. 3 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1839), 1:1. On Landon’s medallion poems, see Daniel Riess, “Letitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 36, no.4 (1996): 819. On Landon’s work with the literary annuals, see Kathryn Ledbetter and Terence Hoagwood, “L.E.L.’s ‘Verses’ and the Keepsake for 1829,” Romantic Circles, <www.rc.umd.edu>; The Keepsake (1829), ed. Kathryn Ledbetter and Terence Hoagwood (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1999), 3–15; and Terence Hoagwood and Gina Opdycke, Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-book 1836 with Poetical Illustrations by L.E.L. (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 2004). L.E.L. “Macao,” quoted by F. J. Sypher, Letitia Elizabeth Landon: A Biography (Ann Arbor: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 2004), 42–43.

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Notes

Notes

78. L.E.L., The Troubadour, in Poetical Works¸ 2: 11. 79. Sypher, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 65. 80. Cynthia Lawford writes that sometimes Landon wrote about art “almost mechanically, unwilling or unable to harness her sympathies to yet another engraving or an oriental landscape or beautiful young women” (Lawford, quoted by Hoagwood and Opdycke, Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-book, 10; Daniel Riess is likewise writing of Landon’s representations of pictorial (rather than musical) art when he says that “her poetry did not simply acquiesce in the increasing commodification of literature and art; rather, it was an active and willing participant” (Riess, “Letitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism,” 810) The consensus about Landon’s ironic theme in relation to her own commercial activity is impressive: Angela Leighton too writes that Landon developed “a streak of scepticism” that “points forward to the devices of self-distance and doubt employed by later poets” (46), and that “poetic sensibility” did not so much express any truths for the poet but rather “covered the need for money” [Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 47]. See also McGann’s “Waking from Adam’s Dream: L.E.L.’s Art of Disillusion,” in McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 143–49. Situating Landon’s commercially successful poetry in the context of the large cultural change represented in “the institutions of literary production” in the 1820s and 1830s (143), McGann shows that Landon’s poetry becomes “a conscious poetical reflection on the commerce of letters” (143), just as Tennyson’s poetry does during the same period. Even while Landon produces extraordinarily successful poetic illusions in the 1820s and 1830s, McGann suggests that “an imagination like hers has few illusions about illusory worlds” (149). In the present chapter I am discussing ways in which the trope of music in her poetic fictions serves as an example of a beautiful illusion and simultaneously a cold critique of it; in the Conclusion I will turn to Landon’s actual pseudosongs, accompanied by music composed by others, in the tradition of George Thomson, Thomas Moore, and other pseudo-songsters of the period. 81. Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” in The New Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (New York: Macmillan, 1917).

2. Sir Walter Scott, “Ballad Deception,” and Romantic Pseudo-Songs 1. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; rpt. London: Routledge, 1995), 26. 2. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12.

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149

3. Blake, Jerusalem, plate 3; in Jerusalem, ed. Morton Paley (Princeton: William Blake Trust and Princeton University Press, 1991), 132. 4. Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, plate 8; in William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (Princeton: William Blake Trust and Princeton University Press, 1993), 256; Blake, “Earth’s Answer,” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 31, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 18. 5. Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 565. 6. Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 1: 175. This substantially annotated edition is the most recent complete and scholarly edition of Scott’s Minstrelsy, and so my citations will usually refer to this edition; however, the “ballads,” Scott’s own writing in the volumes (essays and annotations), and the ordering of the poems vary in different editions, and when occasion requires I will be citing passages from first and early editions. Leith Davis writes well of the printing of Scottish songs in the period, contrasting the mechanized reality of commerce and print against the mythological orality whose sales appeal increased in the period: “The process of printing . . . changed the relationship between music, musician, and audience implicit in the original performance of Scottish songs. The local ‘bodily economy’ [quoting Deane, above] of which the original songs were part was left behind, as ‘Scotch songs’ became commodities available in shops and performed in drawing-rooms all over Britain” [Davis, “At ‘Sang About’: Scottish Song and the Challenge to British Culture,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 189]. 7. In addition to Henderson’s notes, see A[ndrew] Laing, “The Sources of Some Ballads in the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’” Folklore, 13, no. 2 (June 24, 1902): 191–97. 8. Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1985), 3. 9. Joseph Ritson, Scotish Songs, 2 vols. (1794; rpt. Glasgow: Hugh Hopkins, 1869), 1: 67. 10. James Macpherson, Fingal: An Ancient Poem in Six Books (1762; rpt. N.p.: Kessinger, 2003), n.p. 11. For a convincing suggestion that Macpherson’s goal, in his forgeries, “is to render these compositions ‘agreeable to an English reader,’ ” see Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 83. Davis also points out that Macpherson received a government

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

Notes position (secretary, president of the council, and surveyor-general to the Governor of Florida) “after the success of Fingal and Temora.” On his return to England in 1765, he “was allowed to retain his three hundred pounds per annum on the understanding that he would continue to serve the government” (Davis, Acts of Union, 84). In his History of Great Britain (1775) and in a subsequent pamphlet, The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of America, Macpherson expresses a Royalist and anti-American point of view, and he writes in support of preserving the Scottish parliament and welcoming subjection to the English king (87), having “bought a seat in Parliament, thus becoming a political representative in Britain.” Macpherson formulated “a fictitious Great Britain, one that was the subject of much critical scrutiny” (88). On contemporary adjudications of the question, whether Macpherson forged the poems—including Scott’s comments on the issue—see Davis, Acts of Union, 88–90. Robert Chambers, letter to Thomas Percy, 1789; transcribed by A. Watkin-Jones, “Bishop Percy, Thomas Warton, and Chatterton’s Rowley Poems (1773–1790),” PMLA, 50, no. 3 (Sep. 1935): 777. The equivocation—Scott’s having it both ways—represents a recurring pattern in his work. For example, on his similar equivocations concerning the forgeries of Ossian poems by Macpherson, see Davis, Acts of Union, 145–46. Ritson, Ancient Songs and Ballads, from the Reign of King Henry the Second to the Revolution. Collected by Joseph Ritson, New Edition, 2 vols. (London: Payne and Foss, 1829). This book includes Ritson’s essay, “Observations on the Ancient English Minstrels” (1: i–xxxviii), which disputes Percy’s contention (in Reliques) that ancient minstrels were the writers and composers of the songs that they performed, and which criticizes and ridicules Percy’s editing and forging of the ballads in Reliques. Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, Together with Some Few of Later Date . . . Reprinted Entire from the Author’s Last Edition, ed. Charles Cowden Clarke, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 1: xxxii. Terence Allan Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 37–43. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 50–51. See Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 1: 131; and Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 66. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 29.

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151

20. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 5 vols. (1837–38; rpt. Boston, 1902), 1: 317; Sutherland, the Life of Walter Scott, 29. 21. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, tenth ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 113. 22. Obvious examples include Mary Russell Mitford’s Charles the First, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Charles the First,” and Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre, which uses the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as its historical analogue for the French Revolution: see Kenneth R. Johnston and Joseph Nicholes, “Transitory Actions, Men Betrayed: The French Revolution in the English Revolution in Romantic Drama,” in Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays, a special issue of the Wordsworth Circle, edited by Daniel P. Watkins and Terence Allan Hoagwood, vol. 23 (1992): 76–96; and see also Hoagwood’s essay in the same collection, “Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama,” 49–63. 23. In addition to the essays by Johnston and Nicholes and by Hoagwood, cited in the previous note, see Mary Jacobus, “ ‘The Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: MacBeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre,” Studies in Romanticism, 22 (1983): 353–87. On Scott’s own plays, considered in political and historical contexts, see Daniel P. Watkins, A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 123–33. 24. Writing of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Jane Millgate suggests something similar about the distancing-effect that Scott produces with his editorial apparatus: “The subjection of his own poetry to the kind of editorial treatment normally reserved for ancient texts serves to modify the authorial role itself, to detach Walter Scott, Esq., in some degree from the troubling figure of the poetic creator” [Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), 18]. See also Nancy Goslee’s observations in Scott the Rhymer (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1988): “In the traditional ballad’s tension between Thomas’s self-referential and rational assessments of his own art and his acceptance of the uncanny encounter with the elfin queen, we can see a complex attitude toward the criteria of reality and fiction” (11). See also Davis, Acts of Union, 162. 25. Though he writes of Scott’s prose fiction rather than his poetry, Jerome McGann’s excellent observations are helpful on this point: “The whole game of Scott’s art is being put on display—indeed, is being drawn into the fictional space of the text” (117); Scott’s prefatory materials and narrative apparatus “make the subject of taletelling an explicit and governing preoccupation of the fiction” (119); and in this way, even when Scott’s editorial persona cites archival sources, it is not authenticity but rather a “self-conscious fictionality

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26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

Notes [that] is coded deeply and thoroughly” (127): McGann, “Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117, 119, 127. Henderson’s note to Scott’s note includes a question-mark before the attribution of the note’s text to Scott; my own sentence should be understood as using “Scott” as a synecdoche for the corporate agent(s) of production. William Collins, An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland; Considered as the Subject of Poetry (London: John Bell, 1789). Milton’s ode is reprinted in The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Francis Turner Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1861), 41–47. From its first edition in 1861 to the last that Palgrave produced, in 1891, this anthology was reprinted so often, and sold so well, that Christopher Ricks has called it “the best-selling anthology of English poetry ever” [see The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1991), vii.] In this first edition, Palgrave includes poems from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, ending with Shelley’s “Music when soft voices die” (307), a poem that is discussed above in the present book’s first chapter. Palgrave’s preface and notes emphasize the motif of “song” so frequently (referring to poems reprinted without music) that his book might be considered the best-selling collection of pseudo-songs in English literary history, and for that reason I cite it where possible in the present book. Dryden’s poem is reprinted in Golden Treasury, ed. Palgrave, 48–49. Wordsworth, “Ode,” in Golden Treasury, 303. Wordsworth’s note, dictated to Fenwick, is printed in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940–49), 4: 463–64. In 1787, Sir William Jones wrote that he had just read “a very old book” in Sanskrit on the subject of Indian music, an art-form of which he was “particularly fond”; Jones writes that and that he hoped “to present the world with the substance” of the book when time allowed him to do so: Jones, letter to Joseph Cowper, 11 September 1787, in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, ed. Lord Teignmouth [John Shore,] (Philadelphia: Wm. Poyntell, 1805), 304. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne for Longman and Rees, London, 1803), 2: 336. Henceforward I will refer to this edition as Minstrelsy 1803. Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the

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34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Ancient Danish Language, and A Few Originals by the Editor (Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Cadell and Davies, and John Murray, 1806), 1: 157). Scott added that passage in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: A. Constable; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 1: 3. Henceforward, I will cite this edition as Minstrelsy 1821. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932–7), 1: 100–101. For an account of the literary relations of Scott and Jamieson, see Charles G. Zug, “Sir Walter Scott, Robert Jamieson and the New ‘Minstrelsy.’ ” Music and Letters, 57, no. 4 (October 1976): 398–403 Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 79. On Herd’s manuscript, see Harker, Fakesong, 29, 31. For an excellent account of Scott’s work in relation to the Act of Union and the cultural meanings involved in that historical change, see Davis, Acts of Union, especially 144–67, on the Minstrelsy. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 86. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. A Poem, . . . Illustrated with engravings from the designs of Richard Westall (London: John Sharpe, 1809), 302n. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 225. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 105. Sutherland, the Life of Walter Scott, 126. Sutherland, the Life of Walter Scott, 144. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, 335.

