Romantic Ekphrasis and the Intellectual Culture of

Sensibility

by

Jennifer Emily O’Kell

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate English Department
University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jennifer Emily O’Kell (2016)

 Romantic Ekphrasis and the Intellectual Culture of Sensibility

Jennifer Emily O’Kell

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate English Department

University of Toronto

2016

Abstract

This thesis examines the intersection of poetry about art, the culture of sensibility, and
eighteenth-century aesthetic thought in Romantic literature. These converging discourses
allowed poets to suggest insights into the necessary conditions of sympathetic exchange, and the
limits of what sympathy can accomplish. This thesis proposes ambitious changes to our
understanding of Romantic ekphrasis in order to offer a subtle but crucial change to our
understanding of the culture of sensibility. It considers a broad range of Romantic ekphrases –
some well-known poems by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and some largely unstudied poems
by Cowper, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Hart Milman, Barry Cornwall, and others – reading
these texts against multiple historical contexts. One of these contexts is the eighteenth-century
idea that the visual arts represent only a single, “pregnant” moment, whereas literature represents
successions of events. Moral philosophy and the philosophy of the sister arts are bound up with
one another throughout the eighteenth century; David Hume’s formulation of sympathy as
instinctive and visual comes to be associated with painting and sculpture, while Adam Smith’s
formulation of it as an imagined reconstruction comes to be associated with literature. Another
key context is the ekphrastic tradition, especially its understudied eighteenth-century portion.
This thesis is the first study to adequately investigate the archive of eighteenth-century ekphrasis.
In the light of these contexts, it argues that Romantic ekphrasis was a site of ongoing intellectual
activity within the culture of sensibility. Romantic thinkers inherited a set of questions about the
role of emotion and affect in ethical conduct, and about the role of the arts, not only in producing
emotion, but also in shaping how we grapple intellectually with emotion. This thesis brings to
light some of the intellectual tools that early nineteenth-century poets brought to bear on these
questions.
ii
 Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my excellent supervisory committee, Deidre Lynch, Malcolm Woodland,
and most especially Karen Weisman. On anecdotal evidence, I would venture that supervisory
practices in the university are far from consistent, and that I have been more than usually
fortunate. I know of no other supervisors who read their students’ work so attentively and
productively – let alone any who consistently do so in less than a week. Karen is a model that I
hope other faculty will strive to emulate.

I could not have finished this thesis without the unwavering love and compassion of Aaron Yale
Heisler, or without the support of my parents, Arlene Young and Robert O’Kell. I am also
immensely indebted to the colleagues who helped me along the way, especially (in chronological
order) Kailin Wright, Laurel Ryan, Tony Fong, Chris Pugh, Laura Clarridge, Christine Choi, and
Elisa Tersigni. Behind the scenes, good scholarship is always collaborative, and these have been
my chief – though not my only – collaborators.

This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

iii
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi

1 Introduction Sister Arts and Sister Feelings: The Interrelation of Sensibility and Aesthetics
in the Eighteenth Century........................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Criticism and Methodologies .............................................................................................. 4

1.1.1 Sensibility ............................................................................................................... 4

1.1.2 Ekphrasis ............................................................................................................... 11

1.2 The Sisterhood of Sensibility and Aesthetic Thought ...................................................... 14

1.2.1 The Philosophy of Sympathy ................................................................................ 15

1.2.2 The Philosophy of the Sister Arts ......................................................................... 24

1.2.3 Storytelling, Stasis, and Sympathy in Romantic Ekphrasis .................................. 37

1.3 Argument and Plan ........................................................................................................... 41

2 William Cowper and the Ekphrastic Tradition ........................................................................ 46

2.1 Why Study the Ekphrastic Tradition? ............................................................................... 46

2.2 Eighteenth-Century Ekphrasis .......................................................................................... 51

2.3 Cowper’s Reworking of Eighteenth-Century Conventions .............................................. 66

2.4 Poetry about art in the early nineteenth century ............................................................... 94

3 Ekphrasis and Public Discourse in the Annals of the Fine Arts ............................................... 96

3.1 The Cultural Context of the Annals .................................................................................. 98

3.1.1 Discourse about Art: The Artist ............................................................................ 98

3.1.2 Poems from The Artist ........................................................................................ 100

3.2 The Annals of the Fine Arts ............................................................................................ 103

3.2.1 Description .......................................................................................................... 103

3.2.2 The Role of Poetry in the Annals ........................................................................ 109

iv
 3.3 Sympathy and the Posture of Public Reviewing in Ekphrastic Poems ........................... 120

3.3.1 “Sonnet to Mr. HAYDON on a Study from Nature, exhibited at the Spring
Garden Exhibition, 1817.” .................................................................................. 122

3.3.2 “On the Monument to be placed in Lichfield Cathedral to the Memory of two
only Children. By F. L. Chantrey, Esq.” ........................................................... 131

4 Sympathy and Fixity in Keats and Shelley ............................................................................ 141

4.1 Temporal and Instantaneous: The Anachronism of Assuming Lessing’s Influence ...... 146

4.2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Art Beyond the Limits of Sympathy ...................................... 151

4.3 “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci”: Sympathy Beyond the Limits of Sentience ... 175

5 Sympathy, Self-Spectatorship, and Self-knowledge in Wordsworth and Keats .................... 209

5.1 A Spectator of Oneself: Self-Figuration and Sympathetic Self-Sufficiency .................. 214

5.2 An Obtuse Spectator of Oneself: Self-figuration and Misrecognition............................ 239

6 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 256

6.1 Ekphrasis and Sensibility After 1820 ............................................................................. 256

6.2 L.E.L. in 1825: A Test Case ........................................................................................... 258

6.3 L’Envoi ........................................................................................................................... 267

Works Consulted......................................................................................................................... 270

v
List of Figures
Figure 1: William Cowper’s “The Tears of a Painter” and a modern translation of Vincent
Bourne’s “Lachrymæ Pictoris,” re-lineated for ease of comparison. Page 67.

Figure 2: Vincent Bourne’s Latin original “Lachrymae Pictoris” and modern translation by Paul
Franz. Page 69.

vi
 1

1 Introduction
Sister Arts and Sister Feelings: The Interrelation
of Sensibility and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth
Century
One might not think that John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has anything left to tell
scholarship. This most studied of poems, however, has something left to tell us about
how the Romantics addressed questions that matter now more than ever: questions about
the role of emotion and affect in ethical conduct, questions about the role of the arts, not
only in producing emotion, but also in shaping how we grapple intellectually with
emotion. In the sphere of politics, in the sphere of popular culture, in the sphere of “the
arts” as traditionally conceived, and in the sphere of humanistic study that is under
relentless pressure to justify itself in utilitarian terms, these questions count. “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” and other ekphrastic poems from early nineteenth-century Britain cannot
answer them, but they can shed light on how thinkers of another era confronted
comparable questions, and what intellectual tools they brought to bear on them.

This thesis seeks to make a subtle but crucial modification to how we think about the
culture of sensibility. We already know that the culture of sensibility took shape in the
arts, and did some of its best thinking about psychological and ethical questions within
the arts, especially literature and drama. I will here consider how thought about the arts
and thought about the psychology of what we would now call empathy shaped each other
in the eighteenth century. I will examine how, in the early nineteenth century, that
legacy made poetry about the visual arts a different entity than it is now, and different
than we habitually credit it with having been. I will do this in part by fleshing out our
history of Romantic ekphrasis to include more, and more varied, poems than we usually
look at; and I will do it in part by stripping away some layers of accumulated
anachronism from the poems we do read. In short, this thesis seeks to make that subtle
but crucial change to how we conceive of sensibility by making several ambitious
changes to how we conceive of Romantic ekphrasis.
 2

The convergence of several eighteenth-century discourses opened up a space in

Romantic poems about art for exploring both the necessary grounds and the limits of
what thinkers at the time called sympathy. This thesis is about the intersection of poetry
about art, the culture of sensibility, and eighteenth-century aesthetic thought. These three
traditions meet in early nineteenth-century poems about art, where they are refracted in
varying combinations and used to suggest insights into the philosophical questions
underpinning the culture of sensibility. Where aesthetic and sentimental thought
converge in Romantic ekphrasis, they create the conditions for the poems to explore the
necessary conditions of sympathetic exchange, and the limits of what sympathy can
accomplish. This thesis examines some of those explorations, grouping them according
to the specific intellectual tools they use: conceptual frameworks, such as the fixity of art,
the figurative potential of art, and the role of art as a public medium or forum, that were
mainstream at the turn of the nineteenth century and that intersected with ideas about
sympathy.

Both the study of ekphrasis and the study of sensibility stand to gain from being brought
together. Several scholars have already pointed out that the culture and literature of
sensibility continued into the early nineteenth century. I am offering an enriched
understanding of how it did so, and what it looked like. Likewise, several scholars have
pointed out that the Romantic era saw a proliferation of ekphrastic poetry, at least in
comparison with the eighteenth century, when so little ekphrasis was composed at all,
and that many Romantic ekphrases were lyric. In actuality, claims about the flowering of
ekphrasis in the Romantic period are overstated. The number of ekphrases composed
certainly increased in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but it was a modest
increase: poems about art didn’t burst into staggering popularity until the mid-1820s,
after the advent of the literary annuals and the rise to immense fame of Felicia Hemans
and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The significance of Romantic lyric ekphrasis lies less in
its quantity than in the ideas refracted in it. I am offering a lens through which we can
look at a substantial subset of this emerging genre. Some of the ekphrases that have been
the keystones of our current theories of ekphrasis look very different through the lens of
the cultural legacies I am tracing.
 3

Scholars have established the ongoing relevance of eighteenth-century moral and

sentimental philosophy, on the one hand, and of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought, on
the other, to the literature and culture of the early nineteenth century. Moreover, the
influence of those philosophical discourses on one another comes as no surprise –
eighteenth-century thinkers tended to define aesthetic categories in terms of feelings.
The implications of that mutual influence for the Romantic-era culture that inherited both
discourses, however, has not been sufficiently explored. This project offers a thorough
examination of how that historical interplay between moral and aesthetic thought is
refracted in Romantic culture. I will argue that the interrelatedness of these two
philosophical traditions was a crucial part of the intellectual legacy that poets of the
Romantic era inherited and reworked in their ekphrastic poetry.

The present, introductory chapter first situates this thesis within two existing bodies of
criticism, and then examines the evolving relationship between sentimental and aesthetic
thought in the eighteenth century – an important starting point for all of the discussions
in the chapters that follow. I begin by contrasting the formulations of sympathy in the
works of David Hume and Adam Smith. I examine Smith’s construction of his own
work as a calculated response to Hume’s, and his juxtaposition of his own concept of
sympathy (as an imaginative reconstruction of someone else’s experience) with Hume’s
concept of it (as an instinctive reaction to visual cues). I then examine eighteenth-
century British thought surrounding the “sister arts,” especially the work of James Harris,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Erasmus Darwin, and an English translation of the famous
Critical Reflections of the Abbé du Bos, along with such well known writers as Joseph
Addison and Edmund Burke. I look especially at differently inflected versions of the
idea that the visual arts represent only a “single moment,” a “pregnant moment,” or a
“punctum temporis,” whereas literature represents successions of events and builds its
readers’ interest gradually. I argue that moral philosophy and the philosophy of the sister
arts are bound up with one another throughout the eighteenth century, and that Hume’s
formulation of sympathy as instinctive and visual comes to be associated with painting
and sculpture, while Smith’s formulation of it as an imagined reconstruction comes to be
associated with literature. Lastly, I examine how the idea of the “single moment”
 4

represented in a work of visual art metamorphoses, in the Romantic period, into the
related idea that the objects represented in visual art are held static in an infinite
succession of identical moments, as though held in an indefinite theatrical tableau. The
historical material offered in the present chapter informs the entirety of this thesis, and it
becomes especially prominent in the fourth chapter.

1.1 Criticism and Methodologies

1.1.1 Sensibility
This thesis, in exploring the poetry of sensibility as it evolved and intersected with poetry
about art in the early nineteenth century, is nonetheless not a project about feeling: it is a
project about ideas about feeling – a study of an intellectual rather than an affective
culture. Although a number of scholars have worked with the assumption that the
literature of sensibility explores a set of ideas rather than taking for granted a set of
principles, Adela Pinch brings that assumption into the foreground in her 1996 book
Strange Fits of Passion by examining not only a variety of genres, but also a mix of
disagreeing authors: some conventionally associated with sensibility, such as David
Hume and Charlotte Smith, and some conventionally seen as critical of sensibility, such
as Jane Austen. By formulating her study as a history of a set of questions rather than a
history of a set of valorized beliefs, Pinch is able to point out the continuity in these
authors’ approaches to the subject. In Strange Fits of Passion, some of the concerns
usually associated with attacks on the cult of sensibility thus appear in a new light. The
idea that “feelings were getting out of hand” (1) emerges as part of the same cultural
project of interrogating the nature and origins of emotion and sympathy that fostered the
literature of sensibility itself.

In a similar vein, in her 1994 book Bearing the Dead, Esther Schor makes a case that it
was the elegiac mode of literature1 that furthered the philosophical project of Adam
Smith the most. Smith, she points out, identifies sympathy for the dead as the starting

1
Schor is careful to specify that she means by this all forms of “textual mourning,” not only elegiac poetry
(3).
 5

point of sympathy for the living. According to Schor’s careful reading of Smith, “the
moral authority of the dead, not of a transcendental God nor of the individual human
body, ‘guarantees’ the social circulation of sympathy, pity, compassion, approbation, and
censure by which the living regulate their actions” (37). Schor goes on to study the
colossal moral importance of the concept of mourning in eighteenth-century culture, and
the consequent emergence in literature of the concept of the elegiac, in addition to a
tradition of elegies that shared chiefly formal characteristics or that imitated Latin
elegies: a mode or mood rather than a genre. The implications of Schor’s observations
for our readings of the poetry of sensibility are enormous. If the elegiac mode is in fact a
taking-up of Adam Smith’s ideas, then most of the melancholic poetry of sensibility is a
far cry from the solipsistic self-absorption it has sometimes been made out to be. Rather,
it is a means of circulating the most important kind of sympathy to a wider audience.
Although less explicit than Pinch that the poetry she studies is making a specifically
intellectual contribution to understanding feeling, Schor, too, emphasizes an intellectual
context for texts that might initially seem to dwell on emotion at the expense of reason.

In the chapters that follow, I will focus less on the fact of sensibility’s presence in the
poems than on the specific ideas about sensibility that are worked out or interrogated,
and on the insights about feeling that each poem aspires to offer its readers by means of
its dealings with art. To that end, I will devote a substantial portion of the project to
investigating the means by which those insights are obtained: the discourses that made
poetry about art so culturally fertile, and the specific strands of those discourses that each
poem takes up as the tools of its investigation. The works of moral philosophy I use as
measures of the reading public’s access to ideas, of course, do not necessarily constitute
the whole of the canon of ideas to which the poems respond, although it is often a
convenient shorthand to refer to an idea most famously articulated by a given
philosopher as her or his idea. When this project refers to Wordsworth’s reworking of
Adam Smith’s formulation of the self, for example, it does so without necessarily
assuming that Wordsworth had Smith, in particular, in mind. Rather, this project takes
such philosophical texts to be records of a climate of ideas of which they are the most
prominent surviving witnesses. It was a climate of specifically sentimental ideas that
 6

fostered the philosophical and analytic complexity of Romantic ekphrases, many of

which either draw on clusters of ideas as grounding assumptions or select particular ideas
for scrutiny and interrogation.

Implicit in the claim that philosophical work was carried on in poems and other types of
imaginative literature is the assumption that ideas put forward by philosophers had a
much broader cultural life. Michael Bell makes a case for this assumption as historical
fact, arguing not only that the emerging genre of the novel in the eighteenth century was
a more effective tool for exploring the ideas behind the culture of sensibility than was
philosophy itself, but also that those ideas were already in circulation when the
philosophers began attempting to systematize them. Bell contends, for instance, that “the
manner of argument, on all sides, suggests that the participants were largely assuming
what was to be proved” (17), and he cites the example of the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
whose influence was due in part to “his articulating what many were ready to believe”
(29). Julie Ellison, too, argues in Cato’s Tears that the culture of sensibility predated the
Scottish Enlightenment, and in fact grew out of a particular kind of civic discourse in
elite circles in the late seventeenth century. The role of imaginative literature in the life
of such ideas has been complex. The fact that Goethe’s publication of The Sorrows of
Young Werther famously sparked a wave of suicides across Europe suggests that the
literature of sensibility had considerable cultural influence, and could lend sentimental
ideas widespread circulation, even ubiquity.

This thesis is in part an exploration of how poems think: how they grapple with and work
through complex ideas, and perform philosophical work above and beyond what the
philosophy of their day could accomplish.2 And while the poets who composed the
poems were actively engaged in the intellectual problems of their culture, they generally

2
I am choosing my metaphor carefully, attributing the thought here to the poem, not the poet. I do not
intend to replicate Helen Vendler’s method of seeking in poems traces of their authors’ evolving thought
processes, including moments where poets have changed their minds. Vendler, in Poets Thinking, looks at
“the way thinking goes on in the poet’s mind during the process of creation” (6). By contrast, I am
interested in the ways that poems walk their readers through a process of thought, tacitly posing questions,
testing possible answers, and in some cases acting out a careful reconstruction of a poetic speaker’s
consciousness arriving at those answers.
 7

did not articulate in prose the often complex ideas that I have found latent in their poems,
nor is it clear that they could have done so. This thesis takes poetic discourse to be
capable of giving voice to ideas that are, by the rigid standard of discursive prose, half-
formed, ill-formed, unformed, or unconscious. I take as a starting point the supposition
that the type of thought that happens in poems is fundamentally different from the type of
thought that is recorded in, for example, prose treatises. Even where a poem seems to
suggest something definite, I do not look for it to suggest something that is consistent
with the known views of the poet on that subject. In fact, I see serious limitations to the
mode of scholarship that takes a poet’s published essays or letters as a means of
elucidating the poems, as if the poems were nothing more than a distillation of what is
spelled out more clearly elsewhere. The thinking that happens in poems is more
amorphous than that – more accommodating of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This
thesis is, in part, a tribute to the intelligence of poems.

The contributions of poetry and novels to the working out of ideas as well as to their
popularization has been the focus of most of the best studies of the literature of
sensibility. John Mullan, for example, posits that novelists were able to transcend some
of the difficulties faced by philosophers. According to Mullan, moral philosophy cannot
simply “serve as a privileged explanatory discourse” for the culture of sensibility, and,
what is more, David Hume’s writing “acutely probes exactly that incapacity of
philosophy – ironically realized for him [Hume] when philosophy is posing its most
searching and ambitious questions” (15).3 Novelists, Mullan suggests, could
imaginatively construct special relationships with their readers that allowed them to pose
some of those searching questions without requiring a totalizing explanation: they could

3
Jerome McGann, in The Poetics of Sensibility, nicely pinpoints the paradox inherent in the systematic
manner in which eighteenth century culture “scrupulously re-explored” the “unteachable” spontaneity of
feeling, noting that, ironically, it was a “passion for enlightenment” that “drove the quest for the reasons of
the heart” (43). It is little wonder, then, that Hume expressed the frustration that Mullan has identified, and
Hume was not alone. James Chandler has pointed out that Adam Smith – the last of the major moral
philosophers to take up questions of sympathy and ethics – “closed his Theory of Moral Sentiments with a
general critique of ‘casuistry’” in which Smith insisted that “the effort to produce a rational and minute
calibration of precept to situation must necessarily fail” and that moral education must take place by means
of “open-hearted intercourse” (141). In short, it seems that no one was more aware than the philosophers
of the limits of what thinking about sympathy and morality in the abstract could accomplish.
 8

“concede that habits of sociability were limited or exceptional,” but still “position each
private reader as the exceptional connoisseur of commendable sympathies” (13).
Michael Bell takes a similar line of argument somewhat further, arguing that, as the
philosophical conceptions of sympathy put more and more emphasis on the role of
imaginative reconstruction, the novel became the genre in which writers could best
“actively explore[…] the condition of ethical life.” Sympathy itself, according to such
formulations, “took on the character of an internal fiction” (57). Bell’s most important
philosophical touchstone is Adam Smith, and especially the idea of “the ‘impartial
Spectator’ whom Smith posed as the internal monitor of the ethical life” (44). In the
work of Smith, Bell argues, sympathy is “less a movement of individual feeling and
rather an imagined arena in which the subjectivities of all human others, and of the self,
are reconstructed in a manner which has to be both emotional and judgmental at once.
The compelling analogy is with the novel” (44).

For my purposes, the most crucial element of Bell’s analysis is his discussion of the
sentimental novel’s generic debt to the philosophical tale. Bell does a series of nuanced
close readings, pointing out the ways in which novels had the ability to “dramatize”
weaknesses in sentimental theory. When he posits this ability as a key element in the
larger evolution of the novel, however, he brings the genre of the philosophical tale into
the discussion as both an analogy and an ancestor of the sentimental novel, arguing that
The philosophical tale was often devoted, as in Candide (1759) and
Rasselas (1759), to challenging “ideas” with “experience”. Yet the
form cannot give experience as such, only an idea of experience. What
passes for experience in a fiction can only ever be an exemplary
conception of it and one way of looking at the history of the novel form
is as a continuing attempt to overcome this contradiction. The novel
gives ever greater weight and complexity to the representation of
experience, without ever fully escaping, so much as disguising, the
form of the philosophical tale, the governing structure of a worldview.
(22)
 9

According to this view, the novel of sensibility shares with the philosophical tale the
characteristic of being an imaginative testing ground for ideas. The increasingly detailed
and realistic representations of social life in novels of the eighteenth century stems from
the social nature of the ideas about feeling, sympathy and ethics that were the heart of the
literature of sensibility – ideas that required increasingly complex fictive situations in
which to be tested. But, in spite of that detail and complexity, these novels remained at
some level thought experiments, testing with increasing detail a specific set of ideas.

The argument of this thesis is resonant with Bell’s analysis of eighteenth-century novels
of sensibility. The fact that similar arguments can be made about novels and poetry of
sensibility should come as no surprise. As Gabrielle Starr has argued, novels, especially
in their representations of emotion and individual subjectivity, shared strategies with
lyric poetry, and vice versa. In Starr’s words, “[t]he broad cultural revaluation of
emotional life and individuality brings literary forms close together, [and] encourages
shared solutions to shared problems” (10), such as a particular “understanding of the
relationship between readers and texts” (7). In the light of studies like Starr’s that reveal
the dense web of mutual influence between verse and prose genres, it is only to be
expected that what Bell observes about novels should also be true of a genre like lyric
ekphrasis. The early nineteenth-century poems I study, like the novels Bell discusses,
and like philosophical tales, are testing grounds for the abstract or generalized ideas with
which they engage. They seem intended not only to draw on such ideas for poetic effect
or to help engage the reader’s sympathy, but also to further the reader’s intellectual
understanding of those ideas.

It is not only fiction that scholars have identified as being deeply bound up in the
philosophical project of sensibility, and the poems I shall examine share strategies not
only with novels, but also with plays. David Marshall argues that in fact the compelling
analogy, in Bell’s terms, is not between Smith’s idea of the “case” and the novel, but
 10

rather between Smith’s idea of spectatorship and the theatre. 4 In The Figure of Theater,
Marshall contends that
[f]or Smith, sympathy depends upon a theatrical relation between a
spectator and a spectacle, a relation that is reversed and mirrored as
both persons try to represent the other’s feelings. We need this
sympathy, we thrive upon it, and even when we are alone we double
and divide ourselves in order to play the part of our own spectators.
Thus the theatrical structure of sympathy is both acted out between
people and internalized. (190)
If theatricality is fundamental to how a philosopher as influential as Adam Smith
characterized sympathy, then it should come as no surprise that a number of the lyric
poems examined here use a certain theatricality in their explorations of sympathy.
Although each poem’s strategy is different, this thesis will come back again and again to
the idea that many of these lyrics are enacting instances of sympathy, or constructing
their speakers as playing the part of a sympathetic spectator.

Like Pinch, Schor, Chandler, and Marshall, I highlight the continuities between the
eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, rather than the discontinuities. One
important way in which scholars of the culture of sensibility in the early nineteenth
century sometimes seem to contradict one another is in our differing attitudes to the word
“Romanticism.” Although I use the word “Romantic” in this thesis, I use it as a
shorthand for the awkward phrase “early nineteenth-century British.” Rather than
attempt to define a Romantic movement, I conceive of early nineteenth-century British
texts as products of and contributions to a shared climate of ideas. I am interested in how
these texts participated in the cultural milieu they all shared. As a consequence of my
scepticism about the existence of a Romantic movement, it may look as though I
conceive of the relationship between the literature of sensibility and Romantic literature

4
Like Marshall, James Chandler, in “Moving Accidents,” identifies the concept of the impartial spectator
not as an analogy between Adam Smith and novels of the period, but rather between novels and plays.
Chandler, drawing on Shaftesbury, observes “the incorporation of the soliloquy form into modern
authorship and the production of ‘conscience’ as an impartial spectator internalized within the writer’s
mind” (163).
 11

in different terms than some scholars whose work has in fact influenced my own, such as
James Chandler and Christopher Nagle.5 While I wholeheartedly concur not only with
Chandler and Nagle but also with Ellison, Knowles, and Pinch that the early nineteenth
century in Britain can be usefully thought of as part of an evolving culture of sensibility,
I, like Pinch, stop short of identifying an unsentimental “Romanticism” within the culture
of the period. I choose to rethink entirely the proverbial hostility of the Romantic era to
sensibility, rather than to look for a coherently unsentimental Romantic movement
positioning itself within but against an ongoing culture of sensibility.

Another term that sometimes creates the illusion of scholarly divides where there is in
fact only differing terminology is “sentimental.” The word “sensibility” has long
plagued scholars with its failure to produce an adjectival derivative. When a text
participates in the Victorian culture of sentimentality, we unhesitatingly call it
sentimental. When a text participates in the eighteenth-century or Romantic-era culture
of sensibility, what term should we use? Jerome McGann, in The Poetics of Sensibility,
favours “sensibilious,” and a few other critics have taken his cue; the word does have a
prior existence in early modern Latin. Byron used the somewhat more mellifluous term
“sensibilitous,” albeit with the intention of mocking his subject, but his word has not
caught on. Since I think of eighteenth-century sensibility and Victorian sentimentalism
as phases of the same massive cultural phenomenon, existing on a continuum rather than
being rigidly distinct, I am quite comfortable asking “sentimental” to do double duty.

1.1.2 Ekphrasis
The critical consensus that scholars of ekphrasis reached in the 1990s, and that has since
made work like mine possible, is that Romantic ekphrasis marks a departure from a very

5
Chandler accepts the notion of Romanticism as a movement that rejects sentimentalism, and looks for
some of the hidden continuities between them. Nagle, in a similar vein, frames Romanticism as a
movement within a larger culture of sensibility – one that converts the sexual undertones of sensibility into
a sublime aesthetic of indefinite desire. Both scholars concede that the culture of sensibility was alive and
well in the early nineteenth century. They differ from a scholar like Pinch only in arguing that the
particular subset of that culture that they have labelled “Romantic” relates to sensibility or sentimentalism
in an antagonistic way. Both Chandler and Nagle are selective about which early nineteenth-century
authors and works they are willing to term “Romantic.”
 12

old set of conventions. These scholars drew both on Ian Jack’s seminal work on the
influence that the art world had on Keats, and on the work that scholars such as Jean
Hagstrum and Murray Krieger had done on the relationship between poetry and
eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and they identified the Romantic period as the period
in which the poetic aims of ekphrasis changed for good. One part of the shift that these
scholars identified is that ekphrasis became divorced from its roots in narrative genres
like epic and romance. The archetypical classical, medieval and renaissance ekphrases
are all passages in sprawling epics and romances. The most famous Romantic ekphrases,
by contrast, are all sonnets and odes: lyrics. Grant F. Scott, in The Sculpted Word,
articulated the generic shift as one of size, saying that “[w]here we are struck by the epic
scope of Classical ekphrasis – even Philostratus overwhelms us with the copiousness and
variety of his images – we are forced to acknowledge the distinctly more diminished and
lyrical scale of the Romantics” (15). Other critics have discussed the generic shift in
terms of an intensified interest in the response of the viewer, who is usually also the
poetic speaker, to the artwork – a preoccupation with, in Shelley’s words, the “gazer’s
spirit.” James Heffernan articulated it as an abandonment of the story-telling impulse
that seems to govern so much earlier ekphrasis, saying that
[f]rom Homer to Shakespeare, ekphrasis is driven by the pressure of
narrative, which not only makes the verbalized work of art recall or
prefigure what happens in the story that surrounds it but also turns
graphic or sculptural stasis into process, arrested gesture into
movement. (91)
In place of the story-telling impulse, Heffernan saw Romantic ekphrasis as the starting
point of an overwhelming interest in the fixity of the visual arts and in the artwork’s own
durability. Heffernan called this preoccupation an “ideology of transcendence,” and he
identified its lingering presence in twentieth-century critical works such as Krieger’s
early essay on ekphrasis, which, Heffernan points out, “treats ekphrasis as a way of
freezing time in space” (5).

Although these critics’ claims are compatible with one another, the fact that they have
offered different accounts of what made Romantic ekphrasis distinct from earlier
 13

ekphrasis suggests that there is no single, clear-cut way in which it was distinct. I would
argue that the ekphrastic tradition on which the Romantic poets drew was so varied and
complex that, in fact, what stands out about Romantic ekphrasis is not so much its break
from tradition as its synthesis of disparate parts of that tradition. If, for example, we
follow Scott and take the scale of the poems to be the thing that changed, then the shift
happened much earlier, and short Romantic ekphrases follow in the footsteps of their
immediate predecessors: eighteenth-century ekphrases are almost all shorter than the
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and many of them consist of a single quatrain or couplet. If we
say that a preoccupation with viewer-response is what sets Romantic ekphrasis apart,
then we must account for Shakespeare’s interest in subjective interpretation in “The Rape
of Lucrece.” If anything, I would suggest that Romantic ekphrasis is at least as hard to
characterize collectively as ekphrases from earlier time periods, and this thesis will not
attempt to find homogeneity in so diverse a body of texts. Rather, what interests me is
the differing ways that Romantic poets were able to find in art as a subject-matter for
poetry a range of opportunities to test ideas about subjectivity, feeling, and sympathy.

How we tell the history of ekphrasis depends on what kinds of works we include, and,
for the purposes of this study, I have found it useful to be as inclusive as possible. The
term “ekphrasis” dates back to classical Greece, but its original meaning was simply
vivid description. Our current usage of the word to refer to literature about art is a
twentieth-century development, initiated by Leo Spitzer in 1955. Since the emergence of
the term in criticism is so recent, the kind of literature we think of when we discuss
“ekphrasis” has inevitably been shaped by the ekphrastic poems that have received the
most attention within the last seventy years. We think, on the one hand, of Homer’s
description of Achilles’ shield, and, on the other, of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; the
more a poem or passage resembles one of these, the easier it is to classify it
unhesitatingly as ekphrastic. As a consequence, most attempts at coming up with a
sharply demarcated definition of ekphrasis are at risk of perpetuating an unnecessarily
small canon of texts. The Romantic poets did not think of poems and passages about
visual art as a separate genre called “ekphrasis,” and they certainly did not follow the
delineation of the genre that is now current when they selected earlier works by which to
 14

be influenced. On the contrary, ekphrastic poems of the early nineteenth century show
the influence of a huge range of earlier texts, spanning not only the chronological
spectrum from Homer, to Spenser, to Pope, to Cowper, but also the generic spectrum
from passages in epic, to epigrams, to verse epistles to painters, to the prose works of
Addison, or Burke, or Reynolds. It is thus necessary to study some poems and prose
works that fall outside the usual definition, although my insistence on keeping the
definition of the ekphrastic tradition as broad as possible is specific to the period I study;
a study of late twentieth-century ekphrases would have to take into account instead a
tradition that looks much more like the “canonical” list of English ekphrases.6

1.2 The Sisterhood of Sensibility and Aesthetic Thought

Although British aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century considered poetry and
painting to be sister arts, that discourse itself had a sister. Developments in aesthetic
philosophy paralleled developments in moral philosophy. They became prominent
together, and ideas from each informed the subsequent development of the other. The
dichotomy in eighteenth-century thought between poetry’s narrative capacity and
painting’s immediate visual impact mirrored the split between two popular formulations
of how sympathy works: either instantaneously in response to visible emotional display,
or deliberately by means of imaginatively reconstructed circumstances. In the Romantic
period, that parallel persisted, but became differently inflected as Romantic culture
developed a preoccupation with emotional fixity. The literal fixity of visual art had been
constructed all along as a means of eliciting instantaneous, instinctive, visual sympathy;
it now came to be used, in addition, as a figure for extreme emotion. It was in this
cultural climate that the links between aesthetic and sentimental discourse that had been
present from the start became the material that poets worked with as they explored the

6
Scott cites Lucian’s ekphrases from the first century C.E. as the turning point when ekphrasis became in
practice “a specialized genre devoted to objets d’art” (1); English writers who wrote about art, however,
did not use the term to describe their own work until after Spitzer had reintroduced it. It should
nevertheless be noted that, although the Romantics did not use the term to refer to their own poems about
art, some English-language poets in our own time do use it. For example, in an interesting example of
cross-pollination between literary scholarship and literature, several acclaimed Toronto-area poets (among
them Ruth Roach Pierson and Susan MacLeod) have offered workshops on composing ekphrases.
 15

role of story-telling in sympathy, and as they probed the limits of sympathy in the
absence of temporal sequence. Recognizing the relationships within that cluster of ideas
can shed new light even on some of the best-known of Romantic ekphrases.

1.2.1 The Philosophy of Sympathy

The two frameworks for thinking about sympathy that would come to be linked with the
two chief sister arts are most strikingly articulated by David Hume and Adam Smith; it is
thus worth first examining what these two philosophers say, and, just as crucially, what
they do not say. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is in implicit yet pointed dialogue
with Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature. Although Smith does not directly refute
Hume’s construction of sympathy, he nonetheless sets up his argument in such a way as
to draw attention to the ways in which he differs most significantly from his predecessor,
repeatedly borrowing Hume’s examples and tweaking them so as to highlight his own
interpretation of them. Both the extent of the differences between the two philosophers’
ideas and the care with which Smith distances himself from Hume are helpful for
understanding how these ideas co-exist with each other and interact with eighteenth-
century and Romantic ideas about art. The difference between Humean and Smithian
conceptions of sympathy underpins perhaps the most important strand of thought I shall
argue Romantic ekphrasis explored – a strand of thought to which this thesis will return
many times. That strand of thought is the subject of the sub-section that follows this one,
but, to grapple with it, we must first establish with as much clarity as possible the
distinction between Humean and Smithian sympathy – a distinction first highlighted by
Smith himself.

For readers in our own age, it can be difficult to see the complexity of Smith’s response
to Hume, not least because Smith’s ideas have attained such cultural dominance that we
risk failing to notice their absence in Hume’s Treatise – we risk reading Hume’s
conception of sympathy through Smith-coloured glasses. As a measure of the
pervasiveness of Smith’s ideas about sympathy in our own culture, consider the common
catchphrase of contemporary folk-ethics put yourself in so-and-so’s shoes; imagine what
it feels like to be in so-and-so’s circumstances. I say “folk-ethics” rather than “ethical
 16

ideology” because I think of the precept as generally passed down orally from generation
to generation within western culture, rather than disseminated through cultural structures
that benefit or are controlled by those with economic or political power. I would suggest,
however, that some of the implications of the term “ideology” should be brought to bear
in this case: the foundational nature of putting oneself in another’s shoes for most
people’s day-to-day ethical thinking is not only immense, but inescapable. The precept
has so rooted itself in our culture as to seem obvious or natural. And this ethical
imperative to imagine oneself in someone else’s circumstances is strikingly similar to
Smith’s idea of sympathy: imagining oneself in the “case” of another, or changing places
“in fancy.” Put yourself in her or his shoes is a different and more specific precept than
the widespread, more-or-less Judeo-Christian one do unto others as you would have them
do unto you, but so ubiquitous is the popularized rendition of Smithian sympathy that
they are treated as synonymous. Putting oneself in another’s shoes – what we call
empathy – is precisely what Adam Smith calls sympathy, but it is not what Hume calls
sympathy. In fact, Smith uses a sequence of tacit allusions to Hume to foreground this
difference.

In his basic conception of sympathy, Hume’s emphasis is on the progression from idea to
impression to sympathetic passion: if an idea of someone else’s passion is the mere
awareness of it, an impression is a vivid or forceful awareness of it, which, if it becomes
forceful enough, becomes a sympathetic passion, as if the sympathizer were feeling a
facsimile of the original passion. The first and most emphatic time Hume lays out this
fundamental basis of his understanding of sympathy, he claims that the original idea of
the passion is conveyed by “external signs in the countenance and conversation.” He
makes no mention of the sympathizer understanding or conjecturing about the
sympathizee’s circumstances – there is no putting oneself in another’s shoes. The
sympathizer becomes aware of the sympathizee’s passion because it is evident in his
affective displays. The conversion of this idea into sympathetic passion is paradoxically
both incremental and instantaneous: Hume says that “[h]owever instantaneous this
change of the idea into an impression may be, it proceeds from certain views and
reflections” (2.1.11.3). Hume does mention “the relation of cause and effect” (2.1.11.8),
 17

but the effect he’s referring to is not the sympathizee’s passion (caused by some event or
circumstance), but rather the “external signs” in the sympathizee’s countentance (caused
by the passion).

Hume’s use of the term “imagination” is, like his fundamental idea of sympathy,
treacherous ground for a modern reader accustomed to using the term in common
parlance. Hume lists a series of things that intensify sympathy: resemblance of any kind
between sympathizer and sympathizee, geographical proximity, familial ties, and
acquaintance. In the course of listing these, he mentions the “imagination” making “the
transition,” but the transition in question is not the transition of an idea into an
impression. Rather, it is the transfer of vividness and force from the sympathizer’s
conception of himself to his conception of the other party, which enables the conversion
of an idea into an impression and then a sympathetic passion. More crucially still,
Hume’s “imagination” is not a faculty that posits hypothetical scenarios or does any
story-making.7 Hume’s “imagination” in this portion of the Treatise is a largely visually-
driven faculty (as the name imagination implies) that is responsible for marshalling or
governing the vividness that distinguishes impressions from ideas. The imagination here
must “convey to the related idea [i.e. the idea of a passion felt by someone who
resembles oneself] the vivacity of conception, with which we always form the idea of our
own person” (2.1.11.5). Thus, in all of his opening discussion of how sympathy works

7
Marshall makes this mistake. He quotes Hume’s statement that “‘[n]o force of imagination can convert
us into another person, and make us fancy, that we, being that person, reap benefit from those valuable
qualities, which belong to him,’” and he then states that “[f]or Smith, the imagination seems to have all of
these powers: it can convert us into another person and transport us back and forth, offering both identity
and difference” (The Figure of Theater 179). Smith, to be sure, conceives of the imagination as a faculty
capable of the make-believe that we are in another person’s position. But what Hume is saying is precisely
that the imagination – the faculty that musters the intensity of our impressions – cannot muster so much
intensity that it would be the equivalent of such an act of make-believe.
Saul Traiger outlines some of the scholarly debate surrounding Hume’s use of “imagination,” especially
when it is paired with “memory.” Noting the disagreement over whether imagination is defined primarily
as a faculty or as a type of idea, Traiger argues that, for Hume, the imagination is responsible for ideas that
are “faint and languid” relative to the ideas governed by memory, and that “need not retain the form and
order of any prior complex impressions” (63). Ideas of the imagination can indeed be fictive or unreal, but
we do not mistake them for reality or deem them “appropriate as inferential starting points” because they
lack the “force and vivacity of memory ideas” (64). But if Hume does posit the imagination as a faculty
able to assemble complex ideas that have no correspondent in sense experience, he does not, in his
discussion of sympathy, posit the imagination as constructing narratives, as Smith later will.
 18

and what factors intensify it, Hume is working exclusively with a visually-driven
conception of sympathy that, for all its multi-stage processual nature, he declares to be
instantaneous.

Only much later does Hume discuss something that looks, at first glance, like the put-
yourself-in-another’s-shoes kind of sympathy that is the cornerstone of so much
contemporary folk-ethics, but even here a careful reading reveals something else entirely.
He calls it the sympathy of “general rule” (2.2.7.5 italics his) – sympathy with passions
that the sympathizees do not seem to feel – noting that “the communicated passion of
sympathy sometimes acquires strength from the weakness of its original, and even arises
by a transition from affections, which have no existence” (2.2.7.5). He gives a series of
examples: a level-headed or indifferent fortunate man for whose good fortune we rejoice,
a person who is stoic in the face of misfortune whom we pity, an obliviously foolish
person for whom we feel embarrassed, a sleeping person who never saw his murderer
coming, and lastly an infant prince who does not understand that he’s been kidnapped
and is in danger.

Hume’s explanation of the “pretty remarkable phenomenon” of our sympathy in such

cases is two-fold (2.2.7.5). He first claims that “the imagination is affected by the
general rule, and makes us conceive a lively idea of the passion” (2.2.7.5). It is a general
rule that misfortune makes people grieve, as we “find from experience.” That general
rule not only makes us “conceive” of the expected or usual passion on behalf of an
unfortunate person, but also provokes the imagination and makes the conception a vivid
one. The second part of Hume’s explanation is that “[a] contrast of any kind never fails
to affect the imagination” (2.2.7.6). The imagination thus gets not one but two stimuli:
one from the general rule that prompts the sympathizer to conceive a lively idea of the
passion in the first place, and a second from the sheer contrast between the liveliness of
the sympathizer’s conception of the passion and the apparent passionlessness of the
person observed. The sequence of Hume’s claims here implies that it is this second
stimulus to the imagination that serves to convert the lively idea into an impression and
then a sympathetic passion.
 19

I would like to draw attention to two small but crucial distinctions with regard to Hume’s
notion of the sympathy of general rule. The first is that conceiving of a passion on the
basis of a general rule deduced from one’s general experience of people is not equivalent
to changing places in the fancy (to borrow Smith’s formulation) with the specific person
observed. The second is that, for Hume, it does not matter in such cases whether the
sympathizee is truly indifferent or merely putting on a show of indifference. According
to Hume, sympathy is driven first and foremost by visual stimuli – in fact, he begins his
explanation of the sympathy of general rule with a reminder that “pity stems from the
imagination,” and thus “depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity, and even sight of
the object” (2.2.7.4). If the person observed displays the external signs of the passion
that the general rule leads us to expect in any given situation, then those external signs
will alert us to the existence of the passion and trigger the imagination to enliven our
awareness into sympathy. If the person observed does not display those external signs,
or rather displays the external signs of indifference, then the general rule tells us to
expect one thing, and the contrast between what we expect and what we see is sufficient
to enliven our conception of the expected passion into sympathy. To be sure, Hume’s
explanation seems to apply much more readily to the examples of the stoic sufferer and
the level-headed recipient of good fortune than it does to the person murdered in his
sleep or the kidnapped infant prince. Experience surely would not allow the average
eighteenth-century gentleman to construct an informed general rule about how princes
feel when they are kidnapped. It is precisely this inconsistency that Smith makes use of
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, borrowing and rearranging Hume’s examples in such
a way as to draw attention to his own innovation.

Smith’s formulation of sympathy is very different from Hume’s. At the start of his
Theory, he states that “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” and
thus can only have an “idea of the manner in which they are affected” by “conceiving
what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (1.1.2). Smith here changes the
terms of the discussion in two crucial ways. First of all, he shifts away from Hume’s
concept of resemblance, focusing instead on analogy – a related but certainly not
synonymous concept. For Hume, we sympathize most easily with those who resemble
 20

us. For Smith, by contrast, we conceive of others by analogy with ourselves, imagining
ourselves in “the like situation,” or conceiving of another as if of ourselves. Smith
resorts to several phrases to convey this idea: “changing places in fancy” (1.1.3), which
implies an imaginative projection of the self into the other person’s situation; “bringing
the case home to himself” (1.1.4), which implies the opposite, an imaginative
reconstruction of the situation around the self; and “an analogous emotion” (1.1.4).
Moreover, Smith gives his own concept of analogy far more scope and significance than
Hume does his concept of resemblance. For Hume, the resemblance between oneself and
another makes one’s conception of that other person more vivid or lively, but it does not
displace the process of perceiving external signs of emotion. By contrast, the logical
principle of analogy is the core of Smithian sympathy.

If the assertiveness with which Smith differentiates his own ideas from Hume is not
sufficiently clear from his opening, he goes on to refute Hume by parroting his phrasing
and re-interpreting his evidence. Hume says, in a burst of forthright sounding first-
person discourse, that “[a] chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and
serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden damp upon me”
(2.1.11.2). Smith tacitly evokes Hume when he says that “[a] smiling face is, to every
body that sees it, a cheerful object; as a sorrowful countenance, on the other hand, is a
melancholy one” (1.1.6). Not only the basic observation, but even the phrasing here, is
derived from Hume. The formulation a smiling face…; as a sorrowful countenance…
echoes Hume’s own (a cheerful countenance…; as an angry or sorrowful one…), and
Smith’s use of cheerful, sorrowful, and countenance, albeit in different positions within
the syntactic construction, seems designed to reinforce the allusion.8 Moreover, Smith’s
re-casting of the original observation in the third person – every body that sees it instead
of Hume’s my mind – is a tacit concession that the observation itself is correct.

8
The echo of Hume in Smith’s wording is all the more startling when set against the contrasting example
of Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose Elements of Criticism was published in 1762, a few years after
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. When Kames makes the same point, his wording is very different: “I
cannot behold a man in distress without partaking of his pain; nor in joy, without partaking of his pleasure”
(35). There are no cheerful countenances or smiling faces here, in spite of the fact that Kames elsewhere
devotes considerable time to discussing the effects of visible affect.
 21

Where Hume uses this observation to support his claim that sympathy is fundamentally
driven by the (usually visual) perception of external signs of passion, Smith explains the
phenomenon away not once but three times, treating Hume’s text as a pre-emptive
objection to his own argument that he must refute. His first counter-argument is that
some displays of passion, such as a show of anger, cannot evoke sympathy at all unless
the observer knows the circumstances producing the passion: an unexplained show of
anger, Smith says, will disgust the onlooker or provoke sympathy for the offending party.
His third and last explanation of the effects of cheerful or sorrowful countenances is that
our sympathy with unexplained affective display is “imperfect,” and consists mostly of
curiosity, until we know the “cause” of the emotion (1.1.9). The desire to learn another
person’s circumstances might, if fulfilled, lead to sympathy, but it is not in itself
equivalent to sympathy. Smith’s second rebuttal, however, is more than an explanation
of the phenomenon in question; it is also a clever inversion of Hume’s principle of the
sympathy of general rule. Smith claims that expressions of grief and joy “suggest to us
the general idea of some good or bad fortune” (1.1.8). Where Hume claims that a given
set of circumstances suggests to the onlooker a general rule about how people feel in
comparable situations, Smith argues the reverse: that the unexplained display of feelings
suggests to the onlooker a general rule of what situations provoke comparable reactions
in most people. Hume claims that we infer someone’s happiness from his good fortune;
here, Smith argues that we infer his good fortune from his apparent happiness, and that it
is the presumed good fortune, not the smile per se, with which we sympathize. In short,
Smith borrows Hume’s observation (that smiling faces make one happy), his phrasing
(both the overall syntactic construction and much of the diction), and his argumentative
strategy (using the notion of a general rule or general idea to explain away observations
that seem to disprove or complicate his central argument). But he uses this rhetorical
mimicry to showcase how utterly different his conception of sympathy actually is.

Remarkably, Smith uses this strategy of mimicry with a difference a second time,
reworking and reinterpreting the very observation that Hume explains away with an
appeal to the principle of the general rule to begin with. In support of his fundamental
argument that sympathy “does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from
 22

that of the situation which excites it” (1.1.10), Smith gives a list of examples: objects of
sympathy who do not seem to feel the passion that others feel on their behalf. Not only
the presence of the list itself, but also most of the entries, are an echo of Hume.9 Smith
begins with a person who is oblivious to his own rudeness – comparable to Hume’s
example of the person oblivious to his own foolishness. Smith then adds a lunatic too
mad to understand that he has lost his reason, a sick infant too young to understand his
danger, and lastly the dead. The lunatic is Smith’s innovation, but the sick infant looks
like a quotidian revision of Hume’s kidnapped infant prince, and the generalized dead

9
Hume’s list reads:
From the same principles we blush for the conduct of those who behave themselves foolishly
before us, and that though they show no sense of shame, nor seem in the least conscious of
their folly. […]
We have also instances wherein an indifference and insensibility under misfortune increases
our concern for the misfortunate, even though the indifference proceed not from any virtue and
magnanimity. It is an aggravation of a murder, that it was committed upon persons asleep and
in perfect security; as historians readily observe of an infant prince, who is captive in the hands
of his enemies, that he is more worthy of compassion the less sensible he is of his miserable
condition. (2.2.7.5-6)
Smith’s list reads:
We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable;
because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the
imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. We blush for the impudence and
rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own
behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be
covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.
Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason
appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful; and they
behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other. But
the poor wretch, who is in it, laughs and sings, perhaps, and is altogether insensible to his own
misery. […]
What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant, that, during the
agony of disease, cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its
real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the
unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these, forms, for her own sorrow, the
most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of
the present instance, which can never be great. […]
We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance to their
situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances
which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. (1.1.10-13)
 23

like a more widely applicable version of Hume’s sleeping murder victim.

