"The English Martyrs; A Scene of the Days of Queen Mary"
For a change, here's a poem by someone whom many nineteenth-century specialists will recognize (and may even have read), Felicia Hemans. Hemans wrote a number of historical lyrics and verse dramas; this dramatic scene, set on the eve of the martyrdom of two young lovers, touches on a number of her favorite themes, including the strength of female spirituality in the face of death. "The English Martyrs" was the first poem in Hemans' 1834 collection Scenes and Hymns of Life, with Other Religious Poems, which included both narrative and devotional poetry. Despite the anti-Catholic subject matter, this isn't a controversial poem. Instead, for lack of a better term, it naturalizes Protestantism by linking the essence of Protestant worship first to the English landscape, and then to feeling itself. Sentimentality and spontaneity turn out to be Protestantism's habitat; Catholicism, by contrast, is distinctly forbidding ("I know not love," says the priest [7]).
Hemans dedicated the volume to Wordsworth, and the reader will immediately detect both Wordsworthian and Coleridgean echoes in the innocent Edith's evocations of the landscape from which she has been disbarred. The poem opens with an imaginative tour strongly reminiscent of Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," in which Edith contrasts her "lone dim cell" (1) to the lost "cottage lattice" (2). Simultaneously associating the morning with both her imprisonment's monotonous repetition and nature's joyous stirrings ("Morn once again!" [1]), Edith momentarily escapes the prison's gloom by traversing her mental map of the landscape, each station marked by a "Now." Notably, Edith imagines nature in terms of action and interaction, in stark contrast to the isolated cell: the bird who sings with a "gushing soul" soon calls forth "rich answers of delight," while the lake begins to "[d]arken and flash in rapid interchange/Unto the matin breeze" (2). Nature's glorious variety and expressivism, however, palls before her relationship with Herbert, her "soul's companion" (2), which she limns in an explosion of exclamation points.
In opening with this twin paean to lost landscape and lost lover, the poem suggests that Edith's mind is worldly rather than otherwise, focused on the joys of present experience rather than those of future blessedness. But during her subsequent dialogue with Gomez the priest, Edith reframes the language of landscape poetry to turn it into the most suitable vehicle for Protestant feeling. Initially associating herself with the singing bird in her spontaneous overflow of powerful religious emotion (the "gushings of my prayer" [3]), she casts herself as a thoroughly Wordsworthian "child/Of breezy hills" (3), who frolics with baby animals and otherwise exists in delightful harmony with her woodland surroundings. When Gomez offers her the prospect of liberty, she admits to yearning for nature's wide-open spaces (and, of course, her beloved), but she balks when he demands that she renounce her faith in return for liberation. Sternly refusing the priest's offer, Edith reworks the natural supernaturalism of her earlier identification with nature; now, she insists,
God hath been with me 'midst the holiness
Of England's mountains—not in sport alone
I trod their heath-flowers—but high thoughts rose up
From the broad shadow of the enduring rocks,
And wander'd with me into solemn glens,
Where my soul felt the beauty of His word.
I have heard voices of immortal truth,
Blent with the everlasting torrent-sounds
That make the deep hills tremble.—Shall I quail?
Shall England's daughter sink ?—No! He who there
Spoke to my heart in silence and in storm,
Will not forsake his child! (6)
The innocent pleasures of childhood play now take on a different cast, as Edith envisions a nature resonating with the divine. In a poem that takes its time getting to the Bible, Edith's communion with creation invokes the old trope of nature as the book of God: nature expresses God's language, mysteriously generating "high thoughts" and permeating the sublime "torrent-sounds" with "immortal truths." Notably, thanks to nature's mediation, Edith's encounter with divine language occurs outside of all ecclesiastical systems, spaces, and texts; her purely natural faith transcends not just Catholicism (here linked figuratively and literally with prisons) but, it would seem, Protestant dogma as well. Edith's purified Christianity further offers a purified aesthetics. Not only has the rich visual splendor of Catholicism gone missing, but so have the whitewashed walls of Protestantized churches. Instead, we have the "beauty" associated with the untouched glory of the hills--a transformative experience of God with no human interference at all. And, as Edith twice reminds us, this is an English faith, bound up with an explicitly English topography. No wonder that Gomez, a Spanish priest, cannot make heads or tails of this dialogue.