3. The “Cool Medium” of Sydney Owenson’s THE L AY OF A N I RISH H A RP 1. To identify correctly the book to which the present chapter refers, I will mention here that there is a frequently occurring error in publications about Owenson’s work, from the nineteenth century to the present, mistakenly indicating that The Lay of an Irish Harp (London: Richard Phillips, 1807) is a collection of Irish songs with music accompanying the lyrics. Lay of an Irish Harp is instead a collection of Owenson’s own poems (not songs) with no music at all. The basis of the common error may be confusion with Owenson’s prior publication, Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards (London: Preston, 1805), for which Owenson reported hiring a local young lady to write down scores of the tunes sung at home by her father, a retired actor, after which J. Hook composed arrangements for the piano to accompany the vocal melodies. 2. Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988), xi.

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Notes

3. Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], The Book of the Boudoir, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1829; New York: Collins and Hanway, Collins and Co., C. and H. Carvill, O. A. Roorbach; Boston: Printed by J. and J. Harper, and Sold by Richardson and Lord, Williams, Gray, and Co., Crocker and Brewster, and R. P. and C. Williams; Baltimore: Cushing and Sons, F. Lucas, W. and J. Neal, and Joseph Jewett, 1829), 1: 73–81. 4. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: William H. Allen, 1863), 1: 167. 5. George Paston [pseudonym of Emily Morse Symonds], Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century (London: Grant Richards; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1902), 119. 6. Davis, Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 139. 7. Claire Connolly, “ ‘I Accuse Miss Owenson’: The Wild Irish Girl as Media Event,” Colby Library Quarterly, 36 (June 200): 98–115. 8. Jacqueline Belanger, Critical Receptions: Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007), 18. 9. Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy (1818; rpt. London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 332–33. See Belanger, Critical Receptions, 28. 10. Belanger, Critical Receptions, 26. 11. Monthly Review n.s. 15 (Oct. 1830): 171–72; quoted in Belanger, Critical Receptions, 41. 12. Owenson, Memoirs, 269–75; and Paston, Little Memoirs 112–13. 13. Ian Dennis writes that “Gaelic accessories and a Wild Irish Look helped create the disposable identity of the moment, a commodified romantic femininity with a Celtic Twilight flavour” [Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 49]. 14. Owenson, Book of the Boudoir, 1:62–63. 15. Wright, Introduction to The Missionary: An Indian Tale [by] Sydney Owenson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 17, 12. 16. Campbell, Lady Morgan, 27. 17. Stevenson, the Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (1776–1859 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936), 298–9. 18. Paston, Little Memoir 119. 19. Campbell, Lady Morgan, 60. 20. Owenson, Memoirs, 255. 21. Owenson, Memoirs, 174. 22. Owenson, Memoirs, 263–264. 23. The musical point was made often and clearly during Stevenson’s lifetime; for example, J. Gamble writes in 1819, I speak . . . of Irish music in its original state, not in the form in which Sir John Stevenson has thought proper lately to present it to the English world. I respect Sir John’s talents as a general composer, but he appears to me to be totally unfitted to do justice to

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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Irish music. In almost every instance he seems to have substituted in place of the wonderful charm of melody, the ostentation of science and mere trick execution. . . . It is wonderful indeed how any men who have hearts in their bosoms should be so far misled by the ear as not to perceive that native Irish music would lose its charm the instant that it was shackled by the symphony and accompaniment of modern art” [Gamble, Views of Society and Manners in the North of Ireland (London: 1819), 307; quoted by Ita Margaret Hogan, Anglo-Irish Music 1780–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1966), 95]. Without mincing words, Oxford Music Online calls Stevenson “a follower of Haydn” (). Owenson, Memoirs, 179. Owenson, Memoirs, 182–183. Owenson’s letter is quoted by Campbell, Lady Morgan, 39. Symonds [pseud. George Paston], Little Memoirs, 96, 109. Stevenson, Wild Irish Girl, v. William John Fitzpatrick, The Friends, Foes, and Adventures of Lady Morgan (Dublin: W. B. Kelly, 1859), 6. Wright, Introduction to The Missionary, 18. Campbell, Lady Morgan, 44. Stevenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 46. On the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature of sentiment and sensibility, see Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Among recent attempts to retrieve for Owenson’s writing the dignity of serious and political purpose, Wright mentions her indebtedness to “the Della Cruscan school of sentimental poetry,” and then affirms that “Owenson uses the conventions of literary sensibility to add emotional force to her political points” (11). In The Lay of an Irish Harp, there is Della Cruscan sentimentality without political point. On the Della Cruscan variety of sentiment and sensibility, see McGann’s chapter, “The Literal World of the English Della Cruscans,” in The Poetics of Sensibility 74–93. McGann observes that “The emergence of the authority of sensibility tended to narrow poetry’s authority to the field of personal or interpersonal emotions” (105). Leith Davis confirms the point when she writes that, among Owenson’s Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, “all of the lyrics concern the relationship between a lover and a beloved” (Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, 128). O’Donnel: A National Tale (London: Henry Colburn, 1814), n.p. Campbell, Lady Morgan, 4.

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Notes

36. Wright expresses a different view, seeking to retrieve for the poem, and therefore for the book and for the poet, what I have called the dignity of a political meaning: admitting that Owenson wrote under the influence of the “poetry of sensibility,” like her friend Dermody, whose work was largely unmarked by Irishness [“ ‘Sons of Song’: Irish Literature in the Age of Nationalism,” in Romantic Poetry, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002), 338]. Wright suggests that the poetry of sensibility “sometimes strayed into radical politics” (and she mentions Robert Merry’s support of the French Revolution), but the only poem from The Lay of an Irish Harp that Wright adduces in support of the book’s political seriousness is the first one, “The Irish Harp,” where “melancholy is not independent of colonialism, . . . but a product of it.” The reason offered for viewing the poem as politically significant is that the poem laments the decline in the playing of the harp which is a “national” instrument. In contrast, Owenson’s own explanation, which I have quoted, actually distinguishes her lament about the music from any interest in nationalism. Further, Owenson’s dedication of the book to the King’s “Treasurer of the Ordinance” and her subsequent dedication to “the great English landholders” might call into question the “Irish nationalism” of this poetic project. 37. Oxford Music Online, s.v. “Carolan.” 38. In Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, Davis connects some of Owenson’s earlier poems with the Irish tradition of the aisling, dream-poems in which a lover’s relation to a beloved is associated with a patriot’s love of Ireland, and Ireland is personified as a woman (128); but “La Rose Fletrie” is not a dream-vision, and it lacks evidence of such allegorical design. 39. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 105. 40. The lyrics for “Ned of the Hill” are reprinted in the Lyrics Database ; see also Donal O’Sullivan, Songs of the Irish: An Anthology of Irish Folk Music and Poetry with English Verse Translations (1960; rpt. Cork: Mercier Press, 1981). 41. Julia M. Wright quotes that passage from “To Mrs. Lefanue” to illustrate the “poetry of sensibility” (“ ‘Song of Song’: Irish Literature in the Age of Nationalism,” 338. 42. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 141–42. 43. The following is an English translation of the lines by de la Fare that Owenson reproduces in French: Without hope—and likewise without desires I am regretting the pleasures of the senses Whose sweetness enchanted my youth Are they past? I am desiring without return. 44. A comment on Owenson’s prosody is in order here. While normally the poems in The Lay of an Irish Harp are competent metrically,

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45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

157

occasionally a variant (placed intentionally or not) confirms the casual, informal, impromptu tone that Owenson’s own poems and notes claim. For example, the two stanzas of “To Mrs. C_N_LLE” are metrically distinguished from nursery rhymes (e.g., “Jack and Jill went up the hill”) by the use of anapestic meter, rather than iambic; obviously, Thomas Moore was (only one year later) to use that anapestic rhythm to very popular effect in Irish Melodies. However, in the eighth line of this poem, the italic stress on “have”—a typographical mark which may be Owenson’s, but which was typically the prerogative of the printer in the early nineteenth century—makes the second foot of the line neither iambic nor anapestic. Its breaking the rhythm in that way is one sign that this poem had not undergone the test of singing. Hemans, “The Spanish Lady,” The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green; and John Andrews, 1827), 120. Keats, “Ode to Psyche,” Complete Poems, ed. Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 277. Keats, “Ode to Melancholy,” Complete Poems, ed. Stillinger, 284. Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” Complete Poems, ed. Stillinger, 283. Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, in The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., in Verse and Prose. With a Selection of Explanatory Notes and the Account of His Life by Dr. Johnson, 8 vols. (London: Nichols and Son; F. C. and J. Rivington . . . and J. Johnson, 1812), 2: 276, ll. 250–51. Byron’s translation appears in Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4: 280–85; for McGann’s comments on the poem, see his essay “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” The Byron Journal, 20 (1992): 27–45. Stevenson, for example, writes that Dermody died “of dissipation and consumption in abject poverty” (The Wild Irish Girl, 51). See also “Clare People,” a Web site of the Clare County Library ; and Robert Herbert, Worthies of Thomond, Second Series (Limerick: Published by the Limerick Leader and by the author, 1944). Stevenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 52.