Conspicuously absent from Smith’s list are Hume’s much less far-fetched opening
examples: the calm recipient of good fortune and the serene sufferer of ill fortune.

Smith’s re-working of Hume’s list accomplishes two rhetorical purposes. One the one
hand, like the “smiling face” passage, it signals his engagement with Hume, priming his
reader to attend to the differences in his argument. On the other hand, Smith’s slightly
different examples shift the list’s emphasis away from a contrast between the passions
expected and the passions displayed, and toward a contrast between the passions
expected and the passions actually felt. For Hume, since sympathy depends on the sight
of external signs of passion, it doesn’t matter if the unfortunate stoic is feigning his
heroic patience. As long as he seems above sorrow, it will produce the contrast in the
observer’s mind that heightens the expectation of sorrow into actual sympathetic sorrow.
For Smith, the point of the examples is that they showcase the extent to which sympathy
is regulated by the limits of one’s ability to change places in fancy with another. An
observer might conjecture that the unfortunate stoic is feigning his patience, and might
sympathize with a sorrow he believes to be really felt. But the same observer will not
conjecture that the laughing lunatic really grieves for his lost sanity, or that the sick
infant really worries about his chances of survival, or that the dead really feel the
discomfort of being buried. Even when our reason knows the sympathizee is oblivious to
any suffering, our fancy cannot recreate that obliviousness for us, and so we feel
sympathetically what it can recreate.

The pointedness of Smith’s revision of Hume reveals a deep-seated tension between his
own view of sympathy as an imagined reconstruction and Hume’s view of it as an
instinctive and instantaneous response governed by sight. Smith himself evidently
considers the distinction between his own and Hume’s formulations significant enough to
be worth the trouble of painstakingly reframing Hume’s examples. But if Smith’s
version has attained extraordinary cultural dominance in our own time, it did not achieve
it immediately. Rather, these two conceptions of sympathy existed side by side in
eighteenth-century thought, opposed to each other though they were. Furthermore, it was
their co-existence that facilitated the flourishing of a particular strand of aesthetic
 24

thought. As I shall argue, these two formulations of sympathy – as visual and as

imaginative – were deeply bound up with two ways of thinking about the arts, one a
conception of how visual arts affect their viewers, and the other a conception of how
literature affects its readers.

1.2.2 The Philosophy of the Sister Arts

The study of aesthetics as a discipline was born in the eighteenth century, and
discussions of aesthetic ideas and the arts are everywhere in the works of eighteenth-
century British philosophers. Although aesthetic philosophy as such is usually said to
have originated in Germany with Baumgarten’s Aesthetica in 1750, there was already a
long conversation in full swing in England, dating back to Shaftesbury and Addison,
about the experiences of beauty and sublimity. As Ronald Paulson puts it, “English
aesthetics in the eighteenth century consisted of a succession of theories promulgated by
the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, William Hogarth, Edmund Burke, Richard
Payne Knight, and Uvedale Price which focused on the response of a spectator” (1).
Moreover, that conversation had in turn grown out of yet another. As Timothy Erwin has
noted, early eighteenth-century British thought about the arts was dominated by a debate
about the relative importance of “design” and “image” – form, arrangement, or outline,
and detail, colouring, or vividness. Addison’s theories actually represent the start of a
shift in British philosophy away from seeking objective criteria for assessing beauty in
artwork and toward investigating the psychological mechanisms by means of which we
perceive beauty – primarily in nature, and only secondarily in art. David Marshall
articulates the scholarly consensus about this shift in his 1988 book The Surprising
Effects of Sympathy, saying that “the transition from classical aesthetics (with its
emphasis on a priori rules and principles) to the pre-Romantic aesthetics of the
eighteenth century (with its emphasis on subjectivity and affect) centered on the question
of the effects that a work of art had on its reader or beholder” (2).

The line of thinking in eighteenth-century philosophy that influenced early nineteenth-

century poetry the most is that which deals with the relationships between the so-called
“sister arts,” poetry and painting (and usually also music and sculpture). Addison,
 25

discussing the imaginative pleasure to be found in tracing the resemblance between

mimetic art and the objects it imitates, arranges these four arts on a spectrum, with
sculpture being most mimetic, painting the second-most mimetic, poetry the third-most,
and music the least mimetic (347-9). Inevitably, of course, this kind of spectrum implies
a hierarchy. For much of the eighteenth century, a misreading of Horace’s phrase ut
pictura poesis10 was taken as a kind of aesthetic law: a good poem should be as much
like a picture as possible. As Hagstrum notes, “[t]he Horatian dictum was launched on
its career in modern Europe with the prestige of Renaissance painting behind it” (68),
and it achieved considerable cultural authority. As the eighteenth century wore on,
however, the picture-poem hierarchy slipped upside-down. The sublime came to be
more highly valued than the beautiful, and suggestion came to be seen as more integral to
artistic effectiveness than representation: think, for instance, of Erasmus Darwin’s praise
of a sculpture that suggests a recumbent human figure by representing only its head and
feet in two niches, five feet apart (120). As a result, music and poetry worked their way
to the top of the hierarchy, while painting and sculpture tumbled to the bottom. As
Lawrence Lipking suggests, although we should not ignore the continuities in the
philosophy of the “sister arts” in the eighteenth century, “neither can the movement from
pictures to words and music, over a period of less than fifty years, be ignored” (19).

One important idea that emerged within the discourse of the sister arts was the idea of the
punctum temporis, or single point in time, to which the visual arts were deemed confined
– an idea that is still very widespread. W.J.T. Mitchell, in Iconology, observes that
[w]hen the argument is made that some paintings represent temporal
events, scenes from a narrative, for instance, or even a sequence of
images that suggests movement, one can expect one of the following
replies: (1) the temporality implied in a narrative painting is not
directly given by its signs, but must be inferred from a single
spatialized scene; (2) such temporal inferences, and the clues which

10
Correctly translated, the phrase means “as it is with pictures, so it is with poems,” but for many centuries
it was taken to mean “as it is with pictures, so it ought to be with poems.” For a detailed discussion of the
history of ut pictura poesis, see Hagstrum, p. 9.
 26

suggest them, are not the primary business of painting, which is to

present forms in sensuous, instantaneous immediacy, and not to aspire
to the status of discourse or narrative. (100)
In eighteenth-century British discourse, however, only the first of these assumptions was
widespread. Painting was indeed thought to be capable of representing only a kernel of a
narrative that implies the rest. Doing so, however, was considered painting’s primary
business for as long as history painting maintained its prestige.

The idea that the objects represented in visual art are frozen in a single posture, and that
only one “moment” is depicted, is an idea that became prevalent in eighteenth-century
writing about the “sister arts,” and it continued to be prominent in the Romantic period.
The influence of early aesthetic philosophers such as the Abbé Du Bos and James Harris
is evident in late eighteenth-century works by Reynolds and Darwin, whose influence in
turn is evident in Romantic texts such as those in the quarterly magazine The Annals of
the Fine Arts, founded in 1816. From the outset, however, this idea was presented in
ways that suggest a profound connection with the culture of sensibility. The
philosophers who discussed the atemporality of visual art in comparison to poetry began
from the assumption that the purpose of both arts was simultaneously to represent and to
evoke the “passions.” Moreover, those philosophers talked about the single moment of
painting and the temporal spread of poetry in terms comparable to those in which they
talked about the two distinct kinds of sympathy articulated by Hume and Smith: a
sympathy impelled by visual displays of affect, and a sympathy impelled by an
imaginative leap into someone else’s circumstances.

Two important texts on the sister arts were published within a few years of each other at
the same London printing house: Nugent’s translation of Du Bos’s Reflections (1748)
and Harris’s Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art, The Second Concerning Music
Painting and Poetry, The Third Concerning Happiness (1744). Du Bos comments twice
upon painting’s confinement to a single instant. The first time, he takes the case of a
picture that tells a story or “represents an action,” and explains one of painting’s
 27

shortcomings as a vehicle for narrative. A picture that shows an action, Du Bos says,
“shews only an instant of its duration” (71).11 Du Bos says this for the purpose of
explaining that painting cannot provide the kind of narrative context that makes an
unremarkable “sentiment” seem remarkable: “it is impossible for the painter to express
the sublime, which those things, that are previous to its present situation, throw
sometimes into an ordinary sentiment” (71). A calm expression of resignation, Du Bos
explains, becomes sublime if we know that the person who utters it does so in the face of
tremendous loss or suffering. The second time Du Bos discusses painting’s confinement
to an instant, he reverses his formulation, analyzing not painting’s limited abilities at
story-telling but rather poetry’s ability to “paint” an enormous succession of “pictures.”12
“The poet,” Du Bos says, “presents us successively with fifty pictures, as it were, which
lead us gradually to that excessive emotion, which commands our tears.” In both cases,
painting’s confinement to one moment or picture is important because it impedes either
the representation or the evocation of an emotion. Four years prior to the publication of
Nugent’s translation of Du Bos, James Harris had published his Three Treatises. Harris
had probably read Du Bos in French, and their works share a number of ideas, chief
among them the idea that “every picture is a Punctum Temporis or Instant” (Harris 63).13
Harris deduces from this that historical paintings are most “intelligible” when their
subjects are well known, so that “the Spectator’s Memory will supply the previous and
the subsequent” (64-5). The best subjects for paintings, Harris suggests, are those
“whose Comprehension depends not on a Succession of Events; or at least, if on a
Succession, on a short and self-evident one” (2).

11
All quotations from Du Bos are taken from Nugent’s translation of 1748.
12
Du Bos does not generally favour poetry over painting; in fact he exalts painting as by far the more
effective art. He considers “sight” to have “a much greater empire over the soul than any of the other
senses” (321), and consequently considers the visual arts to be the most affecting. Poetry can only
approximate the vividness of a picture, but its ability to tell an extended story compensates for its other
weaknesses, and renders it moving.
13
A related idea that the two philosophers share is the idea that painting operates by means of “natural
signs” (Du Bos 322), whereas poetry uses the “artificial signs” of language. Harris, however, rather than
straightforwardly conceding poetry’s inferiority on this ground, develops a fully-fledged theory of
onomatopoeia, although he does not use that term, thus making the case that poetry combines natural and
artificial signs (71-2).
 28

These ideas about the different functions of the visual and verbal arts continued to appear
in widely read philosophical texts about art in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Sir Joshua Reynolds states in his annual lecture to the Royal Academy for 1778 that
“[t]he Painter’s art is more confined” than the poet’s, and that “[w]hat is done by
Painting, must be done at one blow” (205).14 Not only the underlying idea, but also the
language of blows is strongly reminiscent of Nugent’s translation of Du Bos, which
states that “[a] picture […] makes but one attack upon the soul, whereas a poem assails it
for a long time, and always with new arms” (329). Erasmus Darwin, in 1789, uses ideas
and language reminiscent of Harris, especially Harris’s formulation of “co-existent” vs.
“successive” objects of representation (Harris 32). Darwin’s Interlude III15 states that
in one circumstance the Pen and the Pencil differ widely from each
other; and that is the quantity of Time, which they can include in their
respective representations. The former can unravel a long series of
events, which may constitute the history of days or years; while the
latter can exhibit only the actions of a moment. The Poet is happier in
describing successive scenes, the Painter in representing stationary
ones. (122)
This kind of continuity indicates that English thinkers at the close of the eighteenth
century were still actively drawing on the pool of ideas about art and time to which
earlier philosophers such as Du Bos and Harris had contributed. Moreover, the
similarities in wording suggest that the earlier writers had some degree of direct
influence on the later.16

14
Reynolds’ Discourses were collected and published in 1797, several years after his death, but, according
to Pat Rogers’ Introduction, the original lectures had been attended by intellectual luminaries (3), and were
influential.
15
Darwin published his aesthetic thought as a series of prose dialogues, inserted as “Interludes” in his
poem The Botanic Garden. The dialogues are between “Bookseller” and “Poet.”
16
Still more strongly suggestive of Harris’s direct influence on Darwin is the similarity in their
comparisons of music and poetry. Both writers make detailed comparisons of the units of poetic metre to
the units of musical time (Harris 73-74, Darwin 123-27).
 29

In the whole cluster of ideas about art’s limitation to an instant and poetry’s ability to tell
stories, the single idea whose formulation is most consistent from Du Bos to Reynolds to
Darwin is the idea that poetry can build up the reader’s or listener’s interest gradually.
Du Bos states that on account of the many instants that poetry can represent, it is “far
easier, without comparison, for the poet than the painter, to make us grow fond of his
personages, and to interest us in their destinies” (72). He later says, as previously
mentioned, that the enormous succession of “pictures” that poetry generates enables it to
“lead us gradually to that excessive emotion, which commands our tears” (329).
Reynolds says that poetry “operates by raising our curiosity, [and] engaging the mind by
degrees to take an interest in the event” (205). Darwin states that, “[w]here the passions
are introduced,” the poet “has the power gradually to prepare the mind of his reader by
previous climacteric circumstances” (122).

Within this fairly consistent set of formulations, what varies most is how tightly bound
up each writer’s version is with the language of sensibility. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the
least sentimental of the three: his formulation does include an appeal to a “passion,” but
the passion in question is specifically our “prevalent disposition” to feel “anxiety for the
future” (205). Readerly investment in plot is itself a passion, according to Reynolds, but
he does not venture into a discussion of sympathetic passion. Du Bos and Darwin, by
contrast, work from the assumption that it is the passions of the “personages” that interest
us, the passions for which our minds are gradually prepared, and the passions that
eventually prompt our sympathetic tears. The contrasting example of Reynolds
highlights the extent to which Du Bos at the beginning of the century and Darwin at the
end were thinking about visual art and poetry within sentimental frameworks.

The idea that art should evoke sympathetic emotion was a crucial part of eighteenth-
century aesthetic philosophy, and it became more so as the century wore on. One of the
best known aesthetic thinkers of eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke, buttresses
his 1757 theory of the sublime and beautiful with a theory of sympathy. According to
Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, the arts affect their audiences in two ways. The first is by pleasing the wit
with the skill of their imitation. The second is by representing things we would want to
 30

see in real life, and Burke proposes sympathy as the passion that makes us want to see
those things, whether in real life or in art. Burke privileges representations that draw on
sympathy, denigrating genres that engage their viewers’ attention solely by means of “the
power of imitation, and [by] no cause operating in the thing itself.” In a still life, for
example, “a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen,
are capable of giving us pleasure” (45). Burke contrasts such genres to those in which
“the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real” (45). In the
preceding section, Burke has already stated that we prefer to watch real to imagined
suffering. “Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we
have,” he says, “appoint the most favourite actors,” then “let it be reported that a state
criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a
moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the
imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of real sympathy” (43). Burke has already made
it clear what kinds of objects “we should run to see if real.” According to the hierarchy
of general preference he sets up, people would rather see a real beheading than a picture
or performance of a beheading, and would in turn rather see a picture of a beheading than
a picture of a bowl of apples. The more opportunity a poem or painting offers for
sympathizing, the greater its effect on its audience.

Even the work of the comparatively unsentimental Harris and Reynolds is underpinned
by the assumptions of the culture of sensibility. Reynolds states in his lecture for 1778
that poetry, unlike painting, “exerts its influence over almost all the passions” (205), and
in the 1786 lecture that “[t]he great end of all those arts is, to make an impression on the
imagination and the feeling” (295).17 Harris wrote for the most part about the
“intelligibility” of paintings, rather than their emotional effect, but even he stated that the
most “affecting” and “improving” subjects for art or poetry, and “such of which the Mind
has the strongest Comprehension” are those subjects that “give us an Insight into
Characters, Manners, Passions, and Sentiments” (84-85). Here, both the subjects

17
Elsewhere in the same lecture Reynolds uses the comparable terms “imagination” and “sensibility”
(283).
 31

recommended and the terms on which they are recommended are redolent of the culture
of sensibility: the best subjects are passions and sentiments, and they are the best because
they are “affecting.”

While the eighteenth-century assumption that evoking feeling is the goal of the arts may
not be in itself surprising, the crucial point to be made about it is this: it is symptomatic
of a more profound conceptual link between aesthetic philosophy and the culture of
sensibility. Eighteenth-century thinking about the sister arts was dependent on thinking
about sympathy from the outset, and vice versa. The Abbé Du Bos, in attempting to
account for the arts’ “power of moving” people, proposes a basic theory of the moral
function of sympathy, saying that “Nature has thought proper to implant this quick and
easy sensibility in man as the very basis of society.”18 Because men are otherwise prone
to selfishness, Du Bos explains,
Nature […] has thought proper to form us in such a manner, as the
agitation of whatever approaches us should have the power of
impelling us, to the end, that those, who have need of our indulgence or
succour, may, with greater facility, persuade us. Thus their emotion
alone is sufficient to soften us; whereby they obtain what they could
never compass by dint of argument and conviction. We are moved by
the tears of a stranger, even before we are apprized of the subject of his
weeping. (32)
This formulation of what sensibility is and how it works, published in French in 1719, is
typical of the subsequent tradition of eighteenth-century British sentimental philosophy,
and we can recognize in this passage the mode of sympathy that Hume was to propose in
1740: the instantaneous sympathy that arises from the mere sight of distress. Du Bos
also complicates his theory of sympathy in many of the same ways that the British
philosophers who followed him would do. As Marshall observes, Du Bos

18
Marshall, in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, comments that “[l]ike many of his contemporaries, Du
Bos asserts that sympathy is natural. Anticipating Rousseau, he argues that nature, in order to counter the
‘amour-propre’ that evolves from “amour de soi’ [...], constructed people so that ‘the emotions [...] of
everyone who comes near to us would have a powerful sway over us’” (17).
 32

“acknowledges that people are strangely attracted to spectacles of real suffering or

misfortune.” Marshall points out that Du Bos “suggests that ‘ennui’ compels us to seek
out objects and emotions that will stir and occupy our souls” (Surprising Effects 23),
much as Burke later suggests that our mental organs’ need for exercise compels us to
seek out terrifying spectacles (123). Du Bos’s primary aim, however, is not to expound
the moral importance of sensibility, or even to offer a theory of sympathy, as Hume and
Smith will later do, but rather to account for the power of the arts, which take such
scenes of distress as “the subjects of their imitations” (32). The widespread influence of
Du Bos suggests that, when sentimental moral philosophy emerged in Britain, it emerged
from a matrix of ideas in which visual art and visual sympathy were already associated
with one another.

This conceptual link between the single moment of painting and instantaneous, visual
sympathy extended to a comparable link between the story-telling ability of poetry and
the idea of sympathy that gained currency in the later eighteenth century: sympathy as an
imaginative exercise in inhabiting someone else’s circumstances. The two modes of
sympathy – one based on instinctive response to a visual cue, and the other based on
imaginative reconstruction of circumstances – mirror the two chief “sister arts.” Painting
makes a vivid impression that can be taken in at a single glance; poetry recounts the
“previous” and “subsequent” of a given moment, thus conveying the circumstances of
the chief characters. The two conceptions of sympathy were not equals in eighteenth-
century thought, however. One lost ground in the public imagination to the other. As
one conception of sympathy became more prevalent, the sister art associated with it
gained prestige, and as the other conception of sympathy became less prevalent, the
corresponding sister art lost prestige. Du Bos, early in the century, wrote only of
instantaneous, instinctive sympathy; and he strongly favoured painting for its immediacy,
in spite of its limitations in story-telling. By midway through the century, Burke, who
favoured poetry over painting for its suggestiveness – for leaving room for a leap of
sympathetic imagination – explained that sympathy, which he defines in terms that seem
to prefigure Smith’s, is the source of beauty and sublimity alike (41).
 33

Burke outlines his conception of sympathy in his Philosophical Enquiry, published in

1757, two years before Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. He states that sympathy
makes us “enter into the concerns of others” and be “moved as they are moved” (41). It
is “a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected
in many respects as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of the nature of
those which regard self-preservation, and turning upon pain may be a source of the
sublime; or it may turn upon ideas of pleasure” (41). Later, he rephrases his definition
with considerable consistency, saying “the nature of this passion is to put us in the place
of another in whatever circumstance he is in, and to affect us in a like manner; so that
this passion may, as the occasion requires, turn either on pain or pleasure” (47-48).
Burke’s definition is less invested in the active reconstruction of another’s circumstances
than is Smith’s – he outlines no imaginative leap. Furthermore, he uses the very Humean
word “transfuse” when he states that “[i]t is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting,
and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another” (41),
implying that sympathy is a passive process of feelings seeping out of one person and
into another. Burke’s repeated emphasis, however, on “the concerns of others,” “the
place of another,” “substitution” of the self for another, and another’s “circumstance”
strongly prefigures Smith – and, indeed, Smith may have been influenced by Burke. All
that is lacking from the core of Smith’s definition of sympathy, in Burke’s formulation,
is changing places with another in fancy.

In only one other place does Burke complicate his proto-Smithian model of how the
passions get from one person’s consciousness into another’s. In his discussion of “the
celebrated physiognomist Campanella,” he proposes a mechanism of deliberate mimicry,
in which impersonating another person’s affect will prompt one to feel that person’s
passions.
When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he had to
deal with, he [Campanella] composed his face, his gesture, and his
whole body, as nearly as he could into the exact similitude of the
person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what turn
of mind he seemed to acquire by this change. So that, says my author,
 34

he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people, as

effectually as if he had been changed into the very men. I have often
observed, that on mimicking the looks and gestures, of angry, or placid,
or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned
to that passion whose appearance I endeavoured to imitate. (120-21)
This observation, however, which Burke makes as part of his exploration of the various
ways people come to feel pain and fear, is not linked to his discussion of either sympathy
or the arts. He presents it as a separate mechanism by which one can set about adopting
someone else’s feelings, distinct from the mechanism of sympathy. A careful reader
might deduce that Burke’s understanding of how feelings are communicated is not quite
as straightforwardly proto-Smithian as his definition of sympathy seems to indicate, but
Burke himself quarantines this discussion, keeping his theory of sympathy unified by
treating affective imitation as a separate psychological process.

The main thrust of aesthetic and moral philosophy may seem to have evolved to reject
the pictorial along with the simpler formulation of sympathy as an instinctive and
instantaneous response to affective display, but the cultural heritage left to the Romantics
was less unanimous than the trajectory from Du Bos and Hume to Burke and Adam
Smith might imply. The idea of visual sympathy did not simply fade, as Smith’s
formulation suggests it ought to; the two conceptions of sympathy co-existed in
Romantic culture, like the two chief sister arts, in productive dialogue with one another.
When Erasmus Darwin, for instance, in his Interludes to The Botanic Garden, introduces
the difference in available “quantity of Time” between poetry and painting, he does so in
the context of a discussion of how the two arts represent the passions: painting by
making affect visible, and poetry by making a character’s circumstances available to the
imagination. There is a crucial feature, Darwin says,
which belongs both to the pictorial and poetic art; and that is the
making of sentiments and passions visible, as it were, to the spectator;
this is done in both arts by describing or portraying the effects or
changes, which those sentiments or passions produce upon the body.
(121)
 35

This explanation, attributing figuratively to poetry the visual display of affect that
belongs literally to painting, may seem to conflate the roles of the two arts. But it is on
the very next page that Darwin explains that poetry “can unravel a long series of events”
while painting “can exhibit only the actions of a moment.” Immediately afterwards,
Darwin deduces from this that
[w]here the passions are introduced, as the Poet on the one hand has the
power gradually to prepare the mind of his reader by previous
climacteric circumstances; the Painter on the other can throw stronger
illumination and distinctness on the principal moment or catastrophe of
the action. (122-23)

He may not use the term sympathy, but there can be little doubt that this is what Darwin
is describing. Painting makes available the “passions” of those represented by visually
displaying them at their most intense, i.e. by deploying the inner mechanism of sympathy
proposed by Hume. Poetry does so by elaborating the circumstances that produce the
feeling, i.e. by deploying the sympathetic mechanism favoured by Smith. Darwin thus
expounds the sisterhood of poetry and painting by attributing to both the power of
representing the passions, and by attributing to each a means of doing so that is
consistent with one of the two modes of sympathy that had for decades competed in
philosophical discourse. That he would do so in 1789 argues strongly not only that
aesthetic and sentimental philosophy were still bound to one another in British
intellectual culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, but also that poetry and
imaginative sympathy co-existed peacefully in the public mind with painting and
instinctive sympathy.

The sorority of aesthetic and moral philosophy that I have just traced has the potential to
illuminate the intellectual work accomplished by a number of Romantic ekphrastic
poems. The sonnet by Mary Russell Mitford discussed in Chapter 3 is one; it collapses
the distinction between instinctive and imaginative sympathy while also implicitly using
a painting as a model for its own poetic project. Barry Cornwall’s “On the Statue of
 36

Theseus, One of the Elgin Marbles”19 is another. This poem demonstrates a viewer’s
response to a piece of visual art that, while striking in the immediate visual impression it
generates, does not elicit sympathy for the figure depicted, seemingly because the affect
it represents repulses rather than prompts fellow-feeling, as though the poem is enacting
Adam Smith’s observation that we are more likely to sympathize with the target of
unexplained anger than with the person displaying such anger.
Aye, this is he,
A proud and mighty spirit: how fine his form
Gigantic! moulded like the race that strove
To take Jove’s heav’n by storm, and scare him from
Olympus. There he sits, a demi-god,
Stern as when he of yore forsook the maid,
Who doating saved him from the Cretan toil,
Where he had slain the Minotaur. Alas!
Fond Ariadne, thee did he desert,
And heartless left thee on the Naxos shore
To languish. - This is he who dared to roam
The world infernal, and on Pluto’s queen,
Ceres’ own lost Proserpina, did lay
His hand: thence was he prison’d in the vaults
Beneath, till freed by Hercules. Methinks
(So perfect is the Phidian stone) his sire,
The sea-god Neptune, hath in anger stopp’d
The current of life, and with his trident-touch
Hath struck him into marble.
The frieze’s posture exudes arrogance – eliciting awe perhaps, but certainly not
sympathy. Rather than simply responding to the statue with awe, however, the speaker

19
Barry Cornwall wrote a substantial number of ekphrases later in his career, many of them for the
illustrated literary annuals. This poem, however, predates the bulk of his ekphrastic output; it was
published in 1820 in A Sicilian Story, with Diego de Montilla, and Other Poems.
 37

finds an appropriate object of sympathy in the process of recalling the stories associated
with the mythological Theseus. In order mentally to establish that this is in fact a statue
of Theseus, the speaker tests the statue’s affect against the deeds attributed to him, each
time confirming that the statue really does represent the demi-god who committed those
crimes. As a consequence of calling the mythological stories to mind, the speaker begins
to experience the mode of sympathy habitually linked with literature – gradually
beginning to feel for Ariadne on the basis of her circumstances. He first recounts
Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, and only afterwards addresses her sympathetically in
apostrophe, as though the act of calling her circumstances to mind is what enables him to
shift from narrating to sympathizing. Once he begins sympathizing, the speaker’s
sympathy for Ariadne and vicarious vexation with Theseus even prompts him to imagine
that the statue is the “real” Theseus, punished by Neptune for his misdeeds by being
turned to marble. “On the Statue of Theseus” is thus at least in part an elucidation of
how the two modes of sympathy conventionally associated with the “sister arts” might
interact in the case of one art borrowing material from another. If visual sympathy fails
because the statue’s subject matter does not elicit it, the literariness of that subject matter
might provide food for sympathy on the basis of narrated circumstance. The sculpted
Theseus’s affect may be visible, but it doesn’t lead to sympathy; Ariadne’s affect – and,
indeed, Ariadne – are not visible to the speaker, but his knowledge of her circumstances,
once he calls them to mind, is sufficient to produce a sympathetic response.

1.2.3 Storytelling, Stasis, and Sympathy in Romantic Ekphrasis

After the turn of the nineteenth century, the cluster of ideas that we find in Erasmus
Darwin persisted, but the idea of the visual arts presenting only a single moment
underwent a crucial metamorphosis. James Heffernan gets to the heart of this
metamorphosis when he states that “[t]he romantic poets and painters radically revised”
existing formulations and that “the idea that visual art could make such a [fleeting]
moment transcend time became an article of romantic faith” (93). His term for the new
cluster of ideas is “the ideology of transcendence,” and it includes both the idea that
artworks themselves will endure and the idea that art perpetuates a transitory moment,
holding the figures it represents in postures that would normally be fleeting. Neither of
 38

these ideas is quite the same as the idea that art is confined to the representation of a
single moment. If anything, the notion that art perpetuates an otherwise transient
appearance is an inversion of the earlier idea: rather than a pregnant moment from which
the previous and subsequent elements of a narrative can be deduced, we are left with a
static moment that negates the progress of narrative or the passing of time.

This idea of perpetuating a pose has elements in common not only with the earlier idea of
painting selecting a single moment, but also with developments in the language of the
theatre as it borrowed from and changed the language of painting. At the end of the
eighteenth century, Lady Emma Hamilton became famous for her “attitudes”: poses held
as though to replicate a work of art, usually a classical sculpture. The word “tableau,”
which in its English usage had originally meant “a vivid or picturesque scene or
description,” and had long been associated with painting, as its etymology suggests,
shifted semantically in the late eighteenth century to mean “a group of people or objects
positioned so as to form a vivid or picturesque scene” (OED); this use of the word still
suggests an analogy to painting, but assumes that living bodies are involved. The word
shifted again in the early nineteenth century to take on the theatrical meaning of “a
representation of the action at some stage in the play (especially a critical one), created
by the actors suddenly holding their positions” (OED). The first cited example of this
last definition dates from 1808. Martin Meisel, in his history of nineteenth-century
dramaturgy, defines a tableau as a moment in a play in which “the actors strike an
expressive stance in a legible symbolic configuration that crystalizes a stage of the
narrative as a situation [i.e. an emotionally laden scenario], or summarizes and
punctuates it” (45). Meisel identifies the tableau as “[t]he fullest expression of a pictorial
dramaturgy” (45) that he argues is characteristic of the nineteenth-century theatre.
Although this pictorialism reached its height, Meisel argues, in the mid-late nineteenth
century, its origins can be traced as far back as Diderot’s theatrical criticism (41) The
OED’s dating of this usage of the word tableau certainly suggests that such a dramaturgy
was already gaining ground in the Romantic period. A related concept, the tableau
vivant, emerged toward the end of the Romantic period: the Oxford English Dictionary
traces the term no further back than 1821, and defines it as “a silent and motionless group
 39

of people posed and attired to represent a well-known character, event, or work of art.”
The word “vivant” tacitly acknowledges the roots of “tableau” in the language of
painting; the term “tableau vivant” is linguistically the opposite of “nature morte,” the
French term for still life. The tableau vivant, however, was fundamentally a theatrical
undertaking. I would suggest that what Meisel identifies as a cultural habit of using the
metaphor of pictures to set the terms of stage performance is one half of a two-way
exchange that also shaped Romantic Britain’s ideas about real pictures. The language of
tableaux may have originated in the realm of painting, but its inflections changed
permanently when the culture of the theatre co-opted it; and that change, in turn, seems
to have become a tool that some Romantic poets were able to use in their constructions of
painting itself. Rather than the kernel of a narrative, pictures came to be associated with
actors laboriously holding their postures at a critical moment.

The Romantics’ fascination with theatrical tableaux and their recasting of painting in that
mould are part of a more general preoccupation with fixity or stasis at moments of
narrative climax or emotional intensity. This preoccupation is most vividly evident in
the Romantics’ habit of representing characters dying of grief: not wasting slowly away,
but collapsing in moments of unbearably strong feeling. Byron’s Haidee20 and Scott’s
Brian de Bois-Guilbert are two of the most striking examples, both collapsing
spontaneously in fits of intense emotion, but others who die more explicably are Baillie’s
De Monfort, Coleridge’s Ordonio (Remorse), Moore’s Hinda (Lalla Rookh), and
Hemans’s Leonor (The Forest Sanctuary).

Given visual art’s associations with tableau and with the selection of a single, crucial
moment within a story, it is no surprise that at least three poets made an explicit
connection between the visual arts and the popular motif of emotion so strong that it
brings itself to halt in death or madness. As Heffernan has pointed out, Byron figures
Haidee’s death in Don Juan as a kind of metamorphosis into sculpture, using metaphors
of statues or marble no fewer than three times in his representations of her prior to her

20
According to McGann’s notes to the Oxford edition, the name is spelled Haidee in the original editions
of Canto II, but Haidée in Canto III (1048).
 40

death (132). Moreover, when Haidee is in her coma, it is the unchanging visibility of her
“ruling passion” that constitutes her resemblance to a statue (Don Juan 4.481). Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, probably influenced by Byron’s example, uses a similar set of tropes
in The Troubadour, where Leila, a minor character, is figured as a statue in the moment
when she is discovered to be dead. Leila’s intense and long-suppressed feeling kills her;
her deceptively calm demeanour is finally all that is left of her, as the attributes of life
linger uneasily in her reflection in a fountain while she herself becomes indistinguishable
from sculpture (205). An earlier example, less well-known to current readers but widely
circulated in its day, is the Newdigate Prize Poem for 1812, Henry Hart Milman’s “The
Belvidere Apollo.” In the poem’s final verse-paragraph, Milman draws on a scientific
account of a French girl who supposedly died of love for the celebrated statue, 21 but he
represents the girl as becoming statue-like herself in the process of “perish[ing] of
despair.”
Yet on that form in wild delirious trance
With more than rev’rence gazed the Maid of France,
Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood
With him alone, nor thought it solitude!
To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care,
Her one fond hope – to perish of despair.
Oft as the shifting light her sight beguiled,
Blushing she shrunk, and thought the marble smiled:
Oft breathless list’ning heard, or seem’d to hear,
A voice of music melt upon her ear.
Slowly she waned, and cold and senseless grown,
Closed her dim eyes, herself benumb’d to stone.
Yet love in death a sickly strength supplied:
Once more she gazed, then feebly smiled and died.

21
Milman’s footnote attributes the story of the French girl to “the work of M. Pinel sur l’Insanité.” More
than a decade later, Barry Cornwall published a much longer poem inspired by the same story, entitled
“The Girl of Provence” (1823).
 41

In this poem, as in Don Juan and The Troubadour, the girl is “herself benumb’d to
stone” by her desperate love. According to the poem, her strong feelings make her
resemble a statue, just as the Apollo Belvidere’s powerful affect makes it resemble a real
god, displaying “stern delight,” “insulting ire,” and the “settled majesty of calm disdain /
Proud of his might, yet scornful of the slain.”

The Romantics were not the passive inheritors of the linked philosophical traditions of
the sister arts and moral philosophy. Heffernan is quite right that they reworked those
ideas. Understanding the intellectual heritage they were working with in as much detail
as possible, however, allows us to see more clearly when these poets are participating in
their own culture’s theatrical appropriation of the punctum temporis idea, when they are
speaking back directly to older iterations of it, and when they are doing something more
radical, as I shall argue in Chapter 4 that Keats and Shelley do, in “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” respectively. The presence in
Romantic culture of this linked cluster of ideas made poems about art an especially rich
medium for thinking about sympathy: not only for representing instances of sympathy by
enacting a viewer’s response to an artwork, but for thinking through what sympathy is,
how it relates to the narrative element that was thought to be present in visual art only in
germinal form, and how it relates to the instantaneous visual impression that the plastic
arts were thought to be supremely capable of bestowing.

1.3 Argument and Plan

Each of the chapters that follow focuses on two poems, situating those poems within a
specific strand of Romantic discourse, and contextualizing them with shorter discussions
of other poems – other works by the same authors, or other works printed in the same
venue of publication. Only in the second chapter are the two central texts by the same
author. The central texts of each chapter are paired because they use similar elements of
Romantic discourse to further their explorations of sentimental questions. It is thus the
contextual material that is the unifying thread for each chapter. The second chapter, for
example, gives a history of the ekphrastic tradition that the Romantics inherited – a
 42

tradition that will help to illuminate the poems discussed in later chapters as well.
Although much has been written about the ekphrastic tradition, including how it bears
upon the Romantic period, the existing body of scholarship contains significant gaps,
most notably a dearth of material on eighteenth-century poetry about art. The second
chapter thus includes extensive archival work aimed at filling in those gaps so as to
present as accurate as possible an account of the influences on Romantic writing from
within what we now call the ekphrastic tradition. The third chapter, by contrast, focuses
not on a tradition but on a new discourse that emerged in the Romantic era, as
professional artists began collectively to forge a public space in which they could speak
with authority about their vocation. Building on research by John Barrell and Jon
Klancher, I examine the pages of the quarterly Annals of the Fine Arts, launched in 1816,
along with its predecessor, a weekly magazine called The Artist, to trace some of the art
world’s self-fashioning in the public eye.

Chapter 2 examines two poems by William Cowper: a translation of a Latin poem by

Vincent Bourne called “The Tears of a Painter,” and the longer “On the Receipt of My
Mother’s Picture.” These are set in the context of prior traditions of ekphrasis and of
elegy, two genres that were much more fluidly conceived of in the early nineteenth
century than they usually are now. The chapter argues that the two poems explore the
boundary between appropriate and excessive grieving. They do so in part by reworking
the conventions of a very specific type of ekphrasis that had been popular in the
eighteenth century, namely portrait poems, in which paintings were habitually credited
with capturing the spirit or mind of their subjects. Cowper was able to put this trope to
much more pointed use in these elegiac poems than in the kind of celebratory piece that
had been typical of portrait poems throughout the eighteenth century.

Chapter 3 looks at poems published in The Annals of the Fine Arts, focusing on a sonnet
by Mary Russell Mitford about a sketch by Haydon and on an anonymous poem about a
memorial statue of two children; the two poems were printed together in the second
volume of the Annals. Situating these poems in the context both of the other poems
printed in the Annals and of the general tenor and structure of the magazine, I argue that
they find ways to co-opt the posture of editorial disinterestedness and authority adopted
 43

by the Annals to accentuate the intellectual work they do in testing out ideas about
sympathy. The Mitford sonnet, I argue, synthesizes the two concepts of sympathy –
imaginative and visual – whose history I have traced in the present chapter. The
anonymous poem uses sympathy for an imagined viewer to test the limits of an
appropriate affective response to an artwork on the part of its speaker, an idea closely
related to the ones explored by the Cowper poems discussed in Chapter 2. The two
poems in the Annals accomplish their respective thought experiments more effectively
because they are juxtaposed with one another and with the self-consciously professional
discourse that surrounds them in the magazine.

The Annals had sufficient visibility that Wordsworth published two sonnets there, six
months after the poems I have selected for study in Chapter 3. It offered a venue where
those writing about art in any genre could publish, even if they did not already have
eager publishers or an established audience. The mix of established and anonymous
authors who made use of it suggests that there was a demand for such a venue: that there
was an ongoing cultural conversation in which a wide range of writers wished to
participate. When I move on to my discussions of productive tensions in the ekphrases
of Keats and Wordsworth in Chapters 4 and 5, these comparatively unknown ekphrases
will serve as a reminder that the “great” poets whose work was also published in the
Annals did not write poems about art in primarily in the context of the ekphrases by
Homer or Spenser that we are inclined in the present day to take as the cornerstones of an
ekphrastic tradition. On the contrary, the lesser-known ekphrases from the Annals
demonstrate the existence of a flourishing poetic conversation about the relationship
between art and sensibility.

The fourth chapter of this thesis centres on two of the poems that have most influenced
contemporary studies of ekphrasis as a genre: Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and
Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.” The first is a monument of the current
canon both within and without work on ekphrasis, and a foundational text for a tradition
of criticism that sees ekphrasis as dealing with issues of stasis and temporality. The
second is the cornerstone of W.J.T. Mitchell’s influential theory of ekphrasis as a
gendered encounter with a feminized, sometimes threatening artwork. I situate these
 44

poems in the context of the historical coupling of sentimental and aesthetic thought that I
have outlined in this chapter, and I further explore two strands of that tradition that are
especially pertinent to the poems by Keats and Shelley. One is Adam Smith’s
formulation of sympathy for the dead as a sympathy based on willing self-delusion, with
which Shelley engages in “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” and the other is the
historically specific inflection of the idea of the visual arts stopping time that underpins
“Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As part of this exploration, I offer a corrective to the
anachronistic language of space and the spatial that pervades contemporary
reconstructions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse of the sister arts.
Chapter 4 argues that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “On the Medusa” draw on and
challenge the conventional pairing of visually-impelled, instantaneous sympathy with
theories of the efficacy of the visual arts, and that they do so to push at the boundaries of
how sympathy can be conceived. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” challenges the culturally
ubiquitous assumption that the visual arts should necessarily engage their viewers within
a sympathetic paradigm, while “On the Medusa” challenges the assumption that visually-
driven sympathy is necessarily instantaneous, or that sympathy driven by circumstances
requires an imaginative leap on the part of one fully conscious mind reconstructing the
activities of another.

The fifth and final chapter looks at Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a
Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont,” and at Keats’s
“Ode on Indolence.” Both poems, I argue, use the tradition of allegorical ekphrasis, and
combine it with metaphors of masque and pageantry, to draw attention to the
performativity of their own construction and to their densely allegorical figuration. They
do this in order to stage the process of testing the limits of their speakers’ ability to know
themselves or moderate their emotions in the absence of an interlocutor outside
themselves. That testing resonates with Adam Smith’s idea that we achieve the
impressive virtues founded on self-control by sympathizing with a would-be spectator
whose sympathy we in turn desire. The fifth chapter argues that, in the two poems it
examines, Smith’s idea is transfigured into pointed explorations of the feasibility of
 45

substituting a figurative projection of the self for a real interlocutor in an attempt to

achieve self-mastery.

The eight sustained readings of the central poems of the four chapters that follow this one
are surrounded by shorter discussions of other poems, including a large number of
eighteenth-century and Romantic ekphrases. I hope that the accumulated weight of these
shorter readings will offer my readers a fairly balanced picture of how Romantic
ekphrasis engaged with the intellectual culture of sensibility, and of how the ekphrastic
poems that did so compare to their siblings that did not. More crucially, this project
offers an overview of what Romantic poems about the visual arts had to work with when
they did engage with sensibility. Taken together, these chapters offer a birds’-eye view
of how the various discourses feeding into Romantic ekphrastic poetry had the potential
to intersect: the philosophical history that informs my reading of “On the Medusa” also
informs my reading of Mitford’s sonnet, or of “Ode on Indolence.” The history of
ekphrasis that shapes my interpretation of Cowper also shapes my interpretation of
“Peele Castle.” The understanding of how the Annals of the Fine Arts functioned in
Romantic culture that underpins my readings of the lesser-known poems in Chapter 3
also underpins my readings of a cluster of poems by Keats and Wordsworth that were
published there, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The total meaning of the chapters
that follow, in other words, is cumulative.
 46

2 William Cowper and the Ekphrastic Tradition

2.1 Why Study the Ekphrastic Tradition?
In the spring of 1799, the reclusive poet William Cowper, now famous chiefly for his
long, meditative blank verse poem The Task and his short lyric “The Castaway,”
translated a Latin poem composed earlier in the century by his own schoolmaster Vincent
Bourne. The poem is “Lachrymæ Pictoris” – “The Tears of a Painter” – and it recounts
an anecdote about the ancient Greek painter Apelles creating a commemorative portrait
of his dead son. Cowper’s translation is a fascinating artefact – in itself rich and
complex in its construction of emotion, but particularly revealing when studied both in
juxtaposition with Bourne’s original and in the context of the tradition of ekphrastic
writing that Cowper inherited. “The Tears of a Painter” makes an illuminating test case
for the usefulness of a balanced understanding of the ekphrastic conventions that poets of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had to work with. This chapter will
examine what poetry about art written in earlier periods looked like from a Romantic
perspective, and explore how that context could be absorbed and used by a poet deeply
engaged with the culture of sensibility. It will begin with a survey of earlier poems about
art, focusing on the understudied ekphrases of the eighteenth century, and using “The
Tears of a Painter” as a lens to bring the historical material into focus. This chapter will
then return to the poem, pairing it with a second ekphrastic poem by Cowper, “On the
Receipt of My Mother’s Picture.”

Cowper’s rendition of “The Tears of a Painter” sketches an emotional trajectory for

Apelles as he creates a work of great personal significance under tremendous
psychological strain, and that trajectory is established chiefly by means of the shifting
ways in which Apelles relates to his own painting.
APELLES, hearing that his boy
Had just expired, his only joy,
Although the sight with anguish tore him,
Bade place his dear remains before him.
He seized his brush, his colours spread;
 47

And—“Oh! my child, accept,” he said,

“(’Tis all that I can now bestow,)
“This tribute of a father’s woe!”
Then, faithful to the twofold part,
Both of his feelings and his art,
He closed his eyes with tender care,
And formed at once a fellow pair.
His brow with amber locks beset
And lips he drew, not livid yet;
And shaded all that he had done
To the just image of his son.
Thus far is well. But view again
The cause of thy paternal pain!
Thy melancholy task fulfil!
It needs the last, last touches still.
Again his pencil’s powers he tries,
For on his lips a smile he spies:
And still his cheek unfaded shows
The deepest damask of the rose.
Then, heedful to the finished whole,
With fondest eagerness he stole,
Till scarce himself distinctly knew
The cherub copied from the true.
Now, painter, cease! Thy task is done.
Long lives this image of thy son;
Nor short-lived shall the glory prove,
Or of thy labour or thy love.
The way Apelles relates to the painting by the poem’s end is starkly different from the
way he relates to it at the outset, and the trajectory from one to the other is fascinating.
The painting begins as Apelles’ “tribute” to his lost son, its creation fuelled by his “woe.”
As the poem progresses, however, the language begins to suggest ever so faintly that the
 48

painting, impossibly, expresses the son’s feelings as well. The pronouns are slightly
ambiguous, often requiring the reader to infer when they refer to Apelles and when to his
dead son: “he closed his eyes,” “he seized his brush,” “on his lips a smile he spies”
(italics mine). While few readers would be confused by these pronouns for more than a
passing moment, the grammatical ambiguity is just sufficient to suggestively blur the
distinction between Apelles’ artistic agency and his dead son’s passivity, Apelles’ grief
and his son’s seeming peace, especially in the first instance, in which a reader might
expect “he closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts,” or some other formulation in
which Apelles closes his own eyes. That whisper of a blurred boundary between father
and son leaves us with the suggestion that Apelles is both expressing his own anguish
and ventriloquizing his son’s apparent calm contentedness.

That subtle hint that the painting impossibly expresses the dead son’s feelings becomes
much more pronounced, and much more clearly a product of Apelles’ own mind, in the
second verse paragraph. After he has succeeded in capturing his son’s physical
appearance with verisimilitude, Apelles applies himself with renewed energy to capture
the boy’s smile, only perceived on the corpse after the first, literally representative phase
of artistic creation is complete: “[a]gain his pencil’s powers he tries, / For on his lips a
smile he spies.” Whether the child’s corpse really has a smile is beside the point.
Apelles looks at the body anew, as if obeying the poetic speaker’s injunction to “view
again / The cause of [his] paternal pain,” and this time he “spies” the smile – either
perceiving a smile subjectively where there isn’t one, or perceiving for the first time an
expression previously overlooked. In either case, he perceives and seeks to capture in
paint a display of contentedness rather than a physical feature, and in either case the
smile bears no relation to any state of mind really felt by the boy, since a smiling corpse
can surely be assumed to be no happier than a frowning one. In first seeing and then
painting the smile, Apelles uses the portrait as a medium through which he can imagine
an ongoing emotional state for his son and then express it on his behalf.

Lastly, Apelles’ attitude to his painting shifts again upon its completion. No sooner is it
a “finished whole” than it becomes a visual object to which Apelles responds with
rapture, succumbing to the verisimilitude that he himself has created, like a sort of
 49

paternal Pygmalion, and approaching the painting with “fondest eagerness” as virtually
indistinguishable from his real son. Since these lines are not present in the Latin original,
Cowper evidently made a considered choice to deploy the conventional praise of an
artwork as mimetically faithful in this rather unusual context. Rather than the site of
Apelles’ expression of an imagined affective state on behalf of his son, the painting is
now a stand-in for the son – a surrogate loved one toward which Apelles can direct his
affection. Over the course of the poem, then, Apelles relates to the painting in three
quite distinct ways: as a means of expressing his own “woe” and paying “tribute” to his
son, as a means of imagining and attributing to his son an emotional state, and as a
deceptively lifelike stand-in for his son.

