“Mild, Melancholy and Sedate He Stands”: Melancholy in the British Poetry of Slavery

Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) was secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society from 1827 to 1834. It was in 1827 that a trio of his sonnets first appeared in George Thompson’s Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, which Pringle edited, entitled “The Bushman,’ “The Caffer,” and “The Hottentot.”¹ The “Bushman,” who is besieged and shot by “Christian-Men,” leaves his sons “a curse, should they be friends / With the proud Christian race—‘for they are fiends!’“ (3–14). The “Caffer” is a warrior, with “free-born pride” (5), who “burnishes for war / His assegai and targe of buffalo-hide” (7–8) in preparation for conflict against the colonists, or a “white-skinned bandit” (10). Both of these characters are not enslaved and show resistance to the Christian colonists, although that of the “Bushman” is merely a curse. The “Hottentot,” however, is emblematic of a slave:

The HottentotMild, melancholy, and sedate, he standsTending another’s flock upon the fields,His father’s once, where now the White Man buildsHis home, and issues forth his proud commands.His dark eye flashes not; his listless handsSupport the boor’s huge firelock; but the shieldsAnd quivers of his race are gone: he yieldsSubmissively his freedom and his lands.Has he no courage? Once he had—but lo! Harsh Servitude hath worn him to the bone.No enterprise? Alas! The brand, the blow,Have humbled him to dust—even hope is gone!“He’s a base-hearted hound—not worth his food”—His Master cries—”he has no gratitudel”

According to this text, colonial depredation and slavery have degraded the “Hottentot,” in the course of one generation, to the point of extreme passivity and despair. He could, of course, turn the boor’s own firelock against his master, a weapon significantly more powerful than the bows and arrows of his forefathers.² Pringle was aware of this possibility. In a published letter on slavery in 1826, Pringle acknowledges that “hatred and revenge on the part of the slave” are “generally the result of this unnatural relationship,” yet “The Hottentot’s” mildness and listlessness in this poem are clearly at odds with what Pringle acknowledges to be generally the case.³ In Anne Anlin Cheng’s terms, the melancholic subject here is clearly a “subject of grief” rather than a “subject of grievance” (though he could be the latter)—the subject as portrayed here suffers rather than speaks out.⁴ The affect of melancholy in this case is portrayed as mildness and despair, and there is no strategy of resistance present, from suicide to revolt, only submission: even “his dark eye flashes not,” rendering the possible call for an understanding of alterity in the “Hottentot’s” gaze superfluous. This depiction is in line with Pringle’s general philosophy that slavery degrades the slave as much as the master, but it prompted me to start questioning the role of melancholy in the poetry of slavery.

This turned out to be a huge question to answer, as there were literally hundreds of thousands of poems published about slavery in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain and America. I have limited my inquiry here to British poetry, as there are substantial differences between the productions of the two nations. My inquiry was guided by the most comprehensive anthology of slavery poetry published to date, namely Marcus Wood’s excellent The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764–1865 (2003), as well as Bonnie Barton’s anthology The Bow in the Cloud (1834) and Joan Sherman’s Invisible Poets (1974), which form a representative database of about thirteen hundred pages.⁵ I undertook the survey in order to be able to make some generalizations about the topic of melancholy in slavery poetry. I will be making generalizations, but note that each poem one encounters, including the most trite, if considered as a text for in-depth analysis, often shows itself to be fractured, inconsistent, and so on, and there are always exceptions to the broad generalizations.

Before I commence a summary...