4. Contradictory Arts: Moore’s I RISH M ELODIES 1. This Ossianic prose poem appeared first in a Belfast newspaper, Northern Star, in May 1797; in Dublin it appeared again, in The Press, 62 (20 February 1798); quoted in Jones, The Harp That Once—A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), 34. 2. A Sophister [Thomas Moore], “Letter to the Students of Trinity College,” The Press, 2 December 1797. Quoted in Jones, The Harp That Once, 34.

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Notes 3. Jones, The Harp That Once, 35–36. 4. On 1 August 1800, Moore wrote to his mother from London: I was yesterday introduced to his Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales. He is beyond doubt a man of very fascinating manners. When I was presented to him, he said he was very happy to know a man of my abilities; and when I thanked him for the honour he did me in permitting the dedication of Anacreon, he stopped me and said, the honour was entirely his, in being allowed to put his name to a work of such merit. He then said that he hoped when he returned to town in the winter, we should have many opportunities of enjoying each other’s society; that he was passionately fond of music, and had long heard of my talents in that way. Is not all this very fine? [The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.1: 22)] In letters home from London, Moore boasts repeatedly about the popularity of his work in England: see for examples Letters, 1: 32, 33. In the background to Irish Melodies, two important collections, both containing work by Robert Burns, are James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum, 1787–1803; and George Thomson, A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, 1793–1818. For that book, Thomson commissioned musical compositions by Haydn, Beethoven, and Sir Henry Bishop (who later composed music for the last three numbers of Irish Melodies). On the lyrical writing for these projects, see Harker: “When [Burns] became involved with George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs (which began to appear in London in 1793), Burns almost invariably bowed to Thomson’s businessman’s instincts to ‘accommodate our tastes to our readers.’ ” (27; Harker cites James Dick, The Songs of Robert Burns, 1903, xvii). For both The Scots Musical Museum and Thomson’s Select Collection, “Burns rewrote or re-cast texts . . . . Burns was prepared to produce ‘many silly compositions’ . . . for polite book-buyers . . . In a ‘good many of them, little more than the chorus is ancient, though there is no need for telling everybody this piece of intelligence’ ” (36, citing David Lacing, “Advertisement” to the 1853 edition of The Scots Musical Museum). For Irish Melodies, perhaps the most important of the Irish collections is Edward Bunting’s General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (London: Preston and Son, 1796), containing Bunting’s transcriptions of tunes, some of which he had heard at a festival of Irish harpers in Belfast in 1792. Other collections and histories of Irish songs published in the period include Walker Jackson, Celebrated Irish Tunes (Dublin: Edmund Lee, 1774); Joseph Cooper Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards: Interspersed with Anecdotes of, and Occasional Observations on, the Music of Ireland; also, an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Musical Instruments of the Ancient Irish (Dublin: Printed for the author by Luke White,1786);

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Sydney Owenson, Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of the Ancient Irish Bards (London: Preston,1805); Smollett Holden, A Collection of Favorite Irish Airs Arranged for the Harp or Pianoforte (Dublin: W. Power’s Music Ware-house, [c.] 1807). Jones, The Harp That Once, 292. Here, Jones quotes the first volume of an unpublished collection of manuscripts and clippings about Moore which was assembled by Edward Raleigh Moran, who knew Moore from 1830 onward. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1954), 447; Leith Davis, “Irish Bards and English Consumers: Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the Colonized Nation,” Ariel, 24 (April 1993): 7–25. Title-page of A Selection of Irish Melodies. With Symphonies and Accompaniments by Sir John Stevenson, Mus. Doc. And Characteristic Words by Thomas Moore, Esq. First Number. London. Price 15s. N.d. [1808]. The ten “Numbers” of Irish Melodies were published in 1808, 1808 again (“Second Number”), 1810, 1811, 1813, 1815, 1818, 1821, 1824, and 1834. See, e.g., Irish Melodies (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856). For accounts of these events, see Ronan Kelly, Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (Dublin: Penguin, 2008), 33, 35, 47–48, 55. Jones, The Harp That Once, 39. Kelly, Bard of Erin, 59, 64–65, 93. Kelly, Bard of Erin, 70. Kelly, Bard of Erin, 75. Even ten years later, in 1812, at a time when Moira seemed to fall out of favor with the Prince (then Regent), Moore wrote to Lady Donegal of his own political affiliations and goals in terms of Moira’s power: “In Lord Moira’s exclusion from all chances of power, I see an end to the long hope of my life” (Letters, 1: 179). Later in the same year Moore wrote, “Lord Moira is appointed Governor General of India, and he and Lady Loudoun, with the three eldest children, are to sail in January next. I cannot possibly tell at present what effect this very important event will have on my destinies, but it appears to me the worst way in the world that he could be provided for my interests, though the only way by which his own could be served in the present state of politics” (Letters, 1: 224). Jones, The Harp That Once, 45–46. Jones, The Harp That Once, 52–60; Moore, The Letters of Thomas Moore, 1: 30; Kelly, The Bard of Erin, 83. The Letters of Thomas Moore, 1: 27. Quoted in Jones, The Harp That Once, 79. Moore, Letters, 1: 66; see also Jones, The Harp That Once, 77. Jones quotes this verse epistle to Thomas Hume, in The Harp That Once, 80.

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Notes

20. Letters of Thomas Moore, 1: 50. 21. Jones, The Harp That Once, 101. 22. Frank Kidson, British Music Publishers, Printers, and Engravers: London, Provincial, Scottish, and Irish. From Queen Elizabeth’s Reign to George the Fourth’s (1900; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 105. 23. Harker, Fakesong, 27. See also Judith Bailey Slagle, “Ballads and Folksongs of Scotland, Ireland and Wales: The Collaboration of Joanna Baillie and George Thomson,” Keats-Shelley Journal 55 (2006): 137–57: Thomson “dared not offend the ‘tastes of the lucrative drawing-room polite society market’ ” (Slagle, 139, quoting collection information from the Dundee City Library). Thomson specifically asked Beethoven, for example, to supply musical arrangements simple enough for young ladies learning to play the piano [Slagle, 142; see also Barry Cooper, Beethoven’s Folksong Settings: Chronology, Sources, Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)]. 24. William H. Grattan Flood explains lucidly: The old Irish scale was pentatonic, proceeding as follows: C D EG AC. By making each note in this first mode a tonic, or keynote, we naturally form four other modes—and thus we get five modes. These five are:— 1st. C D EG AC 2nd. D EG AC D 3rd. EG AC D E 4th. G AC D EG 5th. AC D EG A The notes F and B are studiously omitted, and the arrangement is made throughout these five modes so as not to include the fourth and seventh. This omission of F and B is largely the cause of the quaintness which characterizes many of our oldest airs. [A History of Irish Music (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1905), 32–33] Because of the widespread use of pentatonic scales in blues, rhythmand-blues, and rock-and-roll, it may not be “quaintness” that we hear in such modes now, but they do not exist at all in the Irish Melodies. In the first volume of A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, Containing a Variety of Admired Airs Never Before Published and also the Compositions of Conolan and Carolan Collected from the Harpers &c. in the Different Provinces of Ireland, Adapted for the Piano-forte (Dublin: W. Power, n.d. [?1796]), the first song scored by Bunting, “If to a Foreign Clime You Go,” uses the fourth note in the scale, which did not exist in old Irish music; but in this song Bunting avoids the seventh, which likewise did not exist in the ancient,

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25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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indigenous songs. To mention only one other example, the eighth song in Bunting’s collection, “Kitty Tyrrel,” uses both the fourth and the seventh notes in the scale, which the pentatonic scale did not include. Either the harpers at the Belfast festival in 1792, where Bunting transcribed the music performed by the harpers, had compromised the strict pentatonic scale of the ancient music, or Bunting heard notes that weren’t there; or perhaps his adaptation “for the piano-forte” put the modern European notes where the old melodies lacked them. Bunting’s publisher, William Power, later published Moore’s Irish Melodies, and Bunting’s collection was Moore’s most frequently-used source of tunes. Note that, in this score, Bunting, who is professedly transcribing the music “for the Piano-Forte” (title-page), touches lightly on the note b-flat, but never sets the piece solidly on the major chord, B-flat, as Stevenson does. Ita Margaret Hogan observes justly that “Irish influence is negligible in Stevenson’s original music. He rarely uses Irish folk tunes and their idiom does not affect his style. This is not surprising in view of the fact that even in his arrangements of folk tunes Stevenson sought to remove their special melodic characteristic” [Anglo-Irish Music 1780–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1966), 95]. Davis, Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, 128. For information about twelve different versions of “Aileen Aroon,” with a useful bibliography, see Juergen Kloss, “Eileen Aroon,” in More Roots of Bob: Bob Dylan as a Songwriter and More . See Kelly, Bard of Erin, 167 and 578n. Kelly points out the poem’s lack of political activism (Bard of Erin, 167). Kelly, Bard of Erin, 167. On the mix of the personal and political meanings of the poems in Irish Melodies, see Kelly: “The Melodies consistently blur the borders between the personal and the political. Those evocative keywords—tears, sorrow, light—invite the audience to invest their own emotional history in the songs, to share that mood for a moment, so that laments for Ireland or for Emmet become obscurely entwined with one’s private life, whether real or imagined” (Bard of Erin, 167). I find Kelly’s speculation convincing, and likewise Stella Tillyard’s characterization of Moore, whereby, in comparison with Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the poet was apparently more interested in his relationships with aristocracy than he was interested in politics [Tillyard, Citizen Lord: The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, Irish Revolutionary (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), passim] . Moore, Advertisement in Irish Melodies, First Number (1808).