In the second scene, Gomez allows Edith to visit Herbert in hopes that she will persuade him to recant. Here, the female convert proves stronger than the male evangelist: resigned in the face of impending death, Edith finds herself needing to comfort and reassure her wavering beloved. Edith announces that she has rejected the "tempter's price" (10), constructing her experience, as Julie Melnyk points out, as a version of "Jesus' struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane" (79). But in her last meeting with Herbert, Edith unconsciously offers her own temptation, that of romantic love. Within the close confines of the prison, Edith becomes for Herbert a shattered avatar of nature, his "blighted flower," but these figures of blasted pastoral inappropriately confuse Edith's physical and spiritual weakness. Herbert, wavering, moans that "I have been/Thy guide to death!"--Judas, in effect (9) It falls to Edith to put her ecstatic communion with nature in the first scene into context: "Yes! a new earth and heaven,/And a new sense for all their splendours born,/These were thy gifts!" (11) The apparently spontaneous natural faith of the first scene now turns out to result from the conversion experience; the "high thoughts" of nature resonate only with a Protestant mind attuned to the glories of nature.
Herbert's fantasized vision of their romantic future in that same "cottage" earlier mourned by Edith, however, indicates that he has yet to finish wrestling with the devil. Edith recognizes this pastoral idyll as yet another temptation, the "unutterable tenderness/Of earthly love," which must be abandoned for perfect reunion in the "bright country" (12). In fact, Edith's rapturous paeans to nature disappear here, as she and Herbert seek instead an alternate language of love to replace their romantic attachment. Effectively, the poem's world simultaneously shrinks and expands, as the two must renounce all mundane attachments in order to prepare themselves for the land to come. If Edith communed with God on the hillside, now Herbert finds His "peace" "lying far within thine eyes,/Far underneath the mist of human tears,/Lighting those still depths, and sinking thence/On my worn heart" (13). Notably, this moment replaces the sublimity of God's hillside voice with something gentler, more merciful. The poem suggests a kind of gendered spiritual complementarity here--God appears to Edith in the ruggedness of nature, and to Herbert in the gentleness of Edith. But both manifestations are a form of religious strength and sustenance. Melnyk, discussing other poems in this volume, argues that Hemans is "revising and Christianizing" Wordsworth's work (82), and Edith's and Herbert's experiences replicate the structure of self-consciousness in a poem like "I wandered lonely as a cloud," in which the speaker finds his own joy in imaginatively identifying with the daffodils. In Hemans' version, men and women become spiritually self-aware in the moment of hearing God's voice apparently outside the self.
After a moment of spontaneous prayer, "The English Martyrs" pays homage to Christ's own distress in Gethsemane with a hymn that was later incorporated into hymnals and books of devotional verse. Extracted from its dramatic context, the hymn suggests a universalized struggle against the fear of death; in place, it further develops the poem's emphasis on religion as feeling. Hemans eliminates the sleeping disciples and Christ's awareness of Judas' betrayal, although she alludes to the three moments of prayer in her tripled "pass'd it not"/"It pass'd not" (17). Instead, the hymn celebrates the mystery of kenosis, in which "He who gave man's breath, might know/The very depths of human woe" (17). This is Christ as terrified human sufferer, experiencing "the doubt, the strife,/The faint perplexing dread" (17) that any man might feel when death comes nigh. Counterpointing Christ's miracles with his impending end, the poem shows us a man apparently stripped of all power, until God "sends" his free gift, "[a] gift of strength for man to die" (17). The model for Edith's and Herbert's experience now made explicit, the poem ends by crowning its two earlier vehicles for religious experience (nature and humanity) with Christ: "How may we meet our conflict yet,/In the dark narrow way?/Thro' Him--thro' Him, that path who trod--/Save, or we perish, Son of God!" (18). By poem's end, martyrdom has partly turned into the imaginative act of identifying with Christ's fear of suffering, and in so doing, becoming aware of the grace that leads to fortitude in the face of death.