“The Tears of a Painter” concludes with a comment that implicitly valorizes the very
emotional process it has just traced, linking the value of the painting to the agonized
effort that Apelles puts into its creation. “Long lives” the “image,” Cowper exclaims in
apostrophe to Apelles, and then, shifting into an understated double-negative, says “Nor
short-lived shall the glory prove, / Or of thy labour or thy love.” The understatement is
pointed: none of Apelles’ works survived into the modern era, and Cowper’s present-
tense “long lives this image” is thus limited in scope to his imaginative reconstruction of
Apelles’ present moment. The glory of Apelles’ labour and love, by contrast, is not only
extant, but also something to which Cowper himself can contribute. It is the story about
the painting, rather than the painting itself, that survives. What is more, it is the story,
rather than the painting, whose “glory” survives: the glory of Apelles’ labour and the
love that inspired it, rather than the glory of an accomplished piece of artwork.

If this much can be gleaned from reading the poem alone, the nuances of Cowper’s
translation nevertheless become clearer when it is taken in the context, not only of the
Latin original, but also of the tradition of ekphrastic writing that Cowper inherited – and
this is true as well of Cowper’s better-known ekphrasis “On the Receipt of my Mother’s
Picture out of Norfolk: the Gift of my Cousin, Ann Bodham.” In fact, an accurate survey
of the ekphrastic tradition available to Romantic poets will make for better-informed
readings of all the poems discussed in this thesis. The poems examined in this thesis all
find, in art as their subject-matter, opportunities for exploring the burning questions of
 50

the culture of sensibility, and they do so by drawing on the intellectual resources (ideas,
structures of thought, conceptual frameworks, productive ambiguities) of several thriving
discourses related to visual art. These include the discourse surrounding art as a public
profession, the philosophical discourse of the “sister arts,” and the concept of the
sympathetic spectator or viewer. The three chapters that follow this one will focus on the
ways in which some Romantic ekphrases put to work the elements of these discourses
that were made available by art as a subject-matter for poetry. First, however, it will be
helpful to establish a more direct context, namely the amorphous set of existing traditions
of poetry about the visual arts. My purpose is not to show that the Romantics were the
first to use poetry about art to explore ideas about human emotion – they were not – but
rather to show how, in so using it, they exploited the intellectual resources available to
them. The fluid conventions of existing poems about visual art was one of those
resources.

Like the ekphrases I discuss in subsequent chapters (and like some earlier ekphrases,
such as the one in Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece”), the poems by Cowper that I
examine here are interested in how the experience of looking at art interacts with other
elements of affective experience, although these texts are not, as the later poems are,
specifically concerned with ideas about sympathy. Cowper’s poems are about the
personal and particular significance of an artwork for a specific viewer, and in this
respect they resemble the short ekphrases about specific, really existing portraits that
were comparatively popular in the eighteenth century, as I shall discuss in the section
that follows. But they transfigure the conventions of portrait-ekphrasis in their
investment in the idea of a viewer’s response as a process, rather than as a static event –
an investment they share with the slightly later poems that are my chief focus. Many
eighteenth-century ekphrases are poems about portraits, often written for specific
occasions and addressing specific recipients; many praise portraits for capturing the
spirit, as well as the outward appearance, of the sitter. Cowper’s poems make use of
those traditions, but they also resist them, marking unconventionally-chosen occasions,
and registering ambivalence about the idea of a portrait representing spiritual qualities.
They do this for the purpose of exploring the emotional stakes of memorial portraiture,
 51

probing the experiences of grief by seeking out the limits of portraiture’s ability to
mitigate it in a wholesome fashion. “The Tears of a Painter” and “On the Receipt” both
adapt the convention of praising portraits for capturing the spirit of the person portrayed,
transposing that convention onto an elegiac context quite different from the modes of
ekphrasis popular in the eighteenth century, and using it as the cornerstone of their
constructions of types of grief that are unsustainable or even, in the case of “On the
Receipt,” theologically problematic.

2.2 Eighteenth-Century Ekphrasis

Romantic poets writing about the visual arts had an assortment of traditions on which to
draw, many of which have been helpfully elucidated by other scholars, but the
eighteenth-century portion of those traditions is understudied, and its characteristics may
surprise those familiar with what came before. Indeed, the fact that eighteenth-century
poems about art have so little in common with the familiar ekphrases of Homer,
Shakespeare, Keats, and Auden may in part account for their critical neglect: they are
not, in general, momentous or highly charged, nor do they evoke any Classical grandeur.
Notwithstanding the general consensus that Romantic ekphrasis, as a body, is not quite
like any of its predecessors, eighteenth-century ekphrasis is actually the more dramatic
break from tradition. Romantic poets writing about art thus had a still more complex
pool of literary influences and predecessors to navigate than other scholars have
acknowledged. Moreover, since poetry about art had never been collected or codified, let
alone labelled in English with the impressive term ekphrasis, the traditions available to
the Romantics were fluid; describing a painting did not necessarily involve evoking
Homer or Virgil. Inevitably, recent poems about art – eighteenth-century poems – had an
immediacy of influence on Romantic ones, and it is only by giving eighteenth-century
poems a prominent place in our understanding of the traditions inherited by the
Romantics that we can really understand how the texts studied in this thesis situate
themselves in and against those traditions.

Several critics have offered historical surveys of poetry about art, each with a different
purpose; combined, their accounts offer a helpfully balanced picture of what poetry about
 52

visual art looked like prior to the eighteenth century. The collective effort of these
scholars, while it requires supplementing with additional information about the
eighteenth century, is a crucial building block for understanding, not only Romantic
ekphrasis, but indeed the context for the very eighteenth-century material that is absent
from the accepted account. Scott, interested in outlining how Keats took up the idea of
antiquity, gives a useful survey in The Sculpted Word of some of the influential
ekphrases of the classical tradition, starting with Homer’s description of the shield of
Achilles. He observes that, in the early classical passages that are now most readily
recognizable as ekphrasis, “the things described – shields, cups, brooches, cloaks,
tapestries – are not nominally works of art but utilitarian objects that are personal and
portable” (1). Keats was not, of course, the first modern poet to write ekphrases in a
similar vein. As we shall see, eighteenth-century poets wrote poems that, if not about
shields and cups, are certainly about decorated objects rather than works of art per se:
garden ornaments, obelisks, funerary monuments, cut-silk portraits, and so forth. James
A. W. Heffernan, whose primary interest lies in the relationship between ekphrasis and
gender, offers a reading of the passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describing the rival
tapestries woven by Minerva and Arachne, which I will discuss at more length shortly.
He also expands the scope of his study to include a different genre: the advice-to-a-
painter poem. Interested in tracing the influence of this genre on “Peele Castle,” he
identifies it as originating in a series of odes written by Anacreon in the sixth century
B.C.E., mostly requesting that the painter represent the poet’s mistress. Heffernan points
out that the genre “resurfaced in seventeenth-century England,” where it was “made to
serve other purposes” (100). As with the decorated-object ekphrases examined by Scott,
advice-to-a-painter poems continued to be composed in the eighteenth century, and,
indeed, “The Tears of a Painter,” in its two apostrophes to Apelles, evokes the
conventions of the genre. Jean Hagstrum, in his 1965 study, discusses a very broad
category that he calls “iconic poetry.” Under that rubric, he examines some texts that fit
in tidily with the tradition of poems about urns and shields that is now mainstream
reading in the study of ekphrasis; he points out, for instance, that many medieval
ekphrases describe the decoration on temples. But he also discusses everything from
Early Modern emblems, to Greek epigraphs, to passages that draw on the conventions of
 53

allegorical painting, and some of the works he examines look very little like ekphrasis as
most scholars know it. The heterogeneity of the works Hagstrum investigates has some
advantages: it lends to the prevailing account of pre-eighteenth-century ekphrasis a
roundness and thoroughness that it would otherwise lack. It is also crucial to note,
however, that Hagstrum adopts this strategy in order to cope with the difficulty of finding
poems from the eighteenth century that are actually about visual art. The idiosyncrasy of
his work will thus offer a useful starting point when I come to discuss the comparable
idiosyncrasy of eighteenth-century ekphrasis.

Two patterns emerge in the work of these scholars that are particularly helpful for setting
up our understanding of both eighteenth-century and Romantic ekphrasis; the first of
these is the recurrence of figuration in ekphrastic writing. A frequent element in poems
about art prior to the eighteenth century is the investment of artworks with figurative
meaning; and that element has taken a variety of forms that is worth examining. The
early modern period produced a number of symbolic and allegorical ekphrases, not only
in the faux-medieval ekphrases of a work like the Faerie Queene, but also in emblem
books, in which, as Hagstrum has pointed out, the words explicate the allegorical or
analogical meaning of the picture – as if verbally completing a visual parable.22
Figuration, indeed, had been an important convention in poems about art since long
before the early modern period. Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, for all that it
seems narratively driven, nevertheless has figurative significance. As Scott puts it, the
images in the shield represent everything that is absent from the world of The Iliad:
peaceful cities, agriculture, weddings – normal life, in other words (2). Heffernan’s
reading of the tapestries in the Metamorphoses suggests the symbolic importance of the
tapestries’ pictorial depictions of the gods: Minerva, Heffernan suggests, is “[o]utraged
just as much by the content of these pictures as by the virtuosity that created them” (52).
In both cases, meaning inheres in the mere presence of the objects depicted in the
artworks. What is symbolic about the shield is the simple fact that it represents elements

22
Hagstrum cites an early eighteenth-century writer (Francis Quarles) who called the emblem a “‘silent
Parable’” (95).
 54

of normal, civilian life. Arachne’s tapestry is defiant by virtue of the very stories to
which it alludes. An allusion to a story of the gods behaving badly is intrinsically a
criticism of divine authority; an allusion to a specific narrative is a symbolic act because
there is a symbolic meaning inherent in the narrative. A similar type of figuration recurs
in the Romantic poem “On the Monument to be Placed in Lichfield Cathedral,”
discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis: a funerary sculpture of two sleeping girls achieves
figurative significance because the bare fact of representing sleep, in the context of a
cathedral niche, carries certain symbolic implications.

If figuration had been present in ekphrasis from Homer onward, it achieved new
dominance in medieval literature. Hagstrum has observed that, where classical antiquity
had valued in art “the rhetorical and critical notion of enargeia, or lifelike vividness,” the
culture of the “medieval centuries” sought instead “to remove the pictorial from the
external and natural and associate it with the internal and supernatural” (129). In other
words, the medieval expectation of art was that it would represent the unrepresentable –
it would be figurative. In many medieval ekphrases, pictures represent kernels of
recognizable narratives that come to function as symbols, much as the incidents depicted
in Arachne’s tapestry function as symbols of divine depravity. Heffernan points out that
the temple decorations in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” offer commentary on the main
action of the story by evoking well-known narratives (63). To take a different example,
the temple decorations in the “Parliament of Fowls” do the same, despite the extreme
brevity of Chaucer’s treatment of each story. After naming the protagonists of some
dozen love stories that end in death, Chaucer’s comically simple narrator says only “Alle
these were peynted on that other syde, / And al hir love, and in what plyte they dyde”
(293-94). The point of the passage is not to tell any story whatsoever, but to allude to as
many stories as possible. The point of commonality among all of the narratives is that
the characters were in love and that they died. Their symbolic function is to demonstrate
the greatness of Venus: the paintings of these mythological characters are, in effect,
trophies, like the broken bows of ex-virgins hung on the wall beside them.

The second pattern I want to draw attention to in the existing histories of ekphrasis is a
concern in ekphrastic writing with viewers’ responses to artworks; although this is
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sometimes treated as a feature of Romantic ekphrasis, it is in fact a very old tradition, and
its manifestations in eighteenth-century and Romantic writing make more sense in the
light of its history. To take a very early example, Scott says of Virgil’s description of
Aeneas’ shield that “what most distinguishes the shield from its antecedents […] is the
centrality of Aeneas’s response” and Virgil’s “interest in the psychology of aesthetic
response and in ekphrastic empathy…” (8). He makes a similar observation about
Philostratus’ Imagines, arguing that it pokes fun at the idea of a viewer’s “awe before the
mimetic fidelity of the image” (13). But, of all the instances of this kind of
preoccupation with viewer response, the ones most actively taken up by the Romantics
are early modern. Shakespeare’s ekphrases are much more interested in what the
onlooker thinks and says than in the work of art itself. Hagstrum says of the extended
ekphrasis in “The Rape of Lucrece” that “Shakespeare’s aim was […] dramatically to
relate the paintings to the human being who confronts them” (79), an aim that is apparent
in many of the first-person lyrics studied in this thesis: “On the Receipt of My Mother’s
Picture,” “Peele Castle,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and others. Heffernan offers a useful
reading of the same ekphrasis from “The Rape of Lucrece,” arguing that Lucrece herself
interprets the painting of the fall of Troy as a series of emblems of her own condition:
Helen’s rape as an emblem of her own, Hecuba’s sorrow an emblem of her own, and the
invasion of Troy an emblem of the invasion of her own body (77-9). There is a crucial
difference between this – representing a viewer finding symbolic meaning in an artwork
– and representing an artwork as transparently symbolic. In Chaucer’s ekphrases, the
burden of symbolic interpretation is placed on us, but the symbolism of the artwork is
obvious. In “The Rape of Lucrece,” the symbolic meaning that Lucrece attributes to the
painting of Troy is subjective: she identifies herself one moment with Helen (because
Helen has been raped), one moment with the city of Troy (because Troy has been
violated), and one moment with Hecuba (because Hecuba is sad). In short, Shakespeare
seems less interested in using the ekphrasis as an opportunity to mine the story of Troy
for its potential symbolism than in representing the subjective and personal process by
which one viewer goes about investing the story with meaning. A similar observation
could be made about “The Tears of a Painter,” written two centuries later: the poem is
less interested in praising the verisimilitude of Apelles’ painting than in showing the
 56

process of Apelles himself reacting to that verisimilitude, finding in the painting a

spiritual likeness to his son that it does not really possess.

Shakespeare’s representations of viewer response extend beyond exploring the process of

investing art with symbolic meaning to include another kind of response: the kind of rapt
attention to trompe l’oeil effects that had received attention in classical ekphrasis, and
that Scott sees parodied in the Imagines (and, again, “The Tears of a Painter” evokes this
in Apelles’ final near-inability to distinguish “[t]he cherub copied from the true”). The
most famous work of art in Shakespeare’s oeuvre is, of course, not a work of art at all,
but the real, living Hermione – a “sculpture” whose lifelike appearance startles her
husband into wishing to embrace her, and who eventually sheds her supposed status as
art to reclaim her husband, title, and long-lost daughter (The Winter’s Tale 5.3). The
dramatic relation between the viewer and the static “artwork” in this case turns out to be
so intense – and reciprocal – that the conventional effusions about the artist’s skill in
creating illusion with which the passage begins dissolve into absurdity in the long
moment of suspense between Paulina’s first injunction to Hermione to come to life and
Hermione’s first spoken words. What an audience member ends up admiring is not the
skill of a sculptor or painter, but the skill of an actor who can maintain near-total stillness
for long enough to be convincing. This scene from The Winter’s Tale may not meet most
scholars’ expectations of an ekphrasis, but it is nonetheless part of the amorphous set of
traditions that Romantic poets writing about visual art had at their fingertips – one might
see its influence, for instance, in the moving frieze-figures of “Ode on Indolence”
(discussed in Chapter 5), and reading either Cowper’s “On the Receipt of My Mother’s
Picture” or “The Tears of a Painter” against The Winter’s Tale lends an extra layer of
poignancy to those lyrics about confronting a portrait of a loved one who really is dead.

Written discourse about art in the eighteenth century was plentiful, and familiarity with
the work of Addison, Shaftesbury, Reynolds, and Darwin, to name only the most famous
few writers on the subject, might make one expect that eighteenth-century England
would have produced dozens of ekphrases. If the flourishing discourse of the “sister
 57

arts,” discussed in the Introduction to this thesis, were not sufficient, John Barrell’s
magisterial study The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt might lead a
reader to expect numerous weighty poems about the salutary effects of history painting
on the British polity. But in truth eighteenth-century England did not produce a
particularly large body of poetry about art, and what it did produce is no longer widely
read. The work of Jean Hagstrum shows the strain of this disconnect between
philosophical discourse and poetic output. Determined to examine the variety of ways in
which literature related itself to its “sister arts” in the eighteenth-century, Hagstrum
evades the scarcity of ekphrases from the period by stretching his concept of “iconic
poetry” to the breaking point, as I mentioned earlier, including in it everything from
epigraphs to emblems, and defining virtually all personifications as pictorial by default.
The poems about visual art that were published in the eighteenth-century are now rarely
anthologized; finding them requires some diligence, but that diligence is necessary if we
are to see clearly how the Romantics adapted the conventions of poetry about art that
were available to them.

What one finds does not line up tidily with the corpus of works most commonly studied
as ekphrastic. Looking through the collected poems of Thomson, Gray, Beattie, Collins,
Pope, Swift and Dryden, one finds only a tiny handful of poems about art. Swift wrote a
rather nasty series of satires about a cut-silk and paper portrait (the start of a much longer
series of fictive replies and pardons), and his famous “Stella’s Birthday” poem for 1720
uses an elaborate conceit comparing Stella’s face to a painted sign outside an inn. Pope,
showing the influence of the intellectual climate in which he worked, wrote an “Epistle
to Mr. Jervas with Dryden’s Translation of Fresnoy’s Art of Painting” (first published in
1716), in which he recalls himself and Jervas being “[s]mit with the love of Sister-Arts.”
He also wrote a ten-line poem called “Extemporaneous Lines on a Portrait of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, Painted by Kneller” and a quatrain “On Drawings of the Statues of
Apollo, Venus, and Hercules.” John Dyer wrote an epistle “To A Famous Painter,” in
which he first catalogues the painter’s skills and then concludes with two delightful
couplets that mock the idea of a poet dictating a subject for a painter. Robert Burns
published several very short, comic pieces about portraits, along with a four-quatrain
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poem called “Verses Intended to be Written Below a Noble Earl’s Picture” (written in
January of 1787). If this seems a scant collection of poems to represent an entire century,
searching the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database reveals only a handful
more. In and of itself, this might be dismissed as the result of inaccurate transcriptions,
especially of book titles, in the ECCO database, which impede searches by making some
items impossible to find; the disproportionately small number of items in a search for
“art,” however, in contrast to a search for a different subject, such as “theatre,” suggests
to me that there simply were not many publications about art, relative to other subjects.23
It was only by combing through the relevant six volumes of Robert Anderson’s famous
Works of the British Poets that I was able to assemble a large enough body of eighteenth-
century ekphrases to substantiate a generalization. I catalogued only eighty-three
ekphrases from Anderson’s immense anthology, in addition to those that were duplicates
of the ones I had found using other means – about a hundred poems in all.

Of this modest body of ekphrastic poems, almost all are short or mid-length poems about
either real art or real artists, seemingly out of keeping with an English tradition that
begins with the notional ekphrases of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all describing
extensive, even improbable, works of art, and that eventually leads to the equally

23
A subject search for “art” under “Literature and Language” produces ninety-one entries: dictionaries of,
essays on, and guides to the arts, biographies of artists, catalogues of collections, treatises on the art of war,
or the art of horseback-riding, and only one poem – John Dyer’s The Ruins of Rome (which contains many
architectural descriptions, but nothing that stands out about specific works of art). A subject search for
“artist” produces no results, although a title search for “artist” will produce many texts illustrated by artists.
A search for “picture” produces only one result: a beginner’s Latin textbook. A search for “sculpture”
produces a lone treatise on ancient art and poetry. A search for “portrait” produces only two editions of the
bizarre entry: A Poetical, Supplicating, Modest, and Affecting Epistle to those Literary Colossuses, the
Reviewers. By Peter Pindar, Esq. A search for “painting” produces fifty-two results, including several
poems or books of poems: the most relevant of these are a pair of verse epistles by Hayley, and a
fascinating anonymous poem entitled Pindarick Ode on Painting: Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq.,
published by itself in 1767. This substantial poem (334 lines long) pays tribute to painting for its ability to
capture fleeting mental visions, to convey copious and detailed information quickly and without tedium,
and to move its viewers emotionally; in the process, it imagines several hypothetical paintings and
describes several real ones. All of these searches can be easily expanded by searching under “Fine Arts” as
well as “Language and Literature,” but this produces no poems.
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imaginative notional ekphrases of Keats and Auden.24 A few of the eighteenth-century

poems are rambling verse essays on aesthetics or the sister arts, such as “An Essay on
Painting. To the Right Hon. Thomas Earl of Pembroke,” by Walter Harte. Harte’s 500-
odd line “Essay on Painting” begins with an “argument” outlining its contents:
A parallel between painting and poetry—Advice to a good painter;
influenced by Titian—An universal notion of beauty—That we must
not despair—A luxuriant fancy, or too much exactness often faulty—
Decency still to be preserved—Repose and solitude—Nature to be
imitated—In a fault, whether to be corrected or not—The Je ne sçai
quoi of beauty—Draperies—An encomium on painting—The episode
of Mimicina—Sculpture—Innovations faulty—Sometimes to be
admired—Invention—Union of colours—Immoderate ornament—The
Landscape—Design—The principal figure of a picture—Modesty in a
painter—Harmony of colours—The surprise—Optics—The obscura
camera described; its use in painting—Disposition of objects—Two
equal lights to be avoided in the same picture—Truth to be observed—
Travelling, its use—Another parallel between poetry and painting—
Their distinct excellencies considered—Painting far more lasting and
universal—Yet derived its light first from poetry—Its rise and progress
through all ages—An account of the most celebrated painters, with
their several characters—Conclusion, with an address to the Earl of
Pembroke.

Such sprawling verse discourses are the exception, however, rather than the rule. Most
eighteenth-century ekphrases are quite short,25 some of them consisting of only a single

24
The prevalence of poems about the whole oeuvre of a given artist makes John Hollander’s distinction
between “actual” and “notional” ekphrasis – i.e. ekphrasis about a real or imaginary artwork – impossible
to maintain, since the distinction assumes that an ekphrastic poem is about a single artwork.
25
Twenty-five of the eighty-three poems in Anderson’s anthology are very short indeed: twelve lines or
fewer.
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couplet or quatrain. A few are either translated or imitated from Latin or Greek texts.26
But the vast majority are occasional pieces: charming relics of the social milieu of
literary England, addressed as a compliment to a particular person or honouring a
particular occasion. The habit of writing poems about visual art to mark occasions is one
that persists and is transfigured in Romantic writing. The occasions to which the
eighteenth-century poems respond range from the creation of a portrait,27 to the death of
an artist, usually an artist personally known to the author,28 to the erection of a public
monument. Samuel Garth, for example, wrote “On Her Majesty’s Statue in St. Paul’s
Church-Yard,” which describes the “awful form” of Queen Anne and the “four mighty
realms” that sit “[b]eneath her feet.” It comments extensively on the respective
demeanours of the attendant statues that personify the four realms: Britain, Ireland,
France, and “India.”29 Garth’s poem is atypical in paying so much attention to the
appearance of the monument; many eighteenth-century poems with titles referring to
monuments discuss only the person commemorated, rather than the monument itself. In
addition to the erection of a new statue, the fate of existing artworks could in some cases
elicit a few poems – at least two celebrate Lady Pomfret’s gift of her statue collection to
Oxford.30 A few ekphrases are about decorations for private estates, such as Shenstone’s
“On a Statue of Venus de Medicis,” which appears in Anderson’s Works as the sixteenth
of nineteen “inscriptions” by Shenstone (some of them in Latin)31 intended mostly for

26
Dryden and Addison, for instance, both translated portions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dryden’s
translations include “Pygmalion and the Statue, from the Tenth Book,” and Addison’s include “The Story
of Aglauris, Transformed into a Statue.” Aglauris, for those not familiar with the myth, is turned into a
statue by an impatient Mercury when she attempts, out of envy, to bar him from her sister’s bedroom.
27
Matthew Prior, for example, wrote “On seeing the Duke of Ormond’s Picture at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s,”
and George Granville wrote “Lady Hyde, sitting at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s for her Picture.”
28
James Thomson, for instance, wrote an “Elegy on the Death of Mr. Aikman the Painter,” whom he
evidently considered a good friend.
29
The fourth attendant statue actually represents North America, personified in Aboriginal garb.
30
One such poem is “Verses occasioned by Lady Pomfret’s Present of some Antique Statues to Oxford, the
Streets whereof were foolishly said to be Paved with Jacobites,” by a Paul Whitehead, and one is “On Lady
Pomfret’s Presenting the University of Oxford with her Collection of Statues,” by Edward Lovibond.
31
A substantial minority of the poems about visual art composed in England in the eighteenth century are
in Latin.
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garden ornaments: eight of them on seats, three on urns, one on an obelisk, and so forth.
The eight-quatrain inscription for the statue, presumably a replica of the Venus de
Medici, is among the most extensive of the nineteen. It offers the statue as a model of
good decorating, taking Venus’ apparent “coy reserve” as an analogy for a well-
landscaped estate, and instructing the “boastful sons of taste”
Who plan the rural shade;
Learn hence to shun the vicious waste
Of pomp, at large display’d.

Let sweet concealment’s magic art

Your mazy bounds invest;
And while the sight unveils a part,
Let fancy paint the rest.

Despite this variety, one type of poem about visual art stands out as overwhelmingly
popular in the eighteenth century. Sixty-seven of the eighty-three ekphrases in Anderson
are about specific portraits. Most seem intended to flatter either the artist or the sitter;
many are published with explanations of the contexts in which they were originally
composed and presented to the objects of their flattery.32 The most serious in tone of
these ekphrases turn the portrait into an opportunity for moral commendation, either
praising the artist’s ability to capture the inner grace of the sitter, or lamenting the
impossibility of doing so.33 Pope’s “Extemporaneous Lines on a Portrait of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, Painted by Kneller” is an excellent example of this common type of

32
Grant Scott helpfully points to the importance of the often critically neglected “portrait poem genre” in
his chapter “Keats and the Urn,” in The Sculpted Word (124-31), and again in “Shelley, Medusa, and the
Perils of Ekphrasis.” His reconstruction of the portrait ekphrasis tradition, however, strikes me as skewed.
His cornerstone example is in fact a poem about a history painting of Medea; although it does draw on
some of the conventions of portrait-ekphrasis, it is far from typical of the genre. In discussing his second
and third examples, James Vale’s “Verses on Seeing the Portrait of Miss C—N” and the anonymous “On
Looking at the Picture of a Beautiful Female,” Scott does not comment on their urbane and understated
charm – the hallmark of the portrait poem in its eighteenth-century heyday.
33
Heffernan has observed that “the most notable seventeenth-century poems we have on actual portraits
praise the artist’s ability to make a face and figure express the mind” (92). In the eighteenth century, such
poems were (by the standard of ekphrasis) extremely common.
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eighteenth-century poetry about art. Pope begins by noting the visible features
represented in the portrait, then expresses a wish to “draw” in his poetry Lady Montagu’s
corresponding, hidden virtues:
The playful smiles around the dimpled mouth,
That happy air of majesty and truth;
So would I draw (but oh! ’tis vain to try,
My narrow genius does the power deny;)
The equal lustre of the heav’nly mind…
The lengthy parenthetical clause suspends the verb “draw” for a line and a half before the
speaker permits himself to name its object, the “equal lustre of the heav’nly mind,” the
expression of the speaker’s modest self-doubt actually postponing even the mention of
the quality that he wishes figuratively to “draw.” Overcoming the hesitation, however,
the speaker proceeds to detail the virtues he has just declared himself unequal to
representing:
The equal lustre of the heav’nly mind,
Where ev’ry grace with every virtue’s join’d;
Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe,
With greatness easy, and with wit sincere;
With just description show the work divine,
And the whole princess in my work should shine.

What interests me about this poem are the features that Pope attributes to the painted
portrait, for they are not physical features, but details of expression and bearing that the
reader is meant to take as reflections of Montagu’s interiority. For example, the picture
shows “playful smiles around the dimpled mouth.” A smile and a dimple are tangible
enough, but a playful smile goes beyond simply recording what Montagu looks like.
This smile expresses a specific state of mind. Moreover, the fact that the smiles are
“around” her mouth, rather than on it, suggests a degree of movement that a painting can
only hint at. The most obvious reading is that Montagu is smiling in a way that suggests
that she is playful, and that the dimples created by that smile, themselves shaped like
smiles, are literally around (i.e. framing) her mouth, but such a reading is destabilized by
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the language, which is itself playful, for Pope pointedly does not say “the dimples around
the smiling mouth,” but rather “the […] smiles around the dimpled mouth,” rendering a
straightforward reading dependent on a reader’s interpolation. A second possible
reading, made available by that ambiguity, is that the smiles themselves are personified
as playful – that they are playing around her mouth, coming and going, or shifting. The
“happy air of majesty and truth” that Pope attributes to the painting is still more abstract
– a kind of impression of Montagu’s bearing that hints at her moral stature. It would be
all too easy to read the text as juxtaposing the portrait’s painted representation of
Montagu’s body with the poem’s own, verbal representation of her mind (for this is what
the line “the equal lustre of the heav’nly mind” suggests). In actuality, the opening
couplet of “Extemporaneous Lines” credits Kneller’s painted portrait with capturing
expressions that implicitly reveal the very virtues that Pope wishes to “draw” more
explicitly in his verse. Although Pope’s brief poem is more clever in its juggling of these
motifs than most, the motifs themselves are typical of the genre: most eighteenth-century
portrait-ekphrases are meant to flatter, many express modest doubt about the poet’s own
abilities, and many praise the portrait for capturing the sitter’s moral, as well as physical,
beauties.

Eighteenth-century ekphrasis constitutes a fairly coherent, if small, body in and of itself;

it is only when it is compared to the ekphrastic traditions that preceded and followed it
that certain absences become conspicuous. The tradition of figuration in ekphrasis did
not continue unbroken until the Romantic period. Curiously, although eighteenth-
century literature is teeming with examples of personified abstractions, they aren’t
ekphrastic. Hagstrum comes closer than any other critic to identifying this surprising
trend when he designates poems that use such personifications as “iconic” poems. His
reasoning is that they draw on the conventions of allegorical painting, and therefore, he
claims, would have called up images in the minds of their readers (144) – highly stylized
images, but images nonetheless. What Hagstrum omits is that these supposed images are
not described as belonging to an actual picture. If personified abstractions were
considered the hallmark of allegorical painting, then it is difficult to account for the
almost total absence of ekphrastic representations of such abstractions, especially in an
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age that used personification with such enthusiasm.34 One notable exception to this
absence is Andrew Tooke’s 1698 translation of the French school book The Pantheon:
Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods and Most Illustrious Heroes,
which, according to ECCO, was reprinted many times throughout the eighteenth century.
In this educational text, the youthful Palaeophilus responds to the Pantheon’s murals both
before and after they have been explained to him, and his responses help to guide those
of young readers. The explanations themselves often unpack the supposed allegorical
meaning of the myths depicted or the iconographic meaning of the gods’ painted
attributes, treating the murals as having a largely figurative significance. Given the
work’s dismissive attitude to the allegories it explains, however, it should perhaps be no
surprise that the text remained popular long after allegorical ekphrasis had fallen out of
fashion.

The other conspicuous absence in eighteenth-century ekphrasis is sensibility. Given how

many Romantic ekphrases mine the visual arts for ways of grappling with questions of
how sympathy works, when it fails, and what role it plays in regulating the emotions, a
reader looking back on the urbane occasional ekphrases of the eighteenth century might
be surprised to see so few that engage with such questions. The century that produced
the works of brooding introspection that are usually identified as poetry of sensibility –
Night Thoughts, “The Deserted Village,” “Elegy Written in a Country Churhyard,” “The
Castaway” – produced fairly few ekphrases in that vein, even by the standards of a
century that produced fairly few ekphrases at all. An early exception is Thomas Tickell’s
“Thoughts Occasioned by the sight of an Original Picture of King Charles I: Taken at the
time of his Trial.” The speaker of this poem accuses the painter of being hard-hearted

34
Nicholas Halmi’s work on the emergence of a specifically Romantic idea of the symbol offers a useful
perspective on why allegorical ekphrasis vanished during the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century
literary criticism, Halmi points out, took a stern stance with allegory, defining it, not as a rhetorical figure,
but rather as a genre of “narrative that refers to meaning outside itself,” and insisting that the narrative
ought to be “strictly and transparently separate from the meaning it presents to the intellect”: in other
words, allegory must be obvious and therefore dull. As a result, Halmi explains, allegory was used almost
exclusively in “didactic and satirical literature” (9). This does not, however, fully account for why
personified abstractions and other forms of figurative signifiers did not make their way into at least some
eighteenth-century poetry about art.
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because he painted competently instead of breaking down before so moving a sight.

Tickell died in 1740; insofar as this is a poem that engages with the culture of sensibility,
it is thus a very early instance. Another exception, from later in the century, is Edward
Young’s “On Michael Angelo’s Famous Piece of the Crucifixtion, Who is Said to Have
Stabbed a Person that he Might Draw it More Naturally.” This short poem, published in
Anderson with a footnote acknowledging that “the report [about Michelangelo murdering
his model] was propagated without the least truth,” goes into gothic detail not only about
the model’s suffering but also about Michelangelo’s methodical study of it.
Whilst his Redeemer on his canvas dies,
Stabb’d at his feet his brother weltering lies:
The daring artist cruelly serene,
Views the pale cheek and the distorted mien;
He drains off life by drops, and deaf to cries,
Examines every spirit as it flies:
He studies torment, dives in mortal woe,
To rouse up every pang repeats his blow;
Each rising agony, each dreadful grace,
Yet warm transplanting to his Saviour’s face.
Oh glorious theft! oh nobly wicked draught!
With its full charge of death each feature fraught:
Such wondrous force the magic colours boast,
From his own skill he starts in horror lost.
Young’s poem, even while it revels in its own sensationalism, is hostile to the project of
understanding the passions too well, or representing them too accurately; it is interested,
instead, in the cost of too perfect an understanding or too true a representation of human
suffering. Even this poem, however, seems more deeply engaged with the questions of
sensibility than the majority of eighteenth-century ekphrases. Thus, the fact that a
substantial number of poets did choose to write about art in order to think about feelings
in the early nineteenth century marks something of a departure from contemporary
practice, if not from the longer tradition of ekphrastic poems. Eighteenth-century poets
 66

may have written copious texts exploring ideas about feeling, but they rarely did so when
writing about art.

The importance for early nineteenth-century writers of that contemporary practice – of

the eighteenth-century portion of the ever-shifting ekphrastic tradition – should not be
overlooked. Poets continued to write short, lyric ekphrases, often about real works of art.
The occasional pieces that dominated eighteenth-century ekphrastic writing did not
vanish from the world of letters in the Romantic period. Even the portrait of Mr. Darcy
in Pride and Prejudice functions much the way Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s portrait
does in Pope’s “Extemporaneous Lines,” revealing Darcy’s true, likeable character by
means of a smile. On the other hand, as any reader of Keats and Wordsworth knows,
allegory and other complex forms of figuration re-emerged. And, as the later chapters of
this thesis shall argue, ideas from aesthetic philosophy, such as the idea that art can stop
time or preserve the transitory, found their way into poetry. In Romantic poetry, then,
the tradition of earlier ekphrastic writing is only one of several pre-existing and emerging
discourses that poets drew on in poems about the visual arts. This thesis as a whole aims
to trace, not every discourse that fed into Romantic ekphrasis, but all of the discourses
that played a significant role in making ekphrastic poetry a fertile ground for testing out
ideas in the ongoing culture of sensibility. It is the goal of this thesis to unpack some of
the ways in which Romantic poems mined the discourses surrounding the visual arts for
potential insights into the workings of sympathy. The remainder of the present chapter
will begin that process by examining how one poet, William Cowper, mined the specific
tradition of eighteenth-century portrait ekphrasis for insights into the workings of grief.

2.3 Cowper’s Reworking of Eighteenth-Century

Conventions
The two ekphrases by Cowper to be examined here look very different in the light of
their predecessors than they do without that context. In some respects, both are fairly
conventional ekphrases. Both construct some kind of artistic production – Apelles’ act
of painting or a poetic speaker’s act of versifying – as a response to a particular occasion,
and as a duty or tribute to a particular person. More importantly for the purposes of this
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exploration, both poems draw extensively on the conventions of portrait poems as

modelled by Pope and others – conventions that they subtly undercut. In particular, both
poems resist the tradition of praising a portrait for capturing the spirit of its subject. “On
the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” and “The Tears of a Painter” are both
fundamentally about grief, and about portraiture’s ultimate inability to replace a lost
loved one. Cowper draws on the conventions of eighteenth-century ekphrasis in order to
critique them, and that critique is part of his exploration of what appropriate or
inappropriate mourning looks like – for inappropriate mourning, in these poems, turns
out to look a lot like a traditional portrait-ekphrasis. In both poems, the conventional
trope that a portrait might capture the mind, heart, or soul of a lost loved one is tacitly
revealed to be a pernicious one, associated with an unwholesome, even sinful, refusal to
grapple with loss.

Because both these poems are about grieving, as well as art, it is necessary to situate
them in a second tradition: the tradition of other poems about grieving, which was much
more robust in England than the ekphrastic tradition. While it makes sense in hindsight
to call this “the elegiac tradition,” doing so is as much a retrospective imposition of
current terms as is calling poems about art “the ekphrastic tradition” – a necessary
shorthand for talking about poems with shared subject matter and influence, rather than
an established genre that the poems’ authors would have recognized. Where the term
“ekphrasis” simply was not in use the eighteenth century, however, the term “elegy” was,
and the evolution of its meaning over time makes talking about the elegiac tradition
tricky. Not all of the poems that comprise it were labelled elegies at the time, nor were
all the texts published as elegies poems about death and mourning. No history of English
poems about death and grieving is complete without “Lycidas,” for example, but Milton
published “Lycidas” as a monody. Problematically, neither term – elegy or monody –
referred exclusively to poems about death and grief. Stuart Curran, in “Romantic Elegiac
Hybridity,” uses the definitions provided by eighteenth-century lexicographers as a way
of pinpointing the difficulties of relying on eighteenth-century labels. He points out that
“Johnson’s dictionary, giving three definitions, seems to have established the range of
expectations for the elegy […] ‘1. A mournful song. 2. A funereal song. 3. A short poem
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without points or affected elegancies’ (1777)” (238). Curran adds that, “in the second
half of the eighteenth century” the term elegy could just as easily refer to any poem
composed in “the verse form known as the elegiac stanza” (238). As for monody, Curran
observes that its definition “is even looser. Johnson derives it strictly from its Greek
roots: ‘A poem sung by one person not in dialogue’”; and only one eighteenth-century
lexicographer “limits its application to […] ‘A funeral ditty sung by one.’” (238)

In spite of this ambiguity surrounding the terms, however, there is a recognizable lineage
of poems about mourning in English verse that is pertinent to a complete understanding
of “The Tears of a Painter” and especially of “On the Receipt,” which marries the
conventions of elegy with those of ekphrasis; that lineage emerges most clearly in the
juxtaposition of several subsets of the elegiac tradition. Lorna Clymer discusses the late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century funeral elegy specifically, as distinct from
other subgenres such as the pastoral elegy, the epitaph, the monody, or other poems
written in an elegiac mode. The funeral elegy in this period was very much connected to
actual funerals: elegies were “pinned to the hearse or tomb,” or “read over the coffin
during the burial ceremony” (175), and typically took the posture of “explor[ing] the
meaning of death urgently, as if near an open grave, and relatively briefly, as if the
devastating focus could not be sustained indefinitely” (171). Crucially for an
understanding of “On the Receipt,” however, even these short poems had a specific
convention of moving through several phases or types of utterance: a “traditional
movement through” or “customary three-part narrative of lament, praise, and
consolation” (172, 183). Moreover, that convention of a three-stage speech beginning
with lament and ending with consolation, influenced eighteenth-century verse that does
not otherwise fit Clymer’s rubric for funeral elegies. Her discussion culminates with a
reading of Edward Young’s immensely popular Night Thoughts, which is by no means
brief, does not adopt an attitude of speaking over an open grave, and indeed is not an
immediate and occasional response to a single death. And yet, Clymer argues, it follows
the pattern established by funeral elegies, moving through a sequence of lament, praise,
and consolation. As a precedent for “On the Receipt,” Night Thoughts is especially
important in that, as Clymer argues, “[i]ndividual book titles suggest how the poem’s
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slow progress – from grief and praise to brief and finally lasting consolation – is not
without suspense, even real dramatic tension,” and the whole poem “unfolds
incrementally, as if what is represented corresponds in some realistic way to what is
being experienced by the narrator himself, moment by moment” (181). The formulaic
conventions of public funeral elegies, in this vast poem, seem to be deployed in the
service of enacting a realistic mental or psychological process.

The enactment of a psychological process with varying degrees of realism or apparent

sincerity is a recurring theme in studies of the elegiac tradition. David Shaw, in Elegy
and Paradox, stops short of adopting Peter Sacks’s psychological framework for
thinking about elegy, in which the unfolding of the elegy both represents and is the
“work of mourning” – the coming to terms with loss. Shaw points out that some
influential elegies, most notably “Lycidas,” are famously feeble enactments of true
mourning. For the purposes of talking about what he calls confessional elegy, however,
Shaw proposes a model that strongly resembles Sacks’s, in spite of its fundamentally
different theoretical grounding. In Shaw’s model of confessional elegy, the poem
retrospectively re-enacts the process of achieving a transcendent insight that has allowed
the mourner to become an elegist to begin with. The fact of the poem being a poem
implies that the mourner has already reached this point before beginning, but the poem
nonetheless traces the steps of getting there (50-51). Shaw, of course, designates
“Lycidas” a classical, rather than a confessional, elegy, and yet what “Lycidas” has in
common with both Shaw’s confessional model and Sacks’s psychoanalytic “work of
mourning” model is an element of stage-by-stage re-enactment. The speaker starts by
stating who is dead and expressing grief, and ends by expressing consolation; somewhere
in between, the speaker tries out a series of other attitudes. And if “Lycidas,” which
Shaw highlights as far less profoundly concerned with the inner mental workings of the
mourning process than the elegies he designates as “confessional,” nonetheless includes
such a substantial portion of this kind of processive enactment, then we can hardly
underestimate how fundamental such enactment is to poems of mourning as an evolving
genre in the English tradition.
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Cowper’s two ekphrases under discussion here, then, are not unusual in setting out a
representation of grieving that moves in stages. “On the Receipt” is the more
conventional of the two, since it is uttered in the first person, and since it concludes with
a gesture of acceptance that acknowledges the theological truths Cowper held dear: its
final attitude is the desirable one according to the poem’s own terms – the attitude that
Cowper, as poet, sanctions. “The Tears of a Painter” is unusual by the standards of
poems about mourning in that it is told in the third person, and in that, as I shall argue,
Apelles’ concluding attitude is not the desirable one – not an attitude to the lost beloved
that a profoundly religious and profoundly reasonable poet like Cowper could possibly
sanction. But the very oddity of “The Tears of a Painter” by the standards of poems
about grieving can point us toward something important. In spite of its third-person
narration and unconventional ending, the poem nonetheless, like most elegies, and like
“On the Receipt,” presents or re-enacts stages of mourning. They also both explore such
stages intellectually – again, like many elegies – asking questions and positing answers
about what is or is not a desirable, a reasonable, a sustainable reaction to loss, and about
which passions and feelings are the right ones. In these two poems, however, it is the
opportunities created by the genre of portrait-ekphrasis that facilitate the intellectual
testing. In the case of “On the Receipt,” because it is a more conventional elegy, this
element of the intellectual testing of various processes of grieving might be easily
overlooked, but becomes more apparent when it is paired with “Tears.”

The ekphrastic tradition of praising a portrait for capturing its subject’s spirit is
transformed, in “On the Receipt,” into a symptom of psychic distress on the part of the
speaker. Of course the poem is also an elegy, and the step-by-step reconstruction of an
emotional process is conventional in elegies. Nevertheless, the fact that this elegy is also
a response to a portrait allows Cowper to explore not only the shifting attitudes the
speaker adopts, but also the emotional and ethical viability of those attitudes, all of which
are eventually displaced in favour of the religious consolation that typically concludes an
elegy. Religious consolation, in “On the Receipt,” is more than just the expected
resolution of an elegiac poem, however, and more than a hard-earned truth that the
speaker struggles to attain; it stands in contrast to the attitudes conventional in portrait-
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ekphrases. The resolve with which the speaker eventually claims religious consolation
solidifies interpretive possibilities that are only hinted at earlier in the poem: that the
speaker’s initial reactions to the portrait, while perhaps necessary as preliminary steps
toward spiritual truth, are in and of themselves problematic.

To return to the test case of “The Tears of a Painter,” situating it in the context of
eighteenth-century ekphrasis enables us to see both the ways in which it is conventional
for its time and the ways in which it turns convention on its head. Translations of Latin
ekphrases and narrative ekphrases derived from Classical source material were both
relatively common throughout the eighteenth century; “The Tears of a Painter” is both of
those, and, in addition, it is a translation of a poem that is itself an eighteenth-century
ekphrasis. The poem itself is not an occasional piece, as so many ekphrases of its era
were, but it does construct Apelles’ creative act as occasional: commemorating his son
and marking the occasion of the boy’s death. But the changes that Cowper makes to the
Latin original in the process of translating it reveal something about the nature of his
exploration of grief in the poem. Although the alterations are subtle, Cowper’s version is
more focused in its exploration of grief as a process that unfolds, rather than as a static
state: Cowper examines the toll that grief takes. Moreover, Cowper’s version is more
thoroughly embedded in eighteenth-century conventions for poems about art than is
Bourne’s.

These two changes are not coincidental, for Cowper’s re-working of eighteenth-century
ekphrastic conventions, especially the conventions of portrait-ekphrasis, helps him
sharpen the poem’s focus on the cost of Apelles’ grief. Cowper’s most significant
changes to Bourne’s original reveal that his use of ekphrastic conventions is part of a
systematic exploration of a specific, unwholesome emotional process. The trajectory of
Apelles’ increasing emotional investment in the painting’s resemblance to his child
culminates in his rapturous gazing – an invention of Cowper’s, not present in Bourne’s
original. But the trajectory by which Apelles gets to that rapture is one deeply bound up
in the tradition of portrait-ekphrasis. Half-way through the poem, the speaker’s
description of Apelles’ activity shifts, the two descriptions mirroring the two
conventional praises bestowed upon portraits in ephemeral occasional poems. Initially,
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Apelles paints to achieve literal verisimilitude; after the turning point, he paints to
capture the spirit of his dead child. “The Tears of a Painter,” however, does not construct
Apelles’ success at the latter as something to be unqualifiedly praised, suggesting instead
that his attempt to capture his son’s expression is part of his process of succumbing to the
psychological corrosion of intense grief. When Apelles strives for physical
verisimilitude, the poem’s language carefully separates his act of painting from his
expressions of affectionate grief. When he strives to capture his son’s spirit, that
separation evaporates. Given this trajectory, and given that Apelles’ ecstatic gazing at
his own painting is entirely Cowper’s addition, I would argue that the speaker’s final
apostrophe to Apelles is more invested in a firm distinction between reality and illusion
than my initial reading, without the context of eighteenth-century ekphrastic conventions
or of Bourne’s original poem, would have suggested.

Even the fine details of the poem’s re-working of the conventions of portrait ekphrasis
are specific to Cowper’s transfigured rendition of Bourne’s original. Apelles’ address to
his son, asking him to “accept” the painting, is present in both versions, but the word
“tribute” is specific to Cowper’s (see Figure 1); in Bourne’s version, although Apelles’
request that his son “accept” his “lamentations” does indeed suggest that the lamentations
are a kind of gift, a different choice of word in the translation would have downplayed
the associations that the word “tribute” had for eighteenth-century readers: it was
frequently used as a way of describing elegies, but it was also used to describe
compliments.35 The addition of that word, so familiar from polite exchanges in the

35
Arguably the most famous use of the word “tribute” in eighteenth-century poetry is Gray’s “frail
memorial” that “[i]mplores the passing tribute of a sigh” on behalf of the rural dead. But the futility of that
tribute, paid by strangers to the unlistening dead, is part of the pathos of Gray’s “Elegy.” The purpose of a
verbal tribute is generally that it does not go unheard: that it is public, even when the addressee is
deceased. Eighteenth-Century Collection Online contains twenty-one entries under “Literature and
Language” with the term “tribute” in the title. As with any search of ECCO, this number is probably
misleadingly small, given ECCO’s notoriously limited text-recognition software, but the texts it produces
are nonetheless a useful random sample. Some of these entries are for specifically elegiac tributes, such as
two editions of An Elegiac Tribute to the Memory of the Rev. John Fletcher, Late Vicar of Madeley,
Shropshire (1785 and 1785), or The Druid's Monument, a Tribute to the Memory of Dr. Oliver Goldsmith
(1774). Some of the entries are for poetic “tributes” to the living, such as two editions of Original Poems.
By a Lady, Dedicated to Miss Ann Henderson. A Tribute to Gratitude and Friendship (1785 and 1786). In
either case, the word is used figuratively to imply the humility of the person offering praise, gratitude, or
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sphere of print culture, tacitly brings the painting into line with such exchanges,
constructing Apelles’ creation of the portrait as a marriage of the convention of writing
portrait-ekphrases as a means of paying elegant compliments with the convention of
writing verses as a means of honouring the dead. And if the bare word “tribute” is
insufficient to suggest this connection, it is cemented by Apelles’ parenthetical aside that
“‘[t]is all that [he] can now bestow.” This self-deprecating acknowledgement of the
inadequacy or futility of the gesture is another addition of Cowper’s not present in
Bourne, and it brings the creation of the painting still further into line with the
conventions of literary compliments, including portrait-ekphrases such as Pope’s
“Extemporaneous Lines,” in which the speaker modestly expresses doubt about his
ability to fulfill the task of flattery he has set for himself.