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Notes

34. On Moore’s use of parlor-parties to advertise Irish Melodies for sale to English customers, see, for example, his letter to James Power of 30 December 1812: Bessy has consented to my passing next May in town alone . . . my Songs would all remain a dead letter . . . if I did not go up in the gay time of the year and give them life by singing them about. . . . That is quite my object—I shall make it a whole month of company and exhibition, which will do more service to the sale of the Songs than a whole year’s advertising” (Letters, 1: 229). 35. Moore’s note cites Ferdinando Warner, The History of Ireland: From the Earliest Authentic Accounts, to the Year 1171: Since Which Period It Has Been Annexed to the Crown of England, 2 vols. (Dublin: James Williams, 1770). 36. Last Leaves from the Journal of Julian Charles Young, A. M., Rector of Ilmington, Warwickshire (1875), 173–75; quoted in Kelly, Bard of Erin, 180–81. 37. A Selection of Irish Melodies, Second Number (London: J. Power; Dublin: W. Power, n.d. [1808]), 75n. 38. Irish Melodies, 6th ed. (London: J. Power, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 73. 39. A Selection of Irish Melodies, with Symphonies and Accompaniments by Sir John Stevenson Mus. Doc. And Characteristic Words by Thomas Moore Esqr. (Dublin: W. Powers; and London: J. Powers, n.d. [1810], 19. 40. Irish Melodies by Thomas Moore, Esq. With an Appendix, containing the Original Advertisements, and the Prefatory Letter on Music, 6th ed. (London: J. Power, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 142–43. 41. Jones, The Harp That Once, 110–111. 42. The best account of these financial transactions appears in Muir’s excellent albeit unpaginated essay: The financial details of the early numbers are obscure. It is known that Moore received ₤50 for the copyright of the first six songs and that he later drew an annuity from Power of ₤500. It is said [apparently by Andrew Gibson in a lecture in Belfast in 1904] that the terms of the annuity entailed the obligation on Moore to produce the copy for one part of the Melodies in each year that he drew the annuity. However, Muir concludes reasonably that “these details do not fit the facts.” Muir agrees with the account offered in the Dictionary of National Biography “that for each of the one hundred and twentytwo songs Moore received one hundred guineas, which, over the period on which he was at work on them, represents ₤500 a year.” Moore did not supply that many songs by the 1815 publication

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43. 44.

45.

46.

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of the sixth number, and there are records of “Moore’s overdrafts with Power” beginning in 1819. At the stated rate, Moore was, in 1822, in arrears to the extent of ₤2,500, but accounts show that his “actual debt at this date was ₤504 6s 6d.” Muir infers “that the agreement was for Power to pay Moore ₤500 a year as a fixed annuity against songs to be supplied by him,” including National Airs and Sacred Songs, the musical settings of songs from Lalla Rookh, and individually printed and published songs [Percy H. Muir, “Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies 1808–1834,” The Colophon: A Book Collector’s Quarterly 15 (1933): n.p.]. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983): 1: 99. Muir reports that publication of six numbers of Irish Melodies was originally contracted with Power, and those volumes (engraved in London) were published by James Power in London and by William in Dublin. Arrangement for the remaining four numbers was with James, who denied William’s right to publish those numbers. “It seemed that William did, nevertheless, contrive to issue the seventh part; his advertisements at the time include it as ready. . . . But he had to pirate the eighth part with music by Stevenson, whereas Bishop had been engaged to arrange the music for James’s edition.” [Muir, “Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies 1808–1834,” n.p.]. The first edition of the first Number of the Irish Melodies was published sometime between April and August 1808: see the concluding pages of Muir’s unpaginated “Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies.” Muir, “Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, n.p.

5. “It Gave Them Virtues Not Their Own”: Byron’s H EBREW M ELODIES 1. “Essay on Song Writing,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 7 (1820): 32–35. That essay is one among reviews cited by Jeffrey W. Vail in his comparison of Byron and Moore, perhaps the best critical discussion in print of Byron’s imitative project in the Hebrew Melodies [The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)]. In his outstanding edition and commentary on the Hebrew Melodies, Thomas L. Ashton mentions Moore’s Irish Melodies in a more general way, as part of the national-melodies fad: “Moore looked into Edward Bunting’s General Collection of Ancient Irish Music (1796) and Lady Morgan’s (Sydney Owenson’s) The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807) before starting to work” [Ashton, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 4]. Ashton apparently confuses The Lay of an Irish Harp, which includes no songs, with Owenson’s Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, with English Words, Imitated and Translated from the Works of Ancient Irish Bards [London, 1805], to which

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2.

3.

Notes Moore or his publisher, Power, refers in a note to the Advertisement in the first Number of Irish Melodies. The Advertisement includes a letter from Moore to Stevenson about the project of Irish Melodies, and a note to this letter apologizes for Moore’s having forgotten to mention his awareness that “the Public are indebted to Mr. Bunting for a very valuable Collection of Irish Music; and that the patriotic Genius of Miss Owenson has been employed upon some of our finest Airs” [1808; rpt. Irish Melodies, 6th ed. (London: J. Power, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 228n.] . In Hibernian Melodies, Owenson was “employed upon” airs; in The Lay of an Irish Harp she was not. Ashton writes clearly about the commercially modified versions of supposedly ancient and national music: “if the taste for the ancient, the national, and the sublime yielded contemporary volumes in which the poetry of Byron, Moore, and Scott was joined to accompaniments by Haydn, Stevenson, and Beethoven, no one looked too closely. This was the best that an Age of Bronze attempting to echo an Age of Gold could do” (3). Ashton points out that, in the first edition of Hebrew Melodies, published by Isaac Nathan in 1815, “Nathan’s volume had been made to resemble Thomson’s work” (37). Jeffrey W. Vail points out that “Byron’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies . . . could not help being written and published under the shadow of Moore” (81); Joseph Slater writes that “physically [the first edition of Hebrew Melodies] was made almost a facsimile of Moore’s Irish volumes” (82). Referring to George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793), Ashton points out that the work joins “the words of Burns and the accompaniments of Ignace Pleyel; the second edition (1804) includes music by Haydn and Leopold Kozeluch”; Thomson’s “predecessors, concerned with the purity of musical tradition, had not sufficiently gauged the rococo Regency musical taste,” but Thomson published “incongruous accompaniments of German composers. In later editions, rude traditional verses were supplanted by those of modern authors”; correctly and memorably, Ashton says of the national-melodies books that “it was not the past, but rather its imitation” (4). Jeremy Davies’s essay on Hebrew Melodies draws upon the early reviews of that book to question whether it belongs in the genre of “national melodies”; Davies suggests that Byron’s poems “anticipate their being read as sacred verse, and gain much of their interest from the way they frustrate without rendering irrelevant the expectations of such reading” [“Jewish Tunes, or Hebrew Melodies: Byron and the Biblical Orient,” in Byron and Orientalism, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 200.] Quoting that passage from the British Critic, Ashton observes justly that this review “made the source of Moore’s antagonism explicit”

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

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(47). Having projected a volume entitled Sacred Songs, Moore did not complete that project until a year after the publication of Hebrew Melodies, and Ashton suggests that Moore’s negative comments on Hebrew Melodies may express annoyance at the priority and commercial success of Byron’s book of supposedly biblical songs. Moore wrote to his publisher, James Power: “Was there ever any thing so bad as the Hebrew Melodies? Some of the words are of course good, tho’ not so good as might have been expected—but the Music! ‘Oh Lord God of Israel!’ what stuff it is!” [Notes from the Letters of Thomas Moore to His Music Publisher, James Power, ed. Thomas Croker (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853), 46. In the Eclectic Review, Josiah Conder writes that the Hebrew Melodies remind him of Moore’s poems, [Conder, review of Hebrew Melodies, in Eclectic Review, 2nd series., 4 (July 1815): 94–96; see Vail, 90] Review of Hebrew Melodies, Second Number [1816], in Critical Review, 5th series, 3 (April 1816): 357–66; see Vail, 90. Kurt Heinzelman, too, points out that “Byron certainly borrowed image, stanza form, and metrical strategy from Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies” [“Politics Collaboration, Memory, and the Lyric: as Style in Byron’s Hebrew Melodies,” Studies in Romanticism, 27 (1988): 520]. Byron to Thomas Moore, 8 March 1815, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: John Murray, 1975), 4: 279–80. The musical scores published in the first edition of Hebrew Melodies are reproduced in the facsimile, A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). The scholarly introduction to this volume, by Burwick and Douglass, is one of the outstanding scholarly works on Hebrew Melodies. Burwick and Douglass, A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, 241n. The engraved score for “Herod’s Lament for Mariamne” is reproduced in Nathan’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, 2nd Number (London: I. Nathan, 1816), 83. Nathan’s score for “Bright Be the Place of Thy Soul,” a poem that Nathan included in Hebrew Melodies in a “newly arranged” edition (1824–27), was first published in a separate sheet in 1815. See, for example, the editors’ commentary on the score for “Jephtha’s Daughter,” in A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, ed. Burwick and Douglass, 241. If, as Heinzelman writes, Byron’s writings in Hebrew Melodies involve a “promise” of “collaboration with a real because original musical source” (“Politics, Memory, and the Lyric,” 522), it may be important that the promise is false. See, e.g., The Gentleman’s Magazine: “The expression of some parts we feel to be so true and so powerful as strongly to remind us of our old favorite Purcell’ ” [Gentleman’s Magazine, 85, Part 1

