Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

Yet, as Hemans's consistent reference to "father" underscores, one pre-
cedent for Casabianca's anguish at the Battle of the Nile may lie in Christ's
suffering at Gethsemane. "My father! must I stay?" (IV, 158). Alive, the
boy is subject to a rule whose combined familial and governmental force is
at once miraculous and harrowing. Dead, he is a burnt sacrifice. When the
final stanza announces that the "noblest thing which perish'd there / Was
that young faithful heart!" (IV, 158), Casabianca's death emerges, perhaps
not entirely persuasively, as the greatest of many noble gifts of sacramental
military faith.

Significantly, the hero of "Casabianca" is French. In dozens of "national
lyrics" and battle-songs on behalf of an amazing range of countries,
Hemans celebrated an internationalist patriotism rooted in what William
Hazlitt called a universal "law of our rational and moral nature." 17 Yet she
also supported what Marlon B. Ross has termed "the romance of Words-
worthian organicism," with its project of consolidating national identity. 18
Logically, such versions of patriotism were irreconcilable; metaphorically,
they met in the trope of the heroic soldier's grave. For even as the return of
soldiers' bodies to their families reconciles Hegelian divine and human law,
so the organic return of those bodies to the soil creates rational grounds for
attachment to specific portions of the earth. "Wave may not foam, nor wild
wind sweep, /Where rest not England's dead" (FHV, 129): the claim, from
Hemans's "England's Dead" (1823), consecrates far-flung burials for rever-
ence whose sources are at once intimate and imperial. In great part through
Hemans, Victorian patriotic writing thus came to be intimately linked to
longings for home; and home came to be linked to far-flung places of
mourning and exile. British soldiers' graves were destined to be crucial sites
for struggle over national identity, through the First World War and
beyond; and poetry was crucial to such struggles.

Ill

For Victorians, then, patriotic poetry was not always what Peter Brooker
and Peter Widdowson have termed "literature for England." 19 This point is
most striking with respect to mid-century women poets, among whom no
British struggle provoked such ambitious patriotic poetry as did the
Risorgimento, the struggle for Italian national unification. Here, as else-
where, the Napoleonic Wars are central: for it was in 1807, five years after
Napoleon banished the famous French intellectual Germaine de Stael from
Paris, that she published Corinne, or, Italy. Near the novel's opening,
Corinne is crowned at the Roman Capitol as an inspired "priestess" of
Italian national "genius." 20 Many critics have addressed the extent to

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