Bring flowers

As many have mentioned, the Romantic poetesses write in verse centered around suffering and melodramatic woes. Many undergo what swong calls “existential crises”. Specifically thinking of Felicia Hemans, Mary Robinson and the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, it would be an adequate representation to group this genre of poetry as the “Women’s Sympathy Movement.” As kduglin writes, it seems there is an “artificial emotionalism” among the poets in their strained appeal to gain either audience appreciation or sympathy. Interestingly, these processes and appeals to audience change in accordance with their varying styles, and the different poets’ personalities.

For example, looking at Felicia Hemans in The Grave of a Poetess, she writes under a very Wordsworthian sentiment, emphasizing both nostalgia and melancholy as particular elements of her verse. The world is depicted as forlorn, “Parted from all the song and bloom/Thou wouldst have lov’d so well,/To thee the sunshine round thy tomb/Was but a broken spell” and “The bird, the insect on the wing/ In their bright reckless play/ Might feel the flush and life of spring,/ And thou wert pass’d away.” Hemans’ melancholy exists where death and the passing of human life meet a fuller, more alive, vibrant world. Following The Women’s Sympathy Movement, we as modern readers might view this as indicative of women writers in the early 1800s, where a strong attempt at poetry and the sublime is immediately shot down by a world not ready, unwilling to feel. Hemans writes in her ending“where couldst thou fix on mortal ground/ Thy tender thoughts and high/ Now peace the woman’s heart hath found/ And joy the poet’s eye.” The female poet finally finds peace in her grave, where her tender thoughts are not tried by a scornful world filled with non-receptive audiences.

We have a similar but slightly different dynamic in Charlotte Smith, where her call to sympathy is more overtly stated. The entire poem is inundated by a sense of gloominess and dread (see Ford’s snip Oh Melancholy). Hers is a translation of the well-known gothic movement, saddened by solitude and loneliness. All around our narrator lurks a stalking sadness: “Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies,/ As of night-wanderers, who their woes bewail!” “And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,/ I love to listen to the hollow sighs,” (here) and (here). The solitude of the female poet intensifies, as Smith’s (Sonnet XXXII- To Melancholy) is not so much written from the grave but from real life stricken by supernatural woes. Perhaps Charlotte Smith is more a martyr-poet offering up herself and her on life for the cause, as opposed to Hemans’ Wordsworthian aloofness.

Finally in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem (L.E.L.’s Last Question), as commented by swong, we experience a direct appeal to sympathy in a personal address to the reader in her beginning lines (see Do you think of me). Her repetition of “Do you think of me as I think of you?” knocks home the point of personal address, but fails in a similar sense to the artificial emotionalism that kduglin found in Charlotte Smith. Perhaps topping the list of the “Women’s Sympathy Movement”, we find Ms. Browning also falling short of her goals. Rather than proving her worth as a poet, so we might in fact “think of her” the same way- or at least develop a respect for her not denied until after the grave- she instead repeats a dull question that is as airy as it is thin and unsubstantiated.