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Notes

(June 1815): 539; quoted in Joseph Slater, “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies,” Studies in Philology, 49 (1952): 84. In a letter to Byron of 15 September 1814, Douglas Kinnaird writes that Nathan’s “music is in Handel’s style” [Ashton, 14–15, quoting Kinnaird’s letter from mss. in the Murray collection]. Like Stevenson, Nathan composed modern (and sometimes extravagantly modern) music to accompany the poems. [Burwick and Douglass write that Nathan “is an English composer, working mostly in familiar popular modes”; he “appears to have sought genuinely Hebrew source materials, although it is extremely difficult at this date to rediscover those sources, themselves already affected by the westernization of synagogue music” (10–11). Burwick and Douglass cite Francis Cohen [“Isaac Nathan,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1925), 9: 179]: “Though lacking in Hebraic character, six of the ‘Melodies’ were used in the synagogue; probably four of these were derived from non-Jewish sources.” They cite also Abraham Zevi Idelsohn [Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1929), 338 ]: “The tunes, with the exception of those for Chanukah and Pesach, were not traditional at all” (quoted by Burwick and Douglass, 11) and Eric Werner, [ A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 221, 321] who found that “the music does not presume to be written for the synagogue. . . . It is true that the arrangement of the traditional tunes in the Byron songs leaves a good deal to be desired in craftsmanship. . . . But the style of English ‘domestic chamber music’ was exactly of the same caliber and compositional skill” (quoted by Burwick and Douglass, 11); But Burwick and Douglass press further than Cohen, listing the twelve songs in the first number of Hebrew Melodies with notes on their “sources” while admitting that the supposedly Hebraic melodies are not traditional but “adapted” (and sometimes “may be” adapted) from synagogue music. Of the twelve songs, analogues for four were identified by Cohen, two were identified by Werner, and four more by Douglass (13). Again, they do not claim that Nathan used the synagogue songs themselves, but “responded to currently fashionable Italian and German motifs” (14). Further, Burwick’s and Douglass’s list of “sources” includes and “English folk song,” a “Northern folk song,” a “13th c. German hymn,” and some “unidentified.” 13. Franklin, “ ‘Some samples of the finest Orientalism’: Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235. 14. A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern with Appropriate Symphonies & Accompaniments by I: Braham & I: Nathan [,] the Poetry Written Expressly for the Work By the Right Honble Lord Byron,

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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First Number ([London:] I. Nathan, [1815]). John Braham, a popular singer on London stages, had “a financial stake in the Hebrew Melodies” (Ashton, 15). Hebrew Melodies. By Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1815). The Works of the Right Hon. Lord Byron. In Two Volumes (London: John Murray, 1815) [Hebrew Melodies appears at the end of vol. 2]; and The Works of the Right Honorable Lord Byron. In Four Volumes (London: John Murray, 1815) [Hebrew Melodies appears at the end of vol. 4]. Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 110. Letter from Murray to Byron, 17 February 1815, in The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 128. Nicholson’s excellent edition includes deleted phrases which I have not reproduced. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–91), 2 [1984]: 849. Ashton,14–15, quoting Kinnaird from Murray mss. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 27. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 22–23. The First Number of Hebrew Melodies appeared in April 1815; the Second Number appeared in April 1816, according to Ashton (Hebrew Melodies, 42) and McGann (Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 3: 467). McGann’s commentary appears in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 3:459n. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 21. Both Nathan 1815–16 and Murray 1815 print 24 poems as Hebrew Melodies, but not the same 24; in his Entire New Edition of the Hebrew Melodies (1829), Nathan prints 30 poems as Hebrew Melodies, three of which appear first (and in the case of one of them, only) in Nathan’s book. The following are those three books’ contents: Contents of Nathan’s two numbers, 1815–1816: 24 poems (12 per no.) INDEX / TO / THE FIRST NUMBER. She walks in Beauty The Harp the Monarch Minstrel swept If that high World The wild Gazelle Oh weep for those On Jordan’s Banks Jephtha’s Daughter Oh snatch’d away in Beauty’s Bloom My Soul is dark I saw thee weep

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Notes

Notes Thy Days are done It is the Hour [three are also “Harmonised Airs, / fir / Four Voices.” [1816 or, as McGann says, November 1815:] INDEX / TO / THE SECOND NUMBER. Warriors and Chiefs! [in Murray’s edition, “Song of Saul”] We sate down and wept by the Waters of Babel Vision of Belshazzar Herod’s Lament for Mariamne Were my Bosom as false as thou deem’st it to be The Destruction of Semnacherib [sic] Thou whose Spell can raise the Dead [in Murray’s edition, “Saul”] When Coldness wraps this suffering Clay Fame, Wisdom, Love, and Power were mine [Murray: “All is Vanity, Saith the Preacher.”] From the last Hill that looks on thy once holy Dome [Murray: On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus] Francisca Sun of the Sleepless HARMONISED AIRS, / FOR / TWO AND THREE VOICES. [four of the poems listed above] Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron: Containing an Entire New Edition of The Hebrew Melodies, with the Addition of Several Never Before Published; the Whole Illustrated With Critical, Historical Remarks, Notes, Anecdotes, Interesting Conversations, and Observations, Made by that Illustrious Poet: Together with His Lordship’s Autograph; also Some Original Poetry, Letters and Recollections of Lady Caroline Lamb. By I. Nathan, Author of an Essay on the History and Theory of Music, The Hebrew Melodies, &c. &c. London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co. Ave Maria Lane. 1829. Apart from poems by Byron that Nathan prints in his memoir of Byron, Nathan prints the following poems in the portion of the book subtitled Hebrew Melodies, adding atop the list, “Those lines with an asterisk attached to them are original pieces of Lord Byron, which have never before appeared in print.”: She walks in beauty If that high world Jephtha’s Daughter The wild Gazelle It is the hour Oh weep for those On Jordan’s banks

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Oh snatched away The harp the monarch minstrel swept I saw thee weep My soul is dark Thy days are done Warriors and chiefs We sat down and wept by the waters of Babel Vision of Belshazzar Herod’s lament for Mariamne Thou whose spell can raise the dead When coldness wraps this suffering clay From the last hill that looks on thy once holy dome The destruction of Sennecharib [sic] I speak not—I trace not—I breathe not thy name* In the valley of waters* They say that hope is happiness* A spirit passed before me A spirit passed before me Francisca Were my bosom as false as thou deem’st it to be Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine Sun of the sleepless Bright be the place of thy soul Hebrew Melodies. By Lord Byron London: John Murray, 1815. Contents She walks in beauty The harp the monarch minstrel swept If that high world The wild gazelle Oh! weep for those On Jordan’s banks Jephtha’s daughter Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom My soul is dark I saw thee weep Thy days are done It is the hour Song of Saul before his last battle Saul “All is vanity, saith the preacher” When coldness wraps Vision of Belshazzar Sun of the Sleepless! Were my bosom as false as thou deemst it to be Herod’s lament for Mariamne

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Notes

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

Notes On the day of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept The destruction of Semnacherib [sic] From Job Lines on Sir Peter Parker Burwick and Douglass, Introduction to A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, ed. Burwick and Douglass, 10. Spector, “The Liturgical Context of the Byron-Nathan Hebrew Melodies,” Studies in Romanticism, 47 (Fall 2008): 396. This episode is ably recounted by Ashton, 35–36. Evans, An Essay on the Music of the Hebrews, Originally Intended as a Preliminary Discourse to the Hebrew Melodies, Published my Messrs. Braham and Nathan (London: John Booth, 1816), 46. Jonathan David Gross is perhaps following Slater, who simply credits Nathan’s account, when he writes that Byron “was truly collaborating with Nathan in 1814 rather than sending him poems he had previously written” [Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 65. As we have seen, Byron could not “collaborate” with Nathan because Byron lacked knowledge of music. Benita Eisler agrees with Ashton: “Several of the poems make no claim to biblical association” (Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (1999; New York: Vintage, 2000), 455. Heinzelman points out that the books of Samuel embed psalms and elegies within their narrative, and that “many of these . . . have no overt reference to doctrinal or theological matters, just as many of the Hebrew Melodies have no scriptural referents” (“Politics, Memory, and the Lyric,” 519). In her recent and impressively critical essay, Spector suggests that “the Byronic skepticism of the lyrics” in Hebrew Melodies creates “a counterpoint to the liturgical religiosity of the music. Spector illustrates that ironic point with reference to “If That High World” and “The Wild Gazelle”: in the first, “Byron’s lyric makes a conscious choice that redounds back against what, in contrast, appears to be the blind faith inherent in the liturgy,” and in the second the “combination of lyric and liturgy can be viewed as a concrete instantiation of the criticism of blind faith inherent in the liturgy” (“The Liturgical Context of the Byron-Nathan Hebrew Melodies,” 398–400). Frederick W. Shilstone writes that “Byron’s presentation of doctrine in these poems is, overall, tentative, questioning, and uncertain” [Byron and the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 103).] Further, Slater points out that “Byron’s [supposedly Hebraic] harps and minstrels and waters are reminiscent of the Irish Melodies” (86). For this comparison with Moore’s poems, Slater also cites Edgar Dawson, Byron und Moore (Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Seele & Co., 1902). See especially Dawson, 56–59 on Hebrew Melodies.

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34. Just as Woody Guthrie adopted tunes from hymns for songs about political and social subjects (among others, “This Land Is Your Land” and “I Ain’t got No Home”), some twentieth-century Zionists have adopted and applied Hebrew Melodies to their political aspirations: e.g., Nahum Sokolow writes that “Zionist poetry owes more to Byron than to any other Gentile poet” [Sokolow, History of Zionism (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), 1:95]; see Slater, 93. 35. The ms. bears that date. Ashton suggests that “1814” may be a slip for “1815” (20n.). In Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, McGann prints the poem, dating it 1814. Whereas Ashton had claimed that the poem had “never been published” (20n.), McGann points out that it had been published first in Murray’s Magazine (1887): see Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 458n. 36. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 20n. 37. McGann, Commentary in Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 458. 38. McGann, in Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 471. Vail makes the admirably balanced suggestion that “by writing songs that purported to express the feelings of the Jews, a people at least as oppressed and defeated as the Irish, Byron was enabled, like Moore, to indulge his penchants both for melancholy poetry and for the advocacy of the downtrodden” (92). 39. Deciding upon a text of Byron’s poems in Hebrew Melodies is not a simple matter. As I have mentioned above, the first edition of twelve of the poems is Nathan’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, the First Number (1815); Murray’s edition of Hebrew Melodies (1815) reprints those twelve poems and adds twelve others to Hebrew Melodies, and the volume also includes one poem which is not in that sequence— “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker.” Nathan’s A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, the Second Number (1816) prints eleven of the twelve additional Hebrew Melodies that Murray had published in 1815; Nathan includes “Francisca” but omits “From Job.” In the poems that both Nathan and Murray published in 1815, Murray’s edition incorporates revisions; on the basis of manuscript evidence Ashton suggests that Byron entered the revisions on proofs, though the proofs are not extant (111). The accidentals in Nathan’s edition of the first twelve poems differ from those in Murray’s, but the accidentals for the next twelve poems are the same. The ordering of the first twelve poems in Nathan’s edition is reproduced in Murray’s, but the order of the next twelve poems differs. An additional poem, “Bright be the place of the soul,” did not appear in Murray’s editions of Hebrew Melodies, but rather in Byron’s Poems in 1816, but Nathan includes it in Fugitive Pieces which also includes Hebrew Melodies, so Ashton includes it in his edition of Hebrew Melodies. In his enlarged edition of Hebrew Melodies (1827–29) and in the “Entire New Edition” included in Fugitive Pieces, Nathan includes four additional poems.

