Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

political explicitness, her criticisms of British policies became increasingly
harsh. Many English poets, among them Swinburne and Harriet Eleanor
Hamilton King, wrote passionate Risorgimento poetry; but for no other
Victorian poet, perhaps, did the Risorgimento unite deeper, more im-
mediate concerns.
"I heard last night a little child go singing / 'Neath Casa Guidi windows,
by the church, / Oh bella libertd, O bella!" begins Casa Guidi Windows
(1851; EBB 1-2), Barrett Browning's longest, most ambitious political
poem. Birdlike in its pure exaltation, this triumphant music floats in
through the windows of the Brownings' home in Florence, Casa Guidi, and
echoes throughout the poem, seeming to voice not only "the heart of Italy"
(I. 8) but also the joyous beauty of simple national song (I. 155). In her
meditation on the Florentines' exuberant 1847 welcome of Duke Leopold
I, whose liberalization of Tuscan laws seemed to open way for Italy's
constitutional unification, the explicitly English speaker follows Corinne i n
positioning herself as reverent heir to Italy's older singers. Such writers
have troped Italy as a victimized or fallen woman - a Cybele, a Niobe, or a
Juliet, laid "corpse-like on a bier" (I. 34). If Italy is a Juliet now, however,
she has risen: her tomb is "as void" as "all images / Men set between
themselves and actual wrong" (I. 43-44). The time for mourning is over.
"Of such songs enough... !" (I. 40-41). Poets should now sing with those
who "are awake"; and England should seize its chance to unite "good and
glory" (I. 156) in the Italian cause, hastening the time when "Drums and
battle-cries, / Go out in music of the morning-star" (I. 726-27).
Juliet's resurrection is a bad omen, however. By Part II of Casa Guidi
Windows, the speaker's poetic revolution seems to have failed, along with
the early Risorgimento. Once more the Duke returns to Florence - this time
under protection of the city's Austrian occupiers. Remembering the child's
song, the speaker laments, "Alas, poor people, of an unfledged will, / Most
fitly expressed by such a callow voice!" (II. 270-71). What she had taken
for Italy's national song was "just the trilling on an opera-stage, / Of
'liberta' to bravos - (a fair word, / Yet too allied to inarticulate rage / And
breathless sobs, for singing)" (I. 226-29). "Great nations have great
shames" (I. 648) moreover; and England has added to its own by failing to
come to Italy's aid. What remains, for England as for Italy, is a counterfeit
peace whose reality is "treason, stiff with doom, - /... gagged despair, and
inarticulate wrong" (I. 414-15; see also I. 374-84). "Still, graves, when
Italy is talked upon" (I. 724), the speaker mourns. "Still Niobe!" (I. 726).
Has Italy won "Nothing but death-songs?" (I. 728-30).
Despite such defeat, however, "Life throbs in noble Piedmont!" (I. 731).
Carnal and female, the Italian landscape has been sown with patriots'

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