Ubi Sunt: Allusion and Temporality in Victorian Poetry

Rereading Robert Browning’s anomalous, much-analyzed poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1852), I was surprised to discover what I had somehow failed to perceive in prior readings: an occluded and parodic, but unmistakable, allusion to one of the most widespread formulas in medieval Latin and Old English literature, the lament “ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt” (where are those who were before us). Focusing on Browning’s skewed deployment of this trope sharpened my sense of the poem’s patterns, moods, and dramatic force but most particularly its painful sense of history.¹ Examining instances from medieval and early modern poetry, I became convinced that, though the ubi sunt trope is often understood as a memento mori or simply as a nostalgic remembrance of the past, in many cases the underlying notion is that of a heightened historical awareness expressed by a speaker—such as Roland—who is adrift and bereft, at a moment of crisis or end point, on a temporal and metaphorical edge where the way forward is in jeopardy or doubt. As far as I have been able to determine, the ubi sunt trope, with its builtin temporal disequilibrium, has not been explored as a means of dramatizing historical crisis. This essay undertakes to lay the groundwork for further studies of the temporal/spatial thematics of this trope.

The ubi sunt speaker seeks to claim his patrimony from, to position himself in relation to, a prior figure or figures. If the speaker can redefine, can represent in poetic language what has been lost—as Browning’s Roland fails to do—then loss paradoxically becomes a kind of retrieval, the lost forebear endowed with a kind of presence, perhaps a redemptive one.

Isobel Armstrong reviews the “repeated shocks” (Matthew Arnold’s phrase from “The Scholar-Gipsy”) of mid-nineteenth-century England, shocks that shaped the imagination of “second-generation” poets such as Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold, and William Morris. Political struggles at home as well as European revolutions and wars abroad generated “insistent figure[s] of battle and the estranging spaces of the sea” in Clough and Arnold, tropes “respond[ing] to literal conflict and disclos[ing] unease about the shifting and amorphous definition of national space and frontier, the uncertain delimitation of racial boundary and relationship.”² Pursuing the presence of ubi sunt particularly in midcentury Victorian poetry, and not excluding “first-generation” poets such as Robert Browning and Tennyson, I found that underlying the “where are” or “where is” query are larger questions traditionally present in the ubi sunt trope but emerging with particular force for the Victorians: Do the speaker’s words, at that critical midcentury juncture, have the power of retrieval? Can they draw on cultural memory, on traditions that lend the words moral or ideological authority? Who is the speaker in relation to the lost predecessor—a survivor, heir, or simply orphan? The speaker’s dislocation implies collective displacement: who and where are we now, and where are we going?

In Victorian poems, far removed from the medieval epics and laments where ubi sunt is frequent, overt, and conventional, the trope becomes triply allusive: not only to those lamented (and usually named) but, since the trope is so deeply embedded in our readerly repertoire, to prior textual instances—and, metapoetically, to allusion itself. As Gian Biagio Conte points out in his influential study of allusion in Latin poetry, The Rhetoric of Imitation, literary allusion may be likened to rhetorical tropes such as metaphor and irony, since allusion relies on the disjunction of two poetic contexts, dislodging one figure into a strange context to create complex tensions between meanings.³ This is precisely what the ubi sunt trope does. If allusion to prior objects, persons, and texts is always in some sense an act of memory implying tension between past and present texts and times, the ubi sunt trope makes such tensions explicit. To ask—directly or implicitly—where are those who have gone before us becomes a way of asking where we stand in history, time, and circumstance. In the following study, I hope...