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Notes

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Notes Altogether, Ashton collates twenty-five different editions of Hebrew Melodies, and he places the poems in chronological order of composition rather than the order of any sequences published in Byron’s or Nathan’s lifetime. With its superb use of a complete array of editions and available manuscripts, McGann’s edition presents only the contents of Murray’s first edition of 1815, with corrections based on manuscript authority. In sum, twenty-three of the twenty-four poems in Nathan’s first editions overlap with Murray’s edition, but both Murray and Nathan include a poem that the other lacks, and each omits a poem that the other includes. Their accidentals and their ordering of the poems differ, and there are variants in Murray’s edition that are apparently Byron’s revisions. The most inclusive edition (Ashton’s) is a sequence of thirty poems. Three of these thirty poems had never appeared in print in Byron’s lifetime. The best modern editions—Ashton’s and McGann’s—do not contain the same poems, and those poems that they do both present are not placed in the same order. Each has good reasons for the selection and the ordering that each has produced: it is not the case that there is no good edition available, but that there are several, and they disagree in their content and order, significantly. Accordingly, in the preparation of the commentaries that follow, I have used five editions: Nathan’s first edition (1815), Murray’s first edition (1815), Nathan’s “Entire New Edition” (1829), Ashton’s Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, and McGann’s Complete Poetical Works. Every interpretative judgment requires specification of the particular edition. McGann, “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” Byron Journal 20 (1992): 30. Spector, however, credits Nathan with considerable ironic intent in relation to the supposedly Hebrew tunes that he fits to Byron’s lyrics (399–400). This letter is quoted by Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 9. McGann, “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” 43, 40. McGann, in Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 467. This passage from Gibbon is reproduced in Byron’s note: Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann, 3: 358. The poem appears in Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 4: 280–85. McGann writes that “Byron read the famous episode from Dante’s Inferno in precisely that way—as an emblem for a writing that would bring itself as well as its (romantic) readers to a final, terrible judgement” (“Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” 27–28); and “Byron’s obsession with this emblematic story is evident throughout his work”: McGann mentions several poems in Hours of Idleness, The Bride of Abydos, and Mazeppa. Byron quotes “Francesca of Rimini”

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48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

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at the beginning of The Corsair. McGann suggests that “the tale figures in Don Juan’s first two affairs, with Donna Julia and with Haidee” ( 44n). Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 111. Hobhouse’s diary is quoted in Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, 494–95. Both Ashton (Hebrew Melodies, 94–95) and McGann (Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 459) indicate that “I speak not—I trace not” (entitled “Stanzas for Music” by an anonymous annotator of Byron’s draft manuscript) was written about Byron’s affair with Augusta. The letter is dated October 20, 1814, and appears in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 4: 219–20. Byron’s letter of 20 October 1814 mentions that his writing of Job is “odd,” as he has been “abused as an ‘infidel’ ”; Ashton comments Byron here shows “some interest in demonstrating to the pious Annabella that the epithet ‘infidel’ is undeserved” (80). Stuart Curran suggests that, in writing the Hebrew Melodies, Byron was trying to “prove himself a proper match for his conventionally devout bride” [Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 58]. Eisler agrees: “Providing texts for sacred music . . . was also a tribute to Annabella’s faith. By this act of collaboration he proved he was not an infidel; if not yet a Christian in her own orthodox image, with his homage to the Old Testament he had started on the road to salvation” (Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, 455). Marchand, Introduction to Byron’s Letters and Journals, 1: 14. For a book-length exposition of Byron’s skepticism, which involves far more than religion, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993). McGann writes that, in Byron’s lyric poetry, “he dramatizes his own hypocrisy” while also exposing conventional poetic illusions of sincerity (30). Blackstone, Byron: A Survey (London: Longman, 1975), 144. Review of Cain, in Edinburgh Review, 22 February 1822; Byron attributed this review to Francis Jeffrey (see Byron’s letter to Murray 17 May 1822, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, 9: 159). Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic, 106. See McGann’s note to the poem in Complete Poetical Works, 3: 471. That title is given in Murray’s edition of 1815 (29); Nathan prints the poem in the Second Number of A Selection of Hebrew Melodies with the first line as title (“Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine”) and with the phrase, “All is Vanity, saith the Preacher,” printed as an epigraph with ornamental rules above and below it (113).

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Notes

Notes

60. Spector observes helpfully that “Byron’s ‘If That High World’ exploits the two-part structure of an Italian sonnet for a skeptical analysis of a hypothetical proposition, the question of whether or not there is an afterlife” (“The Liturgical Context,” 399). The octave states the hypothesis (“If . . . ”), and the sestet expresses a wish: “It must be so . . . . Oh! in that future let us think. . . . ”). 61. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 25. 62. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135. 63. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 139. 64. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 151. 65. McGann, in “Byron and Romanticism: A Dialogue” (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm), Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 302. 66. Franklin, “ ‘Some samples of the finest Orientalism,’ ” 236. Franklin argues that Byron’s poetry is “written in reaction to the imperialism which had resulted from both Napoleonic and British ambitions” (241–42). 67. Ashton, Hebrew Melodies, 26–27; McGann, Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 3: 471. 68. McGann compares “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte”: Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 471. Other poems in Hebrew Melodies also present veiled portraits of Napoleon and his defeat, including “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle” and (immediately before it in Murray’s edition of 1815) “Saul,” which is about the prophetic utterances of the Witch of Endor. Both Ashton and McGann suggest that in “The Destruction of Sennacherib” Byron means to draw a comparison with Napoleon (Ashton, 80; McGann, Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 472). 69. In biblical commentaries, the Book of Daniel is a central locus for a theory of symbolic interpretation: see, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: Printed by J. Darby and T. Browne, 1733); and Terence Allan Hoagwood, Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 40, 45, 51, 158. 70. Shilstone, Byron and the Myth of Tradition, 105. 71. For an excellent example and discussion of Byron’s illustrating this conventional and sentimental representation of nature, and then undermining it, see Daniel P. Watkins’s analysis of passages in The Siege of Corinth, a poem related (via Francesca, for instance) to both Parisina and Hebrew Melodies: see Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), especially 119–20. 72. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales, 136.

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Notes

175

Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 468. Byron and Nathan, A Selection, 27. Byron and Nathan, A Selection, 36. For the borrowings from the Ossian poems, see McGann, Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, 3: 469. 77. Two other poems in Hebrew Melodies that refer to David and the Psalms in a way that is also self-referential are “By the Rivers of Babylon” (first published in Murray’s Hebrew Melodies, 1815) and “In the Valley of Waters” (first published in Fugitive Pieces). The latter is a particularly Moore-like poem, written in anapestic fours and developing the theme that the conquered no longer play harp. 78. Notes from the Letters of Thomas Moore to His Music Publisher, James Power, ed. Thomas Crofton Croker (New York: Redfield, 1854), 46; quoted in Vail, The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore, 90–91. 79. Nathan’s commentary on “I Saw Thee Weep,” in Fugitive Pieces, 35.

Conclusion: L.E.L.’s Pseudo-Songs and the End of Romanticism 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” in Coleridge, Sybilline Leaves (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 239. 2. Dibert-Himes, “Sight, Sound, and Sense: L.E.L.’s Multimedia Productions,” in Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (New York: Modern Language Association, 1997), 171. 3. L.E.L., Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (London: Fisher, Son and Co., 1832), n.p. The sentence appears in Landon’s preface to the volume. 4. On the production, marketing, and audience of the literary annuals, see Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, “L.E.L.’s ‘Verses’ and The Keepsake for 1829, Romantic Circles ; and Hoagwood and Ledbetter, “Colour’d Shadows”: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 75–124. 5. See Judith Bailey Slagle, “Ballads and Folksongs of Scotland, Ireland and Wales: The Collaboration of Joanna Baillie and George Thomson,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 55 (2006): 142. 6. See Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, “Colour’d Shadows,” 1–2; Hoagwood and Ledbetter cite those words from Landon’s The Troubadour (1825), in The Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon: A New Edition, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1839), 2: 12. See also Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 83–88.

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73. 74. 75. 76.

Notes

7. Adorno’s statements about artistic reflexivity offer a lucid account of postmodern cultural practice in an economy of commodities: “The monopolistic hold on culture, which forbids anything that cannot be grasped, necessarily refers us back to what has already been produced in the past and institutes self-reflection”; and “the selfreflection of culture brings a leveling down process in its wake. Inasmuch as any and every product refers back to what has already been preformed, the mechanism of adjustment towards which business interest drives it anyway is imposed upon it once again”; and, accordingly, “all mass culture is fundamentally adaptation” [Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” trans. Nicholas Walker, in Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 65, 67]. 8. Anonymous review of The Troubadour and Other Poems by L.E.L., in The Monthly Review, 107 (July 1825): 229. 9. Wordsworth, Preface to [Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,] Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 2nd edition, 2 vols. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800), 1: v, vi. This book is reproduced electronically by Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, with technical editor Vivien Hannon, Romantic Circles Electronic Editions . 10. McGann, “L.E.L.’s Art of Disillusion,” in The Poetics of Sensibility, 143.