The two bursts of activity on Apelles’ part that I noted in my initial reading of the poem
take on new meaning if we juxtapose “The Tears of a Painter” with a typical portrait-
poem like “Extemporaneous Lines.” It is conventional in such poems to establish a
distinction between the portrait sitter’s body and her or his mind or soul, and it is equally
conventional to then insist that the portrait in fact represents both, impossibly capturing
mental or spiritual qualities in the physical medium of paint. (Pope, of course, suggests
this with some subtlety, rather than stating it, and he draws attention to the impossibility
of what he suggests by declaring that the “playful smiles” are “around,” rather than on,
Lady Mary’s mouth – a fluidity that could not really be represented in paint.) “The Tears
of a Painter” plays fast and loose with that tradition,

sorrow, relative to the person receiving it, and in either case that usage is part of eighteenth-century
literature’s set of conventions for polite discourse addressed to specific recipient.
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Figure 3: “The Tears of a Painter” (emphasis added to highlight Cowper’s most

substantial changes) and a modern translation of “Lachrymæ Pictoris (re-lineated
for ease of comparison). Translation by Paul Franz. For the Latin original and the
translation in its original formatting, see Figure 2.
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establishing the binary of body and soul in its descriptions of Apelles’ painting, not for
the purpose of revealing anything about the deceased subject of the painting, but rather
for the purpose of showing the reader two distinct phases in Apelles’ process of grieving
– a process that culminates, not in healing or acceptance, but rather in psychic damage.

Apelles first paints physical features, and his act of painting them is initially kept
carefully separate from his expressions of sorrow and affection for his son. His initial
burst of activity is described in terms of verisimilitude, and Cowper’s version goes out of
its way to downplay the emotional significance of that fidelity to physical appearance.
Although the first description of the picture is surrounded on all sides by affective
language, such as the “anguish” that Apelles feels at the sight of his son’s “dear
remains,” the language actually used to describe the portrait is emotionally neutral.
Cowper specifies, as Bourne does not, the “twofold part” (“either duty” in the Latin) that
Apelles is faithful to – “his feelings and his art” – but, in Cowper’s version, Apelles’
feelings and art at first seem to be separate. Cowper adds that Apelles exhibits “tender
care” in closing his real son’s eyes, but he adds no such modifier to his act of painting a
“fellow pair” of eyes: closing the child’s eyes is his fidelity to his feelings of tenderness
and care, and painting a “fellow pair” is his fidelity to his art. In enumerating the other
physical features that Apelles paints, Cowper changes “not yet pale / Lips” to “lips […]
not livid yet.” This switch is surely a studied one, for it is metrically unnecessary –
Cowper could as easily have said “not pallid yet” – and it has several subtle implications.
On the one hand, whereas “not yet pale” suggests that the child is so recently deceased as
not yet to look unambiguously dead, Cowper’s “not livid yet” connotes the much more
modest implication that the child’s body has not yet started to decompose. More
crucially, the expression “pale lips” has associations with the language of sorrow and
melancholy that the phrase “livid lips” does not, and Cowper’s replacement of the word
has the effect of removing a key piece of emotional language from the first description of
what Apelles paints. Furthermore, Cowper removes a still more prominent layer of
emotional language from his description of Apelles’ first phase of painting when he calls
the picture the “just image of his son,” rather than calling it, as Bourne does, “his sad
work” (“lugubre […] opus”). The first verse paragraph contains, of course, a great deal
 76

of emotionally charged language, but Cowper very pointedly does not apply any of it to
Apelles’ actual act of painting.

Figure 4: Lachrymae Pictoris - Vincent Bourne. Translation by Paul Franz.

Cowper’s careful separation of Apelles’ feelings of “anguish” and “tender care” for the
real boy and his mimetic accuracy in making the painting extends only as far as the mid-
point of the poem, and heightens the contrast of Apelles’ second phase of work, in which
that separation vanishes, and Cowper begins to use affectively charged language to
describe the picture and act of creation. In the second verse-paragraph, Cowper
replicates all of the affective language associated with the painting in the Latin: he
translates Bourne’s “sad work” (this time “opus triste”) as “melancholy task.” More
tellingly still, Cowper renders “loveliness yet suffused the cheeks with redness” as “still
his [i.e. the dead child’s] cheek unfaded shows / The deepest damask of the rose.” The
phrase not only calls to mind the standard eighteenth-century conventions for describing
blushes, but also removes grammatical agency from Bourne’s “loveliness” in order to
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give it to the dead child’s “cheek,” thus heightening the faint suggestion that the boy’s
rosy cheeks are an affective display rather than a mere biological fact. In this couplet,
the poem’s language begins to suggest to the reader exactly the kind of impossible show
of affect on the part of the dead child that Apelles himself perceives when he “spies” the
boy’s smile. Cowper’s second verse-paragraph, in other words, makes the same move
that any clever eighteenth-century portrait ekphrasis would. It describes Apelles’
creation of a portrait that transcends the representation of mere features and captures
facial expressions, and it implies, very subtly, that those pictured facial expressions
convey something about the mental or spiritual state of the portrait’s subject, in spite of
the evident impossibility of their doing so.

The purpose of Cowper’s deployment of the conventions of portrait ekphrasis becomes

evident in his two most substantial changes to Bourne’s original poem, which, taken
together, transform the poem into an exploration of emotional process. In Cowper’s
version, the poetic speaker instructs Apelles to “view again / The cause of [his] paternal
pain” – i.e. to look again at his son’s body; in Bourne’s poem, the speaker instructs
Apelles only to “continue […] pouring forth [his] lamentations.” Cowper’s added
emphasis on Apelles’ gaze highlights the shift in what Apelles is doing. In the first half
of the poem, he was painting physical features; in the second half, he is painting
expressions. He now “spies” the smile on his son because he is, as the speaker suggests,
viewing his son’s body again – seeing it anew. This is not a continuation of the same
expression of lament, but rather a revisiting with a difference. Cowper’s still more
dramatic change is to omit entirely the lines in which Apelles “transfer[s]” what he sees
onto his panel, as he continues the process of mimetic representation he began in the
poem’s first section. Cowper replaces these two lines with a four-line account of
Apelles’ reaction to his own finished artwork:
Then, heedful to the finished whole,
With fondest eagerness he stole,
Till scarce himself distinctly knew
The cherub copied from the true.
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These lines add an entirely new element to the poem. The language here suggests, as
nothing else in the poem has, the depth of Apelles’ grief: his “fondest eagerness” is fond
both in the sense of affectionate and in the older sense of irrational; his perception is not
“distinct[…]”; he may be “heedful,” but he is also stealing – sneaking, tiptoeing – up to
the painting that he himself has made, as though tacitly aware that his actions are not
quite right. In adding the account of Apelles’ enraptured gazing, Cowper transforms the
accounts of the painter’s two phases of work that precede it. Initially able to be equally
“faithful” to his “feelings” and his “art” by keeping them separate, Apelles then revisits
his work to add an emotional component to its physical verisimilitude, subjectively
attributing an affect of contentment to his son’s body that may or may not really be
present; he then moves into a third phase – one that does not produce any new “last
touches” to the painting – in which his awareness of reality appears to waver. The three
phases appear to be part of a progression, as Apelles attributes more of his son’s real self
to the painting in each successive part of the poem. What initially looks like a suitable
“tribute” to the dead child – a piece of portraiture marking an occasion and following the
conventions of a polite portrait-poem – becomes in retrospect the first phase of Apelles’
increasing disorientation under the influence of intense grief. Indeed, the poem’s
emphasis on Apelles’ subjective process of reading meaning into his painting hearkens
back to older ekphrases like the one in “The Rape of Lucrece,” which, as Heffernan
observes, also traces a viewer’s frantic, not entirely rational response to an artwork in a
moment of unimaginable emotional strain as Lucrece identifies her own experience first
with one depicted figure and then with another, constructing not an allegory but rather a
disordered heap of emblems in which every element of the artwork signifies the same
thing.

In the light of Cowper’s addition of Apelles’ rapturous gazing, the speaker’s two
concluding couplets of apostrophe to Apelles appear much more decidedly preoccupied
with re-asserting the boundary between reality and illusion than they may seem at first
glance. Immediately after the four lines Cowper adds, when the speaker exclaims
“[n]ow, painter, cease! Thy task is done,” it is not instantly clear, as it is in Bourne’s
original, that Apelles is to “cease from signifying [his] pain by painting.” In Cowper’s
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version, the speaker could as easily be asking Apelles to cease from gazing in delusional
rapture – to recognize that his “task” of painting is complete and that succumbing to
illusion is not his task. The pointed understatement of the concluding couplet, which I
highlighted in my initial reading of the poem, takes on a new sharpness if read in this
light. The speaker appears to be offering consolation when he says
Long lives this image of thy son;
Nor short-lived shall the glory prove,
Or of thy labour or thy love.
The “glory” of Apelles’ love, though characterized here as merely not “short-lived,” had
by Cowper’s day outlived the fabled painting by two millennia. One might, as I have
earlier suggested, interpret this as granting a greater value to Apelles’ act of affectionate
tribute than to the painting itself, and thus take the speaker’s apostrophe as offering
Apelles a viable form of consolation. But the discreet double-negative that draws
attention to the longevity of Apelles’ glory relative to that of the painting also, by
extension, draws attention to the still lesser longevity of the boy: if the glory of Apelles’
love will outlive the painting, the painting will in turn outlive the still-rosy cheeks and
not-yet-livid lips of the child’s body, which have in turn outlived the personality that
once animated them. However long-lived Apelles’ glory may be destined to be, his son
is dead, and the speaker’s concluding apostrophe to Apelles seems intent on reminding
the reader of that fact – reminding us, in short, that the illusion Apelles succumbs to in
the added lines is only an illusion.

Arthur C. Benson, commenting in 1895 on Cowper’s “The Jackdaw,” adapted from

Bourne’s Latin “Cornicula,” observed that “Cowper's [version] is in no sense a
translation. It is a poem of which the line of thought is suggested by Bourne, and at a
few points touches the Latin poem; but the turn, the colouring is Cowper's own” (426).
“The Tears of a Painter” could be characterized in almost the opposite way. Much of it is
a faithful translation of “Lachrymæ Pictoris” – as faithful as a rendering into tetrameter
couplets of a poem written in Latin can be – and the turn and colouring are thus
frequently Bourne’s. But its “line of thought” is quite different; what look like small
added touches are in fact significant additions that alter the poem’s intellectual arc.
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Cowper’s version is much more deeply embedded in the tradition of poems about
portraits that flourished throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, it is preoccupied,
not only with conveying Apelles’ grief, but with tracing the toll that grief takes on
Apelles, in a way that the Latin poem is not. Moreover, those two differences are closely
related, for the poem’s reworking of the conventions of portrait ekphrasis is an integral
part of how it lays bare to the reader the psychic cost of Apelles’ “tribute” to his lost
child.

By eighteenth-century standards, William Cowper wrote a robust body of ekphrases, of

which “The Tears of a Painter” is one of the more extended and interesting. Among the
others is an epistle “To Sir Joshua Reynolds” requesting that he paint “French
disappointment, British glory”; this poem fits comfortably both within the conventions of
eighteenth-century occasional poems about pictures (in this case the occasion is a
military victory), and within the much older genre of the advice-to-a-painter poem.
Cowper also wrote a very short poem meant to be sent with a portrait of himself to a
friend – still more typical of eighteenth-century ekphrases in that it is not only about a
portrait but also thoroughly embedded in social exchange. He also translated several
other poems about paintings, including one about a picture of a sleeping child, and
another, a short comic poem, about an incompetently done portrait, and at least one other
by Bourne: a poem about a portrait by Denner. But the most extended – and also the
most widely read – of Cowper’s ekphrases is “On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture out
of Norfolk: the Gift of my Cousin, Ann Bodham,” composed in 1790 and published in
1798.

“On the Receipt” is a meditative poem, of a hundred and twenty-one lines, of fond
reminiscence about Cowper’s mother, affectionate grief at her loss, and pious reflection
on futurity. “The Tears of a Painter,” as we have seen, is a complex exploration of how
artistic creation can enable or facilitate grieving. In both poems, the works of art are
subjects for poems not because they are inherently interesting, but rather because they
express or elicit suitably sentimental feelings when produced or contemplated in a
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familial context. As I have earlier observed, poems about art in the eighteenth century
usually treated the art in question as a component of ongoing social exchange; they were
lighthearted occasional poems, and they took works of art, usually portraits of people
known to their authors, as an excuse to say something charming. Cowper’s ekphrases
are a curious inflection of that genre of ekphrasis: occasional poems that take the
portraits as an excuse to say something touching. Rather than setting out to make their
readers smile, these ekphrases set out to make their readers weep. “On the Receipt,” like
“The Tears of a Painter,” does more than blend the conventions of eighteenth-century
ekphrasis with those of the meditative, elegiac poetry that was popular in the late
eighteenth century and that Cowper himself was well known for. Like “The Tears of a
Painter,” the poem transfigures the conventions of portrait-ekphrasis, putting them to
work and interrogating them in the service of a nuanced reconstruction of the experience
of grief.

Like many eighteenth-century poems about works of art – especially commemorative

works of art – “On the Receipt” dwells at much more length on the person
commemorated than on the artwork per se: the speaker’s engagement with the picture
itself is concentrated in the first twenty lines of the hundred-and-twenty-one-line poem.
Like many eighteenth-century poems about portraits, it begins by busying itself with
exclamations over the portrait’s verisimilitude – a verisimilitude that captures the sitter’s
“intelligence” as well as her features. But unlike a typical eighteenth-century ekphrasis,
“On the Receipt” combines these conventions in order to undercut them. The convention
of praising a portrait for capturing its subject’s spirit is transformed, in this poem, into a
symptom of psychic distress on the part of the speaker: an emotionally disruptive and
unsustainable wish for the impossible. The poem’s speaker bestows blessings on the “art
that can immortalize” his mother, but he does so as an early part of a process of having
his “filial grief” renewed by that very art, and of struggling anew to come to terms with
his grief. And while that stage-by-stage unfolding of a psychic process may be typical of
eighteenth-century elegies, “On the Receipt,” by bringing that elegiac convention into
uneasy co-existence with ekphrastic conventions, is able to do more. The fact that the
occasion for the elegy is the speaker’s reaction to a portrait allows Cowper to explore
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with considerable rigour the reasonableness and goodness of the speaker’s initial
attitudes, later dropped (as they are in most elegies) in favour of religious consolation.

Kevin Barry reads “On the Receipt” as a poem that pulls in two incompatible directions.
Making this point by drawing a distinction between its apparent meaning and its true
significance, he argues that its “meaning is the consolation of remembered joy. Its
significance is the repetition of remembered anxiety. Its meaning is a narrative of checks
and balances. Its significance is a pattern of further decomposition” (82). In the poem’s
present moment, Barry contends, the speaker seeks consolation by insisting on the
“identification of the picture with the mother, the replacement of her absence by its
presence. This narrative depends upon a convention of representation by which
difference is abruptly stated as identity” (82). In his accounts of his memories, the
speaker seeks consolation in his own past happiness. In both “narrative lines,” Barry
argues, the consolation to be found is partial at best. In spite of his insistence that his
childhood was happy, the memories the speaker recounts are almost entirely of loss,
separation, and sorrow; and the picture very pointedly is not his mother. I would argue,
however, that these insights can be refined considerably by putting the poem in the
context of earlier eighteenth-century ekphrases, and previous elegies. What look like
contradictions are in fact stages in a psychic process of regaining equilibrium in the face
of a stimulus that renews an old grief – a process that Cowper reconstructs in meticulous
detail. I would further suggest that what looks like a dependence on “a convention […]
by which difference [between the portrait and the real person] is abruptly stated as
identity” is actually a subtle critique of a convention in which a poem attributes both
material and spiritual truth-telling to a portrait.

Of course, Cowper uses the conventions not only of portrait ekphrasis but also of elegy
in “On the Receipt,” and he is not the first poet in the English tradition to take the
convention of elegiac poetry enacting an inner emotional process and use it to grapple
with ideas about the relationship between feeling and theology, even specifically in the
context of grief for a parent or child. Lisa J. Schnell discusses a similar phenomenon in
the elegies of several early modern women for their lost children. According to Schnell,
the untitled elegy that is by far Mary Carey’s most extended, written in 1657, starts out
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with the expected, culturally sanctioned consolation that God has taken back the child
that was always his, but from there it launches into a series of protests against that tidy
consolation. In Schnell’s formulation, religious consolation is the “prescriptive work of
mourning that Protestantism and patriarchy demanded” (495), and the poems of Carey
and others resist it. In “On the Receipt,” by contrast, although the speaker’s protests
against his own previously-achieved acceptance and his initial resistance even to
acknowledging the reality of his mother’s death are terribly moving, they also set up the
speaker’s eventual acceptance and consolation to be equally moving. Shaw observes that
“many Romantic and modern elegies codify, not the triumphal ritual decrees of
‘Lycidas,’ but the caesural breaks or dashes that keep testing the conventions of pastoral
and confessional elegies against a mourner’s grievous reticence” (243); I will here argue
that, in “On the Receipt,” such reticence, or perhaps resistance to consolation, is enacted,
but that it is not the chief way in which the poem means – that the text is completely and
unambivalently invested in the resolution that does away with the speaker’s hesitation.
Unlike the authors Schnell examines, Cowper was very much not a woman writing from
within a patriarchal culture that used theology as a tool of its dominance. He was,
however, a profoundly religious man tormented by fear of his own damnation, a fear
most famously expressed in the final stanza of “The Castaway,” in which the speaker
compares himself to another “destin’d wretch” whose analogously inevitable doom is of
the body only:
No voice divine the storm allay’d,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.
Such a fear of damnation – such a mistrust of one’s own spiritual instinct for good – is
palpable in the speaker’s attitude to his own shifting attitudes in “On the Receipt.” The
process of mourning that the poem enacts is one in which the speaker cannot rely on his
initial reactions to be good or viable, no matter how viscerally they are felt. Religious
consolation, in “On the Receipt,” is not a theological prescription that the poem resists,
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but rather a hard-won truth to which the speaker eventually lays claim. And that hard-
won truth retrospectively gives new meanings to the various movements or emotional
phases that precede it: on the one hand, they are justified as preliminary stages in the
speaker’s eventual arrival at consolation, but on the other hand they are more clearly
shown to be premised on falsehoods by their very contrast with the theological truth with
which the poem ends.

The speaker’s first reaction to the sight of his mother’s portrait is to equate the picture
with the person it represents, but that reaction is quickly, if subtly, undercut. In the
extended apostrophe to his mother with which he begins, the speaker bursts into ecstatic
exclamation. Within three lines he has begun to assert that the figure in the portrait is
one and the same as his real parent, and within five lines he has revised his initial
recognition that “those lips” do not have “language” to a claim that “[t]those lips” are
silent because “[v]oice […] fails,” implying that they do possess language or a voice that
has temporarily fallen silent:
OH that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
“Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!”
The speaker then repeats the assertion, saying that the “meek intelligence of those dear
eyes” now “shines on [him] still the same,” but in this second iteration the fervour has
drained out of his formerly ecstatic tone. The statement that his mother’s “intelligence”
shines out of the portrait is interrupted by a parenthetical clause longer than the statement
itself, invoking a conventional blessing on the art that has produced the likeness:
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The art that baffles time’s tyrannic claim
To quench it) here shines on me still the same.
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The parenthetical clause not only comes between the subject (“meek intelligence”) and
verb (“shines”), but also draws attention to all of the reasons why the speaker’s mother’s
intelligence does not shine on him still the same: time has a tyrannic claim to quench it;
it is mortal.

In a new verse-paragraph, the poem shifts into enacting a very different stage in the
speaker’s emotional process. The speaker begins a new apostrophe, in a more moderate
tone, explicitly drawing a distinction between the portrait and the person portrayed, and it
is this apostrophe that charts the course that most of the rest of the poem will follow.
The speaker addresses the portrait as a “[f]aithful remembrancer of one so dear,” calling
it a
[…]welcome guest, though unexpected here!
Who bidst me honour with an artless song,
Affectionate, a mother lost so long.
He then sets himself to the task the portrait has bid him do, saying
I will obey, not willingly alone,
But gladly, as the precept were her own.
In this second apostrophe, there are no assertions of the impossible beyond the most
commonplace personification: the portrait is a “guest” who “bids[…]” the speaker
honour his mother with a poem, but, crucially, he obeys “as [i.e. as if] the precept were
her own,” the “as” signalling his awareness that it is not, even as the analogy makes his
task a joyous one. He then distinguishes explicitly between the portrait’s ability to evoke
his memories of his mother and its ability actually to be her, acknowledging that the
identification of the painted figure with his real mother in which he indulged only a few
lines before is a “dream” or “reverie” created by “Fancy”:
[…] while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief,
Shall steep me in Elysian reverie,
A momentary dream that thou art she.
It is this second apostrophe that sets the terms of the remainder of the poem: it will
honour his mother, and it will allow his imagination briefly to console him with the
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illusion that she is present. These terms being set, overt discussion of the portrait
virtually vanishes from the text. After these opening twenty lines, the speaker delivers a
further hundred and one lines about his memories of and affection for his mother, during
which he mentions the portrait twice: once seven lines later when he exclaims over “that
maternal smile,” and once in the third-to-last line of the poem when he refers to the
picture as “this mimic show of thee.”

If the poem makes a show of the speaker acknowledging the reality that the picture is
only a picture, its details nonetheless register the pain of his doing so. He begins with an
expression of longing – “Oh, that those lips had language!” – that conveys both the
intensity of his reaction to the portrait and his immediate, instinctive knowledge that he
wants more from it than a picture can give. On the heels of that exclamation, the speaker
complains that “[l]ife has passed / With [him] but roughly since [he] heard [his mother]
last.” That complaint conveys a great deal of information. It provides further context for
the speaker’s intense grief for his mother – the mother whose loss evidently ushered in a
period of “but [i.e. exclusively] rough” experiences. It also reveals for the first time the
seeds of his initial conflation of the portrait with his real mother that occupies most of the
first verse paragraph: he addresses the portrait as “thee” and talks of how long it has been
since he “heard thee,” even while acknowledging that hearing is something he cannot
now do because “those lips” do not have language. The portrait may lack a voice, but he
still insists on addressing it as his mother in the context of talking about hearing her. In
the wake of such an exclamation and such a statement, the speaker’s assertion that the
picture’s lips truly are his mother’s lips takes on a note of defiance. Rather than
immediately acknowledge the futility of talking about having “heard thee last” to a
picture, the speaker asserts the impossible in ever more categorical terms for the
remainder of the first verse paragraph: “thine,” “thy own,” “the same,” “distinct.”

A similar emotional strain shows in line twenty-seven, a number of lines after the
speaker appears to have moved into a calmer phase of his progression toward
consolation. Having already acknowledged that it is only a “momentary dream” that the
picture is his mother, the speaker nonetheless takes the picture’s facial expression as an
answer to a question addressed to his real parent. And while the speaker’s posture of
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believing that the portrait’s expression is answering his query is clearly only a posture – a
very conventional way of playing with the limits of apostrophe – the poetic form
registers a hint of struggle, suggesting the speaker’s intense wish to believe the
impossible, and the force of his temptation to let himself believe it, simmering beneath
the polite surface of the poetic trope. The speaker asks
My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hovered thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun?
He begins to answer his own question with tentative conjectures, but quickly foregoes
the conjectures in favour of an assertion reminiscent of the first verse paragraph:
Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss:
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss—
Ah, that maternal smile! It answers—Yes.
The speaker’s sudden apparent certainty here is undercut by the deviations in poetic
form. Even as the portrait’s smile seems to bring tidy closure to the speaker’s rhetorical
question, the line is the third in a rhymed triplet – the only deviation from heroic couplets
in the poem. And while the speaker’s apparent supposition that the portrait’s expression
can meaningfully answer a question directed at a departed soul looks like a conventional
extension of apostrophe into an imagined dialogue, the slant rhyme of “yes” with the
exact rhymes “kiss” and “bliss” suggests that the trope is discordant – that it has
transgressed the limits of benign conjecture.

It is no coincidence that the first memory the speaker recounts, after this outburst, is one
that allows him obliquely to name the process of painful desire for the impossible that he
has just enacted. The memory is of watching his mother’s hearse depart and of being
told by her “maidens” that she will return. Explaining why he believed these false
reassurances, the speaker says that
What ardently I wished I long believed,
And, disappointed still, was still deceived.
By expectation every day beguiled,
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Dupe of to-morrow even from a child.

The adult speaker, unlike his childhood self, has not “long believed” what he has
“ardently wished for,” but the ardency of his wishing – his temptation to let himself be
beguiled – is made clear precisely by the strain in the language with which he
acknowledges that it is not so, or indulges in poetic conventions that recreate the
“momentary dream” that it is so. The adult speaker may be the dupe of art only in fancy,
where his infantile self has been the “dupe of to-morrow” in earnest, but the linking of
that susceptibility to the sheer force of desire is a constant, and his statement that he has
been a dupe “even from a child” suggests strongly that, to some degree, he remains one.

Even in the crucial moment when the speaker first explicitly acknowledges the
distinction between the painted figure and his real mother, his equivocal language
registers some ambivalence at doing so. When he tells the portrait he “will obey, not
willingly alone, / But gladly, as the precept were her own,” the speaker’s apostrophe
exhibits what Barry calls a “syntactic oddity.” Barry observes that, “although the final
clause directs us to read that the speaker will obey not only willingly but also gladly, the
metrical expectations and the syntactic order prepare us for a quite different reading:
namely, that the speaker is alone not by his own choice but by hers [i.e. his mother’s]”
(85). Explicitly, the speaker declares that the picture has bid him honour his mother with
poetry and that he will obey the picture’s request as gladly as if it were his mother’s. But
the phrasing is ambiguous. As Barry suggests, it is not until after he has said “not
willingly alone” that the speaker adds “but gladly,” and in the intervening moment the
reader is apt to interpret “not willingly alone” as a complaint: I will obey,
notwithstanding that I am unwilling to be alone. I would push this insight further, and
suggest that the completion of the syntactic unit does not entirely resolve the ambiguity.
Is the speaker not only willing, but also glad to do the picture’s bidding, or is he
unwilling to be alone, but nonetheless glad to do the picture’s bidding? In the context of
the poem, the first of these is clearly the primary meaning, but Cowper’s choice of syntax
briefly opens up other, conflicting interpretive possibilities. Thus, even as the speaker
explicitly acknowledges the distinction between the portrait and his mother, even as he
backs away from the ecstatic but wilful mis-recognition with which the poem opens, and
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even as he shifts gears from futile longing to glad make-believe, his language is
equivocal enough to suggest pain and inward struggle.

By the time the poem concludes, the speaker has regained his hard-won acceptance of
loss, and, not by coincidence, his attitude to the picture has shifted considerably. He still
apostrophizes his mother, but he is now apostrophizing his real mother – her soul, not
truly lost to him, but absent because she is in heaven. He now distinguishes without
ambivalence or equivocation between his absent mother and the picture, which he refers
to as “this mimic show of thee.” Acknowledging the impossibility of really reliving his
childhood, the speaker expresses contentment with seeming to have done so. “Time
unrevoked,” he says,
…has run
His wonted course, yet what I wished is done
By contemplation’s help, not sought in vain,
I seem to have lived my childhood o’er again;
To have renewed the joys that once were mine,
Without the sin of violating thine:
And, while the wings of fancy still are free
And I can view this mimic show of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft—
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left.
The speaker’s terms have altered considerably since the first three verse paragraphs. A
hundred lines previously, he had forecast that “fancy” would “weave a charm for [his]
relief,” but he now pairs “the wings of fancy” with the much more staid term
“contemplation,” and he speaks not of charms and relief but rather of “renew[ing] the
joys that once were [his].” Where the picture had been first “thee” (his mother), and then
a “faithful remembrancer” of her and a “welcome guest,” it is now merely a “mimic
show”: a silent representation that evokes his mother without engendering any
expectation of illusion or verisimilitude. Thus, although the speaker explicitly gives “the
wings of fancy” a place in his consoled psyche, those wings are not quite as “free” as he
claims: their more extravagant flights have been displaced by the common-sense attitude
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of these concluding lines. As I have earlier suggested, it is standard in elegiac poetry for
a concluding attitude of consolation to displace the attitudes adopted by the speaker at
earlier points in the poem, but a crucial distinction here is that the initial attitudes being
displaced are not only, or even chiefly, lamentation, but rather a particular reaction to the
picture itself: an attitude of exuberant mis-recognition. Remembering is one thing, and
imagining is one thing, but ecstatically addressing a picture or misrecognizing a portrait
as containing or exuding the “intelligence” of a departed soul are a far cry from the
balanced renewing of past joys that the speaker calmly champions in these last lines.

The real meat of Cowper’s critique of conventional portrait-ekphrasis is to be found in

how the speaker achieves this shift: in the content of what lies between his still-conflicted
willingness to be reassured by the picture’s “maternal smile” and his calm reference to
the picture as “this mimic show.” At line 80, having elaborated on a series of memories
of his childhood, the speaker begins another rhetorical question, this time to be answered
without the help of the portrait:
Could those few pleasant hours again appear,
Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here?
I would not trust my heart—the dear delight
Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might.—
But no—what here we call our life is such
So little to be loved, and thou so much,
That I should ill requite thee to constrain
Thy unbound spirit into bonds again.
It is only here, in the words “unbound spirit,” that we get the real stakes of the poem’s
critique. The speaker cannot truly bring himself to wish his mother alive again because
he knows her to be better off where she is: according to Cowper’s unquestioningly
Christian worldview, in paradise. And if her physical body would be a prison, how much
more so would be the portrait, if the “intelligence” of her eyes could truly shine out of it.
The trope of praising a portrait for capturing its subject’s spirit – and I say capturing
advisedly – is absurd because it would be undesirable, even if it were possible, for spirits
to be captured or bound by things of the material world. The convention of blessing art
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for immortalizing a human spirit is still more absurd, since, in Cowper’s worldview,
human spirits are already immortal. This trope of capturing the spirit, in an urbane
occasional piece such as Pope’s “Extemporaneous Lines,” seems innocuous enough, but
Cowper’s poem suggests that it is not always innocuous – perhaps even that the language
of immortality and immortalization has no place in a purely secular, conventional
metaphor for praising art. The very intensity of the speaker’s desire in the early sections
of the poem for its literal fulfillment, a desire revealed in the subtleties of Cowper’s
manipulations of poetic form, necessitates the trope’s rejection in the poem’s conclusion.
In these concluding lines, the portrait’s significance becomes precisely that it does not
warrant the conventionally hyperbolic blessing the speaker had originally bestowed upon
it. The importance of the picture is that it merely appears to have captured the speaker’s
mother’s spirit, without actually having done so: its verisimilitude is an illusion of the
material senses, and for it to be otherwise would be a violation of the mother’s state of
eternal joy.

In the light of this turning point, the words “mimic show” at the poem’s end are a tacit
censure of the speaker’s own initial reaction to the portrait. A mimic show is, of course,
silent, and the poem thus in one sense ends where it began, with the observation that
“those lips” do not “ha[ve] language.” But where the first iteration of this observation is
phrased as a protest and followed by twenty lines that exude emotional turmoil, the
second is an acknowledgement of the advantages of the portrait’s silence: it is not real,
and the speaker can enjoy it without committing the “sin of violating” his mother’s
“joys.” But if the speaker’s revised attitude stands as a tacit reproach of the willful
protest against the reality of his loss in his first reaction to the portrait, his initial reaction
is not, for all its excesses, unusual. It is a version of the most conventional kind of poetic
statement about a portrait, slightly re-worked to suit the context of a speaker viewing a
portrait of a deceased loved one. The poem’s conclusion, then, is not only a critique of
the speaker’s own energetically defiant mis-recognition of the portrait as his mother; it is
also a critique of the conventions of portrait-poems: conventions that cannot, Cowper
implies, be transposed without consequences to a context in which the emotional stakes
are higher than urbane social exchange.
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If “The Tears of a Painter” is about the psychic cost of paying a tribute to a lost loved
one – about the toll taken by unresolved grief – “On the Receipt” is about the emotional
challenge of acceptance, a challenge that must be met anew now that the picture has
“renew[ed] [the speaker’s] filial grief.” Both poems use subtle twists of language to
reconstruct emotional processes, and both poems explore the ramifications of those
processes by turning the conventions of portrait ekphrasis inside out. In the case of “The
Tears of a Painter,” the process Cowper reconstructs is the painter Apelles’ trajectory of
slow breakdown under the pressure of intense grief, and that process takes shape in part
as a shift from one kind of conventional praise for Apelles’ work to another. In “On the
Receipt,” the very conventions of portrait ekphrasis become an early stage in an elegiac
process that culminates in their rejection. In both cases, Cowper scrutinizes the specific
convention of praising a portrait for capturing its subject’s spirit or expression, and he
does so in order to pose questions about what kinds of grief and protest at the loss of a
loved one are viable.

Cowper’s poems about art offer an opportunity to examine the ways in which the poetic
conventions of ekphrasis could be put to use, but they are also a useful starting point for
some of the ideas discussed in the other chapters of this thesis. In part this is because
Cowper’s writing was influential. In Chapter 5, for instance, I will examine the
discourse of spectatorship in Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle”; much of how “Peele Castle”
grapples with that discourse is by shifting its addressee between a figure in a painting and
a real person (although, crucially, the real person is not the deceased brother whom the
poem laments). This fundamental similarity to “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture”
is very unlikely to be a coincidental product of their shared culture, however. It is much
more likely the result of Wordsworth’s reading of, and admiration for, Cowper. But, in
other ways, Cowper seems to work with the same set of culturally available tools of
thought as the other poets whose work I examine. In Cowper’s poems one sees an
insistent focus on the fantasy that visual art can preserve – even immortalize – things that
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would otherwise be fleeting.36 For instance, Cowper’s epistle “To Sir Joshua Reynolds”
opens by addressing Reynolds as the “Dear President, whose art sublime / Gives
perpetuity to Time.” But, while Heffernan refers to the notion that visual art can stop
time as the “ideology of transcendence,” it is nonetheless important to recognize that
even the Romantic ekphrases that are least ironic in tone are not as blinded by the fantasy
of preservation by art as the term “ideology” suggests. The concluding apostrophe of
“The Tears of a Painter” suggests that Apelles’ painting will have the kind of long life
his son did not, even if the poem’s conclusion subtly undermines the idea of art
transcending time by hinting at the fact that Apelles’ verbally constructed and narrated
“glory” has significantly outlived the “image” on which it is supposedly based. The
opening passage of “On the Receipt,” as I have noted, includes a parenthetical blessing of
“the art that can immortalize” and that “can baffle time’s tyrannic claim / To quench” the
intelligence of his mother’s eyes, and, however thoroughly undermined that sentiment is
by the end of the poem, its presence nonetheless offers a link to the somewhat later
poems discussed in Chapter 4, which interrogate that fantasy of fixity or preservation in
different terms.

There are also, however, ways in which Cowper’s work does not fit the same patterns as
many of the poems discussed in the other chapters of this thesis. Much of this thesis will
explore refractions and extensions of the ideas of the moral philosophers in Romantic
poetry – and thus much of it will be concerned with how these poems take up questions
about how sympathy works. Cowper’s poems do not operate within the intellectual
framework of natural morality or a moral sense; their grappling with questions of what is
right and good is much more theologically grounded, as I have suggested in the case of

36
Heffernan observes that “[t]he idea that a work of visual art perpetuates a fleeting appearance is so
deeply embedded in the ideology we inherit from the romantic period that we may be startled to learn just
how recently this idea has emerged in the history of discourse about art” (91). Of course the idea that
poetry can preserve transitory things (such as people) is very old: Shakespeare’s promise to the fair young
man of his sonnets that “this” – the poem – will immortalize him “so long as men can breathe or eyes can
see” is only the most famous of myriad examples. But the idea that visual art can achieve this did not
become nearly as popular nearly as quickly. That idea did, as we have seen, emerge in classical ekphrastic
poetry, but it did not achieve the kind of widespread dominance that it still possesses until the Romantic
period.
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“On the Receipt.” In many ways Cowper is thus an outlier in the literature of sensibility,
since (notwithstanding that he is usually termed a poet of sensibility, and his poems are
certainly full of feeling) the questions about feeling he is asking are somewhat differently
inflected than those posed by the moral philosophers, and differently inflected from those
posed by Wordsworth, Mitford, Keats, and Shelley in the poems I shall discuss in
subsequent chapters.

2.4 Poetry about art in the early nineteenth century

A few decades after Cowper composed his rare ekphrases of sensibility, art was a
comparatively popular subject for poetry – but it was not the massively popular genre it
has sometimes been made out to be. Byron wrote an elegiac lyric ekphrasis entitled
“Written Beneath a Picture” in 1812 and included short ekphrases in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage. Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in 1818 and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da
Vinci” in 1819. Felicia Hemans’ work, as Grant F. Scott points out in “The Fragile
Image,” is laden with ekphrases, from a poem called “The Dying Gladiator” published in
her very early collection The Domestic Affections in 1812 to her long narrative of artistic
production, “Properzia Rossi,” published in Records of Woman in 1828. Keats’s
ekphrases include not only two of his odes, but also his sonnet on the Elgin Marbles and
a number of descriptions in his longer poems, most notably “Endymion.” Wordsworth
wrote twenty-three poems about paintings in addition to his famous 1805 poem “Elegiac
Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George
Beaumont” (Heffernan 94), and Peter Simonsen has identified Wordsworth’s later work
as exhibiting an “ekphrastic turn” in his study Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts;
while it is true that many of Wordsworth’s ekphrases are so late that they fall well
outside what we normally define as the Romantic period, a respectable number of them
were published prior to 1821. Poetry about art was popular – more popular than it had
been in the eighteenth century, to be sure. But it was hardly ubiquitous, and its
popularity in the Romantic period has sometimes been overestimated by scholars of
ekphrasis, beginning with Ian Jack’s influential study. Jack states that “there could be no
more vivid illustration of the fashion [for ekphrasis] than the subjects set for Prize Poems
at Oxford at this time. In 1806 the subject was ‘A Recommendation of the Study of the
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Remains of Ancient Grecian and Roman Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting,’ while
from 1810 to 1820 the subject every year was a work of classical art or architecture...”
(Jack 215). Jack makes no mention of the topics for 1807-1809, nor could I find any of
them. The topics for 1810-1820 were the statue of the Dying Gladiator, the Parthenon,
the Apollo Belvidere, the Pantheon, Niobe, the Temple of Theseus, the horses of
Lysippus, the Farnese Hercules, the Colosseum, the Iphigenia of Timanthes, and the
temple of Diana at Ephesus.37 But can one university’s prize poems be taken as
representative of the literary culture of Britain? The topics for the Chancellor’s Medal
poems at Cambridge for the equivalent period look very different: from its founding in
1813 until 1824, the topics were Columbus, Boadicea, Wallace, Mahomet, Jerusalem,
Imperial and Papal Rome, Pompeii, Waterloo, and “Evening”: people, places, and events,
but never works of art or architecture.38 Oxford’s Newdigate prize certainly lent lyric
poems about art a certain prestige, but Cambridge’s establishment of a competing prize
with such different topics suggests that the ekphrastic bent of the Newdigate Prize was
seen as part of the unique ethos of the prize itself – a situation more consistent with a
moderate increase in the popularity of writing about art than with a major watershed in
English letters.

This, then, is the most fundamental context for the works discussed in the three chapters
that follow: poetry about art, while not terribly popular in the eighteenth century,
nonetheless had a loose and evolving set of conventions associated with it, ranging from
dense symbolism and allegory to polite literary compliment. Furthermore, while poems
about art did not suddenly become the most influential genre in British letters, they did
enjoy a modest rise in popularity, in part because discourse about the visual arts in
general began to find its way to a more prominent place in the print culture of Romantic
Britain. The chapter that follows will explore how one aspect of the art world’s

37
The only source I have been able to find for this information is an 1824 book entitled Illustrations,
Historical and Descriptive, of the Oxford Newdigate Prize Poems, with Engravings. The book does not
contain the actual poems that won the prizes – only engravings of the artworks and buildings themselves,
with prose descriptions.
38
My source for this information is an 1859 edition of A Complete Collection of the English Poems which
have Obtained the Chancellor’s Gold Medal in the University of Cambridge.
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increased visibility became a tool available to writers of ekphrastic poetry as they asked
searching questions about the workings and function of sympathy.

3 Ekphrasis and Public Discourse in the Annals of

the Fine Arts
This chapter focuses on poems published in early nineteenth-century journals about the
fine arts, chiefly James Elmes’s quarterly The Annals of the Fine Arts, a magazine that
has long been famous for publishing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a
Nightingale,” and that has recently begun to be studied as a literary phenomenon in its
own right. This chapter traces its two keystone poems’ participation in their publication
context in much the same way that other chapters trace poems’ participation in their
larger cultural context. As Jon Klancher has shown, the pages of the Annals were the
most prominent vehicle for a discourse that was gaining ground in the Romantic period:
a discussion of art led by practicing artists who claimed for themselves the position of
experts and professionals. The present chapter examines the convergence, in ekphrastic
poetry, of this new, public self-fashioning of the art world with ideas about the function
and functioning of sympathy. The Annals not only provided a ready venue for the
publication of ekphrastic poems, but also created a discursive context that such poems
could incorporate, exploit, and respond to. A small group of ekphrastic poems published
in the Annals take advantage of that context, their speakers’ voices adapting to the self-
consciously public ethos of the Annals in ways that fine-tune their intellectual
engagement with ideas about sympathy: how it works, what it accomplishes, and what
role it should play in a generalized viewer’s response to art. Moreover, the poems’
engagements with ideas about sympathy in turn heighten the histrionic public-ness of
their rhetorical posturing, reinforcing their participation in the journal’s construction of
itself as the public face of a public community.

The first half of this chapter, building on Klancher’s research about The Annals of the
Fine Arts and its predecessor The Artist, sets up the readings in the second half by
outlining the emergence of an art-world discourse that was self-consciously, even
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ostentatiously, public, and examines the role of poetry, including ekphrastic poetry, in
that discourse. I take Klancher’s finding – that the Annals and its predecessor The Artist
mark the emergence and flourishing of a discourse generated by practicing artists
positioning themselves as authorities on art – as a starting point for my own work. I have
gone over the archival ground again in the process of concurring with Klancher, and
added another level of detail to the existing body of research on the Annals where the
aims of this chapter require it. The chapter thus includes a thorough overview of the
contents of the Annals, particularly the role of poetry in the journal’s pages, which I hope
will prove useful to scholars interested in the journal, whether or not they are studying
sensibility. For the purposes of this thesis, however, that research serves the specific
purpose of furthering my understanding of how the poems explore the intellectual
questions of the culture of sensibility.

The second half of the chapter examines two poems that draw on that discourse in order
to think about sympathy. Mary Russell Mitford’s “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon,” read in the
context of its venue of publication, appears to borrow a rhetorical posture from that
venue: a posture of quasi-editorial disinterestedness that renders its shift at the volta to a
posture of obsessively reiterated sympathetic grief all the more striking by contrast. In
setting up that shift to be as noticeable as possible, the poem draws attention to its
defiance of Adam Smith’s distinction between his own formulation of sympathy as
imaginative and an older formulation of it as instantaneous and visual.39 The anonymous
poem “On the Monument to be placed in Lichfield Cathedral to the Memory of two only
Children,” which is announced in the Annals (and deservedly so) as a work with a
complex circulation history, takes on, as a result of the venue and circumstances of its
publication, the appearance of a conspicuously public utterance. Consequently, its
enactment of its speaker’s struggle for emotional moderation in the face of a compelling
artwork assumes an added weight of significance, drawing attention to the poem’s
exploration of imaginative sympathy as a tool of self-regulation.

39
See introductory chapter of this thesis.
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The two poems that form the heart of this chapter explore ideas closely related to those
taken up by the poems discussed elsewhere in the thesis, but this chapter will argue that
the specific ethos of the Annals offers these ekphrases a different strategy for
approaching such ideas. The intertwined strands of thought about the “sister arts” and
the distinction between visual and imaginative sympathy that permeate much eighteenth-
century aesthetic and moral philosophy, discussed in the introductory chapter of this
thesis, are one such set of ideas. Those ideas will form the backbone of Chapter 4’s
investigation of poems by Keats and Shelley, but they also make an appearance here,
some of their complexities teased out by a speaker who initially assumes the disinterested
posture of a reviewer moving through a self-conscious process of bestowing seemingly
public praise on an artwork in sentimental terms. Also present are the ideas about
sympathy and spectatorship that form the unifying thread of Chapter 5. These ideas are
explored in less detail in the poems from the Annals than in the poems by Wordsworth
and Keats in Chapter 5, but they are nonetheless present, informing the showy postures
of sympathetic viewing that are crucial to how the poems in the Annals make use of their
ostentatiously public venue of publication. But while both of these groupings of ideas
are present in the ekphrastic poems printed in the Annals of the Fine Arts, they do not
form the core of those poems’ intellectual work. Instead, these sets of ideas play out in
the Annals in the service of exploring what role sympathy can and should play in the
making and viewing of visual art. Moreover, in the poems investigated here, the ideas
that feature so prominently in the keystone texts of other chapters are inflected
differently, re-shaped by the texts’ affiliation with the Annals and its histrionic self-
imagining as a site of public discourse.

3.1 The Cultural Context of the Annals

3.1.1 Discourse about Art: The Artist
During the early decades of the Romantic period, amid the moderate flourishing
of lyric ekphrastic poetry, a new element became prominent in prose discourse about the
arts: artists deliberately and self-consciously stepped into the public sphere as authors in
order to influence public debate about the arts. This new element could reasonably be
said to date back to Sir Joshua Reynolds’ unrelenting pursuit of the status of a
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professional: his rigorous self-education, his self-appointed role as a hub of polite

discourse, and of course his immensely influential public lectures as president of the
Royal Academy. It was, however, a marked departure from public discourse about the
arts as it had existed for most of the eighteenth century. In one sense, the British
discourse of art as a matter of national concern was already old by the Romantic period.
John Barrell traces its evolution over the course of the eighteenth century, arguing that
writers promoting the visual arts did so by borrowing the civic humanist language of a
public virtue consisting of public spirit and integrity in office among those in a position
to devote themselves to national governance. The traditional prestige of history painting
is grounded in that discourse: paintings of great leaders in moments of heroism will
inspire young men to become great leaders themselves. The type of public discourse
about art whose slow demise over the course of the eighteenth century Barrell examines,
however, is quite different from the type that emerged, beginning with Reynolds’ dogged
pursuit of the status of a genteel professional, in its place. When Barrell talks of public
virtue, he is referring to the virtue of fulfilling civic duty – a virtue that could only be
attained by a tiny elite. By contrast, when Jon Klancher argues that artists entered the
public sphere during the Romantic period, he means the Habermasian public sphere of
ongoing political, cultural, and economic discourse accessible to all literate members of
society, and mediated largely by periodical publications and other forms of print culture.

As Klancher has shown, the movement of artists assuming the role of public
spokespersons gained momentum with the short-lived weekly publication The Artist
(1807),40 whose editor Prince Hoare sought to destabilize the authority of learned,
privileged connoisseurs and collectors, and to establish the practising artists in the public
eye as professionals with knowledge and authority. Klancher makes the case that The
Artist, despite its rapid failure as a publication, was an important first step in the
collective attempt of practicing artists to gain the credibility that would eventually enable
the ambitious young painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s testimony to outweigh that of
the learned Richard Payne Knight. In 1816, Haydon wrote a pamphlet that Klancher

40
The Artist ran from March 14 to August 1, 1807: 21 issues in total.
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identifies as “the decisive testimony” of the Elgin Marbles debate – the piece of writing
that, more than any other, secured Parliament’s purchase of the Marbles. Klancher traces
a powerful link between these cultural moments nine years apart, identifying in Haydon’s
pamphlet rhetoric derived from The Artist – the language of “professional men,” defined
in opposition to connoisseurs and amateurs. Haydon’s pamphlet is a public document,
written by a practising artist, that argues for the right of artists to participate in debate
about the role of the arts in British culture, and it uses that argument as a key rhetorical
strategy for actually winning a public debate. Klancher situates the Annals in this
context. Haydon, of course, was a regular contributor to the Annals of the Fine Arts and
a friend of the journal’s founder and editor James Elmes; he is usually thought to have
influenced the content of the Annals considerably. Moreover, Haydon’s pamphlet of
“decisive testimony” is favourably reviewed in the first issue of the Annals. The Annals
is the heir apparent of the still young tradition of a new kind of public sphere – one in
which those with practical knowledge of the arts could compete for credibility with the
established elite.

