J. Stanyan Bigg's "An Irish Picture"

A smoking swamp before a cottage door;
A drowned dog bobbing to a soleless shoe;
A broken wash-tub, with its ragged staves
Swimming and ducking to a battered hat,
Whenever the wind stirs the reedy slime;
A tumbled peat-stack, dripping in the rain;
A long, lank pig, with dissipated eyes,
Leading a vagrant life among the moors;
A rotting paling, and a plot of ground,
With fifteen cabbage-stalks among lush weeds;
A moss-grown pathway, and a worn-out gate,
Its broken bars down-dangling from the nails;
A windy cottage, with a leaky thatch,
And two dim windows set like eyes asquint;
A bulging doorway, with a drunken lean;
Two half-nude children dabbling in the mire,
And scrambling eagerly for bottle-necks;
A man akimbo at the open door,
His battered hat slouched o'er his sottish eyes,
Smoking contented in the falling rain. ¹

Until the publication of Christopher Ricks's New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse in 1987, I had known nothing of J. Stanyan Bigg and his poem "An Irish Picture," and do not doubt that the same was true of most students of Victorian poetry. Since then, the poem has been included in two other anthologies, Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle's Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999) and Valentine Cunningham's The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000), the latter of which reports in a headnote that Bigg was born in Lancashire in 1828 and worked for a time in the north of Ireland as a newspaper editor before returning to England, where he died prematurely in 1865. Since "An Irish Picture" is becoming better known, some critical commentary on the poem seems called for.

Bigg's picture is an example of a particular kind of ecphrastic poem--one that explicitly or implicitly presents itself as a painterly representation of its subject. John Hollander regards such poems as examples of notional ecphrasis, in which the subject of the representation is a fictional or non-existent work of graphic art. ² It is equally useful to think of these works as pictorial poems that "generate in language effects similar to those created by pictures." ³ Depicting a single or a composite moment, pictorial poems adapt to their verbal medium stylistic and/or generic features of paintings. Oscar Wilde's "Impression du Matin" and "Symphony in Yellow," for example, are impressionist word paintings of London scenes in the manner of Whistler and others. Other pictorial poems imitate genre paintings in their depiction of scenes from ordinary life. Whitman's "A Paumanok Picture," for example, describes Long Island fishermen catching mossbonkers. Other such poems have pathetic subjects: examples include "An Irish Picture" and two poems useful for comparative purposes, John Clare's "The Gipsy Camp" and Thomas Hardy's "No Buyers: A Street Scene." (The text of both poems is given in an appendix.)

Bigg's picture is typical of the Victorian image of the Irish peasant. "There is scarcely a description of Ireland" during the period, writes L. P. Curtis, "without its set passage on the dirt, misery, and primitiveness of the Irish cabin or rural dwelling." ⁴ These accounts make it clear that the squalor depicted in "An Irish Picture" is not exaggerated. S. C. Hall's Retrospect of a Long Life (1883), for example, offers a composite description of "the hovel of the Irish peasant" fifty years previously that contains many of the particulars noted in Bigg's poem: the door "hanging by broken hinges"; two unglassed holes for windows; the leaky thatch roof; the "cesspool of stagnant water" outside the door; the single underfed pig roaming "at large without let or hindrance"; ill-dressed children with "one ragged covering" each; the ragged "caubeen" covering the peasant's head. ⁵

The most conspicuous presentational feature of Bigg's representation of this topos is the viewer's detachment from the scene. One is shown a swamp, a cottage...