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Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. ———. The Culture Industry. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Anon. “Clare People.” Web site of the Clare County Library http://www. clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/people/people.htm. Anon. “Edmund of the Hill.” Lyrics Database. Web site http://www.lyricsdatabase.gen.tr/391351/Edmund_Of_The_Hill_Ned_Of_The_Hill. html. Anon. “Essay on Song Writing,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 7 (1820): 32–35. Anon. “Mr. Pitt—Finance—Sinking Fund.” Review of An Inquiry Concerning . . . the National Debt, by Dr. Hamilton. The Examiner, January 19, 1817, 36–37. Anon. Review of Hebrew Melodies, Second Number [1816]. In Critical Review, 5th series, 3 (April 1816): 357–66. Anon. Review of The Book of the Boudoir. Monthly Review n.s. 15 (Oct. 1830): 171–72. Anon. Review of The Troubadour and Other Poems by L.E.L. The Monthly Review 107 (July 1825): 229–40. Ashton, Thomas. Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Bainbridge, Simon. Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Banks, J., trans. The Idylls of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, and the WarSongs of Tyrtaeus . . . with Metrical Versions by J. M. Chapman. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. ———. “Tom Moore and the Making of the ‘Ode to Psyche.’ ” The Review of English Studies, N.S. 41, no. 163 (August 1990): 325–33. Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

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Abbey, Richard, 13 Act of Union, 83 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 135 “Aileen Aroon,” 84 Aisling, 55 Alastor (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 7 “All Is Vanity” (Byron), 118, 120 Allom, Thomas, 131 Anacreon, 56, 58, 75, 88, 92, 98, 102, 119 Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (David Herd), 41 Antiquities of the House of Brunswick (Edward Gibbon), 113 Ashton, Thomas L., 106–108, 110–11, 116, 121–22 Atkinson, Joseph, 52 “Auld Maitland” (Sir Walter Scott or James Hogg), 26 Bailey, Benjamin, 11–12 Baillie, Joanna, 131 Bainbridge, Simon, 121–22 Barlow, Joel, 2 Barnett, John, 19 “Barthram’s Dirge” (Richard Surtees or Sir Walter Scott), 26 Bate, Jonathan, 16–17 “Battle of Otterbourne” (Sir Walter Scott or James Hogg), 26 “Battle of Philiphaugh, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 26, 32–34 “Beardless Boy, The” (Sir John Stevenson), 76 Beattie, James, 17 Beer, Gillian, 10 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 131

Belanger, Jacqueline, 48 Bion, 2–3 Bishop, Henry, 72–73, 98 Blackstone, Bernard, 117 Blake, William, 8–9, 23–24 Bloomfield, Robert, 17–18 “Bonny Hynd, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 38–39 “Boudoir, The” (Sydney Owenson), 62–63 Braham, John, 108–109 Bride of Abydos, The (Byron), 111 “Brien the Brave” (Thomas Moore), 81–82 “Bright Be the Place of Thy Soul” (Byron), 106, 108 British Convention, 29 Brooke, Charlotte, 87 “Brown Adam” (Sir Walter Scott), 36 Brown, Charles, 13 Brown, Marshall, 6 Buccleuch, Henry, Duke of, 26, 30, 42 Bunting, Edward, 76–77, 96, 103 Burke, Edmund, 29–32, 81 Burns, Robert, 4, 17–18, 35, 77 Burwick, Frederick, 106, 109 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1–2, 17, 54, 67, 105–27, 136, 139–40 Cain (Byron), 117 Campbell, 49 Campbell, Mary, 45, 49, 51–53 “Canzona” (Sydney Owenson), 69–70

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I n de x

Index

Carolan, 76 “Carolan’s Concerto,” 76 Chambers, Robert, 28 Charles I, 26, 32 Chatteron, Thomas, 10–12, 16–17, 28 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 122 Chirico, Paul, 16, 18 Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scottish Poems Both Ancient and Modern, A (James Watson), 26 Chrysostom, John, 1 Clare, John, 4, 16–20 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 6 Cobbett, William, 16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, 130, 139 Collection of Old Ballads (Allan Ramsay), 26 Collection of Songs, Airs, and Dances for the Violin (John Clare), 17–18 Collins, William, 34 Comus (John Milton), 2 Congress of Vienna, 121 Connolly, Claire, 48 Corri, Haydn, 17 “Cottage Courtship” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Henry Russell), 130–31 D’Urfey, Thomas, 27 Daniel (Bible), 123 Dante Alighieri, 67, 113 “Darkness” (Byron), 117 Davis, Leith, 45, 79–80 “Dear Harp of My Country” (Thomas Moore), 87, 95–96 “Death of Featherstonhaugh, The” (Richard Surtees or Sir Walter Scott), 26 “Dejection: An Ode” (Coleridge), 130 Dermody, Thomas, 68–69

Dibert-Himes, Glenn T., 131 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 13 Douglass, Paul, 106, 109 “Drawing-Room, The” (Sydney Owenson), 58 “Dream, The” (Sydney Owenson), 58 Dryden, John, 35 Duck, Stephen, 18 Dundas, Henry, 30 Dwight, Timothy, 2 Dyke, Elizabeth, 90 Dylan, Bob, 77 Ecclesiastes (Bible), 119 Eclogues (Virgil), 3 “Edmund of the Hill,” 56–57 “Eloisa to Abelard” (Alexander Pope), 67 Emmet, Robert, 74–75, 85–86 Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Thomas Moore, 1806), 75 “Erin! the Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes” (Thomas Moore), 84 Erskine, William, 34 “Essay on Songwriting,” 105 “Essay on the Ancient Minstrels of England, An” (Thomas Percy), 28 Evans, Robert Harding, 110 “Eve of St. John, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 36 Evergreen (Allan Ramsay), 26–27 Every-Day Book, The, 17 Examiner, The, 16, 98, 108 Exodus (Bible), 122 First Attempt, The (Sydney Owenson), 45 Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-book, 20, 129–31, 134–35 Fitzgerald, Edward, Lord, 86 Fitzpatrick, William John, 52 Florence Macarthy (Sydney Owenson), 48

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190

“Fly Not Yet” (Thomas Moore), 88 “Fragment VII” (Sydney Owenson), 59–60 “Fragment XXIX” (Sydney Owenson), 68 Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (James Macpherson), 27 “Francesca of Rimini” (Byron), 67, 113 “Francisca” (Byron), 107–10 Franklin, Caroline, 122, 124 “From Job” (Byron), 114, 120 Fugitive Pieces (Nathan and Byron), 108–11, 113–14, 116–18, 120–22 Gaull, Marilyn, 8–9 “Gay Goss Hawk, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 36 George IV (earlier Prince of Wales), 72, 74–75, 83, 92, 111 Gibbon, Edward, 113 Gill, W., 131 “Glenfinlas, or Lord Ronald’s Coronach” (Sir Walter Scott), 37 “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” (musical score by Sir John Stevenson), 77 “Go Where Glory Waits Thee” (poem by Thomas Moore), 77–80, 84 Golden Treasury, The (Francis Palgrave Turner), 21 Golden Violet, The (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 21, 35 Gray, Thomas, 61 Gregg, W. W., 4 Handel, Georg, 106 “Hardyknute” (Allan Ramsay), 27 Harker, Dave, 26–27, 33, 76

191

“Harp That Once Thro’ Tara’s Halls, The” (Thomas Moore), 87, 127 “Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept, The” (Byron), 127 Haydn, Joseph, 106 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 13 Hebrew Melodies (Lord Byron), 1, 17, 54–55, 105–27 Hemans, Felicia, 9–10, 140 Henderson, T. F., 25–27, 34, 39, 41 Heninger, S. K., 4 Herd, David, 41 “Herod’s Lament for Mariamne” (Byron), 106 Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (Joseph Walker), 87 History of Ireland (Ferdinando Warner), 90 History of Scotland, The (Malcolm Laing), 33 History of the Lyre, The (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 6, 135 Hogg, James, 18, 26, 34 Hogle, Jerrold, 7 Holmes, Richard, 6 Hone, William, 17 “How Oft Has the Benshee Cried” (Thomas Moore), 92 Hume, David, 115 Hunt, Leigh, 98, 108 “I Speak Not—I Trace Not” (Byron), 108 “If That High World” (Byron), 121 Improvisatrice, The (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 6, 134 “Irish Harp, The” (Sydney Owenson), 52–54 Irish Melodies (Thomas Moore), 18, 19, 50, 54, 56, 71–103 “Irish Peasant to His Mistress, The” (Thomas Moore), 99–100

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Index

Index

“It Is the Hour” (Byron), 106–107, 113, 124–26 “Ivy Bridge” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Henry Russell), 130–31 “Jamie Telfer” (Sir Walter Scott), 26 Jamieson, Robert, 40–43, 79 “Jephtha’s Daughter” (Byron), 119 Jerusalem (William Blake), 23–24 Jesus Christ, 111 Job (Bible), 115–16 Johnson, James, 76 Jones, Howard Mumford, 71, 76, 97 Judges (Bible), 119 Keats, George, 13 Keats, John, 10–16, 19–20, 37, 64–65, 139 Keepsake, The, 20 Kelly, Ronan, 74, 76, 86, 97–98 “Kinmont Willie” (Sir Walter Scott), 26 Kinnaird, Douglas, 107–110 Lady Morgan’s Memoirs (Sydney Owenson), 45, 48, 50 “Lady of Shalott, The” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson), 21 Lady of the Lake, The (SirWalter Scott), 43 Laing, Malcolm, 33 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (John Keats), 12–14 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (“L.E.L.”), 6, 20–21, 129–40 “Lass of Lochroyan, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 36 Lawes, Henry, 2 “Lay His Sword By His Side” (Thomas Moore), 93 Lay of an Irish Harp, The (Sydney Owenson), 45–70

