Victorian Poetry

HILARY FRASER

Today, tomorrow, world without an end;

To love you much and yet to love you more,

As Jordan at his flood sweeps either shore;

Since woman is the helpmeet made for man. (CR 9-14)

The whole sonnet sequence, through its ironic engagement with the fathers
of an immensely influential literary and cultural tradition, cumulatively
critiques the gender ideology of that tradition.
There was, though, one notable female poet in the ancient tradition upon
whom Victorian women could model themselves. Sappho - the great
classical poet of Lesbos - became an iconic figure that enabled many
women poets to articulate their own poetic identity. As Joan Dejean shows,
Sappho has been the subject of critical debate, editorial intervention,
fabrication, speculation, and translation over the past four centuries. 28 In
the nineteenth century, the sexual politics of Sappho's reception focuses
questions of authorship, gender, history, and sexuality. A significant tradi-
tion of poems about Sappho by early-nineteenth-century women writers
such as Felicia Hemans, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Caroline
Norton, and Christina Rossetti - just to give the prominent examples -
celebrates and develops the prevailing idealized heterosexual myth of her
life, portraying a drama of love and betrayal, a story of heroic female
creativity, even in the face of loss. Norton, for example, writes in "The
Picture of Sappho" (1840):

FAME, to thy breaking heart

No comfort could impart,

In vain thy brow the laurel wreath was wearing;

One grief and one alone

Could bow thy bright head down -

Thou wert a WOMAN, and wert left despairing! 29

But only the bare contours of Sappho's life could be inferred from the
fragments that remained of her work, and Norton explicitly acknowledges
the Lesbian poet's ambiguity, questioning the narrative that has been
constructed from the piecemeal evidence:

Yet, was it History's truth,

That tale of wasted youth,

Of endless grief, and Love forsaken pining?

What wert thou, thou whose woe

The old traditions show

With Fame's cold light around thee vainly shining? 30

As Yopie Prins points out: "These two questions present Sappho as an
increasingly impossible personification." 31

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