3.1.2 Poems from The Artist

One question that Klancher has not addressed is the extent to which the
burgeoning genre of poetry about art figured in the art-world discourse that flourished in
the years leading up to the founding of the Annals: were the two phenomena related, and
was there overlap between them? The Oxford Prize poems, of course, were written by
exactly the kind of privileged, educated connoisseurs and dilettanti whose authority
Prince Hoare set out to challenge in his publication of The Artist, and The Artist itself
contains very little poetry, which seems to suggest that the two were quite separate. But
Hoare included literature among the arts he sought to professionalize, suggesting that the
impulse to reject aristocratic amateurism in the visual arts was not inherently bound up in
an impulse to reject their traditional sorority with poetry. Moreover, the few poems
published in The Artist do participate in the paper’s self-fashioning as a public venue for
artistic discourse.
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An “Ode, to the Honourable W—— L——” urges its addressee to take seriously the
public duty imposed upon him by his innate artistic ability. Introduced by the editor as a
“poetical exhortation [...] to a young gentleman of distinguished talents,” the poem
addresses itself to a “[t]hrice happy youth,” lucky enough to be favoured not only by “all
the tuneful Nine” but also by “Fortune.” The poem reminds this young person that “not
amid the gawdy throng / Of fashion’s idle train / Is caught the soul-inspiring song” – that
in order to fulfil the promise of his abilities he must seek “Inspiration” in solitude, beside
a “slow-winding stream,” on a “woody mountain’s side,” in a “gloomy dell,” in a “forest
sear,” amid “alpine snows,” or in “hollow caverns drear.” Yet if this ode insists that
artistic achievement requires solitary, private reflection, it also insists that such
achievement is a public act with public consequences. It its final stanza, the poem pleads
Let not the precious boon of heaven
Alight on thee in vain! ——
And O! far less, the blessings given
Be proved to thee a stain!
It then bids the young gentleman
In Freedom’s, in Religion’s cause,
Expect the wise man’s just applause;
While curses dire, both loud and deep,
The tyrant’s advocate await.
Bitter remorse, and self-turn’d hate,
Shall once more “murder sleep.”
“Ode, to the Honourable W—— L——” may urge its addressee to forgo the realm of the
social in the short term, but it also reminds him that the cultivation of personal talent is
inevitably a contribution to a social and public sphere. In appearing in The Artist, the
poem also pre-emptively makes a public spectacle of the young man, even if the public in
question is limited to readers of The Artist. With his identity only partially veiled, W. L.
is introduced to the readership of The Artist as a young person of abilities – a rising talent
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to take note of.41 Even if only a few readers recognized the initials, young W. L. is here
brought momentarily into the spotlight, and the expectation of his future performance is
established. As a consequence, his success or failure in his artistic ambitions would be
equally public; the poem’s very publication denies W. L. the chance to be an
inconspicuous failure.

Another poem, published in The Artist on May 16, 1807, explores a different facet of an
artist’s relationship with the public. “The Dead Alive,” a short satirical piece, tells the
story of a painter named Milo who “enjoy[s] a starving kind of fame,” painting well-
respected landscapes that he cannot sell. Milo fakes his own death, and his works are
auctioned off to “crowds of Conoscenti” [sic] for high prices; Milo then emerges from
behind a screen, asks that his patrons “forgive / This harmless strategem to live,” and
promises that “since you’ve been thus lib’ral to my ghost, / I’ll paint you better things at
half the cost.” In “The Dead Alive,” the artist’s public is perverse and hypocritical,
willing to pay exorbitantly for the work of a recently dead painter (or for “daubings
Poussin never drew” and “[v]ile copies, father’d upon Claude”), but unwilling to pay at
all for the same works while the painter lives. The painter, however, is dependent on that
perverse public. In narrating Milo’s comically implausible method of coaxing a living
wage out of his crowd of admirers, “The Dead Alive” mocks the irrationality and
gullibility of well-to-do patrons of the arts. But by representing a painter dependent on
an unreasonable public to begin with, the poem also advocates for artists to the broader
pubic – at least to those interested enough in art to be reading Hoare’s periodical. Like
any satire, “The Dead Alive” offers at least the potential that those reading it will be pre-

41
The identity of W. L. cannot be definitively established, but it is possible that the poem’s author is
addressing the landscape painter William Linton, who at the time of the poem’s publication (on April 18,
1807) was about to turn sixteen (on April 22, 1807). Although not from parents as affluent as the poem’s
reference to “Fortune” would seem to suggest, Linton had shown considerable promise in landscape
painting even as a teenager, practising during holiday visits to an estate in Windermere held by his
mother’s family. At sixteen, Linton was articled for five years in a merchant’s office in Liverpool,
temporarily putting a halt to his aspirations as an artist; if a well-meaning mentor were going to enjoin him
not to forget his true calling, four days before his sixteenth birthday would have been the time to do it.
Linton did continue to practice painting, making “truant” visits to the Lake District (DNB), where the
streams, mountains, and dells recommended by the author of the “Ode” would have been in abundance. Of
course the phrase “the tuneful Nine” suggests that W.L. may have been a writer, rather than a painter.
 103

emptively taught to do better – that wealthy patrons reading The Artist will be
discouraged from treating still-living English painters with the same perverse disregard
as the “Conoscenti” in the poem. In a weekly journal meant to serve as a public forum
for professional artists, this satirical commentary is particularly significant, in that it not
only participates in the journal’s presentation of the visual arts as a profession, but also
offers an implicit commentary on the relationship between the artists who contribute to
The Artist and the art-world amateurs, patrons and critics at whom that self-presentation
as professionals is aimed.

Where “Ode, to the Honourable W—— L——” makes use of the public nature of The
Artist to encourage a young artist to remember the public nature of an artistic career,
“The Dead Alive” speaks more directly to the public audience itself, tacitly requesting
the same respect and support for accomplished living artists that the journal itself sought
to foster. Both poems, in other words, are very much part of the professionalizing
discourse about the fine arts that was emerging in the period, and that Prince Hoare
actively sought to foster. Poems constructing themselves as public utterances in print
periodicals may have been nothing new, but poems doing so as part of a broader impetus
to emancipate the fine arts from aristocratic patronage, joining their voices to an
emerging chorus of professional artists dominated by painters and sculptors, was a
phenomenon made possible by the character of The Artist itself. After a lapse of years,
that possibility reappeared and grew in a new journal, creating a space in which
ekphrastic poems could tacitly support the visual arts’ assertion of their claim to public
status; furthermore, in this new venue, poems could make use of that self-assertion,
participating in it partly to refine their thinking through of questions about sympathy.

3.2 The Annals of the Fine Arts

3.2.1 Description
A decade after the publication of Hoare’s short-lived weekly journal, another periodical
about the arts made its debut. Klancher argues that the newer periodical, launched in the
wake of the Elgin Marbles controversy, “basked in the glow of the artists’ victory over
their long-time antagonists the connoisseurs” (254). I would argue that it did more than
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bask. The pages of Elmes’s quarterly journal reveal a determination to continue asserting
the position of the fine arts as deserving of widespread public attention, and an equal
determination to assert the position of the Annals itself as the chief venue and mediator
of active public discourse about the arts. Eventually, a tension develops in the journal’s
pages between Elmes’s attempts to be an even-handed mediator of a genuinely equitable
debate and his attempts to advocate for the specific interests of practicing artists, and that
tension forms a crucial part of the context that the ekphrastic poems I examine make use
of as they engage the intellectual culture of sensibility.

The Annals of the Fine Arts was edited by James Elmes and published quarterly, each
issue following roughly the same format, with some variation from one quarter to the
next; the final issue of each annual volume came out on January 1st of the following year,
with a Preface to the whole volume. Each issue started with a series of essays or letters
from correspondents that took up roughly half of the journal, and ended with a) a list of
“Notices of Works in Hand” (i.e. works of art currently being created), b) a few pages of
“Original Poetry,” and c) some back matter such as a list of paintings and their
purchasers from a prominent exhibition or an annual registry of professional artists’
names and addresses. In between was a long series of reviews (of exhibitions, of books,
and of prints), some anecdotal or biographical material about prominent artists, and the
“transactions” of various societies that supported the arts, most prominently the Royal
Academy and the British Institution, but also the Artists’ Benevolent Society, the Society
of Dilettanti, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, and even the Highland Society of
London, should they happen to elect an artist as an honorary member.42 Jeffrey Cox
wittily – and not inaccurately – labels the Annals “a kind of Chronicle of Higher
Education for early-nineteenth-century artists” (150), noting that “the Annals of the Fine

42
I have seen all seventeen issues of the Annals at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and I have photographic
reproductions of all of the poems from the copies in the Houghton collection. Since I do not have
photographic reproductions of any entire issues, however, my overall description of the non-poetic content
of the journal is based on the full-issue PDFs that are available online: 1-3, 8-11, and 15-16 (nine of the
total seventeen issues). The issues are numbered consecutively but begin with a three-issue volume, so that
the volumes go 1.1-3, 2.4-7, 3.8-11, 4.12-15, and 5.16-17, and the spring issue, rather than the last issue of
the year, is always a multiple of 4. Issues 10, 11, and 14 contain no poems.
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Arts, which McGann identifies as one of the ‘chief ideological organs’ of romantic
classicism, strikes me less as promulgator of an ideal of classical art than as a trade
journal” (149).

The first few issues of the Annals are self-consciously even-handed, the editor even
stating that he hopes to overcome the mutual hostility between the Royal Academy and
the much newer British Institution by printing their transactions side by side. By the
third volume, however, battle lines are drawn. The Annals become fiercely opposed to
the Academy, denouncing its exclusionary politics, its failure to promote grand genres
such as history painting, its disappointing exhibitions, and the poor quality of its once-
renowned lectures. Although a few opposing articles are printed, they are laced with
editorial footnotes contesting the authors’ arguments. Where the Royal Academy had
once – just a decade before – stood for the enfranchisement of the professional artists
who were its fellows and professors over and against the leisured amateurs who governed
the British Institution, it came to stand – in the eyes of James Elmes – for a narrow-
minded and exclusionary professional establishment that discouraged new talent and that
pandered to the taste for portraiture amongst wealthy clients.

Much of the material in the Annals is anonymous – so much so that it is difficult to know
how many of the supposed correspondents were actually the editor’s inventions. A few
correspondents habitually signed their names (John Bailey and John Britton, for
instance), but most signed only their initials: A.Z., D.Z., S.K., C.J.S., W.A., H., and so
forth. Haydon, the Annals’ most regular named contributor by far, and the driving force
behind the circle of artists and writers out of which the magazine grew, signed his work
alternately as Benjamin Robert Haydon, B.R. Haydon, or B.R.H. A few regular
correspondents used distinctive pseudonyms, such as Philo-Graphicus, Statuarius,
Philotecton Londinensis, and Somniator. Somniator, whose articles consisted of prose
dream-vision attacks on the Royal Academy, became something of a fixture in the later
issues of the Annals. The prefatory material to the fourth volume even includes a short
play starring “Editor,” “Somniator,” and “The Ghost of Barry” (a recently deceased
painter who had stood up to the Royal Academy), all three of them exclaiming in
triumph over the Annals’ astonishing feat of having survived to the end of its fourth year
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– double the life-span of its weekly predecessor The Artist. But was Somniator a real
correspondent, or, as seems more likely, a pseudonym for either Elmes or Haydon?

For all that some of the supposed correspondents may have been masks for either Elmes
himself or Haydon, the fact remains that the Annals busily cultivated the appearance of
being a democratic public forum with a variety of eager contributors. Much of the
journal’s most explicit self-fashioning takes place in its paratextual material – not only
the Preface to each volume, printed at the end of the year when the issues were collected
together, but also the notes “To Correspondents” with which most individual issues
begin. The ninth issue, the second in Volume 3, begins with a note to correspondents that
is fully five pages long, defending the journal from the charge of printing an undue
quantity of writing by and about Haydon (332-36) – defending it, in short, from the
accusation of being insufficiently public, accessible, and democratic. More typical,
however, are shorter notes to correspondents that make much of Elmes’s difficulties
finding room for the supposedly immense quantity of correspondence he receives. The
eighth issue begins with a one-page note to correspondents that mentions fully nine
submissions from readers: a letter by Haydon about the politics of history painting, a
report on an architecture-related trial, a description of a painting by Mr. Ward, a letter
and some verses from “E.C.,” a “second Letter from an English painter at Rome,” a
catalogue of Tomkins’ prints submitted by “C.P. Student,” two letters from “Mr. C - - e,”
and some type of apparently hostile correspondence from an “H.D.” and an “A.Z.Y” (x).
The majority of these are mentioned in order to excuse their absence from the eighth
issue. Some are “unavoidably postponed to our next,” some will be “in our next, if
possible,” and some are “under consideration.” Few of these items, however, actually
make it into the Annals at any point, and a cynic might doubt that some of them ever
existed, particularly since so much of the material that did appear in the Annals
throughout its four year life span consisted of lengthy extracts from other publications.
The report on the trial really does appear in the next issue, as does the letter from Rome.
The description of Mr. Ward’s painting is eventually cancelled, because, according to
Elmes’s statement in the “Works in Hand” section for issue 10, he “really could not find
room” (527). If any of E.C.’s correspondence found its way into Volume 3, I have not
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found it, nor have I found C.P. Student’s catalogue of Tomkins’s prints, or Mr. C - - e’s
two letters. Haydon’s letter is postponed repeatedly because, as Elmes admits in another
note to correspondents six months later, Haydon hasn’t finished writing it (336). As this
last example attests, Elmes’s mere promise that a given item will appear “in our next” is
no guarantee of its existence; some of what goes on in the notes to correspondents may
well be an ostentatious attempt to make the Annals look like a more thriving site of
dialogue than it was. At any rate, Elmes certainly does not downplay the volume of
correspondence he receives from readers.

What makes the note to correspondents for the eighth issue especially revealing is the
overtly partisan debate that bookends its detailed list of postponed items. Elmes begins
by diving straight into what was by then the Annals’ ongoing critique of the value and
integrity of the Royal Academy, saying
Not one of the questions put by us in our last Number to the supporters
of the present system of the Royal Academy have been satisfactorily
answered; or even attempted beyond general denials, and some little
abuse. They may therefore be considered as admitted, for we have had
much conversation with many able friends and defenders of that Body,
who have been compelled, however reluctantly, to admit their justice.
Attacks on the Academy are a running theme in the Annals, and at the end of 1818 Elmes
uses the Preface to Volume 3 to make a sustained argument for his critique, but this note
to correspondents from the start of 1818 immediately frames that running theme as a
lively conversation. Moreover, it frames the Annals itself as both the site and the
moderator of that conversation, as well as a vocal participant: “we” have put questions to
the readers, and “we” are determining what kind of response constitutes a satisfactory
answer. Unsatisfactory answers – “general denials, and some little abuse” – will not, it is
implied, be printed. Elmes’s use of the verb “admit” is surely pointed: he claims that the
absence of satisfactory answers suggests that his questions can “be considered as
admitted” (which of course reveals that the questions were really arguments), and many
able defenders of the Academy have been “compelled” to “admit their justice.” In the
other sense of the word, however, none of the opposing faction’s actual arguments are
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admitted into the pages of the Annals. This insinuation is made more explicit towards
the end of the note, when Elmes says
As to H.D., A.Z.Y., and all such correspondents, we put such letters
where they deserve—into the fire. To differ with some men is a crime;
unable to refute by argument, they descend to the meanness of inferring
bad motives. We shall persevere as we have began [sic], and beg these
writers, if they want insertions, to send us reasonings, and not ipse
dixits.43
Here Elmes both reminds his readers of the “some little abuse” he claims to have
received, and pointedly reminds his would-be correspondents that he holds the power of
bestowing the “insertions” they supposedly vie for and covet. In short, the paratextual
materials reveal the extent to which the Annals wanted to be – and tried very hard to
present itself as – a genuinely public forum for discussion.

The seeming contradiction between the self-consciously public, democratically

accessible ethos of the Annals and the sheer volume of art-world insider squabbling that
actually went on in its pages44 lent the journal a special kind of appeal. On the one hand,
readers who were not part of the art world could catch glimpses of its inner workings,
learn about the alliances and rifts between celebrity artists, and read a steady stream of
anecdotes and short biographies. On the other hand, readers of all stripes could find
themselves tacitly invited to join the conversation. Those not well enough versed in art
to compose whole articles could still write to recommend extracts from other works – a
practice for which the pages of the Annals provide ample precedent (D.Z, for example,
sent in an extract from a letter signed R.J.L. that was published in Barry’s Works).45 It is
precisely this mix of insider glimpses into the art world and open invitation to participate
that the two poems discussed in the second half of this chapter recreate and exploit. The

Ipse dixit: “he, himself, said it” – i.e. an unsupported assertion relying on the authority of the person
43

making it.
44
For example, Haydon complaining about the Academy’s treatment of his students, which produced a
reply from a semi-anonymous contributor, to which Elmes added many hostile footnotes.
45
The extract appeared in issue 3.8, in the spring of 1818.
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Mitford sonnet has all the glamour of an insider piece – a semi-anonymous piece of
correspondence from a poet to a painter that appears to lift back the veil from their
friendship. The anonymous poem “On the Monument,” by contrast, is an extract from
another publication submitted by an unnamed reader. The fact that they fit so
comfortably into the characteristic content of the Annals inevitably draws the reader’s
attention to the public and performative elements of their speakers’ utterances.

3.2.2 The Role of Poetry in the Annals

In the pages of the Annals, poetry is ambiguously one of the fine arts or a part of the
verbal discourse that surrounds the fine arts. The Annals of the Fine Arts was never
meant to be a literary magazine, and in general poetry is not discussed as one of the arts.
Painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture are the most popular subjects. Gardening
is at least as frequently mentioned as poetry. Poets are not included in the list of working
artists at the back of each volume. In other words, if we take the Annals to be
paradigmatic, the privileging of professional expertise and the structuring of a new kind
of public artistic sphere were driven by forces within the profession of the specifically
visual arts, and do not seem to have extended to the literary, musical or dramatic arts.
Nevertheless, poetry does appear, if only rarely, among the fine arts to which the journal
attends. The first issue contains a long essay on Thomson’s poem Liberty as one of the
five substantial essays at the start of the issue, and the early issues of the Annals include
items such as a verse toast given at an art society dinner – items that blurred the lines
between the seemingly insular world of artists and the world of poets and poetry.
Moreover, as I have argued, the earlier journal The Artist had set a precedent for
including poets, novelists, and playwrights in the class of contributors who stood to gain
stature from the democratization of art discourse.

The most obvious way in which poetry was included in the Annals is also the trickiest to
assess. Poetry seems to have been important to how Elmes conceived of the journal, but
original poetry about the fine arts wasn’t so easy to come by. Only about half of the
poems published in the Annals (thirteen out of twenty-seven) comfortably fit that
description. Moreover, it is hard to know what to make of the placement of the “Original
 110

Poetry” section at the back of the journal. On the one hand, the back is a position of
comparative prominence – almost as easy to find as the front. On the other hand, several
issues (three out of the total seventeen) lack a poetry section altogether, with no
explanation in the paratextual material. Did Elmes simply run out of verses to publish?
Or was he too caught up in publishing unusual and lengthy features such as the “Answer
to an Attack upon the Annals” that takes up a great deal of space in the tenth issue, and
did he simply run out of pages? Although the first issue of the Annals specifies that the
original poetry section is devoted to poems about the fine arts, subsequent issues are less
strict on this point. One poem actually has nothing to do with the fine arts at all.

Across the fourteen issues in which it appeared, the “Original Poetry” section of the
Annals included twenty-seven poems in total, a little less than two-thirds of them actually
recent and original. The evident difficulty of finding enough original poetry to maintain
the section is attested to by the evolution of its title: at the start of the second volume, the
name of the section changed from “Original Poetry on the Subject of the Fine Arts” to
simply “Original Poetry; “On the Fine Arts” reappeared briefly in the sixth number (the
third in Volume 2), only to vanish for good. In the final two numbers of the journal, the
section is titled simply “Poetry.”

The poems culled from various sources to compensate for the shortage of original works
vary. The third number of the Annals contains a four-page extract from a previously
published verse critique of a British Gallery exhibition five years earlier. The sixth
number, for the fall of 1817, contains a poem congratulating Henry Tresham on his
election to the Professor’s Chair of Painting of the Royal Academy in 1807 (Tresham
held the post until 1809 and died in 1814). The seventh, eighth and ninth numbers
contain only original poems, but the tenth and eleventh contain no poems at all. The
twelfth issue includes an elegant sonnet extracted from the Literary Pocket Book, edited
by Leigh Hunt, along with a poem from Charles Lamb’s new book, which functions as
advertising for Lamb as much as filler for the Annals. The only poem in the journal’s
final number is a Latin poem about one of Haydon’s pictures, extracted from The
Champion.
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Of the fourteen original poems published in the Annals46, ten of them are unambiguously
about art or the arts. Of those ten, one is in Italian. Three of them deal explicitly with
art-world politics. Only one poem, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” has nothing
whatsoever to do with the fine arts, but several others are only tenuously related to art.
“Lines Addressed to Susan, in America” mentions Susan’s portrait only briefly, although
the lengthy editorial comment that precedes it emphasizes the importance of the portrait
in inspiring the poem’s composition. Still more tenuously, “Monody on Francis Gray,
Esq. who died January last, in his thirty-fifth year” says nothing whatsoever about art,
but the prefatory material explains that Francis Gray was a great supporter of the arts.
“Stanzas on seeing several Views of the Grounds at White Knights, painted by T. C.
Hofland, Esq.” is recognizable as an ekphrasis only because of its title: the poem itself
talks of the Duke of Marlborough’s taste in cultivating his estate, but does not mention
Hofland or his paintings.

As in The Artist, the poetry section of the Annals seems to have contributed to the
journal’s self-presentation as a public forum, especially in the early issues. The poems in
the first number are an epistle to Haydon commenting on his role in the Elgin Marbles
debate and a verse address to a charitable artists’ society, thoroughly in keeping with the
journal’s publication of the proceedings of such societies. The second number contains
three poems, two of which derive their chief interest from their air of contributing to such
a public forum. The first of these is a satirical quatrain about Richard Payne Knight,
Haydon’s principal opponent in the debate over the Marbles, entitled “On the Evidence

46
It is possible that some of these fourteen poems were in fact previously published elsewhere, but not
noted as such in the Annals. Although Elmes carefully notes the prior publication of several poems, he
does not acknowledge the prior publication of Keats’s two sonnets “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” and “To
Mr. Haydon with a Sonnet on Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” both of which had appeared simultaneously in
the Champion and the Examiner a year before their appearance in the Annals (Stillinger 428), nor does he
acknowledge the prior publication of Wordsworth’s two sonnets “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture”
(which had appeared in Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems) and “To B.R. Haydon, Esq.” (which had appeared in
both the Champion and the Examiner in 1816). For complete publication histories of these poems, see the
editorial matter of Stillinger’s edition of Keats’s Complete Poems and of Ketcham’s volume of
Wordsworth’s Shorter Poems, 1807-1820 for the Cornell Wordsworth series. The fourteen poems I am
treating as original are those for which I myself can find no earlier record of publication.
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given before the Select Committee of the House of Commons respecting the value of the
Elgin Marbles:”
While Day believes them ’bove all price,
Knight thinks a small sum would suffice;
Thus still we find that Day and Knight
Differ as darkness does from light.
“On the Evidence” offers very little to its readers beyond a clever pun on Knight’s name,
and the invocation of some traditional poetic tropes to complement that pun. The
reader’s pleasure in perusing the poem depends entirely on “getting” the pun and
recognizing the allusion to recent events.

The second poem in Volume 1, issue 2 of the Annals, while a less overt intervention in
public debate, showcases still better Elmes’s determination that the poetry section should
participate in the ethos of the Annals as a vibrant public forum. When combined with its
editorial preface, it amounts to an art-world inside joke made accessible to a wider
audience – it exploits the celebrity of an established artist even as it constructs that
celebrity for the benefit of the non-initiate and humorously undermines it in the name of
tongue-in-cheek partisan politics. “Lines Addressed to T. Phillips, Esq. R.A.,” by
“William Lewis, Artist,” is introduced with an editorial preface apologizing for its poor
quality and explaining that
[w]e insert the following verbatim et literatim, to shew our impartiality,
and that we might not be accused of keeping back a panegyric on a
Member of the Academy; but we fear the Gentleman here lauded, will
not be very proud of his poet, unless, as it has been suggested to us, Mr.
Lewis is quizzing his friend Phillips.
The poem itself, while neither boldly original nor exquisitely executed, would be merely
a banal poem of praise without this preface to pique the reader’s interest. A reader
encountering the poem without comment would be as likely to be bored by its
predictable tropes and sometimes confusing syntax as to take any comic delight in them.
In a moment of hyperbole, Lewis declares that Phillips is “[n]ot vainly called the Titian
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of the day,” and, rather conventionally proclaims that his paintings show “[g]reat nature’s
charms arrayed in beauty’s dress.”

Lewis reworks the equally conventional praise that the painter preserves the faces of his
subjects beyond their own lifetimes. In doing so, he makes the first of several abrupt
shifts, moving suddenly from praising a specific painting of a Mrs. Whitmore to
imagining the circumstance of a generalized bereaved person looking at a painting of a
lost loved one. “Who,” the poem asks,
... but in deepest admiration fix’d,
Must own a Whitmore’s charms pourtray’d by thee,47
Or oft with Love and tender sorrow mix’d,
Gaze on the face they’ve long been used to see.

Perhaps long since laid in the silent tomb

Or else in distant countries far away
Or torn from parents in its earliest bloom,
In youth’s sweet morning or in manhood’s day.
After the abrupt shift from Mrs. Whitmore’s painting to a generalized painting, the
hypothetical mourner’s possible relationships to the painted figure here extend for fully
six lines. The new sentence (and new quatrain) that concludes this passage, however,
shifts again to a different kind of conventional praise, exclaiming
But these [i.e. such lost loved ones] thy graceful pencil bids to
live
And may recall the soul to Virtue’s way.
The sudden introduction of the idea of paintings deterring their viewers from bad
behaviour is then explained as an extension of Phillips’s ability to preserve lost loved
ones in portraits: it is the portrait of lost loved ones that may recall the soul of the
bereaved viewer to virtue.

47
This is a reference to Phillips’s 1810 painting of Catherine Thomason, Mrs. Thomas Whitmore, of the
Apley estate in Shropshire. The National Trust collection includes an 1850 reproduction of this painting
by Charles Turner, also a member of the Royal Academy.
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Haply the gentle look may seem to give

The kind advice which bids them not to stray.
These shifts – from Mrs. Whitmore’s portrait, to a generalized viewer looking at a
portrait of a deceased loved one, to the various fates that might have separated the viewer
from the loved one, to the morally salutary effect of such paintings on such bereaved
viewers – are slightly hard to follow, in spite of the thoroughly conventional nature of
each piece of praise. The poem’s syntax does not help; while not so muddled as to
impede comprehension, it nonetheless seems inexpertly constructed. The plural pronoun
“they” (in “the face they’ve long been used to see”) stands in only awkwardly for the
person or persons postulated in “[w]ho but [...] must own [...] or gaze,” and the objective
inflection of the plural in “advice which bids them not to stray” is still harder to assign an
antecedent to in the wake of the singular “soul” (“may recall the soul”). The plural
“these” refers not to the viewers, but to the faces of lost loved ones, in spite of the
singular “face” in “gaze on the face they’ve long been used to see.”

These minor flaws in the poem’s execution might escape notice, except that “Lines
Addressed to T. Phillips” both begins and ends with a discussion of its own inadequacy –
a conventional disclaimer thoroughly in keeping with the conventional tropes of the
poem itself, but one that opens up a space for the interpretation that Elmes’s editorial
note suggests. The poem begins by calling itself “[a]n humble tribute” to a much greater
“worth,” and the speaker laments that “[s]mall power have I alas too small to sing / His
magic art whose work’s almost divine.” The poem ends on a still more pronounced note
of modesty:
Farewell, great man! thy works best speak thy praise,
Yet let the Intention sanctify the deed,
Poets alone cannot confer a name,
Thy fame is fixed without a Poet’s aid.
This concluding stanza, in implying that the “deed” of writing the poem requires apology
– that Lewis’s good intentions must be invoked to compensate for the poem’s inability to
“speak” Phillips’s praise as well as his own works do – opens up a space for the
interpretation that Elmes claims has been “suggested” to him – that Lewis is well aware
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of how faulty the poem is, and sent it to be published as a friendly, self-deprecating jest.
But the self-effacing opening and conclusion certainly are not decisive evidence in
favour of such a reading. In the absence of editorial comment, the poem could be
reasonably perceived as ludicrously bad, but it might just as reasonably be perceived as
merely insipid – hackneyed, but not so hackneyed as to provoke laughter.

The editorial preface gives the poem interest by enacting a carefully balanced set of
postures. It flaunts the journal’s supposed impartiality by pointing out that “Lines
Addressed to T. Phillips” praises a member of the Academy, the institution to which
Haydon and his faction (including Elmes) were vehemently opposed. But even in laying
claim to such impartiality the editorial comment reveals the real bias of the Annals by
immediately pointing out how bad the poem is. It prepares readers to be amused by the
ham-handedness of the poem, but at the same time diffuses any sense of its own mean-
spiritedness by acknowledging that, in all probability, the poem was meant as a joke.
Lastly, even as it slyly undermines the prestige of Phillips’s position as a Royal
Academician by framing the panegyric as ludicrous, the editorial preface also tacitly
frames Phillips as a person of sufficient interest that his “quizzing” by his friend is worth
reading. And in generating an aura of celebrity for established artists, the Annals helps to
construct the art world of London as a public sphere of which it, the Annals, is the forum.

It is not only in the early numbers of the Annals that poetry participates in the journal’s
self-construction as a venue of public discourse. George Stanley’s irregular sonnet 48 “On
Seeing the Portrait of Wordsworth, by Haydon” makes a show not only of its own
public-ness, but also of the public context of two poems published six months earlier.
Stanley’s poem appears in the ninth issue (the second in Volume 3), in June 1818, sixth
months after Wordsworth himself had published two sonnets in the Annals, one of them
addressed to Haydon. As Elmes’s footnote points out, the portrait in question was on
display in the Spring Garden Exhibition at the time of the poem’s publication. The
irregular sonnet thus acts in part as an advertisement for Haydon’s work. It does more

48
The poem is only 13 lines long, but it is structured very like an Italian sonnet: it is in iambic pentameter,
with the rhyme scheme abba cdec dfgfg (stanza breaks added for ease of reading).
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than that, however. It is composed in imitation of Wordsworth’s own Miltonic style,

beginning
Great intellect is here! whether it speak
The Poet’s or the Painter’s genius high
Contemplating the things remote that lie
Beyond the sight of other mortals.
But Stanley’s poem echoes more than Wordsworth’s style. In the exclamatory syntax of
its opening, in its pairing of a generalized poet and painter as comparable artists using a
“whether... or” clause, and even in its designation of genius as “high,” it echoes
Wordsworth’s own sonnet “To B.R. Haydon, Esq.,” published in the Annals six months
previously. Wordsworth’s sonnet opens
High is our calling, Friend!—Creative art
(Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with etherial hues,)
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part,
Heroically fashioned.
In echoing Wordsworth’s, Stanley’s poem seems to be joining a pre-existing, very
public, conversation between Wordsworth and Haydon. In reality, however, it does not
so much join as create that conversation. It does this by bringing into public view a
context that remains unspoken in Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth’s two sonnets in
the seventh number of the Annals roughly coincide chronologically with Haydon’s
drawing of his portrait,49 and their appearance in the magazine Haydon was so involved
in may well have been a gesture of kindness to Haydon in the wake of the portrait-

49
Haydon had worked with Wordsworth twice, once in 1815, to make a life mask of him in preparation for
including a portrait of him in his massive history painting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, not completed
until 1820, and once in 1818, to draw the chalk portrait referred to by Stanley. Haydon would, of course,
work with Wordsworth a third time in 1842, painting the famous full-length portrait of the elderly
Wordsworth on Hellvellyn, head bowed and arms crossed, a painting that would in turn prompt Elizabeth
Barret Browning to commemorate it with a sonnet.
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sitting.50 Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s two sonnets make no mention of the portrait. The
first is about an unrelated, possibly fictive landscape painting, and the other – the one
addressed to Haydon – is about painting and poetry as careers and callings.51 The two
poems are not a public gesture of thanks for the specific action of drawing Wordsworth’s
portrait. Stanley’s poem, however, brings Haydon’s drawing into the discussion.
Stanley’s poem frames Haydon’s portrait as a form of “praise” for Wordsworth,
observing that “while the Poet’s genius seems to strike, / The Painter’s claims the praise
his pencil gives.” According to Stanley’s construction of the conversation, Haydon’s
portrait is a public and explicit, if non-verbal, panegyric about Wordsworth’s “genius.”
Stanley does not explicitly mention Wordsworth’s sonnet to Haydon, but his canny
imitation of it tacitly brings the sonnet into conversation with the portrait. Stanley’s
poem presents itself as praise for both artist and poet, but what it praises is the evenly
matched exchange of public praise they give each other. That exchange never actually
took place, but Stanley’s reproduction of Wordsworth’s syntax creates the illusion that it
did, generating the public conversation the irregular sonnet appears to join. The irregular
sonnet, in short, very busily participates in the overall project of the Annals – the project
of bringing practicing artists into the limelight, making their voices publicly heard, and
investing them with prestige and authority.

Given that a number of the poems published in the Annals take full advantage of – and
participate in – the journal’s ethos as a deliberately public venue, it should come as no
surprise that the journal contains some specifically ekphrastic poems concerned with
ideas about sympathy that do the same. An anonymous and unnamed blank-verse poem
of sixty-two lines, published in the second issue side-by-side with the quatrain about
Richard Payne Knight and the panegyric addressed to Phillips, tells a story of two young
Englishmen travelling to Sicily and weeping over the ruins that memorialize the death of

50
The fact that Wordsworth alludes to the “pencil” of the visual artist, rather than the brush, subtly
suggests that he did write the poems in response to having his portrait taken. Haydon staked his reputation
on his paintings, but the 1818 portrait of Wordsworth is a chalk sketch – much closer to pencil than to
paint.
51
The first of these two sonnets is discussed further in Chapter 4 of this thesis, and the second in Chapter
5.
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Nicias in battle. The poem is just as deeply entrenched in the Annals’ project of
constructing artists as public figures as are the two poems that accompany it in the
journal’s pages: it is announced as commemorating “an interesting incident in the early
life of an artist, now decidedly at the head of his profession,” partially identified in the
poem’s last line as “—x—n” (probably John Flaxman).52 The poem praises Flaxman’s
youthful display of emotion, tacitly claiming that the weeping reveals his moral
superiority. The emotion is “sacred” and “pure,” produced by “the best sympathies of
human kind / In their best hours.” The poem also links Flaxman’s superior sensibility to
his artistic career, exclaiming that
…it was not Pity’s tear alone
That gemm’d the traveller’s eye, and from his breast
Wrung the big sigh—although to him unknown,
It was the sense of loftier feelings given
But to the chosen few—’twas rapture’s tear,
The tear of genius—’twas the Artist’s tear.

Similar, if less thorough-going, engagements with the issues of sensibility appear in other
poems. A verse contribution from a C.J.S., published in the eighth issue alongside
Keats’s two sonnets to Haydon, expresses its speaker’s “anguish” at seeing a painting of
The Judgement of Brutus and his “awe” at seeing one called Christ Rejected. Faced with
two paintings that show sons sentenced to death by their fathers, the speaker relies on his
feelings to guide him toward observing the moral difference between Brutus’ sons dying
“for their own crimes” and Christ dying “for all mankind.” A sonnet by William Hayley,
published in the twelfth issue, praises Prince Hoare (erstwhile editor of The Artist) for
maintaining open lines of communication with foreign art academies even during
wartime. Hayley attributes to Hoare a “boundless sympathy and zeal” that has “refin’d”
his mind and allowed him to inspire his “native land” to better conduct. As a
consequence, Britain can, in turn, inspire “the heart of genius to expand.” Sympathy and

52
John Flaxman is listed as “Professor in Sculpture at the Royal Academy, and Sculptor to Her Majesty” in
the directory of practicing artists at the end of Volume 1 of the Annals.
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zeal, in this poem, radiate outward from Hoare and make “new wonders” of art possible
throughout Europe. Printed opposite Hayley’s sonnet is a poem that takes up the
question of the spiritual implications of outward affect. In Lamb’s poem about Da
Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks (taken from Lamb’s recently published Works), Mary’s
expression of “trembling passion / Of devout admiration” contrasts the angel’s
expression of “such a perfect joy / As no dim doubts alloy.” Mary’s “trembling passion”
is trembling because she is as yet excluded from full knowledge of the divine.

Elsewhere in this thesis, I have had and will have occasion to discuss yet more ekphrastic
poems from the Annals that take up the questions of the intellectual culture of sensibility.
George Stanley’s irregular sonnet is comparably preoccupied with the question of what
outwardly expressed affects reveal about Wordsworth’s interiority, describing Haydon’s
sketch of Wordsworth as having an “eye” that “looks searching into Heaven,” and
crediting Haydon with having “portray[ed] with majesty / The soul her prison struggling
through to find / Employment suited to her powers.” A number of other ekphrastic
poems that appear in the Annals and that I shall discuss in other chapters likewise explore
ideas associated with the philosophy of sensibility: Wordsworth’s sonnets “Upon the
Sight of a Beautiful Picture” (Chapter 4) and “To B.R. Haydon, Esq.,” (Chapter 5),
Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (both discussed in
Chapter 4), and Henry Hart Milman’s Newdigate Prize poem “The Belvidere Apollo”
(discussed in the introductory chapter).

For the purposes of this thesis, the question is not only how many ekphrases that engaged
with the philosophical questions of sensibility appeared in The Annals, but also, more
crucially, what intellectual work they accomplished by making active use of the journal’s
vision of itself as a democratic art-world forum. The two poems that I will discuss in the
pages that follow both achieve insights into the workings of sympathy: one of them
generates a paradoxical synthesis of two modes of sympathy, staging a deliberate
intervention in the philosophical tradition outlined in the introductory chapter of this
thesis, and the other tacitly posits imaginative sympathy, even for a purely hypothetical
mourner, as the only effective tool of emotional self-regulation. But both poems’
explorations of sympathy are refined and sharpened by the public character of their
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speakers’ utterances. Mitford’s speaker adopts the tone of an editor or reviewer,

referring to herself as “we” and thus constructing her response to Haydon’s painting as
that of a generalized and impartial viewer. The speaker of the anonymous poem “On the
Monument,” although he stops short of an editorial “we,” nonetheless moves through a
series of rhetorical postures too histrionic to sound private, and contrasts his own,
disinterested response with that of a hypothetical viewer personally invested in the work
of art. The rhetorical strategies of both poems vibrate in tune with the ostentatious
public-ness of the Annals as a whole, but those rhetorical strategies are also part of how
the poems explore sentimental questions.

3.3 Sympathy and the Posture of Public Reviewing in

Ekphrastic Poems
The fifth issue of the Annals (the second issue of the second volume – published in the
summer of 1817) offers two ekphrases that very carefully construct their own
participation in the public sphere: one is a Petrarchan sonnet by Mary Russell Mitford
entitled “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon on a Study from Nature, exhibited at the Spring Garden
Exhibition, 1817,” and the other is an anonymous poem in elegiac quatrains entitled “On
the Monument to be placed in Lichfield Cathedral to the Memory of two only Children.
By F.L. Chantrey, Esq.”53 It is true that these poems’ aura of being public utterances is
heightened by an accident of their publication – a layer of meaning added by their
juxtaposition with one another, rather than anything intended by their authors.
Nevertheless, much of the poems’ intellectual work is accomplished by means of studied
posturing on the part of their speakers. The speakers of both poems adopt the posture of
the disinterested viewer of an artwork, and both speakers use that posture to think
through complex ideas about sympathetic response to visual arts, carefully enacting
sympathetic processes that stretch the culturally dominant paradigms for thinking about
sympathy inherited from eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Mitford’s sonnet
synthesizes the two modes of sympathy – the visual and instantaneous and the narrative
and imaginative – that philosophical convention treated as separate or opposed; it does so

53
F.L. Chantrey is the name of the sculptor, not the author of the poem.
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in order to frame its representation of sympathetic grief as intense to the point of paradox
or impossibility. The anonymous poem, concerned less with pushing the limits of
representing sympathetic grief than, like Cowper’s elegiac ekphrases, with establishing
the appropriate extent of an emotional response to an artwork, moves through a series of
rhetorical postures, as though the speaker is experimenting with sympathetic reactions of
varying abandon and restraint. Ultimately, he relies on the imagined spectre of an object
of sympathy – a bereaved mother – as the yardstick by which he measures the
moderation or intemperance of his own response, and in doing so explores a question
central to Adam Smith’s moral philosophy: the role of imaginative sympathy in
moderating emotional distress.

The selection of the two poems for the same issue is a canny choice on the part of editor
James Elmes: if the poems make use of the self-conscious publicity of the Annals to
augment the theatrical postures of their speakers, the journal in turn makes use of the
poems to further its agenda of promoting the authority of practicing artists. Of the two
poems, the first is the work of an author of comparative visibility, Mary Russell Mitford,
but it is attributed in the Annals to M*** R****** M******, thus leaving the work of
name recognition and attribution to the reader. It is also addressed to Haydon, without
mentioning the fact that Mitford had been in Haydon’s company when she saw the
drawing.54 The poem thus offers the reader the impression of a glimpse into an insider’s
world of artists and their personal friends. The paratexts of the second poem identify it
as submitted by an anonymous reader, who got it from a friend, who extracted it from the
Morning Chronicle.55 This poem, in contrast to Mitford’s sonnet, generates the

54
For a description of the encounter, see Paul O’Keeffe’s biography of Haydon, p. 174.
55
The poem actually appears in the Morning Chronicle twice: once under the title “Lines on the
Monument...,” in its entirety, on May 27, 1817, when the statue it describes was on display in London, and
a second time with no title, only in part (the first three stanzas) on November 3, 1817, after the statue had
been placed in its permanent home in Lichfield Cathedral – and, of course, after the poem’s publication in
the Annals. The second, partial printing of the poem claims to have extracted it from The Sheffield Iris,
and more or less the same article (attributing it to the Iris) appears in the Gentleman’s Magazine for
November 1817 and the Tickler for April 1821. Meredith McGill has noted the commonness of such
multiple reprintings in an American context, observing that “[u]nauthorized reprinting was so widely
practiced in this period that the designation of a poem, article, or tale as an ‘original’ referred not to the
quality of its contents, but to the fact that the book or periodical in which it appeared was the site of its first
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impression of a broad, democratic and actively participating reading public, in which

anonymous contributors could vouch for the aesthetic value both of a statue and of a
poem – in this case because the poem is in “such exquisite keeping with the beautiful
composition which is the subject of [its] eulogy.” In short, although the two poems
present themselves in vastly different ways, they both present themselves as taking part
in a larger cultural conversation about art, and their juxtaposition lends that conversation
both the glamour of an exclusive peek into the world of professional artists and the
egalitarian appeal of democratic participation. Moreover, that juxtaposition fuels the
ongoing cultural project of The Annals and of The Artist before it, balancing the insider’s
authority of practicing artists and poets with the appearance, at least, of radically
democratic reader participation, to the total exclusion of aristocratic patrons or learned
connoisseurs.

3.3.1 “Sonnet to Mr. HAYDON on a Study from Nature, exhibited at

the Spring Garden Exhibition, 1817.”
‘Su le labbre un sospir, su gli occhi un pianto’ Tasso.
“Tears in the eye, and on the lips a sigh!”
Haydon! the great, the beautiful, the bold,

printing” (2). That insight extends to the British printing scene: the Annals, of course, dropped the
“original” from the title of its “original poetry” section for precisely this reason: that so much of its poetry
was not original in this sense. Nevertheless, the fact that the magazine draws such attention to the prior life
of “On the Monument” is significant in itself. The poem is published in the Annals with the following
note:
To the Editor of ANNALS of the FINE ARTS.
SIR,
THE following lines seem to be in such exquisite keeping with
the beautiful composition which is the subject of their eulogy,
that I think they fully deserve to be placed in the poetic pages
of your valuable publication ; but perhaps, having already
appeared in the Morning Chronicle, your rules may preclude
their admission. I wish I could inform you of their author,
but as I obtained them only through a friend, who extracted
them from the Morning Chronicle, it is not in my power.
I am, Sir, yours, &c.
W. S. I.
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Thy wisdom’s king, thy mercy’s god unfold;

These art and genius blend in unison high,
But this is of the soul. The majesty
Of grief dwells here; grief cast in such a mould
As Niobe’s of yore. The tale is told
All at a glance. “A childless mother I!”
The tale is told—and who can e’er forget
That e’er has seen that visage of despair!
With unaccustomed tears our cheeks are wet,
Heavy our hearts with unaccustomed care,
Upon our thoughts it presses like a debt,
We close our eyes in vain; that face is there.
M*** R****** M******

Insofar as “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” is a poem about the nature of good art, it starts from
the assumption that the ability to express and elicit powerful feeling constitutes artistic
value (an assumption markedly different from the assumption underlying Cowper’s
ekphrases: that it is an artwork’s personal relevance that renders it moving).
Furthermore, the poem implicitly holds itself to a similar standard of poetic value, using
the kind of expressive manipulations of syntax that had long been standard in the
literature of sensibility, with the apparent purpose of provoking a reaction in the reader.
“Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” puts its emphasis on the symptoms of overwhelming grief in a
pictured figure, and on witnessing and sympathetically recreating that grief. The poem
pushes the assumption of the artistic merit of eliciting sympathy to its logical extreme,
challenging the idea that such sympathy is inherently pleasurable, and valorizing the
painting’s capacity to afflict the viewer with psychic pain. Its most daring intellectual
work, however, is what it does with the notion of a single moment of representation in a
painting. Mitford’s sonnet may be first and foremost a panegyric on Haydon’s works –
and one work above the others – but the terms of its praise, and the linguistic and formal
strategies with which that praise is expressed, constitute an intervention in the ongoing
discussion of the interrelated ideas of verbal and visual representation and of
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instantaneous and imaginative modes of sympathy that had featured prominently in

British aesthetic discourse for several decades. At the same time, the poem’s publication
in the Annals signals its participation in the burgeoning conversation within the art world
about the relative authority of practicing artists. As a publicized piece of private
correspondence from one artist to another, “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” participates in the
project of the Annals by its very existence, but it also adopts a rhetorical strategy that
further cements its affiliation with that project. It uses a posture of almost editorial
disinterestedness to make its speaker’s eventual succumbing to sympathetic emotion
more striking, thus drawing attention to its careful manipulation of conventional thought
about aesthetic and sympathetic response in representing a sympathetic grief that is,
contrary to convention, both instantaneous and circumstantial.

In spite of the poem’s overt claim to being a piece of personal correspondence made
public, the speaker of “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” adopts a carefully calculated pose of
even-handed assessment. Like Cowper’s “The Tears of a Painter,” “Sonnet to Mr.
Haydon” deals with one of the archetypical scenes of the literature of sensibility, namely
a parent grieving for a lost child, but neither the poem nor the picture makes any of the
biographically-based claims to sincerity that are so prominent in Cowper’s ekphrases.
The poem’s title, presumably borrowing the title of the picture itself, refers to it as a
“Study from Nature,”56 but the fact that the poem’s title says it is “on a Study from
Nature” (italics mine) rather than “on his Study from Nature” or “on the Study from
Nature” seems calculated to blur the distinction between the picture’s title and a simple
descriptive tag: The poem’s title suggests that the poem’s author or speaker either labels
or concurs in labelling the piece a study from nature, thus beginning the poem on a note
of description inextricably linked with judgment. The poem’s speaker refers to herself57
in the first person plural in a manner that initially suggests not the personally invested
viewer but rather the disinterested reviewer. She allots Haydon’s two ambitious history

56
O’Keeffe identifies the sketch as a drawing of “an exotically dressed young woman, who may have been
Patience Smith, his ‘Gypsy’” (174).
57
Or himself. There is no particular evidence that the speaker is female, especially given the semi-
anonymous attribution of the poem to M*** R****** M****** in the Annals.
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paintings their due measure of praise before turning to the picture she prefers. Even the
allusion to Niobe in the second quatrain and the partial suppression of Mitford’s identity
in the attribution contribute to the impression that the emotions represented, including the
speaker’s, are generalized rather than personal. For a poem that presents itself as a
tribute to a painter from his friend, “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” constructs both the picture’s
representation of grief and the speaker’s reaction in surprisingly general terms.

“Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” starts with a loose translation of its epigraph from Tasso that
immediately sets the text of the poem in tension with the privileging of “natural” feeling
in the title: “‘Tears in the eye, and on the lips a sigh!’” The epigraph names two
symptoms of feeling dear to the literature of sensibility – a sigh and a tear – without
specifying whose affective symptoms they are; indeed, at first it seems that they are
Haydon’s sigh and tear, since his name is the first word of the second line. The poem’s
first line not only translates the epigraph but also adds an exclamation mark not present
in the Italian, thus implying a certain fervour on the part of the speaker in uttering the
line. That fervour, however, is undercut by the very fact that the line is a translation, and
thus explicitly not a spontaneous or “natural” expression of feeling. The exclamation
mark thus functions only nominally as an expressive device; its chief effect is to bring
the epigraph yet more completely in line with the conventions of sensibility. It is as if
Mitford deliberately invokes the ritualized literary heritage of sensibility and juxtaposes
it with her speaker’s posture of authoritative and balanced assessment, daring her readers
to find them incompatible.

As the poem progresses, the terms of its praise gradually shift to suggest that Mitford is
invoking the capacity to produce sympathetic reactions as the sole measure of artistic
value. Immediately after delivering the exclamatory translation of the epigraph, the
speaker exclaims “Haydon! the great, the beautiful, the bold,” thus suggesting terms of
praise that are jarringly unrelated to the tears and sigh of the epigraph. The reader is
even momentarily allowed to assume that it is Haydon himself who is great, beautiful
and bold, before the speaker clarifies that it is in fact the subjects of his two most
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ambitious paintings – Solomon and Christ – who are thus praised: “Thy wisdom’s king,
thy mercy’s god unfold.”58 “Haydon!” is the subject of the imperative “unfold,” and it is
the great, the beautiful and the bold that he is to reveal. Half way through the octave,
however, the speaker enacts the process of turning from those two paintings (“these”) to
a third (“this”), which she praises as “of the soul,” saying “[t]hese art and genius blend in
unison high, / But this is of the soul,” the words “but this” falling tidily at the start of the
second quatrain. While “of the soul” may not be obviously a term of more exalted praise
than “unison high” of “art and genius,” it is at least a term that conflicts less with the
tears promised in the first line. Moreover, the speaker’s verbal act of turning away from
the first two paintings suggests that it is this third picture, rather than the more ambitious,
historical works, that is the true object of the sonnet’s praise.59 That act of turning away
is never reversed, even when the speaker attempts to stop looking at the third picture, and
the ideals of greatness, beauty, and boldness are permanently displaced by the
extravagantly emotional terms in which the speaker praises the “Study from Nature.”

The terms in which Mitford’s speaker praises the sketch become more and more
affectively intense as the sonnet progresses, but, as this happens, Mitford’s emphasis
shifts from the picture’s representation of grief to the speaker’s experience of it. The
second half of the octave attributes to the study “the majesty / Of grief,” and likens that
grief to Niobe’s, asserting that “[t]he majesty / Of grief dwells here; grief cast in such a
mould / As Niobe’s of yore.” The allusion to Niobe, of course, seems finally to deliver
the tears promised by the sonnet’s epigraph and first line. The sestet, however, says very
little about the pictured woman’s grief; it mentions her “visage of despair” only once.

58
The poem’s footnotes identify the paintings as “The Judgment of Solomon” and “Christ’s Entry into
Jerusalem, now painting [i.e. currently being painted].”
59
It should perhaps not be a surprise that Mitford, interested in praising an artwork for its representation of
emotion, should turn away from two ambitious history paintings toward a “study from nature” – a sketch.
In The Visual and Verbal Sketch, Richard Sha observes that “[i]f the aesthetics of the sketch makes it look
nonideological and thus allows it to be more ideologically persuasive, its resistance to the excesses of art –
polish – makes it more artful insofar as the artist is not interested in ornament for the sake of ornament or
artifice for the sake of artifice. As the spontaneous delineation of […] the artist’s feelings on the spot, the
sketch aligns itself with nature, as opposed to culture” (3).
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Instead, the sestet says a great deal about the speaker’s sympathetic feelings in viewing
the sketch:
The tale is told—and who can e’er forget
That e’er has seen that visage of despair!
With unaccustomed tears our cheeks are wet,
Heavy our hearts with unaccustomed care,
Upon our thoughts it presses like a debt,
We close our eyes in vain; that face is there.
The speaker’s feelings are not only powerful enough to make her cry, but are also
involuntary and self-perpetuating. They weigh on the speaker’s thoughts “like a debt,”
suggesting not only that they recur, but also that they contain a subtle element of guilt,
and a lingering desire to act in some way that will pay the debt and alleviate the need
repetitively to think about it. The sonnet concludes with the statement that the speaker
actually cannot escape the sight of the pictured woman’s sorrowful countenance – that
the sight is so deeply imprinted on her mind that averting or closing her eyes is futile.
Even the repetition of “the tale is told” and “unaccustomed” seem to mimic the
unstoppable recurrence of the speaker’s extravagantly sympathetic emotions.

Given that the painting’s capacity to elicit a powerful affective response seems to be the
cornerstone of Mitford’s praise, it should perhaps not be surprising that Mitford’s own
sonnet is set up as though it is intended to transmit as well as to represent the speaker’s
sympathetic feelings. Not only the copious exclamation marks but also the complex and
sometimes broken syntax seem intended, as they so often are in the literature of
sensibility, to represent a degree of emotion that transcends the expressive capacity of
words. The syntax frequently mimics the speaker’s fraught experience of seeing the
sketch. The first time the speaker utters the phrase “the tale is told,” in the second-last
line of the octave, it is part of the enjambed statement “the tale is told / All at a glance.”
The enjambment curtails the reader’s ability to pause at the end of the line, and mimics
the headlong rush in which the speaker apprehends the pictured woman’s circumstances.
The second time the phrase appears, in the first line of the sestet, it is followed by a
heavy caesura that emphasizes the finality of the past tense “told,” preemptively
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mirroring the speaker’s inability to forget or un-see the pictured woman’s face: the
phrase is transformed from a statement of the picture’s expressiveness to a statement of
its effect on a viewer. The most crucial tool that the poem uses to evoke the reader’s
sympathy, however, is the speaker’s self-construction. One the one hand, the undefined
“we,” with its overtones of an editorial review, sets the speaker up to sound disinterested.
On the other hand, it becomes increasingly clear that the tears and sigh of the epigraph
belong, not only to the grieving mother, but also to the “we” – to the speaker. As the
speaker’s disinterestedness dissolves in the face of the study’s representation of grief, the
authorial “we” becomes less convincingly that of a dispassionate reviewer. Moreover, as
the syntax mimics the experience of seeing the sketch, thus making that experience
available to the reader, I would posit that the repeated “we” becomes an open invitation.
We, the poem’s readers, can join the “we” who are distressed by the picture, and our
affective participation in the poem`s scenario of viewing the sketch is facilitated by the
same plural self-reference that initially makes the speaker sound so much like an
emotionally neutral reviewer.

The speaker’s complex posture as a disinterested viewer who is inexorably overcome by

the picture’s affective power is especially significant in the light of what “Sonnet to Mr.
Haydon” does with the intellectual heritage associated with the visual arts; the means of
both representing and evoking grief that Mitford attributes to the sketch is presented as
the fusion of two traditionally distinct conceptions of sympathy. The picture affects its
viewer instantaneously and, of course, by means of vision. That effect, however, is
figured as story-telling: Mitford’s speaker says that “the tale is told / All at a glance.”
Moreover, no sooner has the speaker said that the “tale” has been instantaneously told,
than the poem actually presents the tale, with as much concision as its verbal medium
will allow, by ventriloquizing the subject of the picture exclaiming “a childless mother
I!” Here, too, the poem’s syntax attempts to approximate the speed with which the tale is
supposedly “told” by the picture, for the stock situation of “a childless mother” is
presented in its succinct entirety before the grammatical subject (“I”) and the elided verb
(“am,” or perhaps rather “have become”) appear to do the work of turning that situation
into the bare bones of a “tale.” In short, “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” conflates an act of
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seeing and an act of hearing and understanding: an apparently instantaneous visual

impression and a temporally derived knowledge of the painted woman’s circumstances
(she had a child; she no longer has a child; the child has died or been taken from her).

The idea of an artwork conveying a “tale” in a single “glance” is an inversion of an idea

that came from aesthetic philosophy and that had gained popularity in England by the
end of the eighteenth century. The notion that a painter should select the “pregnant
moment” was by this time a comparative commonplace, most notably popularized by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who insisted in his Discourses that painting, unlike its sister poetry,
must make its impression on the viewer “at one blow” (205). Mitford’s phrase “all at a
glance” seems to echo the very wording that Reynolds used. Reynolds, however, did not
contend that painting should tell a tale “at one blow,” but rather simply that it must have
its effect on the viewer “at one blow.” He proposed that poetry, while less powerful in
any one instant, has all the advantages of suspense and plot – in effect, of narrative.
Mitford’s statement that the painting’s instantaneous effect consists of telling a tale is a
suggestive collapsing of categories. “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” may co-opt two sets of
terms that were commonplace in contemporary discourse about art, but it co-opts them in
order to create a paradox: an impossible embedding of the temporally expansive concept
of the “tale” within the temporally compressed concept of the picture’s instantaneous
effect.

I would argue that this paradox of the picture telling a tale at a single glance serves a very
specific purpose within the sonnet: to synthesize two popular ideas about sympathy.
Both the idea of feeling sympathy upon hearing a tale and the idea of registering another
person’s feelings “all at a glance” have a long history, as the introductory chapter to this
thesis explains. David Hume proposed that sympathy is prompted by the observation –
usually the sight – of “external signs in the countenance and conversation” (2.1.11.3).
Adam Smith privileged the former mode of sympathy virtually to the exclusion of the
latter. “Sympathy,” he claimed, “does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as
from that of the situation which excites it” (1.1.10). But if sympathy was primarily an
imaginative reconstruction of circumstances according to Smith, the idea Hume proposed
about it had also found its way into the general culture. For example, Adela Pinch, in
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tracing the idea that “feelings are learned from women,” has identified an excerpt from
the Tatler in which Steele recounts being overwhelmed with sorrow as a child on
witnessing his mother crying, without having any idea what had prompted her grief
(Strange Fits 81). The philosophical legacy of the eighteenth century included two quite
distinct, if not mutually exclusive, ideas about how sympathy works: one involving the
sight of symptoms of feeling, and the other involving the imaginative reconstruction of a
situation that prompted feeling. “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” refuses that distinction,
insisting that the sketch’s “tale” (that is, the stock situation) is comprehended precisely
“at a glance,” just as the pictured woman’s affective symptoms are. By refusing the
conventional distinction between poetry’s temporal tale-telling and painting’s
instantaneous visual effect, “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” is able to attribute two modes of
eliciting sympathy to one work of art, and the study’s extraordinary power to affect the
speaker is constructed in part as an effect of that doubling. The speaker is bombarded
with two kinds of sympathetic stimuli: she perceives the symptoms of the pictured
woman’s grief in the same glance in which she understands the woman’s “tale” of loss.
In so deliberately collapsing two sets of categories that philosophical thought usually
took to be separate, “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” suggests the limitations of such distinctions,
and implies that the most powerful sympathy cannot be so tidily labelled.

“Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” looks at first glance to be participating in the Romantic fashion
for stories of static or self-perpetuating emotion discussed in the introductory chapter of
this thesis, in that the speaker ends up in a kind of static or cyclical psychic state, unable
to banish the image of the childless mother’s grief, much as Keats’s Isabella is unable to
relinquish her attachment to the basil plant; the sonnet, however, is doing much more
than conform to this literary trope. If those narratives of unflagging emotion are
themselves an important way in which the idea of the single or pregnant moment became
differently inflected in the Romantic period, as I have suggested that they are, this poem
nonetheless goes beyond participating in that fashion. It draws directly on the sister
discourses of moral and aesthetic philosophy, actively exploring and expanding
traditional ideas about sympathy. To do so, it relies on its speaker’s posture of publicly
delivering a balanced assessment of three artworks – a posture that comes to function
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quite differently at the end of the poem than at the beginning. That posture, in turn, is
accentuated by the sonnet’s publication in the Annals of the Fine Arts. The quarterly’s
steady pursuit of the status of a public venue makes the speaker’s “we” seem all the more
akin to a reviewer’s when it first appears – an apparently seamless continuation of the
editorial voice that dominates the rest of the journal’s pages – and thus renders all the
more remarkable the speaker’s dissolution into tears before a sketch described as
paradoxically telling a tale. The poem’s sentimental epigraph may conjure expectations
that the text will immerse itself uncritically in feeling, but in fact it makes a pointed
intervention in the intellectual culture of sensibility by refusing to treat as separate two
modes of sympathy that were usually presented as opposed – that Adam Smith, indeed,
had gone to some lengths to distinguish from one another. And that intellectual work is
highlighted by the speaker’s initial attitude of impartial, public reviewing, which
conspicuously breaks down, drawing attention to the unconventional nature of the
speaker’s sympathetic response by drawing attention to the suddenness and extremity of
her response in the first place.

3.3.2 “On the Monument to be placed in Lichfield Cathedral to the

Memory of two only Children. By F. L. Chantrey, Esq.”

The anonymous poem “On the Monument” appears at first glance to have more in
common with Cowper’s ekphrases than with the self-consciously experimental “Sonnet
to Mr. Haydon” with which it appeared in the Annals. Like Cowper’s poems, it deals
with a representation of the deceased, and it takes up ideas of verisimilitude and the
potential of portraiture to assuage parental grief. It does so, however, from a perspective
reminiscent of the editorial “we” in Mitford’s sonnet: that of the disinterested viewer
encountering the work apparently for the first time. And as with Mitford’s sonnet, that
posture takes on a new and enriched meaning in the context of the poem’s publication in
the Annals. The poem appeared in a journal that promoted itself as the public arbiter of
artistic discourse, and achieved widespread publication in a range of other periodicals, as
its paratexts in the Annals announce (the Morning Chronicle, and later the Sheffield Iris,
the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the Tickler). Moreover, like Mitford’s poem, it is about
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a work of art on display in London at the time of its publication. The aura of publicity
that the poem thus acquires subtly alters it, making its speaker’s posture of
disinterestedness more decisively performative. In the context of the Annals, that posture
comes across not merely as an enactment of one speaker’s response to an artwork, but as
a public enactment of a response. Its very publicity lends that response at least the
façade of philosophical authority by giving it the appearance of a typical or generalizable
response. Moreover, although the poem does not engage as directly as “Sonnet to Mr.
Haydon” with the existing aesthetic discourse of its day, it nonetheless uses its aura of
public performance to think through a question about sympathy. This speaker does not
simply respond to the experience of seeing the statue. Rather, he experiments with a
series of responses in which sympathy proves possible only when he is rigorous in
maintaining the distinction between the real (what is) and the imagined (what might be),
carefully avoiding the realm of delusion (what cannot be). I will argue that the trajectory
of the speaker’s experimentation suggests an insight into one of the uses to which the
psychological mechanisms of sympathy could be put, and addresses a question that had
featured prominently in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: the question of the
relationship between a grieving person and a sympathetic onlooker.

The statue, which is called “The Sleeping Children,”60 uses the lifelike representation of
sleeping children in a funeral monument to generate tension between its potential for
consolation and its impulse to represent the impossible. It is a life-sized white marble
representation in a realist mode of two girls reclining in each other’s arms on a large
stone pillow. The sculpture is very explicitly a funeral monument, for the names of the
deceased girls are engraved on the side, and it is working with the clichéd metaphor “the
sleep of death.” That metaphor comes with a weight of theological overtones, including
the Christian idea of death as a literal sleep from which one awakes on Judgement Day.
As the anonymous poem insists, however, the girls in the sculpture do not look
metaphorically or spiritually asleep. They simply look asleep, and nothing about their

60
The statue’s title is not mentioned in the Annals.
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representation suggests that weighty theological abstractions should be brought to the

viewing experience. If anything, the sculpture is as much a posthumous portrait of the
two girls as a gravestone.

The poem’s speaker begins his response to this monument on a note of calm admiration,
using language suggestive both of the statue’s evocation of loss and of its literal
verisimilitude, but without overtly alluding to either, saying
Soft, as when faintly from the evening sky,
The rainbow steals, and bitter tempests cease,
Fading from beauty to eternity,
Recline these forms of gentleness and peace.

The softly twining arm—the leaning head,

By fondness couch’d—the sacred calm that throws
Its halcyon spell around the holy bed
Where loveliness and innocence repose.
The Speaker elides “softly” to “soft,” as though to register the apparent softness of the
stone pillow. In the second stanza, too, he uses diction that suggests pillows and sleep:
“softly,” “leaning,” “couch’d,” “bed,” “repose.” The statue’s function as a funeral
monument is likewise suggested throughout the first two stanzas in words that have
overtones of death or resurrection: “faintly,” “fading,” “eternity,” “sacred,” “holy,” and
“innocence.” All of this, however, is innuendo; however real, even presumed, the idea of
death as a temporary sleep might have been for most nineteenth-century readers, the
poem hints at, rather than expressing, that metaphor, and the spiritual hope it carries with
it, and it hints at, rather than stating, the fact of the girls’ death. The speaker barely
describes the statue, specifying only the relative position of one girl’s arm and the other’s
head. He describes the “calm” mood it evokes, but refers to the girls as abstractions such
as “loveliness and innocence” rather than as real children who have died. Even the
poem’s emphasis on its own artistry evokes the statue’s technical sophistication. The
speaker delivers an extended simile (“as when faintly from the evening sky, / The
rainbow steals, and bitter tempests cease, / Fading from beauty to eternity”) before
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naming its tenor, the sculpted girls, to whom he refers only obliquely, as softly reclining
“forms of gentleness and peace.”

The third stanza marks a notable departure from the first two. Rather than using
language that seems to absorb and reflect the qualities of the statue, it announces itself as
a subjective, even enthusiastic, response:
Oh! they are more than art! I see the breath,
Fan those pure lips—the hovering smile I see
Hang on those brows; and cannot deem that death

Could hold them thus entranc’d so tenderly.

The speaker’s speech patterns become exclamatory, and he hyperbolically praises the
statue as “more than art.” He then expands that hyperbole until it becomes a statement of
delusion: “I see the breath / Fan those pure lips.” The stanza concludes with a statement
that takes the outward form of a judgement: the speaker “cannot deem that death / Could
hold them thus entranc’d so tenderly” (emphasis mine). Notwithstanding the word
“deem,” however, that statement elides the difference between the sculpted girls and the
dead girls they represent, and is less a judgement than a refusal of rational judgement.
The speaker succumbs to the statue’s verisimilitude, treating its realism as reality and
conflating the stillness of the statue with the real girls’ trance or sleep of death. That
conflation allows the statue’s verisimilitude momentarily to negate the fact of the real
girls’ death: the illusion that the sculpted children are real becomes the illusion that the
real girls are still alive.

The speaker quickly rejects this illusion and reasserts the fact of the children’s death; the
language remains exclamatory, but the tone shifts from rapt admiration to regret and awe,
as the speaker says
Alas! they sleep not—tho’ no shade of gloom
Doth o’er the pale soft placid features play;
It is the fearful slumber of the tomb—
It is that rest which passeth not away!
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Although the word “gloom” appears only as a negation – there is “no shade of gloom” –
the rhyme with “tomb” emphasizes the dreary sound of the long vowels, in effect
creating the very gloom the speaker wishes to deny. The anaphora in the third and fourth
lines emphasizes the absolute fact of the statement “it is” in contrast to the speaker’s
erring attempt to “deem” the girls living in the previous stanza. The characterization of
the sleep of death as “fearful slumber” even adds a note of horror to the sombre tone of
the stanza. The biblical locution of the last line seems intended to mitigate that horror,
but it also establishes yet more firmly the inarguable finality of the children’s death –
implicitly framed as the will of an omnipotent God.

Having retreated from his own impulse to succumb to the statue’s illusion of life, the
speaker imaginatively constructs the response of the girls’ mother to the monument,
sympathetically attributing to her the delusion he himself has succeeded in rejecting.
“Still might affection lean,” he says,
o’er such a bier,
By the calm cheek and breathing breast beguil’d;
Still might the anguish’d mother’s fruitless tear
Linger in hope upon her sleeping child!
At first his act of imaginative sympathy is sedate and generalized: he imagines only a
personified “affection” leaning, “beguiled,” over the sculpture. In the second half of the
stanza, however, the speaker imagines the “anguish’d mother’s fruitless tear,”
paradoxically generated not by grief but by an unrealizable “hope.” The imagined
mother grieves in a kind of limbo: “still might affection lean o’er such a bier” suggests
that her mourning is indefinite or even perpetual (italics mine). The mother’s “anguish”
necessarily co-exists with her “hope,” for the protraction of her anguish and her posture
of hanging over the statue are predicated on her being deluded by the statue’s
verisimilitude. Moreover, the speaker not only imagines the mother trapped indefinitely
by the conflicting emotions of hope and anguish, but also registers a conflicted
sympathetic relationship with her. On the one hand, his persistent and anaphoric use of
the conditional “still might” maintains his distance from the bereaved mother by
emphasizing that she is a hypothetical construction. On the other hand, his use of
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increasingly intense affective language as he moves from imagining “affection” to

imagining an “anguished mother,” combined with his concluding exclamation mark,
indicates that he is as enthused in his sympathy with the mother by the end of this stanza
as he had been in his rapt ecstasy of delusion two stanzas earlier.

That enthusiastic act of imaginative sympathy evidently assists the speaker in regaining
his own grasp of reality, for, in the concluding stanza, he appears to have retreated
entirely from the seductive power of the monument’s verisimilitude, acknowledging that
[...] they are pass’d away for evermore—
These cheeks—these lips—are pallid as their own;
For them, life’s struggles of dismay are o’er,
Cold—cold—and silent as this icy stone!
Not only in pointing out the children’s exemption in death from “life’s struggles of
dismay,” but also, and more crucially, in drawing a parallel between their current state
and the artistic medium, the speaker implies a critique of the other reactions in which he
has indulged. While it is conventional for an elegiac poem to pass through a phase of
denying the reality of death, in this case the speaker’s indulgence in that phase is a kind
of willful misinterpretation of the statue that is the poem’s subject, as the poem’s final
line makes clear. Not only is the girls’ death a fact, it is a fact that is part of the total
figurative meaning of the statue. The monument’s lifelike representation of repose may
stand in for the vehicle of the conventional metaphor “the sleep of death,” but the ghostly
white, unmoving and “icy stone” of its medium figures the tenor: death. As the speaker
finally asserts, “[t]hese cheeks—these lips—are pallid as their [the real, dead girls’]
own.” To have succumbed so thoroughly to the statue’s verisimilitude as to have
overlooked its medium – the deathly pale and unyielding marble – is to have
underestimated not only the technical accomplishment that could make stone look like a
pillow but also the spiritual meaning that the statue embodies by means of its medium.

The speaker’s critique of his own erstwhile enthusiasm, however, is slightly incomplete,
for “On the Monument” registers a hint of discomfort with its concluding posture of
acceptance. The substitution of dashes for commas in “[t]hese cheeks – these lips – are
pallid” suggest hesitancy on the part of the speaker as he sets up the terms of the
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comparison “pallid as their own.” The repetition of the dashes in “cold – cold – and
silent” suggests yet further hesitation – a morbid lingering over the concept of coldness,
and perhaps even an unwillingness to bring the second comparison, “silent as this icy
stone,” to its completion. The alliteration of “silent as this icy stone” mimics the hushed
whispers that will surround the monument in its final resting place in Lichfield
Cathedral, presumably also the girls’ final resting place. Lastly, the emphasis on
temperature in “cold – cold – ” and “icy,” while it emphatically counteracts the earlier
emphasis on “soft,” nevertheless concludes the poem with a tactile image: an image both
devoid of comfort and very much of this world.

Still more telling than the punctuation and diction, however, is the unusual figurative
structure of the first comparison. “Cheeks pale as marble” is the conventional simile
hovering in the background of the comparison in the second line. The speaker, however,
calls the statue’s real marble cheeks “pallid,” a word usually reserved for people, thus
subtly personifying the statue. That personification has the effect of making the
comparison between the statue’s cheeks and the girls’ strangely literal. If the point of
analogy is pallor, then it applies literally to the cheeks of the dead girls; the element of
figuration has shifted from the comparison, where one would expect it, to the
personification of the statue. Moreover, the personification reminds us once again of the
statue’s extraordinary verisimilitude; in so doing, it blurs the line between the monument
and the real children, and gestures toward the powerful illusion from which the speaker
has so carefully retreated. Thus, while the comparison looks at first glance like a simile
that makes explicit the figural meaning of the monument itself, the figurative structure of
the line in fact resists the speaker’s overt assertion of the girls’ death and his own
acceptance.

“On the Monument,” then, is a poem that adopts a complex sequence of postures in
relation to the affective power of a work of visual art. Easily dismissible on first glance
as self-indulgently sentimental, it nonetheless enacts a struggle for emotional restraint in
the presence of a compelling work of art; at the same time, it subtly registers discomfort
with its own hard-won emotional restraint, suggesting a certain degree of ambivalence
about the relative merits of the responses with which it experiments. More crucially, the
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poem enacts an instance of sympathetic imagination that suggests an insight into some of
the functions of sympathy itself: the speaker attributes a response similar to the one he
has just rejected to an imagined construction of a bereaved parent, as though he can
establish his own emotional moderation only by imagining circumstances that would
warrant a lack of moderation. The poems discussed in Chapter 5 of this thesis explore
alternatives to Adam Smith’s theory that one can moderate one’s own grief by
sympathizing with the sympathy of an onlooker; the onlooker’s sympathetic grief is
necessarily less intense than one’s own first-hand grief, and so sympathetically bringing
one’s own feelings into line with the onlooker’s sympathetic feelings will involve
lessening their force. “On the Monument” comes at the question of the relationship
between a sympathetic onlooker and a grieving person from a different angle: what
happens when the onlooker, who is not personally bereaved, experiences feelings that
require moderation? Can imagining or sympathizing with someone who is bereaved
lessen the onlooker’s grief by reminding him of the purely imaginative and sympathetic
nature of his feelings? “On the Monument” would seem to suggest that it can.

In order to make that complex suggestion, “On the Monument” depends on its speaker
moving through a series of rhetorical attitudes, enacting in each one a different possible
response to the artwork before him. Moreover, it depends on its speaker’s successive
responses being generalizable: abstract possible reactions of a typical viewer comparable
to Smith’s generalized sufferer and spectator – for only if the speaker is thus typical does
his trajectory of affective responses take on philosophical significance. The poem’s
conformity to the ethos of the Annals is part of how it achieves this effect. Like
Mitford’s sonnet, “On the Monument” seems remarkably at home in the pages of the
Annals. Taken in this context, the poem reads as a verse review: like “Sonnet to Mr.
Haydon,” it is about a work of art on display in London at the time of its publication.
And a review, of course, is meant to put forward the representative reaction of a
generalized viewer. In any other context, the elements of review embedded in the text of
“On the Monument” would probably be too subtle for most readers to note. But the
poem’s publication context in the Annals emphasizes the impersonality of its expression
of a spectator’s reaction to seeing the statue evidently for the first time, without obvious
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preconceptions, and it emphasizes the sheer theatricality of the speaker’s soliloquy-like

exclamations. The intellectual work that “On the Monument” accomplishes is thus
dependent on its (possibly accidental) participation in the Annals’ quest for the public’s
attention. In the Annals, “On the Monument” achieves a kind of symbiotic harmony, its
topicality and performativity playing into Elmes’s project of making the Annals as loud a
public mouthpiece for the art world as possible, while the context provided by the Annals
in turn grants the poem the appearance of impersonal authority. Thus, and only thus,
does its exploration of the moderating effect of sympathy on one’s own feelings become,
not a personal confession or anecdote, but an intervention in the intellectual culture of
sensibility.

The Annals, as Klancher has shown and as its pages reveal, is a publication very much
embedded in the art world of its day, and articulating an anti-aristocratic position within
that world. Other chapters in this thesis examine poems written in very different
contexts. “The Belvidere Apollo” and its fellow Newdigate poems were written by
Oxford undergraduates, deeply embedded in precisely the milieu of connoisseurship
against which the Annals raged. “On the Medusa” was composed by Shelley, in Italy,
writing politically radical texts in the Florentine Gallery. It is worth remembering that
these contexts were interrelated: that Shelley admired Keats, who published in the
Annals, and that Wordsworth enjoyed the patronage of Sir George Beaumont and yet
also published in the Annals. Although the two poems that are the keystone texts of this
chapter use and transfigure their context in the Annals to further their intellectual
explorations of sensibility, the questions about sensibility that they confront are
inseparable from the questions asked by other poems, published both in and out of the
Annals – or, in the case of Keats and Shelley’s posthumous texts, not published by their
authors at all.

The two poems I have focused on in this chapter are both fundamentally concerned with
how sympathy works and what it accomplishes in the context of a viewer confronting an
artwork. “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” constructs an extreme sympathetic response as a
superlative tribute to an artwork that Mitford’s speaker praises solely in sentimental
terms. “On the Monument” conjures sympathy with a hypothetical grief as the antidote
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to too extreme a response to an artwork. But the intellectual work accomplished by these
two poems is not self-contained: it is part of the same intellectual culture that occupies
the remaining chapters of this thesis, and the parallels between the ideas explored in
these two poems and those explored in other Romantic ekphrases reveal just how
embedded in that culture the poems in the Annals are. “On the Monument” is both about
the role of sympathy in a viewer’s response to art and about imaginative sympathy as a
tool of self-regulation, like the poems discussed in my concluding chapter. “Sonnet to
Mr. Haydon” is both about sympathetic response to figures in a picture and about the
intellectual legacy of the eighteenth century, which left the verbal and visual arts linked,
respectively, to two different conceptions of sympathy. It would make no more sense to
study the poems in the Annals without the context of other Romantic ekphrases than to
study Romantic ekphrasis without the Annals.
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4 Sympathy and Fixity in Keats and Shelley

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

No poem has featured more prominently in the study of ekphrasis than “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” and it is a poem with a number of famously baffling interpretive cruxes:
several double entendres, a shift in speaker of indeterminate length, and some lines of
deeply ambiguous tone, such as the one quoted above. The only Romantic poem that
rivals the ode’s influence on contemporary studies of ekphrasis is one by Shelley – not,
as one might expect, “Ozymandias,” but rather the posthumously published fragment
“On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” which gained the attention of scholars of
ekphrasis following the publication of W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Ekphrasis and the Other.” “On
the Medusa” is still more riddled with ambiguities than “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and this
effect is compounded by the fact that it is posthumously published, never finalized to
Shelley’s satisfaction. There is something striking about the fact that these poems, which
have significantly shaped the scholarly community’s understanding of ekphrasis as a
genre, are so full of ambiguity as to make it especially difficult to reach interpretive
consensus about them.

Reading these poems in the context of the intellectual culture of sensibility can help to
shed light on some of their ambiguities, and, because of the poems’ prominence, such a
reading can reveal idiosyncrasies about the history of criticism about ekphrasis. While
the previous chapter explored poems whose primary point of commonality was their
venue of publication and the shared conceptual vocabulary that came with it, the present
chapter focuses on two poems whose most obvious commonality is their canonicity
within the field of ekphrasis studies. The two poems are not exploring the same
question: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is concerned with the long-standing assumption that
evoking sympathy is the chief purpose of the visual arts, whereas “On the Medusa of
Leonardo da Vinci” is concerned with what kinds of sensations can be sympathetically
shared, and whether the sympathizer and object of sympathy both need to be conscious in
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order for the sharing to occur – the fact of the object of sympathy in question being a
figure in a painting is merely a convenient way to explore that concern. These two
poems, however, also share a conceptual vocabulary. Both of them draw on – and
challenge – the by-then traditional linking of the visual arts with one mode of sympathy
and literature with another. Both poems rely on their readers knowing the conventional
eighteenth-century wisdom that the plastic arts can evoke sympathy instantaneously, by
means of sight, and that poetry can do so by means of presenting sequential
circumstances to the imagination.

As the Introduction to this thesis explains, eighteenth-century British philosophers, as

they explored the respective properties of the sister arts, especially poetry and painting,
came back again and again to two ideas: that the purpose of all the arts is to elicit
affective responses from their audiences, and that poetry is able to build up readers’
interest gradually, whereas painting is not. These thinkers started from the assumption
that all the arts set out to engage the emotions and sympathies of their audiences. In
explaining how poetry and painting, respectively, accomplish this, aesthetic philosophers
relied on two different conceptions of how sympathy functions. In explaining painting,
they talked of immediate, instinctive sympathy with vividly depicted affective display.
In explaining poetry, they talked of the prior circumstances of characters building
sympathy up gradually. The Abbé Du Bos, for instance, thought painting’s confinement
to a single moment of representation impeded the evocation of emotion because it cut off
the possibility of representing prior circumstances, but he thought that this disadvantage
was outweighed by the immediacy of painting’s visual impact (321).61

These two conceptions of sympathy closely parallel the explanations of it offered by

Hume and Smith, respectively. Sympathy for Hume is driven by the sight of its object,
and limited or enabled by how visible the external signs of the original passion are.
Sympathy for Smith is an imaginative reconstruction of circumstances around a
projection of one’s self, limited or enabled by how available the circumstances

61
For a fuller discussion of Du Bos, see the introductory chapter of this thesis.
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themselves are to the sympathizer’s imagination. This parallel between the two ways the
arts supposedly achieved their effect and the two ways sympathy was most famously
explained is most tidily revealed in English letters by Erasmus Darwin, who, in 1789,
attributed to painting the ability to display the passions at their most intense – and most
visible – by showing the “changes, which those sentiments or passions produce upon the
body” (121). He attributes to poetry the ability to make “passions visible, as it were,” not
literally, by showing them, but rather by explaining the “previous climacteric
circumstances” that have produced the passions.

Romantic culture had a preoccupation with fixity that altered the terms of the discussion.
The Romantics habitually described the experience of intense emotion as an experience
of fixity – sometimes even figuring intense emotion as turning people into statues. That
figuration is writ large in a new usage of the word “tableau” to refer to stage actors
stopping and holding their poses silently at a crucial moment in a play – becoming, as the
word tableau suggests, a figurative painting just as their characters reach their highest
pitch of emotion. This new cultural habit of imagining the stillness of the plastic arts as a
metaphor for an experience of extreme emotion added a new element to the older
discourse surrounding the single moment represented by a work of art. Shifting focus
away from the artist’s selection of a single moment from a pre-existing narrative of many
moments, this new way of thinking about art emphasized instead the stillness itself,
conceiving of static figures as removed from their narrative contexts and held fixed, as
though in a theatrical tableau. (This reconception, in turn, dovetailed with a new way of
thinking about artworks as objects – permanent objects that could be kept intact
indefinitely in museums.) Without losing its association with a specifically visual and
instantaneous conception of sympathy, visual art came to be thought of as not only
representing affective symptoms vividly, but also preserving moments – and feelings –
that would otherwise be fleeting.

The two poems by Keats and Shelley discussed in this chapter use their engagements
with visual art as opportunities to interrogate the modes of sympathy associated with the
“sister arts.” These poems seem at first simply to participate in the Romantic fashion for
representing strong feeling held static – by death, or by its own intensity – and for
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representing the subject experiencing such feeling as a piece of visual art. Both poems,
however, do something more radical than that. In both cases, the feeling subjects are not
akin to art, or metaphorically represented as art; they are figures in works of art. And
both poems do more than simply use the traditional sisterhood of moral and aesthetic
philosophy to buttress or intensify their representations of feeling. “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci” actively interrogate the very kinship
between aesthetic thought and thought about sympathy on which they draw.

The two poems challenge the long-standing sorority of sentimental and aesthetic thought
in different ways, and they do so in order to take on different questions, but both are
concerned with the limits of sympathy as it was traditionally conceived. “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” like a number of Keats’s ekphrases, explores the relationship between the
visual arts and feeling, and does so with a note of scepticism, suggesting in the end that
eliciting sympathy is not necessarily the goal of the visual arts. The “Ode” works at the
frontier of the philosophy of sensibility: if understanding how sympathy and feeling
work is part of the intellectual project of sensibility, then so, of course, is understanding
when and why sympathy might fail – might be undesirable – might, in fact, become an
omnipresent cultural impulse that a viewer of artwork needs to work to escape. The
“Ode,” after painstakingly staging a failed sympathetic engagement with a work of art,
concludes by offering a model of engagement that is outside the framework of
sensibility. Shelley’s posthumously published “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci”
explores a different intellectual frontier, testing the limits of how sympathy had been
conventionally defined, and tearing down divisions between concepts long assumed to be
opposed: sympathy that is visually driven, and sympathy that is gradual.

In “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” Shelley takes the experience of sympathy for
an artwork as an opportunity to challenge assumptions about the limits of sympathetic
subjectivity, and to extend emotional agency beyond the bounds of the animate. By
constructing an instance of a viewer feeling with a sympathetic object who is both dead
and an artistic construct, Shelley might seem to be echoing observations such as the one
made by Adam Smith that we routinely sympathize with the dead. The feeling with that
Shelley represents, however, does not conform to either of the two models of sympathy
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that Smith and the other moral philosophers had proposed. Rather, Shelley implicitly
challenges the idea that visually-driven sympathy for affective display is necessarily
instantaneous, as eighteenth-century theories assumed, or that processive, gradual
sympathy necessarily requires an active effort of imagination. Moreover, by having his
hypothetical viewer of an artwork vicariously experience what it is to be a passive
medium of an unnamed agent’s artistic efforts, Shelley challenges the very notion of the
conscious self that underpins the philosophical tradition in which thinkers such as Smith,
and even Hume, worked.

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats stages, step by step, a failure of sympathetic response
to an artwork, and he does so in order to articulate a subtle resistance to the dominant
assumption that such response is either a reasonable or a desirable objective of the visual
arts. I read the poem as an enactment of a psychological process – a process of a viewer
trying to engage with an artwork. That viewer, the poem’s speaker, may not have many
defining characteristics, but the psychological process staged in the poem’s language is
very specific, and it unfolds one step at a time. We see the speaker come to the urn with
a conventional set of expectations about how he is to relate to it, and we see those
expectations disappointed; we witness in the poem’s language the speaker’s frustration,
his changing tactics as he makes repeated attempts at engaging meaningfully with what
he sees. In the chapter following this one, I will make a similar argument about “Ode on
Indolence” – that it, too, stages a mental process, and that its speaker, like the speaker of
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” is in this sense a character in a miniature dramatization of one
possible psychological process. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats conspicuously refuses
to employ the Humean model of sympathy as cued by visual stimuli that was
conventionally associated with the visual arts. In doing so, he seems to set sympathy up
to fail. His speaker, deprived of the narrative context of the scene represented on the urn,
and insistently trying to imagine his way into sympathetic engagement with figures
whose circumstances he does not know, succeeds only in imagining what it’s like to be a
figure on an urn, and his attempt at sympathy is revealed to fall short as the poem
unfolds. Keats uses the tradition of sentimental philosophy selectively in order to show it
fail, but he shows it failing for a purpose. The fact that the speaker persists in labelling
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the urn a “friend to man” in spite of that failure is a tacit defiance of the longstanding
assumption that the purpose of the arts is to represent the passions and evoke sympathetic
engagement. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” draws on the closely bound traditions of
sentimental philosophy and the philosophy of the sister arts in order to divorce them
from one another, tacitly proposing a value for the arts that is dependent on their capacity
for provoking abstract thought, rather than on their assumed participation in sentimental
exchange.

As the poems discussed elsewhere in this thesis, such as Barry Cornwall’s “On the Statue
of Theseus” and Mitford’s “Sonnet to Mr. Haydon” make clear, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci” are not alone in drawing on the intersection
of aesthetic and sentimental thought. These two poems are selected for detailed study
here not only because they make especially complex and provocative use of the same
coincidence of philosophical traditions, but also because they have been so central to
thought about ekphrasis in the last twenty years. They thus enable me to accomplish two
tasks simultaneously: to further explore an important strand of Romantic ekphrasis of
sensibility, and to bring to light some of the complex history of the study of ekphrasis
within the scholarly community.

4.1 Temporal and Instantaneous: The Anachronism of

Assuming Lessing’s Influence
Before we can fully understand what Keats does with the conventional distinction
between art’s ability to make an immediate, visual impact and poetry’s ability to build up
interest slowly, it is helpful to clarify what he does not do. The fact that “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” is as famous as it is can make attempting a new interpretation of it feel like
acting out an overdetermined script. Of course the “Ode” is about stopping time; that is
where the idea of ekphrasis as striving for atemporality came from. As I shall argue,
however, scholarship about ekphrasis is founded on a habit of misunderstanding the
philosophical tradition Keats had access to. And, although the misunderstanding is
slight, it has had important consequences. We are in a better position to see what the
“Ode” does with the idea that the visual arts do not tell stories when we recognize that, in
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1820, articulating that idea did not necessarily entail any reference to the visual arts
being spatial. The smaller “quantity of time” (Darwin 122) available to the visual arts,
relative to poetry, was not correlated with a correspondingly larger quantity of space, nor
was poetry assumed to be less spatial in its representations than painting. The poem’s
thematic concern with art’s inability to unfold stories in time is usually engaged by
contemporary critics in language that is anachronistic. Moreover, our critical language
does more than simply supplant the language the Romantics themselves would have
used. It has obscured what was for the Romantics one of the most important facets of the
time-stopping idea: its connection in the philosophical thought of the day with ideas
about how sympathy is produced, and its connection with conventions for representing
strong feeling. I want to suggest that, for the Romantics, the relationships between visual
art and poetry and between stasis and sequential narrative came loaded with another set
of associations, and that, as a result, those relationships could provide an intellectual
framework for thinking about sympathy and story-telling, emotion and stasis. It is that
framework that Keats takes full advantage of in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

The version of the art-stopping-time idea that contemporary theorists of ekphrasis use
was imported into the discipline by Murray Krieger; it has so entirely supplanted earlier
permutations of the idea that it has become difficult even to perceive that there were
earlier permutations. In order to see eighteenth-century and Romantic thought about the
arts clearly, we need to uncouple the idea of atemporality from the idea of spatiality – an
association that is anachronistic for the period. Krieger’s work initiated a subset of
theoretical works about ekphrasis that is preoccupied with time, and with space, and with
how arts that work in these media compete with or complete one another. Language is
temporal; art is spatial; Krieger and those who have followed his approach confront the
paradox of how temporal language can attempt to re-mediate spatial objects. More
recent scholars have adopted Krieger’s terminology of the spatial and the temporal.
Mitchell, in Picture Theory, offers the common-sense corrective that although “images,
pictures, space, and visuality may only be figuratively conjured up in verbal discourse,”
this does not mean “that the conjuring fails to occur or that the reader/listener ‘sees’
nothing” (96). Even within his corrective, however, he resorts to the word “space,” and
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he refers elsewhere to “visual-spatial culture” (31). The space-time binary is so

persistent that even the best-informed critics anachronistically perceive it in texts where
it is not present. For example, David Marshall, in his essay in The Cambridge History of
Literary Criticism, states that “the notion that painting should represent a moment had
been used to delineate the temporal properties of writing and the spatial properties of
painting” (695). The example he cites is from the Abbé Du Bos, but the passage from
which he quotes states only that one can comprehend a whole picture instantaneously,
rather than having to imagine it piecemeal; neither there nor anywhere else in his Critical
Reflections does Du Bos mention the spatial properties of the visual arts: instantaneously
comprehensible is not the same concept as spatial. And yet, so persistent is this language
of the spatial that what Cheeke has identified as the “most cogitated” element of
ekphrasis studies is, in his words, “the traditional binarism of space and time” (5).

Given the persistence of the language of space and time, it is worth examining where
these terms came from before Krieger imported them, and why their appeal is so
widespread. As the title of Krieger’s early essay “Laokoön Revisited” would suggest,
the explicit source of the terminology of the spatial is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who
argued in 1766 that the arts excelled at different types of representation. Although
Lessing gave examples of a number of differences between the respective abilities of
poetry and painting, the most important distinction he made was between the static,
spatial representation best done by visual art and the temporal, narrative representation
best done by poetry. Lessing’s influence has been considerable. The idea of a time-
space binary in the relationship between literature and art can be traced in the work of
philosophers and theorists from Oscar Wilde to Gérard Genette, and these thinkers in
turn have influenced theorists of ekphrasis.62 Lessing’s influence on the Romantics is
sometimes taken as a given, even in studies that attempt to historicize Romantic
ekphrases’ preoccupation with stopping time. Heffernan’s chapter on Romantic

62
Heffernan cites Genette’s distinction between narrative (“‘pure process’”), and description (which
“suspends time, [and] spreads the narrative ‘in space’”) (5); Genette’s definition of description is strikingly
similar to Lessing’s definition of the visual arts, as though description were literally a type of painting with
words. Cheeke draws on Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” to argue that Wilde “rearticulated Lessing’s theory
of difference, with its implicit privileging of literature over the plastic arts” (24).
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ekphrasis in Museum of Words rightly identifies the Romantic period as the age when the
idea of art stopping time became popular, and astutely notes that it is “deeply embedded
in the ideology we inherit” from the period (91).63 But even Heffernan overestimates the
influence in England of Laocoön.

In his 1986 book Iconology, Mitchell reads Laocoön closely in order to destabilize
Lessing’s categories, noting that “the notions of space and time fail to provide a coherent
basis for their [i.e. poetry and painting’s] differentiation” (103). Painting’s
representation of spatial bodies, Mitchell points out, is still mediated, rather than direct:
“[p]ainting presents bodies indirectly, through pictorial signs, but it does so less
indirectly than its presentation of actions” (102), and the same can be said of poetry’s
representation of temporal sequence. Although my interest is not in the coherence or
incoherence of Lessing’s ideas, but rather the anachronism of assuming their ubiquity in
Romantic Britain, Mitchell’s analysis is helpful by virtue of what it reveals about the
standing of Lessing’s ideas even in the late twentieth century. The rigour with which
Mitchell must proceed in challenging Lessing’s authority, two hundred and twenty years
after the original publication of Laocoön, speaks to the ubiquity of those ideas in our own
intellectual culture, and the care we must take to step back from Lessing if we are to see
Romantic British thought about the arts accurately. Mitchell observes that “the curious
power his text has had over all subsequent attempts to comprehend the differences
between poetry and painting” stems from Lessing’s “cunning exploitation of the
iconophobic and iconoclastic rhetoric that pervades the discourse we call ‘criticism’ in
Western culture” (112).