Lay of the Last Minstrel, The (Sir Walter Scott), 42–43, 63 Leigh, Augusta, 113 LePetit, W., 131 “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old” (Thomas Moore), 102 “Letter on Music” (Thomas Moore), 73 Levine, Herbert J., 1 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 36, 139 Leyden, John, 25, 35–36, 39 Life of Byron (Thomas Moore), 108 Lincoln, Andrew, 9 Literary Gazette, 20 “Loch Lomond” (Robert Burns), 77 Lockhart, J. G., 30 “Lord Ewrie” (Richard Surtees or Sir Walter Scott), 26 “Lord Maxwell’s Goodnight” (Sir Walter Scott), 26 Louis XVI, 32 “Love’s Picture” (Sydney Owenson), 51 Lowey, Michael, 15 “Lycidas” (John Milton), 2 Lyrical Ballads (William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), 139 “Macao” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 20 Maclise, Daniel, 73, 81, 84, 96, 101–102 Macpherson, James, 27–28, 71 “Magdalen” (Byron), 111 “Maid of the Valley,” 77 Marchand, Leslie, 112, 115 Marvell, Andrew, 17–18 Massey, Irving, 5 McGann, Jerome, 13, 39, 43, 55, 59, 108, 111–12, 115, 122, 124–25, 140 “Meeting of the Waters, The” (Thomas Moore), 91–92

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Milbanke, Annabella (later Lady Byron), 115 Milton, John, 2, 4, 35 “Minstrel Boy, The” (Sydney Owenson), 68–69 “Minstrel Boy, The” (Thomas Moore), 97 Minstrel, The (James Beattie), 17 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Sir Walter Scott), 23–43, 63, 139 Mole, Tom, 107 Monroe, James, 72 Montgomery, James, 17–18 Moore, Thomas, 16, 18, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 71–103 Morgan, Charles, Lord, 48–49 Moschus, 3 Murray, John, 107–108, 111–14, 116–19, 122–25 “Music, when soft voices die” (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 5, 8, 9, 13, 15, 21 Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, The, 6 “My Gentle Harp” (Thomas Moore), 96 “My Soul Is Dark” (Byron), 126 Mycalls, John, 2 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 111, 121–22, 124 Nathan, Isaac, 105–127 Novice of St. Dominick, The (Sydney Owenson), 48 O’Connell, Daniel, 72 O’Donnel: A National Tale (Sydney Owenson), 52 “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (Thomas Gray), 61 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (John Keats), 13, 15 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (William Wordsworth), 35–36 “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (John Milton), 35

193

“Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland” (William Collins), 34 “Ode to a Nightingale” (John Keats), 10, 12–16, 19 “Oh! Blame Not the Bard” (Thomas Moore), 93–95 “Oh! Breathe Not His Name” (Thomas Moore), 85–86 “Oh! The Last Glimpse of Erin With Sorrow I See” (Thomas Moore), 89–90 “Oh! Think Not My Spirits Are Always As Light” (Thomas Moore), 88–89 “Oh! Weep for Those” (Byron), 125 “On Jordan’s Banks” (Byron), 122 Ong, Walter J., 5, 23–24 “Orphan Ballad Singers, The” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Henry Russell), 130–31 Orpheus, 3 Orpheus Caledonius (William Thomson), 27 Orr, William, 72 Ossian, 27–28, 53, 71, 74, 88, 126 Owenson, Robert (Lord Morgan), 49 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), 45–70, 81, 83, 88, 96–98, 139 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 21 Parisina (Byron), 107, 111, 113–14, 125 Patriotic Sketches of Ireland (Sydney Owenson), 49 “Peasant Boy, The” (John Clare), 17 Percy, Thomas, 25, 28–31, 38–42, 87, 147 “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (Wallace Stevens), 21–22 Phillips, Ambrose, 26–27 Phillips, Richard, 48–51, 61, 70 “Picture, The” (Sydney Owenson), 51, 67–68

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Index

Index

“Planxty Drury” (Carolan and Sir John Stevenson), 76 “Pleasant Rocks, The” (Sir John Stevenson), 76 Poems dedicated by permission to the Countess of Moira (Sydney Owenson), 50–51 Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (John Clare), 17 Poems of Ossian (James Macpherson), 27 Poetical Works (Thomas Moore, 1841), 73, 103 Pope, Alexander, 66–67 Popular Ballads and Songs (Robert Jamieson), 41 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 5–6 Powell, David, 18 Power, James, 18, 73, 76, 97–98, 105 Power, William, 73, 76, 97–98 “Prince’s Day. The” (Thomas Moore), 92 Prometheus Unbound (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 7–8 “Proud Ladye, The” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 137 Psalms, 1–2 Purcell, Henry, 106 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 18 Ramsay, Allan, 26 Reiman, Donald H., 5 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Thomas Percy), 25, 28–31, 38–42, 87, 147 Reliques of Irish Poetry (Charlotte Brooke), 87 “Remember Thee” (Thomas Moore), 84 Revelation, Book of (Bible), 2 Revolt of Islam, The (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 7

“Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore” (Thomas Moore), 90–91 Ritson, Joseph, 27–28, 31, 38 Robinson, Eric, 18 Romney, J., 131 “Rose Fletrie, La” (Sydney Owenson), 55–56 Rowley Poems, The (Thomas Chatterton), 11 Rural Muse, The (John Clare), 19 “Sad is the sleep of Erin” (Thomas Moore), 71, 88 “Saul” (Byron), 122 Sayre, Robert, 15 Scots Musical Museum, The (James Johnson), 76 Scots Songs (Allan Ramsay), 26 Scott, Sir Walter, 17, 23–43, 63, 107, 137, 139 “Scottish Music: An Ode” (John Leyden), 35, 39 “Seaboy on the giddy mast, The” (John Clare), 18 Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, A (George Thomson), 76 Selection of Hebrew Melodies, A (Nathan), 108–109, 114 “Sensitive Plant, The” (Sydney Owenson), 65–67 Shakespeare, William, 6 Shawcross, John, 2 “She Walks in Beauty” (Byron), 108, 111–12, 114, 119 Sheffield Iris, The, 17 Shelley, Mary, 5–7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5–9, 13,–15, 19–21 Shelley, Sir Timothy, 6 Shepheardes Calender, The (Spenser), 3–4 Shilstone, Frederick W., 124 “Silence Is In Our Festal Halls” (Thomas Moore), 93

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194

Index Symposium (Plato), 57 Sypher, F. J., 20–21

“Tale of Tamlane, The” (Sir Walter Scott), 34–35 Tales of Wonder (Matthew Gregory Lewis), 36–37, 139 Tasso, Torquato, 59 Taylor [John] and Hessey [J.A.], 13, 16 Taylor, John, 18–19 Tempest, The (William Shakespeare), 6 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 21 Tetreault, Ronald, 7 Theocritus, 3–4 “There’s not a joy the world can give” (Byron), 105 Thomson, George, 16, 76, 105–107, 131, 139 Thomson, William, 27 “Thy Days Are Done” (Byron), 122 “To Mrs. C_N_LLE” (Sydney Owenson), 61–62 “To Mrs. Lefanue” (Sydney Owenson), 56–57 “To the Students of Trinity College” (Thomas Moore), 71 “To-morrow” (Sydney Owenson), 67 Tone, Wolfe, 72 Treason Trials, 29 Troubadour, The (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 6, 20–21, 134–38, 140, 148 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, 50 United Irishmen, 72 Vardy, Alan, 18–19 Vestris, Madame, 17 Village Minstrel, The (John Clare), 17 “Violet, The” (Sydney Owenson), 60–61

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“Sir Patrick Spence” (Robert Jamieson), 40–43, 79 “Sir Patrick Spence” (Thomas Percy), 40–42 “Sir Patrick Spens” (Sir Walter Scott), 26, 39–42 Slater, Joseph, 110–11 Smith, Hallett, 2 “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (John Dryden), 35 “Song of the Troubadour, The” (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 138 “Songs Eternity” (John Clare), 19–20 Songs of Innocence and of Experience (William Blake), 8–9, 24 “Sonnet to Love” (Helen Maria Williams), 59 “Spanish Guitar, The” Sydney Owenson), 63–64 “Spanish Lady, The” (Felicia Hemans), 9–10 Spector, Sheila, 109, 121 Spenser, Edmund, 3–4 “Spleen” (Sydney Owenson), 64–65 St. Clair, William, 7 Stevens, Wallace, 21–22 Stevenson, John, 50, 72–73, 75–79, 83, 87, 93, 95, 98, 102 Stevenson, Lionel, 49 Stillinger, Jack, 13–14 Storey, Mark, 19 “Sublime Was the Warning” (Thomas Moore), 100–102 Suckling, Sir John, 18 “Sun of the Sleepless” (Byron), 107, 117–119 “Supplementary Stanzas to Collins’s Ode on The Superstitions of Scotland” (William Erskine), 34 Surtees, Richard, 26 Sutherland, John, 29–30, 41–42 Symonds, Emily Morse, 50

195

Index

Virgil, 3 “Vision of Belshazzar” (Byron), 122–24 “Vive la Platonique” (Sydney Owenson), 57–58 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 58, 115 Walker, Joseph, 87 “War Song: Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave” (Thomas Moore), 81–82 “War Song” (Sir Walter Scott), 30 Warner, Ferdinando, 90 Waterloo, 122 Watkins, Daniel P., 15, 125 Watson, James, 26 Watts, Isaac, 2 Weller, Barry, 6–7 Werner, Eric, 1 “When He Who Adores Thee” (Thomas Moore), 86–88

Whole Book of Psalms, Collected into English Meter, The (Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins), 1–2 “Wild Gazelle, The” (Byron), 121 Wild Irish Girl. The (Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan), 45, 48–49, 52, 61 Williams, Helen Maria, 59 Wilmot, Anne, 112 Wit and Mirth, or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (Thomas D’Urfey), 27 “With a Guitar, To Jane” (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 5–6, 8 Wordsworth, William, 35–36, 60, 139–40 Wright, Julia M., 49, 51 Yearsley, Ann, 18 Yeats, William Butler, 72 Young, Julian Charles, 90

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196