-
3 Women and the Sonnet
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r t h r e e Women and the Sonnet 1212 This is no time for straying in the woods, Or sitting idly by the river side, No time for poet’s dreaming, there’s a wide And troubled view before us;—multitudes Murmuring like waves of the incoming tide. Oh! for some master spirit now to ride, Like a strong bark, upon those angry waves! Oh that the star of truth at once might rise, Shedding its glory through these gloomy skies, To guide that vessel on!—Men have been slaves In soul too long—they suddenly awake, And find that in their sleep they have been chained, And fettered to the earth—now must be strained The chords, and they, or man’s strong heart must break! (“Sonnet, Written in 1830”) The author is Mary Ann Browne, who published five volumes under this name and another under her married name, Gray. A prolific producer of both sacred and secular verse, despite her modest financial circumstances, Browne is best remembered as hymn writer.1 Her poetry traces a remarkable spiritual relationship with the natural world, which she valued almost as much as the scriptures as a guide for mediating one’s passage to an individualized “heaven.” Deeply meditative, that poetry posits an organic relationship among the individual, the natural world, and an eternal “afterlife ” that combines traditional Christian views of Heaven with a Zenlike notion of a place of perfect peace and equilibrium in which one is wholly liberated from all sense of self.2 Browne’s 1830 sonnet nevertheless reflects a very worldly preoccupa- 116 British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community tion with the civic lives of Britons at this transitional moment from what we usually think of as the Romantic era to the dawn of the Victorian. It was, after all, the year in which William IV took the throne that would pass to his niece Victoria seven years later on his death (Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent, having died when she was eight months old). Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dead, and Coleridge would follow two years later; Hemans and Landon were increasingly popular, although they would not survive the decade either. It was also the period during which the groundswell for reform finally proved irresistible, as the Reform Bill of 1832 would demonstrate. Browne’s sonnet exhibits an anxiety akin to that which Wordsworth had expressed nearly thirty years earlier in “The World is Too Much with Us,” the same uneasiness over social and cultural changes that seemed to be undermining the nation ’s traditional strengths and virtues at a historically pivotal moment. Like Wordsworth , who had sought another Milton and found him, by implication, in himself (“London, 1802”), Browne calls for a strong navigator in the perilous times that have enslaved her materialistic countrymen “in soul” for so long that their chains have become familiar costume, fettering them to the earth “in their sleep.” The distinction she draws between sleep and wakefulness is noteworthy, for, as noted in chapter 1, Romantic-era radical discourse is peppered with calls to a slumbering citizenry to “awake,” to “rise like lions after slumber,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley had put it in The Mask of Anarchy (1819).3 Like Wordsworth in “London, 1802,” Browne invokes the spirit of the poet as activist. Her sonnet’s opening lines do not dismiss poets, but only a particular sort of poet: the idle, self-indulgent, flower-sniffing dreamer. That a different sort of poet exists, “some master spirit” whose advent is signaled (like Milton’s—and Christ’s) by the appearance of a star (here “of truth”), is the clear implication of Browne’s lines. She was not yet twenty when she wrote these lines, but they underscore a sense of vocation that is voiced also in another poem, “Written the Day before the Authoress Completed Her Nineteenth Year,” from the same volume, The Coronal (1833): To think how few the brows my power from grief and woe hath cleared, To think how selfishly mine own deep feelings have been reared, To think how for myself the tears have been allowed to start, How I have been a passive slave unto my own wild heart; And oh! how often I have failed, in thought, and, word, and deed, To Him who binds the broken heart, and lifts the bruised reed. But should it be God’s holy will my life should...