However great his influence in later decades, the likelihood that Lessing directly
influenced Romantic British thought about the sister arts is negligible. The only concrete
evidence we have of direct influence is Fuseli’s citation of Lessing and his paraphrase of

63
Heffernan is surely right that the concept of art’s supposed temporal transcendence is part of our
ideology now, for it was an idea that was taken for granted in studies of ekphrasis until he historicized it.
Whether “ideology” is the right word for how the idea functioned in the Romantic period, when it was
much newer and thus less entrenched, is another question. As this chapter will show, the relationship
between visual art and time was more like a loose cluster of ideas with which writers interested in art were
actively experimenting.
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the central argument of Laocoön in 1801.64 But Thomas De Quincey published his
partial translation of Laocoön in 1826 with a preface that introduced the work as
something new to English letters – a corrective to British culture’s fixation on German
poetry at the expense of German prose. It is decidedly not a preface to a work already in
substantial circulation in British culture. (By contrast, in 1748, when Thomas Nugent
published his translation of the Abbé Du Bos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting
and Music of 1719, his preface looked very different. “There have been very few books
published of late years,” Nugent began, “that have met with a better reception, or attained
to a greater reputation in the learned world, than the following Critical Reflections.”)
Prominent British aesthetic thinkers such as Sir Joshua Reynolds or Erasmus Darwin do
not cite Lessing’s work, in spite of the fact that Darwin’s aesthetic writing is
conspicuously set up as part of an ongoing intellectual conversation.65 Still more telling
than the absence of citations, however, is the absence from British writing of Lessing’s
particular formulation of the idea that visual art exists outside time. It was Lessing who
popularized the idea of the spatial in opposition to the temporal. Other philosophers,
including the widely read Abbé Du Bos, had already introduced comparable binaries,
such as “co-existent” vs. “successive” objects (Harris 32), and one vs. many moments or
“pictures” (Du Bos 329). It is these earlier permutations of the idea that we find both in
philosophical writings such as Reynolds’s Discourses and Darwin’s Interludes to The
Botanic Garden, and in ekphrastic poetry from the Romantic period. Edmund Burke,
although he disagrees with Du Bos’s conclusions, borrows his conceit of poetry
presenting a multitude of pictures. Whereas Du Bos claims that the tragic poet whose

64
On the basis of this paraphrase, James O’Rourke identifies a possible chain of influence by means of
which Keats might have adopted Lessing’s terms: Fuseli taught both Haydon and Severn (62). All of the
examples that O’Rourke gives as evidence of Lessing’s influence on the Annals circle, however, are more
consistent with earlier versions of the stopping-time idea. Indeed, the excerpt of an essay by Lord
Viscount Sidmouth that O’Rourke provides to establish the subject’s prevalence in the Annals actually
quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds, although O’Rourke does not identify the quotation; moreover, since the
essay’s brief preface in the Annals identifies it as the Oxford prize essay for 1779, it predates even Fuseli’s
introduction of Lessing’s ideas into British thought.
65
For example, Darwin has the character of the Bookseller in his “Interlude I” quote Sir Joshua Reynolds
in order to set up his own persona’s citation of Lord Kames in reply (48). Darwin also lists as “three of our
celebrated artists” the cosmopolitan grouping of Reynolds, Fuseli, and Angelica Kauffman (49).
 151

work is performed “presents us successively with fifty pictures, as it were” (329), Burke
praises Milton’s imagery in Paradise Lost in strikingly similar terms, explaining that
“[t]he mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect
because they are crouded and confused” (57).66 Even Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose
Defence of Poetry was written twenty years after Fuseli’s public citation of Lessing, does
not use Lessing’s formulation. The idea that the opposite of “temporal” is “spatial” is
one that would not have seemed logically necessary or even intuitive to the Romantics.67

4.2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Art Beyond the Limits of

Sympathy
Romanticists studying ekphrasis, such as James A.W. Heffernan and Grant F. Scott, have
been less inclined to take the “Ode” as paradigmatic of a whole genre than have
generalists less invested in historicizing the emergence of the ekphrastic tradition as we
now know it. But both Heffernan and Scott have nonetheless devoted considerable time
to the “Ode” – more so than any other single poem about art from the period. But while

66
Burke is unusual for his century in the limited attention he gives to sympathy in his discussion of the
relative merits of the sister arts. In his section on sympathy, he does state that it is “by this principle [i.e.
sympathy] chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to
another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself” (41). Later,
he says that words are the best medium for inspiring sympathy, because “there are no tokens which can
express all the circumstances of most passions so fully as words” (158), and we feel sympathetic emotion
most clearly when we understand the other person’s passions as completely as possible. Following the
combined logic of these two statements, one might assume that, according to Burke, conveying the
passions clearly and precisely would be the goal of the arts. In general, however Burke is actually much
more concerned with the terror of sublimity than he is with sympathetic emotion of any kind, especially in
the arts. Most of his discussion of the relative merits of poetry and painting occurs within his extended
discussion of the advantages of obscurity. He says of poetry that “[i]ts apparitions, it chimeras, its harpies,
its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting,” but that “[t]hese figures in painting would be clear enough,
but I fear they might become ridiculous” (59).

67
A notable exception is Blake, who does pair the terms Time and Space – in fact, he declares them twins
and spouses. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, he says that “Time and Space are Real Beings, a Male & a
Female. Time is a Man, Space is a Woman, and Her Masculine Portion is Death” (K 614 qtd in Damon
404). In Milton, he says that “Los is by mortals nam’d Time, Enitharmon is nam’d Space” (24:68 qtd in
Damon 379). Blake’s abstractly metaphysical writings on Time and Space, however, are far removed from
any discussion of the sister arts, in spite of the fact that Blake himself navigated the relationship between
verbal and visual art constantly in his work as an engraver. The likelihood that Blake’s prophetic writings
about eternity had any impact on how his contemporaries thought of the relationship between poetry and
painting is, to say the least, negligible, and he himself does not seem to have been engaged in the
discussion of how many moments a given art can represent.
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my own reading of the poem owes real debts to the insights of Scott and Heffernan, it
owes a still larger debt to the very misinterpretation of the philosophical tradition, dating
back to Krieger, that I have just traced. Precisely because the prominence of ideas about
time vs. space in studies of ekphrasis results from the apparent presence of those ideas in
the “Ode,” the “Ode” is the poem that most stands to benefit from correcting the
misperception – from shifting our language from our own era’s dichotomy of temporal
and spatial back towards the eighteenth-century dichotomy of temporal and atemporal,
moving and static, many moments and one moment.

According to Heffernan’s chapter on Romantic ekphrasis in Museum of Words, “Ode on

a Grecian Urn” “forges a mordant critique of transcendence [i.e. the idea that the visual
arts can transcend time], and more especially of the notion that any work of visual art can
satisfactorily represent it [i.e. such transcendence]” (110). The poem does this, he
argues, in two ways. First of all, the urn itself is imaginary – not a real artefact that has
survived the ravages of time, but a false one, untouched by time because it does not exist
to be touched. Second of all, although the poem seems to use the language of
“iconophilic homage” (115), it insistently returns to “the language of narration – more
precisely of prediction” (113). It is, Heffernan argues, as though the poem enacts an
impossible struggle to escape the temporality of linguistic representation itself. He
suggests that this apparently impossible escape actually succeeds, but only in the urn’s
utterance, rather than the speaker’s, when the verb is “drops out” of the urn’s “chiastic
utterance,” so that language really does take on “the juxtapositional effect of sculpture”
(115). Like Heffernan, I note the paradoxical nature of the speaker’s attempt to address
the static figures as if they existed in time and could hear him. But I would contend that
the speaker’s impulse to do so, rather than first and foremost acting out Romantic
culture’s fascination with the idea that artworks exist outside of time, is in fact best
understood as acting out Romantic culture’s assumption that one is supposed to
sympathize with figures in works of art.
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Scott, in The Sculpted Word, offers a very different reading than Heffernan’s, performing
the daunting task that had led Mitchell to “capitulate[...]”68 – namely applying to the
poem Mitchell’s own theory of ekphrasis as a gendered encounter between viewer and
art object. Scott not only attributes to the speaker of the “Ode” an unease with the silent,
feminized urn’s potential to reduce him to a comparable silence, but also traces a
similarly gendered pattern in the response of critics to the “Ode,” saying that
[c]riticism has tended to follow the path of the poet as he escapes from
the frustrating embrace of the urn/bride into a more comforting and
inspiriting little aphorism. Most critics are drawn toward this
concluding phrase, then, not so much because it presents an intriguing
logical problem but because it offers a means of escaping the rest of the
ode and its unsettling implications of feminine power and thwarted
male sexuality. (120-21)
Although I agree with Scott that the last stanza of the “Ode” seems to indicate a desire on
the speaker’s part to escape from something oppressive, I would contend that in fact he is
escaping not from the urn’s oppressively feminine silence but rather from an impulse to
engage sympathetically with visual art – an impulse that was very deeply embedded in
Romantic culture.

While Heffernan and Scott’s interpretations of the “Ode” yield these productive insights,
the larger field of ekphrasis studies has, as I have suggested, sometimes imposed
readings on the poem that take it out of the context of its own era; moreover, the
anachronism in the way critics have understood the “Ode” has been reinforced by
scholarship’s propensity to see the “Ode” as a cornerstone text of ekphrasis as a genre.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” has stood at the heart of ekphrasis criticism since its inception.
Leo Spitzer revived the term and attributed to it its current meaning specifically to
categorize the “Ode.” He did so at a time when the “Ode” was already at the forefront of
many scholars’ minds on account of its association with New Criticism, especially

68
Scott says that “Mitchell, able to generate only a slim paragraph on the poem, capitulated, citing
‘weariness with its monumentality’” (119). Scott cites a “confessional letter to the author” as his source
for this quotation (200n).
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Cleanth Brooks’s famous 1947 study The Well-Wrought Urn. Murray Krieger’s 1967
essay on ekphrasis is a kind of extended tribute to the “Ode” – Krieger’s reading of the
“Ode” is his most extensive, and much of the rest of the essay discusses urns in other
literature in order to draw connections to it. Not surprisingly, given this critical history,
the “Ode” is often taken as somehow paradigmatic of ekphrasis as a genre, competing for
such archetypical status chiefly with Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles.
Conventionally, scholars of ekphrasis see “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as the ultimate
articulation of art’s atemporality. Stephen Cheeke says in his 2008 book, for instance,
that the Ode is “probably the most sustained and densely worked meditation we have
upon a certain set of paradoxes that, as we shall see, are central to ekphrasis [...].
Principally, these are the paradoxes of silence/speech, of stillness/movement, and of
time/eternity” (45). While these “paradoxes” can indeed be seen in the poem, part of the
appeal of that reading, as I have suggested, is that it can be made to intersect with
Lessing’s idea that visual art cannot represent anything other than the spatial, and the
spatial is a category that has been superimposed on the poem. Scholarship’s impulse to
see the “Ode” as foundational for a genre that is, according to such theories, intrinsically
spatially oriented has given us a motivation to retain the anachronistic reading that is
now mainstream.

The “Ode,” however, shares fewer assumpations with Lessing’s Laocöon than is usually
thought, and it can be more productively read in conjunction with the work of earlier
thinkers who had a greater influence on Romantic British culture, such as the Abbé du
Bos and James Harris. Keats’s speaker seems to come to the urn with an assumption
thoroughly in keeping with those of most eighteenth-century theorists of the sister arts:
that the urn’s purpose as art is to represent and evoke emotion, and that appreciating it
will consist of sympathizing with the figures it represents. More specifically, the driving
assumption of the first and fourth stanzas of the “Ode” seems to be the idea articulated by
Harris that the visual arts are most effective when they represent stories whose
particulars are well-known. The speaker desires to know what Harris calls “the previous
 155

and the subsequent” elements of the story to which the urn alludes69; in the absence of
that knowledge, he imaginatively reconstructs the figures’ circumstances as best he can.

Conspicuously absent from the speaker’s engagement with the urn is the kind of
instantaneous sympathy that Du Bos had proposed as fundamental to the visual arts.
While Smithian sympathy had become the normative way of conceiving of sympathy in
general, Romantic culture made an exception when dealing with the arts, preserving the
concept of instantaneous, visual sympathy put forward by Du Bos and Hume to account
for the power of painting. Keats refuses that exception, and uses the construction of
sympathy prevalent in the intellectual culture of his day selectively: the “Ode” enacts an
attempt at sympathy that is wholly dependent on a Smithian, imaginative mode of
sympathy – a mode long associated, not with the visual arts, but with the verbal. As this
enactment unfolds, stanza by stanza, Keats’s speaker gives a great deal of attention to the
fixity of the urn, but does so in the process of trying to make an imaginative leap into the
figures’ circumstances. Where earlier thinkers such as Du Bos and Reynolds had
proposed that the limitations created by the fixity of visual art were more than
compensated for by its capacity to represent with great vividness the most affectively
intense moment of a story, Keats’s speaker finds his sympathy inhibited by the urn’s
fixity because it suppresses the befores and afters of the figures’ situation. In the absence
of a known narrative, the speaker imagines the experience of being physically and
emotionally static, as though the figures on the urn could have a temporal, even
narratable, experience of being pinned in their punctum temporis. He constructs the
frieze on the urn less as a single moment than as an infinite proliferation of identical
moments: a “story of changelessness,” in Heffernan’s words (113). The speaker tries to
divorce his act of sympathy from any dependence on narrative by sympathizing with the
figures themselves, rather than with the characters they presumably represent. But the
mode of sympathy he is trying to engage in – imaginative reconstruction of
circumstances – cannot function in the absence of any narrative whatsoever.
Instantaneous, visual, sympathy is never in play. That story of changelessness, of course,

69
For a fuller discussion of Harris, see the Introduction to this thesis.
 156

proves inhospitable to sympathy – so much so that, as we shall see, the speaker forges a
more successful sympathetic connection with the “little town” that is not actually
represented on the urn than with any of the figures that are.

The question is why Keats chose to omit the conception of sympathy as visually driven
and instinctive – a conception that, although largely displaced by imaginative sympathy
in general thought, was nonetheless popular in discussions of the visual arts. The failure
of imaginative sympathy in the face of a work of visual art suggests a need to re-conceive
the objectives of the visual arts – and to account for the fascination of an artwork that
does not represent a known story and does not elicit sympathy. I would posit that it is
such a re-conception, however enigmatic, that the final stanza of the ode offers at the
conclusion of the poem’s step-by-step enactment of failed sympathy: an idea of what
art’s friendship to mankind might consist of that can account for some visual art’s
resistance to sympathetic identification. By restricting his speaker’s idea of sympathy to
an imaginative identification incompatible with visual art and then representing that
identification failing, Keats offers a resistance to the very idea that underpinned the
eighteenth-century philosophical tradition of linking the sister arts with sympathy to
begin with, namely the assumption that the purpose of all art is to evoke sympathy. As
the following pages will demonstrate, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats tacitly suggests
that in fact the plastic arts may not and need not evoke the passions – that their value lies
in something else entirely, namely their ability to provoke abstract thought or offer
viewers a window into an ongoing intellectual debate.

We can see more clearly the purposefulness of Keats’s engagement with the
philosophical link between the sister arts and sympathy by comparing the “Ode” to a
poem that almost certainly influenced it: Wordsworth’s “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful
Picture,”70 which was published in the Annals of the Fine Arts two years before Keats’s
“Ode.”

70
Its title in the Annals is “Sonnet Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture”; it is printed in the Cornell
Wordsworth series, and is usually referred to, as “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture.” When it
appeared in the Annals, the poem had been previously published in 1811. Heffernan takes this poem to be
 157

Praised be the art whose subtle power could stay

Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape;
Nor would permit the thin smoke to escape,
Nor those bright sun-beams to forsake the day;
Which stopped that band of travellers on their way,
Ere they were lost within the shady wood;
And shewed the bark upon the glassy flood
For ever anchored in her sheltering bay.
Soul-soothing Art! which morning, noon tide, even
Do serve with all their changeful pageantry!
Thou, with ambition modest yet sublime,
Here, for the sight of mortal man, hast given
To one brief moment caught from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity.
Much of “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture” sounds like a recycling of “Peele
Castle”: the words “glassy” and “pageantry” both appear in “Peele Castle,” and the
“appropriate calm of blest eternity” in the last line of this sonnet sounds eerily like the
idyllic vision Wordsworth’s earlier speaker claims he would have painted. As the
discussion of “Peele Castle” in the next chapter will reveal, however, the overlap is more
linguistic than intellectual. It is in fact “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that most stands to
benefit from being juxtaposed with “Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture.”
Wordsworth’s sonnet, unlike the “Ode,” does not mention the idea of an artwork’s
physical permanence or durability, but it does, like the “Ode,” explore the idea that the
figures in a work of art are held fixed. In Wordsworth’s poem, the verb “stay” in the
opening line is transitive: “Praised be the art whose subtle power could stay / Yon
cloud.” Art’s staying power is not its own power to endure, but rather its power to

an unfettered expression of what he calls the “ideology of transcendence,” even using it as the epigraph to
his chapter on Romantic ekphrasis (91-93).
 158

compel the things it represents to remain in place – to “fix” the cloud in a “glorious
shape.” That power is framed in the language of authority. Art will not “permit” the
cloud or the sunbeams to leave; it has “stopped” the travellers, just as it has “stay[ed]”
the cloud. The hours “serve” art. That authority, however, by and large comes across as
protective. The poem links ideas of sublimity and authority, beauty and propriety, and it
finds in the art object a synthesis of these conventionally opposed pairs of concepts. The
artist’s sublime and protective authority is what enables the beauty and propriety of the
objects represented. 71 The state of being held static within the painting is one of
security. The smoke has not been allowed to “escape,” or the sunbeams to “forsake the
day”; the travellers are not “lost”; the ship is “anchored in her sheltering bay.”

The language of safety and security is plentiful in the sonnet, but what is not plentiful is
the language of feeling, let alone of sympathy, and it is in this difference that we can see
just how determinedly plentiful it is in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In “Upon the Sight,”
“Art” is apostrophized as “[s]oul-soothing,” and the poem’s insistent language of safety
is soothing in turn; moreover, the spectre of danger that lingers in words like “escape,”
“forsake,” and “lost” intensifies the soothing effect of the assertions of security that
negate those words. But “Upon the Sight,” unlike Keats’s “Ode,” is not primarily a
poem about feeling. The speaker does not directly express any feelings; he does not
sympathize with any of the figures in the painting, or with the artist, nor does he ask any
sympathy of the reader. The sonnet starts with the idea of art holding a cloud static, and
ends with the more abstract idea of art extracting a moment from “fleeting time” in order
to bestow upon it an “appropriate calm.” Between the catalogue of specific figures held
in place by art and the generalized abstraction of catching a moment from “fleeting
time,” the only transition is an apostrophe to “Soul-soothing Art! which morning, noon
tide, even / Do serve with all their changeful pageantry.” Keats’s “Ode” also starts with
the idea of an artwork holding figures static, and also ends with an abstraction, but it gets
from one to the other by means of a densely worked enactment of sympathy failing.

71
I use propriety here in the etymological sense of being in one’s own, fitting place – the ship is in her
sheltering bay, not a sheltering bay – and this seems also to be evoked by Wordsworth’s “appropriate
calm.”
 159

Keats adopts the idea that art can fix and hold its objects, but does something quite
different with it, imagining the consequences of stasis for those objects in terms of strong
feeling, rather than safety.

Readers conditioned to interpret the “Ode” as a poem “about” stasis may find themselves
surprised by its beginning, for there is no clear juxtaposition in the opening stanza
between an unchanging or static urn and temporal flux; on the contrary, the poem’s
concern with stasis emerges and evolves only as the subsequent stanzas unfold, and, in
the first stanza, the static and the shifting are blended by the stanza’s slippery verbal
play.
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
The famous pun on “still” does suggest the urn’s stasis: “thou still unravish’d bride”
could mean “thou as-yet unravished bride,” and it also hints at “thou unmoving,
unravished bride.” But that suggestion is subtle almost to the vanishing point. The
phrase “unravish’d bride of quietness” is likewise ambivalent, suggesting both that the
urn’s own life story has been arrested at a moment of unfulfilled desire and that the urn is
not yet wholly allied with quietness, perhaps not even quiet. Time, in this stanza, is not
rapid or headlong or even relentless, but “slow,” and wed to “silence.” The urn’s status
as the “foster-child” of that marriage implies that its familial allegiance to slow time and
silence may be ambiguous or incomplete, like its unconsummated marriage to
“quietness”: it is a foster-child rather than a birth-child.

As the stanza moves into a series of questions, the urn seems still less static. The
speaker’s questions act as an oblique description, and it is a description teeming with
movement. The speaker’s interrogation gains momentum as the questions themselves
become ever shorter. Lines 5-7 contain a single, long question:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
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The question may have multiple parts, but the fact that they are all presented in a single
interrogative slightly restrains the headlong rush of the questioning. Lines 8 -10,
however, each contain two short questions:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
The frequency of the question marks, the repetition of “what,” and the disappearance of
the verb “are” after the first of these questions all suggest that the speaker’s pace of
questioning has quickened. In the version published in the Annals,72 line 9 contains three
extremely short questions – “What love? What dance? What struggle to escape?” – the
quickness of the syntax creating much the same aura of hurry as the phrase “mad
pursuit.” Moreover, while the first question asks about the identity of the figures and the
setting, the later questions name actions and passions more often than figures or objects:
“love” and “dance” in the Annals version, “mad pursuit” in the Lamia version; “struggle
to escape”; “wild ecstasy.” The questions, far from conveying any sense of the urn’s
stasis, give the impression that the urn represents movement, or at least that the speaker
perceives it as doing so. Thus, although critics reading the poem as deeply invested in
the idea of stasis have often made much of the word “still” in the opening line, the urn is
only ambiguously associated with silence and stillness in the first stanza.

In the poem’s third line, the speaker addresses the urn in terms that would have struck
some readers of the Annals of the Fine Arts as philosophically old-fashioned. The
speaker calls the urn a “Sylvan Historian” and attributes to it the ability to “express / A
flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.” This statement defies some of the principle
aesthetic tenets of its era, boldly contradicting the established idea that the visual arts are
confined to a single moment of action or that poetry is better able to relate sequential
events than its sister arts. The idea that a work of visual art tells a story was at best a

72
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” was first published in the Annals of the Fine Arts under the title “On a Grecian
Urn”; in the same year, it was published as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in Keats’s most famous and successful
volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The Lamia version is usually taken as
definitive.
 161

conservative one in 1820, grounded in the traditional prestige of history painting,73 but
called into question by the already long-established discourse of the sister arts. Of course
the theory of the “pregnant moment” was itself grounded in history painting. The
philosophy of the sister arts consistently suggests that the visual arts can and should
represent scenes from stories. But it also consistently suggests that the visual arts are
less good at telling stories than they are at maximizing the emotional impact of key
moments within stories that are already well known. Keats’s choice of the word
“express” when his speaker credits the urn with telling a “tale” is pointed. He uses the
word “express” in a sense that was already archaic in the nineteenth-century: “[t]o
represent by sculpture, drawing, or painting; to portray, delineate, depict” (OED). The
archaic usage seems calculated to draw attention to the antiquatedness of the idea of art
telling a tale, in contrast to the much more current idea of art expressing the passions of
the figures depicted. Keats’s speaker, however, says not only that the urn can express a
tale, but that it can “thus express / A flowery tale” (emphasis mine), suggesting that the
urn has already told or is in the process of telling its tale. The fact that the speaker then
questions the urn about that tale for six lines suggest that the urn isn’t expressing its tale
very clearly, but the speaker never acknowledges this. At this early point in the poem’s
staging of his reaction to the urn, the speaker seems to see what he wants to see, his
perception conforming to his expectations: he comes to the urn with an outdated
expectation of its capabilities, and perceives it telling a tale effectively even in the face of
his own confusion.

The speaker’s transition to treating the figures as static is belated and gradual: it is only
once he has finished stating the abstract value of imagined experience and starts actually
trying to imagine the figures’ experience that he begins to note their fixity. At the start of
the second stanza, he ceases to address the urn as an artifact, and begins to address the

73
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his 1771 Discourse, stated that “Invention in Painting does not imply the
invention of the subject; for that is commonly supplied by the Poet or Historian. With respect to the
choice, no subject can be proper that is not generally interesting. It ought to be either some eminent
instance of heroick action, or heroick suffering. There must be something either in the action, or in the
object, in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the publick sympathy”
(117). Barrell argues that the prestige of history painting was founded in the discourse of civic humanism:
that paintings of worthy deeds would inspire young men to public spiritedness (3).
 162

figures represented, as though he has imaginatively entered the world of the figures, but
he does not immediately begin trying to reconstruct their experience. For as long as he
only comments upon the superiority of the imagined to the real, the speaker continues to
address the figures as temporal beings.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
The speaker enjoins the “pipes” represented to “play on,” as though they can hear him
and register his approval, and perhaps could even stop playing if they chose. He even
compares the imaginary pleasures represented on the urn to “melodies” – the least
directly mimetic but also the most dependent on sequential progression of the sister arts.

It is in the fifth and sixth lines of the stanza that the speaker suddenly seems to perceive
the figures differently, abruptly realizing their immovability, and attempting to
reconstruct their experience without knowing anything about them except that they are
immovable.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
The content of the declarative “thou canst not leave / Thy song” contradicts the
assumptions inherent in the imperative “play on”: if the youth cannot leave his song, then
there seems little need to tell him to keep playing. This apparent paradox marks the start
of the speaker’s attempt imaginatively to access the figures’ experience: to sympathize
with them. He begins by observing the figures’ circumstances, and then proceeds to
surmise what their feelings must be, first imagining that they must be grieved by their
situation (since he instructs the lover not to grieve), and then rhapsodizing about the
advantages of their “[m]ore happy love,” with “happy” here suggesting both fortunate
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and joyful. As Grant Scott puts it, the speaker “improvises a series of empathetic
effusions” (132). But the speaker’s attempt at sympathy is hampered by the fact that, as
the opening stanza has made clear, he does not know what story is represented on the
urn. The only circumstance he can observe is that the figures are on an urn: that they are
static representations. In the absence of a known story, the speaker reconstructs the
experience of stasis itself, imagining the feeling of being eternally frozen in a single
moment: in his attempt at sympathy, he is looking at the representations themselves,
rather than at what they represent. He sustains this imaginative exercise for the better
part of two stanzas.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above.
The speaker’s shift from the broadly approving injunction “play on” to the observation
that none of the figures can move coincides with his attempt to move past his
generalization about the advantages of imagined experience and actually to imagine the
figures’ experiences – to sympathize with them.

The speaker’s attempt at sympathy falls conspicuously short, its failure enacted in a
series of incongruities and in the famously unwieldy line “More happy love! more happy,
happy love!” The experience the speaker tries to imagine is an impossible one – the
experience of being a work of plastic art – and his attempt to reconstruct it is riddled with
self-contradictions. As Heffernan has observed, the speaker’s imperative to the bold
lover not to “grieve” suggests that the lover’s feelings are not as fixed as his pose, and
that he could grieve or is grieving. The speaker’s construction of the figures’ “happy
love” as “forever panting” seems preemptively to undercut the idea that it is superior to
“breathing human passion” (113-14 – italics mine). More crucially, the sympathetic
 164

emotion the speaker ultimately expresses in these stanzas comes across as hopelessly
strained. A number of critics have pointed out the awkwardness of the “happy love” line.
Helen Vendler, in The Odes of John Keats, posits that “what is being said is palpably
subordinated to the effect of incoherent envy,” and she cites an older critical tradition in
which it was “assumed that Keats lost control of his poem in this stanza” (138).
Vendler’s interpretation is at its most insightful, however, when she suggests that the
speaker approaches the figures as a “passionate sympathizer” but that his “fever of
identification” is “defensively over-prolonged through an extra stanza” (124). I would
argue that the famously hollow sounding “happy!” line is a deliberate demonstration of
the speaker’s uncertainty. The excessive repetition comes across as forced – as though
the speaker is attempting to convince himself or to compensate for his lack of conviction.
The line enacts the speaker’s realization of his failure in a determined attempt to
sympathize with the figures by imagining their circumstances.

In the wake of that failure, the speaker makes a second attempt at sympathy, this time
with a different set of figures – presumably those depicted on the other side of the urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker reverts to asking the urn for its narrative context, as he
had in the first stanza, again asking questions that function as description. This time,
however, the speaker asks for different information.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
As in his first attempt to engage interpretively with the urn, he addresses the figures in
the vignette directly, but he asks only once, in general terms, for their identities,
contenting himself with addressing a priest whose identity remains “mysterious.” What
he asks for is, in James Harris’s terms, the “previous and subsequent.” The speaker
wants to know where, “[t]o what green altar,” the procession is going, and from where,
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from “[w]hat little town,” it has come. He once again addresses the figures as if he has
entered their world, but this time goes further, treating the moment represented as if it
were a moment in a temporal sequence, and referring to “this pious morn” as if the
figures themselves required such specificity in order to understand the question.

Both the idea of the urn’s fixity and the speaker’s apparent impulse to sympathize
resurface at the end of the fourth stanza, but this time the speaker’s sympathetic energy is
redirected in ways that suggest the limitations of the plastic arts in evoking sympathy.
Immediately after referring to “this pious morn,” the speaker apostrophizes the “little
town” from which he imagines the figures have come.
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
The speaker begins by obliquely reasserting the fixity of the figures, telling the town that
its streets will be silent forever. But when he tells the imaginary town that “not a soul to
tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return,” he subtly anthropomorphizes74 it, treating it
as a feeling agent and thus as a fit object of sympathy. In effect, the speaker’s address to
the town implies both that it has a continued temporal existence and that it has a species
of interiority: it has the agency to wonder why it is desolate, and a temporal experience
of being forever, indefinitely, desolate. The very word “desolate” implies that the town
feels its abandonment – that it is lonely, as well as alone. Although the speaker’s
construction of the town’s desolation is considerably more subtle than his single-minded
construction of the lovers’ supposed happiness, his sympathy with the town is also less
thwarted than his sympathy with the lovers in the first vignette. Since the speaker tells
the town what its situation is, he fulfils its supposed desire for explanation even in the act
of implying that it has such a desire; he is able not only to imagine the town’s temporal
experience of desolation, but also to behave benevolently toward it. Vendler asserts that

74
I use “anthropomorphize” rather than “personify” advisedly. Although the town is personified by the
speaker’s apostrophe, I want to stress my interpretation of this moment as indicating the speaker’s desire to
find an object of sympathy, and I have thus chosen the term to denote a psychological process rather than a
rhetorical choice.
 166

the speaker “enters into the life of the religious scene, prolonging it forward and
backward with tenderness and feeling” (125); that feeling is a fellow-feeling, not with a
human figure, but rather with an inanimate and unpictured town, empty of its inhabitants.

The “tenderness” of the speaker’s address to the town stands in contrast to the forced
tone of his address to the lovers, and I would suggest that we can and should note the
oddity of this. Where the speaker’s attempt to sympathize with the human figures has
fallen short, his sympathy with the town, which relies on the imaginative fiction that a
town can feel in the first place, is comparatively successful. What makes the town
accessible to imaginative sympathy when the human figures are not is precisely the fact
that it is not represented on the urn. As I have suggested, the figures on the urn resist
sympathy because their state of being permanently arrested by the work of art that
represents them is opaque to sympathetic imagination. The little town is not permanently
arrested by the work of art on which it is not represented, and it is thus available to the
sympathetic imagination. The fact that the speaker resorts to sympathizing with the town
that is not actually portrayed suggests, still more powerfully than his failed sympathy for
the figures that are, that visual representation cannot evoke sympathy.

The final stanza marks a return to apostrophizing the urn itself, but the idiom and tone of
the poem have changed.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The speaker uses affective language sparsely, and with a tone of deliberate aesthetic
distance. The men and maidens are “overwrought,” a term that, in one of its senses,
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frames whatever emotions or passions the figures might feel as undesirable or excessive.
The “woe” that the speaker foresees in the future is “other woe / Than ours”: implicitly,
the woe of coming generations, but framed here not as our children’s woe or woe like
ours, or even as other people’s woe, but rather simply as “other” woe, not “ours” but not
attributed to any actual suffering agents. The urn, in this stanza, is not a bride or foster-
child, but rather an “Attick shape” and a “fair attitude” – belonging to aesthetic rather
than human and familial categories. Indeed, the word “attitude” in effect names the
metaphor at the heart of the poem’s construction of the figures as arrested in the middle
of their movements: an “attitude” is a theatrically held pose indicative of “some action or
mental state” (OED).75 The urn is not a “Sylvan Historian,” but a “Cold Pastoral”: the
genre remains the same, but the urn is figured as a text or example, rather than an author,
and the word “cold” suggests that it is both lifeless and devoid of emotion. Even the
famous double pun in the first and second lines of the final stanza calls attention to its
own artifice. The urn is wrought all over with braid of men and maidens; the urn
represents a breed of overwrought men and maidens; the pun depends on the strange and
archaic spelling “brede,” and thus denies readers the option of appreciating it without
noting its ingeniousness. The tone of the last stanza is self-consciously clever and
emotionally distant – a far cry from the impetuous questioning of the first stanza, the
eager effusiveness of the third, or the “tenderness,” in Vendler’s word, of the fourth. The
language in this last stanza seems, if anything, to enact the urn’s role of “teazing” those
who encounter it out of thought – or perhaps into a more abstract kind of thought.

I suggest that the final stanza’s distant tone and conspicuous artificiality constitutes a
resistance to the paradigm of aesthetic response that relies on sympathetic engagement.
The blatant artifice of the whole stanza has the effect of undercutting the speaker’s
construction even of the town as an object of sympathy by reminding us of the literal
artifice of both of the Greek scenes. We may or may not have engaged sympathetically

75
Like “tableau,” “attitude” was imported into English from French as a term that referred to the visual
arts, and that his how Johnson defined it. Like “tableau,” “attitude” was appropriated in the latter half of
the eighteenth century to refer to poses held by living people (OED). Lady Hamilton’s famed attitudes
probably assisted, but did not begin, that trend, which the Oxford English Dictionary traces as far back as
James Harris.
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with the figures or the unpictured town, but we have watched the speaker do so, and here
the poem’s language points out to us how fruitless the speaker’s sympathetic engagement
has been. The overwrought emotion of the figures is less apt to provoke sympathy if we
are reminded that it is also wrought: made. Nobody is arrested and held in place, because
the figures on the urn are merely figures, and the “little town” is a fiction – an invention
of the speaker’s imagination. The final stanza’s posture of contemplative distance
removes what Lord Kames would have termed the “ideal presence” of the little town: the
temporary mental illusion of its real presence that enables the speaker to be moved by its
desolation but that is instantly destroyed by the reflection that it is not real (Kames 91-
96).76 The final stanza of the “Ode,” by highlighting and mirroring the urn’s artifice,
retrospectively shows the speaker’s earlier attempts to suspend his disbelief and
sympathize with the figures to have been misguided. The last stanza does not merely
alienate us from the attempts at sympathetic engagement in the rest of the poem,
however. The speaker foretells that the urn will “remain […] a friend to man,” but its
friendship to humankind will consist of uttering a statement equating beauty and truth. Is
this assertion the extent of the urn’s answer to the “woe” of humankind? As I shall
argue, the urn’s famously enigmatic statement, by intervening in a fashionable but
abstractly intellectual debate about the value of realist representation, offers an
alternative to the sympathetic paradigm of aesthetic response: the urn speaks, not to the
heart, but to the mind, and it knows no other way of speaking.

A great deal has been made of the ambiguity of the final two lines of the “Ode.” How
much does the urn say? Who is addressed as “ye” – the urn, the reader, mankind? How
are we to interpret the statement about truth and beauty? A number of these difficulties,
however, have been helpfully clarified by careful historical research. James O’Rourke
has found evidence both in correspondence and in the Annals of the Fine Arts themselves
that “the paired use of these words [beauty and truth] was a commonplace in Keats’s

76
Kames says that, “[i]n contradistinction to real presence, ideal presence may properly be termed a
waking dream; because, like a dream, it vanisheth the moment we reflect upon our present situation” (91),
and he argues that “in reading, ideal presence [is] the means by which our passions are moved,” and thus
“it makes no difference whether the subject be a fable or a true history” (94-5).
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circle, particularly in relation to the Greeks” (53). Moreover, the words had a very
specific meaning. Truth, far from being a vague abstraction, was a term used “to oppose
an aesthetic realism to the representation of imaginary ideas” (54). In the discourse of the
Annals of the Fine Arts, and in Keats’s own circle, “beauty” typically referred to ideal
beauty and “truth” to realist representation. In this context, the statement “beauty is
truth” necessarily sounds less like a mystical aphorism and more like an intervention in
an argument: beauty is truth. Of course its meaning is still ambiguous to a degree, since
the urn could be saying that the beau ideal is more genuinely realistic than any purported
artistic realism, or it could be saying that realism is more beautiful than any purported
imaginary ideal. The chiasmus of “beauty is truth, truth beauty” suggests that the urn is
saying both of these things. Seen in the poem’s context of publication, the urn’s equating
of truth and beauty cuts to the core of a significant quarrel within the art community.77

77
As Stillinger has demonstrated, there is no sound textual basis for assuming that the urn speaks the
entirety of the last two lines. At most, the extent of the urn’s utterance is ambiguous in the early copies of
the poem. In the Lamia version, it is clear that the urn says only “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
Moreover, given the persistence with which the speaker apostrophizes the urn throughout the poem, and
especially in the last stanza, “ye” could address the urn just as easily as it could mankind or the reader.
The change in pronoun from “thou” to “ye” certainly enables ambiguity, but it does not negate the more
intuitive interpretation that “ye” is the urn. As O’Rourke has observed, “it is a curious fate for a poem to
become as canonized as the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ through a critical history whose primary goal has been
to dissuade the reader from believing what the poem seems to say” (46).
One reason why some recent criticism has resisted the disambiguation of the Lamia version’s quotation
marks around “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” and has resisted interpreting the “ye” in the final two lines
as addressing the urn, seems to be discomfort with a male speaker informing a feminized urn of what the
limits of its knowledge are and ought to be. The only recent studies that have taken the “ye” to most
obviously address the urn are those that see the speaker as threatened by the urn’s feminine inscrutability,
such as Scott’s. But to argue that the male speaker is attempting to contain the urn’s castrating power by
imposing a limitation on its knowledge is to conflate the speaker’s construction of the urn as both feminine
and story-telling in the first stanza with his very different construction of it in the last. The language of the
final stanza’s apostrophe to the urn is not coherently gendered: “fair attitude” sounds faintly feminine, but
“Attic shape,” “Cold Pastoral,” and “friend to man” do not. Moreover, once we are aware that “Beauty is
Truth” is not an inscrutable conundrum, but rather a moderating position in a current, very public debate, it
is difficult to see the urn’s confinement to that debate as an uncomfortable silencing of the urn by the male
speaker. Even if we take “ye” to be unambiguously the urn, the limitation articulated by the speaker
amounts to an insistence that the urn can participate only in the debate over the relative value of naturalistic
representation and the beau ideal: all the urn knows or needs to know is a very cerebral set of aesthetic
ideas. Moreover, what is excluded by that limitation – what the urn doesn’t know anything about – is the
realm of changeable emotion. The discourse it can’t participate in is the one the speaker has been trying to
engage it in for four stanzas, to no effect: the discourse of sympathetic exchange. The speaker’s
feminization of the urn in the opening stanza is part and parcel of his attempt to sympathize with its
representations; when that attempt fails, he ceases to address the urn as a virgin bride.
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What the speaker’s shift into a stylized mode of discourse has in common with the urn’s
intervention in aesthetic debate is that both sidestep the question of a sympathetic
relationship between art object and viewer. What is conspicuously absent from the urn’s
statement is anything to do with feeling; the urn’s answer to the “woe” of humankind is
not the ecstasy, bliss, or happiness that preoccupied the speaker in his initial response to
it, but rather a valorization of a particular kind of visual mimesis. The final stanza of
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” then, does not offer an unqualified commendation of visual
realism; what it does offer is a repudiation of a sympathetic paradigm for the visual arts.
The urn, in effect, will not console mankind so much as distract us from our “woe”; and
it will distract mankind not by offering us happier feelings with which to sympathize, but
rather by giving us something outside the realm of feeling to ponder. It will tease us out
of feeling. Of course, if teasing us out of feeling is where the “Ode” ends, it is certainly
not where it began. The final stanza, with its tacit suggestion that the visual arts have a
purpose other than evoking sympathy, can have such a meaning only in the context of the
whole poem and the speaker’s failed attempts at sympathetic engagement. Only by first
showing a speaker trying to sympathize and failing can the “Ode” juxtapose visual art’s
suitability for evoking abstract intellection with its apparent unsuitability for evoking
sympathy. This, I would suggest, is what motivates the poem’s pairing of visual
representation with a conception of sympathy that accords ill with it. In taking sympathy
to be an imaginative act and in representing a work of visual art as impenetrable to
sympathetic imagination, the opening stanzas of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” set up the final
stanza to do more than suggest art’s capacity to articulate abstract thought. In the context
of the preceding stanzas, the final stanza tacitly proposes that capacity as a challenge to
the long-standing assumption that the primary object of the arts is to appeal to the
passions by means of sympathy.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not the only ekphrastic poem in which Keats eschews
sympathy for the figures depicted in favour of some other kind of reaction: given how
mainstream the assumption that evoking sympathy is the purpose of art was, Keats’s
small body of free-standing ekphrases is conspicuous for the very absence of that
assumption. His 1817 sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” for example, may
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announce itself as participating in the tradition of sensibility, but it nonetheless avoids

any representation or expression of sympathy. The speaker delivers an effusion about his
own rather rarefied feelings:
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
These lines exude sensibility: the speaker has a weak spirit, an intuition of mortality
weighs heavily on him, weeping over his mortal limitations is a gentle luxury, he feels an
undescribable feud or a dizzy pain – all of these suggest a man of feeling whose very
sensibility incapacitates him. The speaker here feels a great deal, and describes his
feeling with startling clarity. In fact, what he describes is all feeling, and nothing of the
marbles themselves.78

Strikingly, the speaker’s reaction, while powerful, is not sympathetic; he does not enter
into the imagined life of the figures. Rather, his reaction is a two-fold awe before a
magnificent artistic achievement and before the equally sublime power of time to undo
that achievement. The sonnet is the utterance of one artistic creator doubting that he can

78
Sophie Thomas makes a related point when she notes that “the poem is not about looking at the newly
acquired Elgin Marbles […]. Rather, it charts a response to that event that reconfigures the act of looking
in complex ways” (29).
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live up to the precedent of another, and simultaneously acknowledging that his creations,
too, will be someday marred, perhaps obliterated. Compared to Cornwall’s 1820 poem
about the Elgin Marbles’ Theseus, discussed in the Introduction to this thesis, Keats’s
“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” seems downright radical in its break from the normative
way of relating to art, in that it does not ponder – or even mention – the art’s
representational content. Cornwall’s poem, like the “Ode,” interrogates ideas about
sympathy and art, but only up to a point. The speaker cannot sympathize with the marble
Theseus because his affect is so haughty as to repulse sympathy; but Cornwall’s speaker
still sympathizes with someone, drawing upon his knowledge of the Theseus myth to
supply him with a fit object of sympathy in the abandoned Ariadne. By contrast, Keats’s
speaker in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is overwhelmed by feeling, without the aid
either of any narrated set of circumstances or of any vivid impression of passion
expressed by the figures themselves, but his feeling is entirely on his own account. “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” is thus not alone among Keats’s ekphrases in challenging the popular
assumption that the visual arts ought to elicit sympathy: his praise of the Elgin Marbles
utterly refuses that same assumption.

Keats’s “On a Leander Which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend, Gave Me,”79 another
sonnet written the same year, likewise evokes the conventions of sensibility, and could
even be said to be about sympathy, but it nonetheless resists a sympathetic paradigm for
the value of art. This poem, like “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” uses several of the
conventional tropes of sensibility: a swooning man, sympathetic maidens, physical
symptoms of sympathy (downcast eyes radiating chastened light). In this poem,
however, the speaker does not react to the tiny artwork at all. Any reaction to the
representation engraved in the gem is displaced onto the vaguely delineated “sweet
maidens,” the addressees of the poem’s opening imperatives. The poem’s octave

79
According to Stillinger’s note, the poem was probably composed in March of 1817, but was not
published until 1829. The “Leander” in question was “one of James Tassie’s popular ‘gems,’ glass-paste
reproductions [...] of ancient cameo medallions” (Stillinger 428n). According to the 1898 Dictionary of
National Biography, Tassie also made enamel, cameo-style portraits of his contemporaries, and his gems
were not only popular, but esteemed in their day as art. Catherine the Great of Russia purchased a
collection of them, and Tassie exhibited at the Royal Academy beginning in 1769 (374).
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prepares the maidens to see something that will affect them emotionally: they should
come with down-cast eyes, and they should hold hands, because they are too gentle to
witness Leander’s death “untouch’d.”
Come hither all sweet maidens, soberly
Down-looking—aye, and with a chastened light
Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white—
And meekly let your fair hands joined be.
So gentle are ye that ye could not see,
Untouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright—
Sinking away to his young spirit’s night,
Sinking bewilder’d mid the dreary sea.
The sestet describes a short series of moments: Leander purses his lips while still
swimming, as though to kiss Hero; Leander loses consciousness and begins to sink;
Leander’s arms and shoulders gleam as he fades from view beneath the surface; Leander
disappears and his breath bubbles up to the surface.
’Tis young Leander toiling to his death.
Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips
For Hero’s cheek and smiles against her smile.
O horrid dream—see how his body dips
Dead heavy—arms and shoulders gleam awhile:
He’s gone—up bubbles all his amorous breath.
The first of these moments is described in the most detail, while the others are delivered
in rapid succession, prefaced by the exclamation “O horrid dream.” The poem’s tone,
however, does not encourage us to interpret “O horrid dream” as a sincere expression of
dismay on the part of the speaker; where the speaker of the “Ode” loses himself in the
exclamatory “happy, happy love!” line, the speaker of this poem seems firmly in control
of his utterance. The choice of a dash rather than an exclamation mark following “O
horrid dream” may not have been Keats’s, and perhaps should not be taken alone as
indicating a more measured tone, but “O horrid” is conventional in a way that “More
happy” is not, suggesting that the speaker remains distanced from his own exclamation.
The speaker comes across more as a guide than as a viewer reacting to the engraving
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himself, and the exclamation and imperative “O horrid dream – see how his body dips /
Dead heavy” seems intended to bring the sympathetically viewing “maidens” to a higher
pitch of horror. Indeed, the speaker’s description of the maidens’ bright eyes and white
eyelids suggests that he observes them with a mix of interest and erotic pleasure – and
that his motive for encouraging their sympathetic horror is mingled with a voyeuristic
desire to watch them feel. Although the poem unmistakably draws on the conventions of
the poetry of sensibility, and although it is largely about a particular set of viewers and
their potential sympathetic reaction to an artwork, it sidesteps any expression of such a
reaction on the part of its speaker, turning the sympathetic reaction itself into an object to
be viewed. Taken together with “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” and the “Ode,” this
poem suggests that Keats was using ekphrasis in part to experiment with resisting the
paradigm of sympathetic response as the chief end of the visual arts.

Romantic culture inherited two conceptions of sympathy that, while not mutually
exclusive, had nonetheless competed for dominance for a century. The idea of sympathy
as instinctive and visually driven had been associated with the visual arts from the
beginning, but it had also lost ground in the intellectual mainstream of Britain to the idea
of sympathy as an imaginative act. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” deliberately omits the
possibility of instinctive, visual sympathy in order to enact in some detail the failure of
imaginative sympathy to render the visual arts meaningful. But where some of the later
eighteenth-century philosophers of the sister arts, such as Burke, denigrated the visual
arts along with visual sympathy, the “Ode” does not assert, or even suggest, the
superiority of poetry to painting or sculpture. Instead, it concludes by drawing attention
to the artifice of the visual arts as a feature that enables an abstract form of aesthetic
thought even while it hinders sympathy. The “Ode” distances itself from sympathy as a
potential reaction to art by first showing sympathetic engagement falling flat and then
offering a viable alternative – a way in which the visual arts can have value
independently of their ability to evoke sympathy.
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4.3 “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci”: Sympathy

Beyond the Limits of Sentience
The unfinished “On the Medusa” did not gain a prominence comparable to that of the
“Ode” in studies of ekphrasis until the 1990s, when the advent of W.J.T. Mitchell’s new
theoretical approach to ekphrasis brought it suddenly and decisively to the forefront.
Mitchell, in 1992, and Heffernan, in 1993, each examine the poem in the context of their
respective theories of ekphrasis (in Mitchell’s case, a theory of ekphrasis in general; in
Heffernan’s case, a theory of Romantic ekphrasis); Scott, in 1996, offers an expanded
reading grounded in Mitchell’s theoretical foundation. Each reads the poem as
simultaneously embodying and critiquing the norms of ekphrasis, although they differ
significantly as to what those norms are. In “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Mitchell argues
that “On the Medusa” both exemplifies and questions a convention of ekphrasis as a
gendered encounter with a feminized artwork, while Heffernan argues that it both
exemplifies and questions Romantic culture’s assumption that the visual arts could
somehow transcend time. These readings take the poem to be chiefly concerned with the
cultural function of art, but construct the poem as less politically charged than one might
expect a work by Shelley to be. Being alert to the poem’s political undercurrent,
however, does not mean ignoring its engagement with the discourses surrounding the
arts. These readings stand to be enriched by a recognition that for sculpture to act as a
metaphor for emotional petrification is conventional in Romantic poetry. To read “On
the Medusa,” as Heffernan does, as if it were a commentary only on a culturally
dominant idea that art can transcend time is to overlook its participation in its culture’s
vocabulary for representing feeling and the passions. To read it, as Mitchell does, as
interrogating something inherently paralyzing or threatening about the visual arts is
likewise to overlook the fact that to the Romantics it was feeling itself that was often
figured as paralyzing. The viewer’s spiritual paralysis in the face of the painting of
Medusa has less to do with anything intrinsically petrifying about the visual arts than
with the philosophically daring ideas about feeling and sympathy that the poem subtly
proposes. And sympathy, in Shelley’s oeuvre, is a cornerstone of hope for social and
political renovation.
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Mitchell proposes his theory of ekphrasis as a gendered encounter between the viewer
and the artwork in his influential essay “Ekphrasis and the Other,” first published in
South Atlantic Quarterly in 1992, and republished in Picture Theory in 1994. Mitchell
explicitly chooses “On the Medusa” as the cornerstone text of his new theory, saying that
Medusa is the perfect prototype for the image as a dangerous female
other who threatens to silence the poet’s voice and fixate his observing
eye. Both the utopian desire of ekphrasis (that the beautiful image be
present to the observer) and its counterdesire or resistance (the fear of
paralysis and muteness in the face of the powerful image) are expressed
here. All of the distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful, the
aesthetics of pain and pleasure, or of the masculine and the feminine,
that might allow ekphrasis to confine itself to the contemplation of
beauty are subverted by the image of Medusa. Beauty, the very thing
which aestheticians like Edmund Burke thought could be viewed from
a safe position of superior strength, turns out to be itself the dangerous
force: ‘it is less the horror than the grace’ that paralyzes the observer.
(Picture Theory 172)
Mitchell adds, however, that “On the Medusa” is more than simply the perfect example
of the ekphrastic mechanism that he identifies: the poem also critiques that mechanism.
“On the Medusa,” Mitchell argues, seems “designed to deconstruct, not just the
repression of Medusa, but the genre of ekphrasis as a verbal strategy for
repressing/representing visual representation”; it does this deconstruction by
systematically effacing the mediation of the painter, describing the image as if Medusa
were really present (173).

