Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse by Emily Harrington (review)

Emily Harrington’s Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse describes a tradition that runs from Christina Rossetti’s poetry of the 1860s to the later poetry of Augusta Webster, A. Mary F. Robinson, Alice Meynell, Dollie Radford, and Mary E. Coleridge, five poets who inherit her “emphasis on silence, restraint, and reserve” and who share her commitment to “short lyrical forms” (pp. 4, 2). To establish the Rossettian aesthetic at her book’s outset, Harrington provides a stunning reading of “Echo” (1862), finding the emotional detachment of this and other after-death lyrics to be one of the “cornerstones of Rossetti’s poetics” and a paradoxical “precondition for lyric intimacy” (p. 40). Second Person Singular then takes Rossetti’s poetry as a model for looking closely at the noncanonical women poets of the Victorian fin de siècle, showing precisely how (and how differently) they “embrace an impersonal intimacy” (p. 9). Taking her lead as well as her title from Meynell’s “The Second Person Singular” (1898), Harrington tracks the distinctive ways the authors construct, resist, or mourn I-thou intimacies. Meynell becomes Harrington’s informal period theorist, and perhaps for this reason, the chapter on her poems and essays is among the book’s most assured. Attention to the thematic possibilities raised by her poems’ silences and “meaningful pauses” shows Meynell prizing distance and detachment “precisely because they create possibilities for intimacy” (pp. 112, 110). Consideration of Meynell’s prosody demonstrates, too, how skillfully she manages temporal pace; the trochaic scheme of “To Any Poet” (1913) “enacts disconnection” while the “shifting rhythms” of “The Modern Mother” (1902) match “the distress of life” with “metrical distress” (pp. 133, 137).

When exploring Webster’s and Robinson’s ways of thinking about intimacy, Harrington positions them at remote ends of a familial-communal spectrum; Webster imagines relationships with, and Robinson without, the possibility of “mutuality” (p. 90). Webster’s late-life sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1881, 1895) takes the pain of anticipated loss as its through-line. The sure knowledge that “Time, the strong creditor, will call his debt” is lamented in a traditional meter, a formal choice that—as Harrington deftly notes—“tallies the time to the poem’s end” (pp. 67,48). Robinson’s concern about “modern realities,” including “class consciousness [and] moral uncertainty,” informs her intentionally jarring style (p. 95). Her “Prologue” to “The New Arcadia” (1884) cautions readers that her aim is “to wring your hearts and make you know / What shame there is in the world, what wrongs what woe” (p. 94). Although Robinson’s experiment with “discordant prosodic and lyric techniques” was not well received at the time, Harrington shows her “attempt to establish an ethical aesthetics” to be of lasting interest (pp. 78, 81).

For Radford’s A Light Load (1891), the focus is on self-referential lyrics that treat song as a metaphorical “form of waiting” or an occasion “for misinterpretation and deceit” (pp. 145, 157). Faced with the bland derivativeness of the lines that ask “Why do I sing? / Why?” or that celebrate themselves as “little songs which come and go, / In tender measures,” Harrington makes the least robust claim possible: Radford’s style is “boldly unoriginal” (pp. 143, 170, 141). The chapter recovers, however, with an informative account of Radford’s place in the art-song tradition. Having arranged a performance of Radford’s “Six Songs” (1888) set to their original sheet music by Erskine Allon, Harrington is well-equipped to discuss the relationship between music and poetry, the ephemerality of drawing room performance, and “what ‘song’ means . . . to fin de siècle poetic culture” (p. 152).

Engaging analysis of the women poets’ historical and cultural context is Harrington’s strong point, providing what G. K. Chesterton might call “the rib of a strong intellectual structure...