Victorian Poetry

The Victorian poetess

their own titles. Hence a description of the speaker's painting precedes
"Sappho's Song." It occupies more lines than the poem itself, offering no
greater connection between herself and the one "Who proved what
woman's hand might do, / When, true to the heart pulse, it woke / The
harp" (3) than it had earlier between the improvisatrice and Petrarch, or
than it does between the speaker's situation and the later "Hindoo Girl's
Song" or "The Indian Bride." The prefatory verses become more personal
as the poem progresses. But only when we read the final interpolated poem
do we discover an explicit relationship between it and the initial framing
verse, though the poem is still another's - her lover's - story retold. As if to
undercut the growing sense of congruence between the frame and its
pictures, the final verse paragraph steps beyond the frame to provide a
posthumous denouement, spoken by an additional unidentified first-person
voice. The asymmetrical framing jars, as if the layers of voices bearing a
teasingly analogous but always artfully divorced relationship to one
another might be extended indefinitely. Although early-nineteenth-century
critics might have felt that The Improvisatrice was a transparent expression
of a woman's identity, more recent readers are apt to find an ambiguous
meditation on the relationship between the self, the other, and the lyric
voice.

In this early volume by L.E.L., the paradox that attends the figure of
artless performance or improvisation - a paradox that became strongly
associated with women's poetry - emerges clearly in L.E.L.'s later "History
of the Lyre" (1829). Here the Pythoness Eulalie, another incarnation of the
improvisatrice, reveals that her poetic utterances proceed not from the
experience and loss associated with Sappho or the improvisatrice, but from
genius and imagination:

"I have sung passionate songs of beating hearts;

Perhaps it had been better they had drawn

Their inspiration from an inward source.

Had I known even an unhappy love,

It would have flung an interest round life

Mine never knew. This is an empty wish;

Our feelings are not fires to light at will

Our nature's fine and subtle mysteries;

We may control them, but may not create,

And Love less than its fellows. I have fed

Perhaps too much upon the lotos fruits

Imagination yields, - fruits which unfit

The palate for the more substantial food

Of our own land - reality." (LEL 229)

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