Samuel Rogers' "The Nun"

Samuel Rogers was one of those bestselling poets now remembered only by English professors...which, however, makes him rather better known than most of the authors I discuss on this blog.  I'm singling out "The Nun" because it exemplifies a kind of genre-mixing (or busting) that crops up quite frequently in nineteenth-century Protestant (and, as one might imagine, anti-Catholic) poems about nuns: the marriage (sorry) of epithalamium and elegy, the two genres that seem least suited to meeting cute in the same poem. 

The blank-verse poem figures the ceremony at which the young novice finally assumes the veil as both wedding (she becomes the Bride of Christ, after all) and psychological funeral.  The first two stanzas portentously begin with "'Tis over'" (162-63), referring both to the ceremony and the nun's life, and we find ourselves gazing into a parody of the nuptial bedroom, where the nun's "lovely cheek" rests alone on a "hard pillow" (162).  Reflecting more closely on the nun's "cheek," that emblem of feminine beauty and bliss, the speaker projects its future degradation, as it grows ever more "[w]an" (162) under the weight of the nun's projected future pain.   The poem is never quite grounded in time and space: the speaker, who makes it clear that he watched the ceremony and  knows the nun, Teresa, moves fluidly between what he saw (the ceremony), what he imagines in the present (Teresa, sleeping in her cell), and what he is sure she will feel in the future (loneliness, suffering).    Thus, in the second stanza, the speaker unproblematically occupies Teresa's mind, as he imagines her reflecting on the events of the day, in which she is arrayed in "gorgeous vesture" (163) to meet her bridegroom.  But, the speaker reminds us, this marriage will never be consummated; she will awaken unchanged, "as tho' she still was there,/Still in her father's house," with a habit in which she must now "shroud" herself (163).  This marriage which is no marriage turns out to be a change which is no change; the only "difference" is an eternity of non-difference, in which the nun herself turns out to be interchangeable with the one who "comes" after her death (162). (It's as though her permanent virginity somehow erases the possibility that she might have an existence in history, as it were.) The only alteration which the speaker registers is the slow, steady decay of the nun's mind and body, as she degrades towards dust.

In the third stanza, the speaker pulls back from his fantasy of the nun's future in order to contemplate her spiritual marriage, which he actually witnessed.  His memory of that event turns out to be encrusted with the language of the supernatural (which is reasonably appropriate) which soon shades into magic (which isn't): the "angelical" chanting which accompanies the ritual morphs into a "dirge," again transforming epithalamium into elegy, and seems to cast a "spell" (164).  The speaker's uneasy response to the chanting highlights what, for him, is the absence at the heart of this marriage: the missing male body (quite possibly his own).  Even as she kneels, wearing "[h]er crown of lilies as the spouse of Christ" (164), she goes faint, with only the "faint but fatherly smile" (164) of the priest to hold her up; pointedly, the thought of Christ himself proves inadequate at this moment, and the priest's "fleeting" (164) kindness is not much in the way of support, long as the speaker assumes that she'll remember it.   This is marriage without any masculinity to speak of.  Even the speaker, who figures himself throughout as intimately attuned to Teresa's dreams and feelings, merely gazes upon this spectacle, inadequate in his own melancholic distress.

In fact, the poem's tone abruptly roughens here: "Like a dream, the whole is fled;/And they, that came in idleness to gaze/Upon the victim dressed for sacrifice,/Are mingling in the world; thou in thy cell/Forgot, Teresa" (164).  This moment puts the speaker in a somewhat awkward position, as he too is "mingling" with those who regard the ceremony as mere spectacle, a modern human "sacrifice" in which Teresa's body is consumed and abandoned.  Nor is it clear whose "dream" it is--perhaps both his dream and Teresa's, once away from the church and its evocative chanting.  What distinguishes the speaker from the rest of the crowd, of course, turns out to be his own tender fantasies about Teresa's subjectivity, combined with his desire to mourn and memorialize her figuratively dead body.  What the speaker mourns, in fact, is Teresa's emotional and erotic potential:

Yet, among them all,
None were so formed to love and to be loved,
None to delight, adorn; and on thee now
A curtain, blacker than the night, is dropped
Forever! In thy gentle bosom sleep
Feelings, affections, destined now to die,
To wither like the blossom in the bud,
Those of a wife, a mother; leaving there
A cheerless void, a chill as of the grave,
A languor and a lethargy of soul,
Death-like, and gathering more and more, till Death
Comes to release thee. Ah, what now to thee,
What now to thee the treasure of thy Youth?
As nothing! (164-65)

Teresa's marriage to Christ turns out to be one dull eternity of unrequited love and desire; the promise of mutual pleasure associated with her body and mind turns out to be frozen into sterility, both literally and figuratively.  Inverting the celebrations of play and fecundity associated with the epithalamium, the poem substitutes instead the wintry "grave."  Without the judicious application of licensed heterosexual sex, the poor nun will find herself spiraling into depression.  Or so the speaker thinks, as he is once again prophesying her future.  We are back to that missing male body, that which would have made her a "wife" and "mother."  One could argue, flipping the poem around, that the speaker's ongoing genre failure here derives from his inability to imagine spiritual fulfillment without sexual fulfillment--without, that is, the presence of a male body like his (or even his own male body) in Teresa's narrative.  The speaker imagines himself inside Teresa's mind, but he doesn't find himself there... [1]

The poem's concluding stanza thus invites us to wonder who is disturbed here: Teresa, or our speaker? "But thou canst not yet reflect/Calmly" (165), he begins, a surprisingly declarative statement about a woman whom he cannot speak to or even see.  The faintly Gothic evocations of her haunted bedside, dreams that are the "monstrous birth" (165) of her spiritual wedding day, once again suggest the non-existent eroticism that keeps troubling our speaker: her marriage to Christ produces not babies, but strange, insistent, and unnatural dreams.  The "nuptial feast" has given way to the "requiem" (165), the glories of marriage to a death that, in the speaker's mind, is a death to life imagined solely in terms of heterosexual potential.  Perhaps for that reason, the speaker suddenly shifts from his self-confident representations of her inner struggles to a series of interrogatives: "Thy young and innocent heart,/How is it beating? Has it no regrets?/Discoverest thou no weakness lurking there?" (165).  While these rhetorical questions suggest their answers, the speaker's decision not to supply them implies that he has, in a way, chosen to bury her; while the "weakness" might well appeal to him, he elects to seal off the possibility of knowing anything about it, and thus projecting a future for her in which there could be dissent or change.  Instead, he leaves us with a blessing on her slumbers, removing the last vestiges of an imagined male presence from the scene. 

[1] Several decades ago, one critic saw the germ of Browning's dramatic monologue form in Rogers' Italy, in which "The Nun" features; see  Richard R. Werry, "Samuel Rogers' Approach to the Blank-Verse Dramatic Monologue," Modern Language Notes 62.2 (1947): 127-29.