Picking up the thread of Mitchell’s argument, Grant F. Scott offers a reading of “On the
Medusa” in his 1996 chapter “Shelley, Medusa, and the Perils of Ekphrasis.” Adopting
Mitchell’s definition of ekphrasis as articulating an encounter between a hopeful
spectator and a threatening, feminized artwork, Scott takes Mitchell’s claim that the
poem is a prototype of the genre to yet a further extreme. He argues that the myth of
Perseus and Medusa itself constitutes a “primitive allegory of ekphrasis,” in which
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Medusa’s cave resembles a gallery, Perseus resembles a gallery viewer, and Medusa
“represents an aesthetic trap that threatens to realize what is only a metaphoric possibility
in the ut pictura poesis tradition: the fate of speechlessness and paralysis” (319, 320).
Perseus, in this reading of the myth, “becomes the first great practitioner of the genre” of
ekphrasis (320). In spite of the ahistorical flamboyance of this claim, when he comes to
his reading of what Shelley does with the myth, Scott notes some important differences
between “On the Medusa” and conventional ekphrasis as defined by Mitchell: that the
speaker seems to crave and enjoy, rather than fear, the overwhelming and perhaps
emasculating power of the image; that the roles of the speaker/viewer, Perseus, and
Medusa herself are blurred by the poem’s slippery language; that the poem “affirms “a
poetics of aesthetic encounter which remains wholly antithetical to the predatory gazing
of the eighteenth century” (330).

Heffernan also devotes a substantial discussion to “On the Medusa,” close-reading it to

make the most of its ambiguities and interpreting it as a challenge to what he deems
Romantic culture’s dominant mode of thinking about art. He argues that the “gazer”
whose spirit is turned “into stone” is not an unnamed viewer of the painting, but rather
Medusa herself, since it is Medusa who lies “gazing” at the sky; he thus concludes that
the poem is about beauty’s capacity to petrify even itself. Like Mitchell, Heffernan
draws attention to the breakdown of the conventional binary of the sublime and beautiful
in the poem’s description of Medusa, but he reads the poem as critiquing the idea of art
transcending time. If, as Heffernan argues, Romantic culture idealized art’s ability to
preserve the fleeting and to endure indefinitely in museums, then this poem seems to
resist that paradigm by representing such preservation and endurance as horrifying.
Heffernan pits the Romantic “ideology of transcendence” against the petrifying capacity
of the image of Medusa that is “graven,” in his reading, on Medusa’s own spirit: art here
signifies a petrification that is deathlike and to be avoided.

These three readings of the poem – especially Mitchell’s, which stands as the seminal
interpretation of the poem within ekphrasis studies – are notably apolitical by Shelleyan
standards. While it is true that all three construct the poem as resisting or destabilizing
mainstream ideologies, they are ideologies at several removes from practical politics.
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Mitchell and Scott argue that the poem resists a mode of writing about art that has its root
in patriarchal social structures; Heffernan argues that it resists a mode of thinking about
art that removes art from the ordinary, transactional world. What they do not discuss is
how Shelley’s poem brings the painting of Medusa to bear upon the affairs of the
ordinary, transactional world. An older study of the poem, ignoring its status as an
ekphrasis entirely, offers a reading of it that is much more in keeping with the
mainstream of Shelley criticism. McGann’s 1972 essay “The Beauty of the Medusa”
makes it clear that the Shelley who wrote the poem is the same Shelley who wrote
Prometheus Unbound or “England in 1819.” McGann is interested in the potentially
radical political symbolism of Medusa – a woman punished by all-powerful gods for
events not her fault – and Shelley’s poem is only the starting point of his discussion of
the ways in which Minerva/Athena’s treatment of Medusa was taken as a prototype of
unjust tyranny in Romantic and post-Romantic thought.

Reading “On the Medusa” as an ekphrasis does not necessarily preclude reading it in the
context of Shelley’s famous radicalism. In fact, unpacking what the poem does with
sympathy, and the way it uses the discourse of the visual arts to do it, allows us to see an
added layer of its radical subtext. McGann himself observes that “[t]he fascination
[Medusa] arouses has been translated into a sympathetic process” in the poem, and that
the reader’s sympathy with a victim of tyranny is crucial to the poem’s effects (8).
Moreoever, sympathy and love are keywords that Shelley returns to again and again: in
the “Defense of Poetry,” for example, or in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” in which he
addresses a Spirit of Beauty that is a “messenger of sympathies” (42) and that has taught
him to “love all human kind” (84), imploring that spirit to “free / This world from its
dark slavery” (69-70). Shelley’s consistently articulated vision that sympathy and love
are “the great secret of morals” is a fundamental part of his impulse to hope for a world
free of tyranny and injustice (“Defense of Poetry” 682). Sympathy, for Shelley, is
radical.

As I shall show, reading “On the Medusa” as an ekphrasis and noting its interactions
with conventional ideas about art clarifies what it does with ideas about sympathy, ideas
that lend further complexity to the poem’s demand that its readers sympathize with the
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tyrannized Medusa. Using slippery language and densely worked metaphors to present a
viewer who seems to absorb feelings, sensations, and thoughts from a painting of a dead
woman, Shelley offers several challenges to existing ideas about sympathy. Pushing to a
new extreme Adam Smith’s observation that we sympathize with the dead even when
doing so involves constructing a fiction of their continued bodily sentience, Shelley
represents a form of sympathy for the dead that requires no such fiction. Not only does
he refuse to align instantaneous sympathy with visual stimuli and gradual sympathy with
notions of reconstructed circumstances, but Shelley also refuses to ground sympathy in
the apparently common-sense assumption that either the sympathizer or the object of
sympathy need to be conscious. Shelley was far from the first in British letters to
position sympathy as a cornerstone of ethical renewal, but existing representations of
sympathy, measured against “On the Medusa,” seem drastically to underestimate its
potential scope.

“On the Medusa” is never explicit that the interaction it represents between viewer and
artwork involves sympathy, and perhaps Shelley himself would have resisted the use of
the term. It may seem counterintuitive to examine Shelley’s construction of sympathy in
a poem that does not use the word “sympathy” at all, but “On the Medusa” is not the only
posthumously published text in which Shelley probes conventional ideas about
sympathy, re-constructing or re-defining the concept in unusual ways. He does not
always name sympathy as such, and the ideas he proposes are not consistent from one
posthumously published text to the next, but these texts nonetheless suggest a pattern of
ongoing exploration. In his famous passage on the subject in “A Defense of Poetry,”
Shelley carefully avoids the word “sympathy,” although what he describes is readily
recognizable as such. He states that “[t]he great secret of morals is Love,” which he
defines as “a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the
beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own,” and he adds that in
order for Love to achieve this moral force, “a man must imagine intensely and
comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (682). Here, Shelley
systematically appropriates to his redefinition of “Love” the attributes usually ascribed to
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sympathy: identification with another, putting oneself in another’s “place” by means of

imagination, feeling another’s pleasure or pain as if it were one’s own.

I would argue that this calling of a concept that would have sounded to most readers like
sympathy by a different name – love – is carefully set up in the preceding sentences,
which prepare the reader to be a little more likely to notice the slight misalignment of
idea and signifier.
But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges
the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love...
(682).
Within one paragraph, Shelley first states that poetry offers “unapprehended
combinations of thought” and “makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
Then he states that poetry “reproduces all that it represents.” Lastly, he redefines love as
sympathy. While “unapprehended combinations of thought” is most easily read as a way
of describing metaphor, Shelley leaves open-ended the question of how thoughts can be
combined. Appropriating to one concept a term that usually means something related but
separate is certainly one way of re-combining existing ideas, or of making a familiar idea
seem unfamiliar. Moreover, between his statement that poetry offers hitherto
“unapprehended combinations of thought” and his offer of an unconventional
combination of ideas, Shelley asserts that poetry “reproduces all that it represents,” thus
further preparing his reader to note that what follows reproduces the process described
immediately before. The apparently aphoristic style of the “Defense” here enables the
juxtaposition of Shelley’s assertion that poetry can offer new combinations of ideas with
an actual recombination of existing ideas.
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Simply linking the terms “sympathy” and “love,” or observing that they are related,
would hardly have been unusual, but omitting the term “sympathy” entirely and
substituting the word “love” is more daring than that – a much more radical way of
combining or juxtaposing the two ideas. “Love” has its own connotations: intense and
vulnerable personal attachment, but also divinity and boundlessness. It is by far the
older, more conventional term, and, especially in the context of a discussion of morals,
its connotations are theological. “Sympathy” is a word associated with secular moral
philosophy – the philosophy that had sought to separate morals from religion. To state
that sympathy and love are related, or that sympathy is a means of achieving love, might
have sounded in 1821 like a subordination of the philosophical concept of sympathy to
amatory attachment, but it might as easily have sounded like a conservative tempering of
secular thought with religious language; to call sympathy “love,” and to thus appropriate
to the idea of sympathy the connotations of divinity and boundlessness associated with it,
is quite the opposite.

Elsewhere, Shelley defines “Love” not as sympathy, but as a kind of impulse to seek
sympathy: not as the identification itself, but as the drive to identify. In his fragmentary,
posthumously published essay “On Love,” he calls Love
that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope
beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of
an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a
community with what we experience in ourselves.
He goes on to say that
[i]f we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that
the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we
feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own; that lips
of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with
the heart’s best blood. This is Love.
The wished-for experience he describes here is sympathy. In “On Love,” however,
unlike in the “Defense,” Shelley does not hesitate to use the term sympathy. If anything,
he uses the term conspicuously, both before and after his definition of Love, as a means
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of clarifying the relationship between the two concepts. He begins the essay by
lamenting that he has not received sympathy from other people, saying
when […] I have thought to appeal to something in common, and
unburthen my inmost soul to them [other men], I have found my
language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The
more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has
appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the
points of sympathy been withdrawn. […] I have everywhere sought
sympathy, and have found only repulse and disappointment.
In stating this before defining Love as the impulse to strive for communion with others,
Shelley is making it clear that Love is the craving for sympathy. Curiously, however,
Shelley never uses the term sympathy in his attempts actually to describe the sought-after
communion, although he does signal his participation in the intellectual tradition of
sensibility by alluding to A Sentimental Journey. Instead, he reserves the term as a kind
of shorthand for talking about the lack or failure of such communion, returning to the
word at the end of the essay when he says that “in solitude, or in that deserted state when
we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the
flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky.” Here, both verbs, “sympathize” and “love,”
are standing in for the effusive definitions that precede them in the essay: to sympathize
is to understand and share the intellectual, imaginative, emotional, and spiritual
experience of another, and to love is to seek such sympathy from another.

If Shelley’s strategies for constructing the relationship between the terms “Love” and
“sympathy” are noticeably different in “On Love” than they are in his “Defense of
Poetry,” his actual definition of Love is also crucially different. In “On Love,” Shelley
proposes that each person has an inner concept of an idealized self, “deprived of all that
we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent and lovely that we
are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man.” Love, in “On Love,” is the
compulsion to find resemblances to this idealized self in the external world: it is not an
identification with the good in others, as it is in the “Defense,” but rather an impulse to
identify others with the good in oneself. In the “Defense,” his manifesto as a poet,
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Shelley accomplishes something specific. By not naming sympathy, or rather by naming

it something else, he can insist on a fresh set of associations with the concept. In “On
Love,” he explicitly articulates twin concepts of love and sympathy, in which sympathy
is defined fairly conventionally as a shared experience of someone else’s inner life. The
essay’s discussion of sympathy is somewhat unconventional by the standards of a
philosophical text, however, in that it is the object or recipient of sympathy, rather than
the sympathizer, whose experience concerns Shelley, and whose craving for sympathetic
communion is a motivating force for action. Furthermore, the essay’s treatment of
sympathy is still more unconventional in that the inner experiences to be sympathetically
shared are not just emotions, but also thoughts, reasonings, and imaginative fictions: the
“airy children of our brain.”

“On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci” shares elements with both essays. Like “On
Love,” it stretches the concept of sympathy, expanding it to include shared experiences
well beyond feeling or the passions. Composed roughly a year and a half before “A
Defense of Poetry,” “On the Medusa,” like the “Defense,” rethinks the concept of
sympathy without naming it as such (albeit using a very different strategy for rethinking
it). Never revised for publication, “On the Medusa” does not offer nearly as familiar a
formulation of sympathy as either essay, nor does it offer a conclusive theory of
sympathy’s moral function, as does the “Defense.” What it does offer is a representation
of a response to an artwork – a representation in which the viewer seems paradoxically to
be both struck with intense feeling and as insentient as the painting of the dead Medusa.
The feelings named in the poem – pain, agony – seem to belong to both Medusa and the
viewer, without either of them having the consciousness or even the grammatical agency
to feel them in the conventional sense of the word.

The poem’s status as a fragment makes widely differing interpretations more than usually
difficult to reconcile, and a skeptic might doubt that the poem can bear the weight of a
reading close enough to tease out a reconceiving of sympathy as nuanced as the one I am
attributing to Shelley. “On the Medusa” seems at first glance more problematic in this
respect than some other fragments. Keats’s “Ode on Indolence,” discussed in the next
chapter, was also not published during its author’s lifetime, but, unlike “On the Medusa,”
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“Ode on Indolence” has a fixed number of stanzas, the order of which has been
authoritatively determined. “On the Medusa,” by contrast, is variously reconstructed as
having five or six stanzas. Most strikingly, “On the Medusa” has two words missing.
This does not mean that the poem did not participate in the discourses of its day, or that
the interpretations of it that have been proposed within ekphrasis studies could not be
enriched by noting the elements of the poem that, finalized or not, signal its participation
in the those discourses. Nevertheless I have wrestled with the question of just how much
focused explication the poem can support.

My first answer to this is that the text is not as unfinished as some of the controversies
surrounding its “extra stanza” might lead one to believe. The disputed “sixth” stanza was
not published by Mary Shelley, but rather was “found” by Neville Rogers, who pieced it
together from two fragments on two different pages of Mary Shelley’s notebook
transcription in the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (Rogers 9-12). The copy of “On the
Medusa” in the Bodleian manuscript is incomplete: 80 the poem is spread across pages
97, 98 and 100 of the manuscript, but stanza 3 and most of stanza 4 are missing, making
it unlikely that this copy is the version Mary Shelley was working from when she
published the poem. Moreover, even if the transcription were an authoritative source
text, it offers no justification for linking the two fragments into a single stanza. The two
partial stanzas are on pages 97 and 100; the first follows stanza 5, while the second
follows the final two lines of stanza 4. Moreover, what neither Rogers nor any of the
scholars who have adopted his sixth stanza have acknowledged is that the five stanzas
published by Mary Shelley are in in a very particular verse form: not a nonce stanza
invented for the occasion, and not an English ode stanza expected to be irregular, but
rather the comparatively prestigious Italian form ottava rima, 81 all too appropriate for a
poem composed in Florence about an Italian painting in the Uffizi gallery; in spite of the
technical demands of the form, all five stanzas are metrically regular except for the two

The manuscript is available in facsimile in Volume 2 of Irving Massey’s The Bodleian Shelley
80

Manuscripts.
81
I.e. eight-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, rhymed abababcc.
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missing words, and consistently rhymed. Rogers’ sixth stanza, by contrast, is wildly
irregular, containing nine lines and rhyming ababcdcdc, a deviation that Rogers
cavalierly dismisses as “a typical Shelleyan irregularity by which Mary would not have
been disturbed.” In other words, the two short fragments that have been grafted together
to construct it both appear to be unfinished beginnings of normal ottava rima stanzas, one
consisting of the first four lines of a stanza, and the other consisting of the first five.
It is a woman’s countenance divine
With everlasting beauty breathing there
Which from a stormy mountain’s peak, supine
Gazes into the night’s trembling air.

It is a trunkless head, and on its feature

Death has met life, but there is life in death,
The blood is frozen--but unconquered Nature
Seems struggling to the last--without a breath
The fragment of an uncreated creature
Both partial stanzas appear to be early attempts specifically at the first stanza. Both
begin with “It,” the first word of the poem as we have it, and both contain other words,
phrases and images that survive in the first stanza as Mary Shelley published it.
Medusa’s countenance is “divine,” as her horror and beauty are “divine” in the first
stanza. She is on “a stormy mountain’s peak, supine,” while in the first stanza she is
“upon the cloudy mountain peak supine.” She “gazes” into the air, as she is “gazing” at
the sky in the first stanza, and the air is “trembling,” like the “far lands [that] are seen
tremblingly” in the first stanza. “Unconquered Nature” is “struggling” within Medusa, as
her pain is “struggling underneath” in the first stanza. By contrast, only one phrase from
either of the discarded fragments recurs in any other stanza of the poem as Mary Shelley
published it: “a woman’s countenance,” which appears in the concluding couplet of the
last stanza. Rogers suggests, in fact, that Mary Shelley’s reason for omitting what he
takes to be the sixth stanza might have been “the fact that it seemed repetitious” rather
than its irregularity (17). A more likely explanation for both its repetitiousness and Mary
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Shelley’s decision to omit it, however, is that it consists of two rejected drafts of the first
stanza.

If the disputed “sixth stanza” is really two rejected partial drafts toward the first stanza,
then it seems unreasonable to consider the text of “On the Medusa” more unstable or less
capable of withstanding close reading than the text of any other posthumously published
Romantic poem; only the two missing words render it fragmentary at all. Given its
posthumously published state, “On the Medusa” cannot stand beside “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” as a public document of its author experimenting with resistance to culturally
dominant ideas. With this caveat, however, I would suggest that the poem has posed
problems for criticism that can be resolved only by recognizing how it uses and resists
discourses about art and sympathy from its own time. The reading of “On the Medusa”
that sees it as being about the potentially paralyzing nature of the visual arts misses the
Romantic literary conventions the poem is playing with (in which paralysis is typically
figured as becoming artwork, not the result of looking at artwork), and it misses the
poem’s subtle reworking of the conventional pairing of ideas from aesthetic and moral
philosophy.

“On the Medusa” cannot readily be labelled an enactment of a sympathetic attempt, as

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” can, because there are no actors: the sympathy that is suggested
has no obvious subject or object. Sensations and emotions – things that are usually felt
by someone – are presented as having independent existence. Pain is figured as light that
radiates out from Medusa, who may or may not be conscious enough to feel it, and
eventually fills the sky. The poem’s syntax increasingly allots grammatical agency to
nearly everything but Medusa, including the snakes that are her own hair, thus
emphasizing still more Medusa’s passivity and dubious state of consciousness.
Eventually, grammatical agency dissolves altogether in the convoluted syntax of the final
stanza, and yet feelings – pain and torment – continue to be present. Given that
sympathy in Romantic literature is almost always constructed as the recreation of
someone else’s emotional experience within one’s own consciousness, it may seem odd
to conclude that a poem in which nothing has a clearly defined consciousness is actually
a poem about sympathy, and I would certainly not suggest that “On the Medusa” is about
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sympathy in any of the usual senses, in which one conscious agent sympathizes with
another. Rather, I would suggest that the “gazer”’s reaction to the painting of Medusa is
a sympathetic one in a technical, etymologically precise sense: a reaction of feeling with
the painted Medusa, or rather of sharing feelings with her, or partaking of sensations that
one would normally expect to be Medusa’s.82 Moreover, it is not primarily Medusa’s
pain with which the viewer sympathizes. It is her very insentience that the viewer seems
to feel with or come to share with her. The gazer’s agency and consciousness are slowly
erased from the text in tandem with Medusa’s. Lastly, the dominant metaphor of the
second stanza suggests that the viewer of the painting becomes, like the painting, a
passive medium for the representation of Medusa.83 It is thus not only the dead
Medusa’s insentience, but the painted dead Medusa’s insentience that the viewer
partakes in.

The poem’s language resists received ideas about sympathy in two ways. First, the
sympathy represented in this text is unconventional in and of itself. It is not confined to
shared emotions or passions. It is a feeling with that includes all that the object might
feel: passions, but also physical sensations. It is also a hybrid of the two conventional
formulations of sympathy. Visually cued and instinctive but also processive and gradual,
this sympathy defies the traditional distinction between instantaneous and imaginative

82
I will continue to refer to the viewer’s sympathy as a feeling with Medusa, as a strategy for stripping
away some of the conceptual baggage that the word sympathy had, even in 1819. Even this term, however,
remains problematic, because it still implies that both Medusa and the viewer are actively feeling
something, which I shall argue is not the case. Any verb – feeling, sharing, partaking – presents the same
challenge, since the poem offers sustained resistance to consciousness and agency as we know them. I
have chosen the term feeling with to highlight what I see as Shelley’s own paring down of the concept of
sympathy to its absolute bare bones, freed from the weight of philosophical formulations that the word had
accrued in the comparatively short time it had been part of English usage. What he then does with the
concept, however, cannot be readily expressed in a single word or phrase.
83
I am not the first to suggest that this metaphor is grounded in the concept of sympathy. In “The Beauty
of the Medusa,” McGann states that “The fascination [Medusa] arouses has been translated into a
sympathetic process” in which she “impresses upon the sympathetic observer the very essence and source
of her dazzling beauty: her image is sculptured on the gazer’s soul, which is turned to receptive stone…”
(8). Since McGann said this in 1972, however, fully twenty-four years before publishing his magisterial
Poetics of Sensibility, it should not be a surprise that he uses the term sympathy somewhat loosely,
evidently taking the metaphor of sculpting simply to mean that the reader is likely to empathize with
Medusa and be spiritually enriched by the sight of the painting: her beauty “become[s] part of the gazer’s
now humanized and harmonized life” (8).
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modes of sympathy, and thus also the traditional pairing of instantaneous sympathy with
the visual arts. The poem defies the expectations that visual sympathy is necessarily
instantaneous or that gradual sympathy relies on imagination. Second, “On the Medusa”
also upends the literary conventions surrounding the trope of people turning to stone,
challenging the conventions about what kinds of inner experiences Medusa’s power to
petrify can metaphorically signify. I shall argue that it does both of these things in order
to make a space for a type of sympathy that is impossible to represent, or even imagine,
within the confines of either set of conventions, and thus to challenge the idea that we
sympathize with the dead by deceiving ourselves, as Adam Smith had hypothesized.
“On the Medusa” breaks the conventional definitions of sympathy into their component
parts and scrambles them, taking processiveness from one definition, visual stimulus
from another, and assembling a new concept of sympathy that can accommodate an
experience of feeling with a figure that ought otherwise to be inaccessible to sympathy.
Furthermore, the model of sympathy that the poem tacitly constructs can accommodate
such an experience without resorting, as Smith does, to the idea that we “overlook”
realities in order to achieve such sympathy (1.1.13). By denying the reader a viable
approximation of consciousness with which to sympathize, the poem suggests an
understanding of sympathy that does not rely on the sympathizer’s assumption of self-
aware consciousness in the object of sympathy. Where Smith’s formulation of sympathy
with the dead, as I shall show, relies on the sympathizer suspending disbelief in the
fiction that the dead feel being buried and forgotten, “On the Medusa” suggests a mode
of feeling with in which the sympathizer actually has a vicarious experience of
insentience.

“On the Medusa” is not the only ekphrastic poem in which Shelley explores the effect on
the viewer of the symptoms of strong feeling represented in an artwork, and its
philosophical boldness can be spotlighted by juxtaposing it with a poem that treats the
issue of viewer response less directly, and that interrogates instead the logical basis for
any kind of emotional reaction to an artwork. The traveller who relates the bulk of
“Ozymandias” treats emotion and symptoms of emotion as entirely legible/transparent:
Ozymandias’ pride and scorn could be “read” by the sculptor, who could in turn stamp
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onto the stone both Ozymandias’ heart, which fed the passions, and his own artistry,
which “mocked” or imitated the passions.
‘[…]Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
The traveller’s assumption of affective transparency, however, is quickly undermined,
and the sonnet in fact suggests that the link between the passions supposedly signified in
a work of visual art and the representation of outward affect that does the signifying is a
profoundly unstable one.

The double meaning of the inscription on the pedestal destabilizes the traveller’s assured
declaration of affective legibility, drawing attention to a subtle paradox buried within it.
Not sufficiently aware of the ironies he is about to utter to mark the sonnet’s turn with
the more conventional “but,” the traveller goes on to say
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
The obliteration by time of Ozymandias’ kingdom and “Works” ironizes the original
meaning of the inscription (despair of equalling me), displacing it in favour of a different
meaning (despair of your works lasting any better). In the light of that fairly obvious
irony, we are more likely to retrospectively perceive the irony in the traveller’s earlier
statement that the passions “survive” because they are preserved on “these lifeless
things.” The symptoms of the passions may be “read,” recorded and preserved, but the
traveller figures the passions themselves, paradoxically, as surviving on a “lifeless”
medium. Shelley could as easily have said “endure,” derived from the Latin “durus”
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(hard) without altering his meter; he chose “survive,” a word derived from the Latin
“vivere” (to live), thus drawing out the element of paradox in the traveller’s statement
(OED). These ironies undermine the traveller’s confident assumption that the links
between the statue and the real face, the real face and the heart, are transparent. The
poem’s equivocation hints at the unknowability of Ozymandias’ long-dead heart, even
while the traveller’s vivid language conjures up all too well the affective verisimilitude
of the statue. “Ozymandias” thus suggests a disconnect between the extraordinary
affective displays of which the visual arts are capable and the feelings, passions or
emotions that those displays supposedly signify. The traveller succumbs to that
verisimilitude and believes he understands Ozymandias’ scornful heart, feeding on its
own bad passions, but he believes this at the expense of the logic of his utterance. So
too, the poem suggests, the viewer of an artwork takes an impassioned face as a legible
record of feeling at the risk of being mistaken. “Ozymandias,” rather than representing
sympathy for a figure in an artwork, speaks to the logical – or illogical – grounds of such
sympathy.

“On the Medusa” requires special attention in part because it does something more
complex in this respect than does “Ozymandias.” Medusa’s “real” experience is just as
inaccessible, just as unknowable, as Ozymandias’; but where the strong impression
generated by the statue’s features in “Ozymandias” is displaced onto a self-contradicting
traveller, the speaker of “On the Medusa,” relating the reactions of a generalized “gazer,”
confronts the fact of the gazer’s sympathy without making any concessions either to the
knowability of Medusa’s feelings or to the unreliability of the gazer. Instead, “On the
Medusa” takes apart the conventional definitions of sympathy, reconstructing them in
order to make them accommodate an experience of feeling with an enigmatically
expressive painted representation of a dead figure from myth. “On the Medusa” does not
sidestep Medusa’s insentience: she is presented in the first word of the poem as “it,”
rather than “she.” And yet, as I shall argue, “On the Medusa” is very much a poem about
sympathy, however radically redefined.

The feeling with that is suggested in “On the Medusa” is of a strange kind: sensations and
emotions seem to exist independently, belonging to Medusa or to the viewer of the
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painting without either of those figures consciously feeling them, and this ambiguity
surrounding both of their feelings enables a certain degree of slippage between them.
The poem’s metaphors sidestep the question of whether Medusa is conscious in any
conventional sense. Pain emanates from her, readily perceptible, irrespective of
Medusa’s own awareness of it. One of the dominant metaphors of the first two stanzas is
the representation of pain as light: an inversion of the equally synaesthetic but far more
conventional representation of joy or pleasure as light.
It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,84
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
“The agonies of anguish and of death” are here presented as a light that shines, “fiery and
lurid,” out from under a loveliness that is figured, equally unconventionally, as a
“shadow.” In the second stanza, “pain” is figured as light again: as a “glare” that is
partially veiled by the “melodious hue of beauty.” Whether Medusa herself actually feels

84
Mary Shelley’s edition reads “shrine” here, and the editors at Romantic Circles have preserved “shrine,”
but later editions emended it to “shine,” which makes more syntactic sense.
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this pain in any recognizable sense is beside the point; the pain has its own, independent,
“fiery” existence.

The unconventional figure “loveliness like a shadow” echoes one of Shelley’s most
pointed explorations of the nature of figuration itself, written three years prior to “On the
Medusa” in 1816, and published in 1817. “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” a poem
addressed to the Spirit of Beauty, opens with the statement that “[t]he awful shadow of
some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us.” As the pointed repetition of
“unseen” and “though unseen” makes clear, not only the power itself but its shadow is in
fact unseen; the power’s perceptible effects are, paradoxically, imperceptible. Karen
Weisman observes that, in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley “figure[es] […] the
process by which the sceptical mind establishes emblems of its desired other” (48).
Shelley’s “obtrusive” use of simile, she argues, “calls insistent attention to the lyrical
process: in rejecting the absolute equivalents of metaphor in favour of the obtrusiveness
of the mere likeness proposed by simile, Shelley refuses the presumption of surely
locating his spiritual anchor even while he advertises the frenetic quality of his urge to do
so” (48). In trying to describe or name the unseen power, Shelley’s speaker resorts to
similes and analogies that are themselves insistently intangible: “like moonbeams that
behind some piny mountain shower” (5); “like memory of music fled” (10); “like […]
music by the night-wind sent / Through strings of some still instrument” (32-4). And if
the vehicles of these similes are incorporeal, their tenors are radically abstract: “the awful
shadow of some unseen Power,” in the case of the first two examples (1), and the “light”
of the Spirit of Beauty,” in the case of the second (32). As these examples reveal, the
similes themselves are modifying metaphors – shadow and light – for something else that
cannot, apparently, be named directly. A third metaphor for the Spirit of Beauty,
“nourishment” for “human thought” (44), is modified by a yet more ineffable simile:
“like darkness to a dying flame” (45). If the “thou” addressed in the poem is
nourishment to human thought in the same sense that darkness is nourishment to a dying
flame, then we must reconsider the apparently conventional and straightforward meaning
of “nourishment” in this context: darkness may render a dying flame visible, but does not
feed it in the usual sense in which a flame can be fed – with fuel. At the culmination of
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“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley’s speaker admits to the inadequacy of his tropes
to convey the nature of either the Spirit of Beauty or that spirit’s presence and effects in
the world, proclaiming his “hope […] [t]hat thou, O awful LOVELINESS, / Wouldst
give whate’er these words cannot express” (69-72).

“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” has in common with “On the Medusa” not only its staging
of a speaker’s not-quite-conscious mental process – in this case a process of attempting
without success to name a power whose presence he senses but cannot describe – but
also its use of slippery and layered figuration to find a middle ground between what is
experienced at the level of full consciousness and what is not experienced at all. In “On
the Medusa,” a more conventional representation of sympathy for a painted figure might
tell us simply that Medusa’s features express pain; this poem by contrast makes pain the
active agent, rather than the thing expressed or felt by an active agent. It is the “agonies”
themselves that are “struggling,” as though they are conscious agents who actively seek
to shine out from under the shadow of loveliness. And while the first iteration of the
pain-as-light metaphor seems calculated to be as disturbing as possible, the second
iteration suggests that in fact the light of pain is the least disturbing element of the
painted Medusa. Initially, the “lurid” light of pain emanates from Medusa’s mouth and
eyes, partially hidden by her presumably half-closed “lips and eyelids.” In the second
stanza, however, “the darkness and the glare of pain” seem to be the elements that
“humanize and harmonize” the painting. The syntax here is ambiguous, but only up to a
point. It is possible to read the plural verbs “humanize and harmonize” as referring to
“the melodious hue of beauty” as well as to “the darkness and the glare of pain,” and it is
possible to read them as referring only to “the darkness and the glare of pain,”85 but it is
not possible to read them as referring only to the singular “melodious hue of beauty.”
Syntactically, the poem demands that we interpret the “glare of pain” as one of the

85
This second possible reading leaves “‘Tis the melodious hue of beauty” as a parallel clause to “It is less
the horror than the grace,” which forces “the melodious hue of beauty” to be another iteration of the
“grace” that “turns the gazer’s spirit into stone.”
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humanizing features of the painting.86 The light of pain, then, is credited with the agency
not only to “struggle” to escape from under the shadow of Medusa’s beauty, but also to
create harmony over and against the melody – the “melodious hue” – of that beauty, and
to render the painting – the strain or song – human.

The apparent agency of pain itself at the expense of the agency one might expect for
Medusa is reinforced in subsequent stanzas by the proliferation of other objects that
likewise have agency at Medusa’s expense. In the third stanza, grammatical agency is
located entirely with the vipers of Medusa’s hair, literally around Medusa’s head instead
of in it. “Hairs which are vipers” is the subject of every verb in this stanza: grow, curl,
flow, lock their long tangles in each other, shew, saw. And while one might expect
vipers to do things – to be the subjects of such active verbs – the phrase “[h]airs which
are vipers” gives priority to their status as hairs. Growing, curling, and flowing are all
conventionally actions attributed to human hair, and “lock,” when used as a noun, is a
conventional collective noun for hair, but in this case these words are all used to denote
things that only a viper could do.
And from its head as from one body grow,
As [ ] grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock

86
It is possible that Shelley had “Peele Castle” (discussed at length in the next chapter) in mind when
writing this line. The idea that “the glare of pain” might “humanize” the painting is reminiscent of
Wordsworth’s line “a deep distress hath humanized my soul.” There is a crucial difference, however,
between “distress” humanizing a poetic speaker’s soul and “the glare of pain” humanizing a work of visual
art, particularly with the addition of the musical metaphor, in which the painting is a “strain” that is not
only humanized but also “harmonize[d]” by the glare of pain. It is a fairly tame proposition to suggest that
a soul that is already a human soul can be made more human, or perhaps more humane, by suffering,
especially if (as “Peele Castle” strongly suggests) suffering is an integral part of human experience – what
it means to be united with “the kind” in both senses of the word. What Shelley’s poem suggests, however,
is far more radical. Pain not only renders more human/humane a painting of a creature who is herself not
fully human, but also improves the painting’s aesthetic qualities, figured in musical terms. Moreover, that
pain is itself figured as light, as part of Shelley’s unconventional scheme of figuring suffering as light and
beauty as darkness in this poem.
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The torture and the death within, and saw

The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
The grammatical agency of the viper-hairs is thus doubly unsettling: it is unsettling
because they are extensions of Medusa’s body, still alive and moving when she is dead
or dying, and given the status of subjects of active verbs when she is not, and it is
unsettling because the vigorous actions of the viper-hairs are denoted using words eerily
close to the more sedate verbs one would expect hairs to be the subjects of. “Hairs which
are vipers” is also the implied subject of the infinitive “to mock” – the viper-hairs show
their radiance as if to mock the torture and the death within Medusa. Mock, of course,
can mean imitate, as it does in “Ozymandias,” or it can mean taunt. If we take it to mean
taunt, then it suggests that torture and death are feeling agents capable of registering the
taunts. If we take it to mean imitate, then the phrase “as it were to mock” suggests that
the vipers are (or at least appear to be) showing their radiance in order to mimic the fiery
and lurid light of torture and death. In either case, the phrase “as it were to mock”
ambiguously suggests that the viper-hairs show some kind of intention to mock – to taunt
or to imitate – and that suggestion of intent is striking, particularly when it is
immediately juxtaposed with the image of their “ragged jaw[s],” so clearly animal in
nature.

As the final two stanzas progress, the attributions of agency to objects and entities shifts
from the non-human but concrete to the wildly abstract. The “poisonous eft” that peeps
into Medusa’s eyes is sitting on a stone, very nearly as concrete an object as one could
imagine. But the “bat, bereft / Of sense” that has “flitted” out the cave and that “comes
hastening” after Medusa is a “ghastly” bat – horrifying, but with the connotations of the
word’s cognate, “ghostly.” Buried within the restrictive clause that modifies “the cave”
is another grammatical subject – “this hideous light” – which has “cleft” the cave. It is
not clear whether the cleaving is metaphorical or literal: has the light emanating from
Medusa actually created the cave by cleaving a rock in two, or has it only “cleft” the
darkness of the cave? More crucially, it is not clear whether “this hideous light” is the
“mailed radiance” of the vipers’ scales or the fiery and lurid glare of pain emanating
from Medusa’s eyes and mouth.
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And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
At the end of the fourth stanza, the phrase “the midnight sky / Flares” moves
grammatical agency still further from either the animate world or from Medusa herself:
where the eft, the bat, and the vipers are all animate creatures, and where the vipers and
“this hideous light” are both parts of Medusa, the midnight sky is part of the inanimate
background of the painting. The fact that its flaring is “a light more dread than
obscurity” is not surprising in the context of the poem, since light has all along been
signifying pain and death, and darkness or shadow has been signifying beauty. The
Burkean sublime evoked by “dread […] obscurity” is here a strategy for intensifying the
horror of the light, but light has been established as the lurid glow of pain from the
opening stanza onward. Now, however, the “dread” light is dissociated from Medusa
herself. In being produced by the sky, the light has increased massively in scale
compared to the lurid glare struggling out from under Medusa’s eyelids. But it has also
lost its metaphorical ability to stand in for a specific being’s pain. Insofar as the “dread”
light still, by sheer force of precedent, evokes pain, it is a generalized pain – a kind of
bleak pathetic fallacy.

In the fifth stanza, grammatical agency becomes so diffuse as almost to fall apart.
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there –
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A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,

Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
What, one might ask, is the antecedent of it in “’Tis” – what is it that is “the tempestuous
loveliness of terror”? Is it the immediately preceding noun, “a light more dread than
obscurity,” the attribute of the midnight sky; or is it the “grace,” not mentioned since the
second stanza, that was also the antecedent of it in “‘Tis the melodious hue of beauty
thrown / Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain”? In the second line, it is not the
serpents themselves that gleam, but rather a “brazen glare” that gleams from them: a
glare gleaming is a strangely redundant phrasing that calls attention to itself, and thus to
the care with which the serpents are refused grammatical agency. Moreover, the “brazen
glare” is modified by two radically ambiguous clauses. The glare is “[k]indled by that
inextricable error.” “Error,” here, is presumably used in its latinate sense to mean the
literal wandering or winding of the serpents,87 and it is inextricable because the serpents
are inextricably entwined with one another. Nevertheless, the description of the “brazen
glare” continues to turn back on itself: it is gleaming from the serpents because it has
been kindled by the movement of the serpents. The clause that follows presents the
reader with yet another unclear antecedent: it is not clear what
[…]makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there.
“Which” could refer either to the “error” of the twining serpents or to the “brazen glare”
they kindle. It is not clear what it means for a vapour to become a mirror. If the
antecedent of “‘[t]is” in the first line of the stanza is the dread light in the midnight sky,
then it makes sense that the vapour of the air should be stated to reflect Medusa’s pain

87
Rogers identifies the phrase “inextricable error” as a “Latinism” borrowed from Virgil, and meaning
“inextricable windings” (15-16); McGann argues that the latinate meaning is secondary, and that “error”
chiefly “refers to Medusa’s original ‘sin,’ punished so harshly by Minerva” (9). If McGann’s suggestion
adds a potential layer of complexity to the phrase, however, “inextricable windings” seems the much more
fundamental meaning of the phrase. The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that “windings” was a
standard poetic meaning of “error” until well into the nineteenth century, and this is also how Milton
famously uses the word in Paradise Lost (4.239). It is certainly very like Shelley to use words in ways that
are profoundly informed by their history and etymology (as, indeed, I am arguing that he implicitly does
with the very concept of sympathy in this poem).
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and death, since the sky does seem to reflect the light of pain emanating from Medusa.
Not only is it not clear, however, that ‘tis refers to the dread light, it is also not pain and
death that the vapour reflects, but rather beauty and terror. Indeed, “all the beauty and
the terror there” is the one abstraction in the final stanza that is clearly explained, and it
refers to the transparently comprehensible image in the final couplet:
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.
The vapour is a mirror, not of the light that has been acting as a slippery metaphor for
pain, but rather of the image represented in the painting at its most easily apprehended.
How either the “error” of the serpents or the “glare” gleaming from them has made this
happen is never explained, and the poem thus ends, paradoxically, with a concrete image
that renders the abstractions of the final stanza more baffling, rather than less.

The convoluted games Shelley plays with grammatical agency in this poem are a crucial
part of how he constructs sympathy – feeling with, or having felt sensations in common.
The agony struggling to escape Medusa’s eyes, the glare of pain, and the torture within
are all clearly Medusa’s agony, pain, and torture. They belong to her (or rather to “it,” as
Medusa’s head is called in the poem). And yet she (or it) does not feel them, per se,
because she/it does not do anything, except lie supine, gazing at the midnight sky. The
feeling can exist, and it can be clear whose feeling it is, without any guarantee of the
proprietor of the feeling being conscious of it. In some sense, then, even the objects that
reflect or mock the light of Medusa’s pain can be said to feel with her: to sympathize. If
the sky flares with a light that is akin to the lurid light struggling to escape Medusa’s
eyes, then the sky seems to have that pain just as much as Medusa does, and it is not
presented as either more or less conscious of pain than Medusa is. As I shall show,
Adam Smith’s formulation of sympathy tacitly relies, not on the object of sympathy
being conscious, but on the sympathetic viewer imagining that the object of sympathy is
conscious, and imagining that the object of sympathy is experiencing things that are
sufficiently familiar to be comprehensible. Given how diffuse consciousness and agency
are in this poem – given how unclear it is whether Medusa feels – one might assume that
Shelley is going out of his way to make Medusa impossible to sympathize with. Yet in
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spite of this, as I shall argue, he represents the viewer of the painting as sympathizing
with her.

The viewer is not constructed as a self-aware consciousness any more than Medusa is.
We get no clear sense of a poetic persona as viewer, or even of an individual viewing
consciousness, but rather a vague, third-person reference to a “gazer.” The very
petrification of the gazer’s spirit is represented as an inevitable result of the painting’s
attributes: the “grace” of the painting is the agent that “turns the gazer’s spirit into stone.”
Sensations are described in the passive voice, as if in an inventory or gallery caption.
“[F]ar lands are seen,” but the reader is not told by whom; presumably they are seen by
the viewer of the painting, but this is not specified. Except for the fact that Medusa is
facing upwards, there would be room for the interpretation that it is Medusa who sees the
far lands; and, although Perseus is not mentioned in the poem, there is room for the
interpretation that it is Medusa’s slayer who sees them. The lands are “seen
tremblingly,” but it is not clear whether this means that the lands appear trembling
because they are partially veiled by cloud, or whether the unnamed viewer of the lands is
characterized as trembling. Loveliness “seems to lie” upon Medusa’s features, but the
poem does not specify who perceives this seeming. For the duration of the first stanza,
the reader is reliant on the fact that the painting is named in the title to indicate that these
things are “seen” by someone looking at a work of art.88

The second stanza, the only portion of the poem that uses the conventions of discourse
about the visual arts in any recognizable way, gestures explicitly toward the presence of a
viewer of the painting, however nebulous. It is in this stanza that the poem’s speaker
uses language such as “grace,” and “hue of beauty / Thrown athwart the darkness and the
glare,” and this language sounds recognizably like eighteenth-century art criticism, in
which the respective relevance of forms and colours was fiercely debated.89 “Grace” is a

As Sophie Thomas observes, Shelley does not “refer[…] to the fact that he looks at a painting of the
88

Medusa – rather, the illusion is of an unmediated scene of seeing” (167).

89
For a detailed discussion of the eighteenth-century debate about the relative importance of “design” and
“image” – outline or general shape, and colouring or detail – see Timothy Erwin’s essay “The Ecliptic of
the Beautiful.” Sir Joshua Reynolds usually uses the terms “colours” and “composition” (89, 212), and he
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word typically used to praise form, whereas “hue,” “darkness,” “glare,” and even
“thrown athwart” are terms typically used to describe the colouring of a painting. The
musical metaphors – the “melodious hue” and the need to “harmonize the strain” – are
likewise an instance of fairly conventional borrowing from one sister art to furnish
analogies for another. All of these gestures toward the language of the visual arts suggest
a viewing consciousness assessing the painting. The second stanza, moreover, refers
explicitly to such a viewer, as no other stanza does: the “gazer.”

Even in the second stanza, however, the viewer emerges only just distinctly enough to be
erased again. Named only as “the gazer,” the viewer is suggestively aligned with
Medusa herself by the verbal echo of Medusa’s “gazing on the midnight sky”90
(emphasis mine). All mention of the gazer then vanishes from the poem. In the
remaining stanzas, just as grammatical agency seems to move further and further from
Medusa herself, the concept of a viewer – even the recognition that the poem’s subject is
a painting – becomes fainter and fainter. By the time we get to the poem’s concluding
lines, “all the beauty and the terror there” (emphasis mine) does not refer to all the
beauty and the terror in the painting, but rather to all the beauty and the terror staring up
towards the sky “from those wet rocks.” The beauty and terror are reflected by “the
vapour of the air,” not by anything outside the painting. Not only the named “gazer” at

quotes Poussin on the subject in his fourth discourse: “Poussin, whose eye was always steadily fixed on the
Sublime, has been often heard to say, ‘That a particular attention to colouring was an obstacle to the
student, in his progress to the great end and design of the art; and that he who attaches himself to this
principal end, will acquire by practice a reasonably good method of colouring’” (128)
90
Heffernan argues that we are in fact meant to interpret “gazer” as literally referring to Medusa – an
ingenious, if counter-intuitive, reading. While it is true that no reading of the poem is complete without an
acknowledgment of the verbal play that blurs the boundary between the viewer and Medusa, it seems
wilfully clever to assume that such play is to be taken as wholly undoing the scenario implicitly set up by
the title: this is a poem about a painting, and when it says that something is “seen,” we are to assume that it
is seen by whoever looks at the painting. And while the “ever-shifting mirror” of the fifth stanza does
belatedly enable a the possibility that Medusa’s own beauty could turn her spirit into stone as she gazes at
the sky, it is surely not possible that Medusa herself could be the gazer who sees the far lands below.
Thomas offers a sensible alternative to Heffernan’s reading in pointing out that, “[w]hile ‘gazer’ could as
easily refer to the Medusa as to the poet, it is also possible that the process of petrifaction is happening to
both” (167).
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the painting, but also even the scenario of there being a painting that enables the
existence of a gazer, is obliterated from the text. I would argue that this comparable
vagueness with which Medusa’s consciousness and the gazer’s consciousness are
constructed, and the synchronized erasure of any hint of their consciousnesses from the
poem, constitute a strange kind of sympathy. Medusa’s pain, which she can only
ambiguously be said to feel and which humanizes the painting for the unnamed “gazer,”
is as much the gazer’s pain as it is hers; and Medusa’s sinking into ever more remote
states of non-consciousness, evoked through her increasing remoteness from grammatical
agency, is mirrored by the viewer’s disappearance from the text, suggesting that her
increasing insentience, too, is somehow shared.

Central to the poem’s representation of the viewer’s strange, amorphous sympathetic

experience is the figuration of the gazer’s spirit as turned into stone, which appears at
first to be simply a clever marriage of two literary conventions. On the one hand, it is in
keeping with the Romantic fashion for representing violent emotions as producing stasis
in those who experience them, and for figuring those emotions as a metamorphosis into
statuary. In Romantic literature, being or seeming turned to stone usually signifies being
struck motionless with intense feeling, like the hapless “Maid of France” who is
“benumb’d to stone” by her fatal infatuation in Milman’s oft-reprinted Newdigate Prize
poem “The Belvidere Apollo.” On the other hand, the use of that figure in the context of
Shelley’s poem adapts the myth of Medusa, transforming the Gorgon’s power physically
to turn onlookers to stone into a metaphor for an emotional experience by replacing the
gazer’s body with the gazer’s spirit. The lines that follow, however, which adapt yet a
third literary convention, destabilize the signification of the spirit-into-stone metaphor.
The very old convention of figuring profound mental impressions as engravings on the
mind or heart91 is not wholly compatible with the Romantic convention of figuring a
person in the grip of powerful feeling as turned to stone.

91
The Oxford English Dictionary, in its history of the verb “grave,” cites as an early example John
Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390), in which a lover states that his “hert is growen into stone” upon which
his lady has “a printe of loue grave” (OED).
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The gazer’s spirit, we learn in these lines, is not a fixed, immovable, unchanging stone,
but rather an artistic medium in the process of being engraved; and rather than becoming
a statue of him- or herself, as Medusa’s victims conventionally do, the gazer’s spirit is to
bear the image of Medusa. It will be a stone
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace.
If we were tempted to read “graven” as an adjective meaning simply that the stone bears
an image of Medusa’s face, the temporal marker “till” discourages us, suggesting instead
that “are graven” is a verb indicating a kind of extended moment – the moment of the
gazer’s spirit being transfixed – in which Medusa’s face is in the process of being
“graven” onto the stone. The end-point specified by the “till” clause is somewhat
nebulous. The graving will continue “till the characters be grown / Into itself,” but what
is “itself” – the face of Medusa, or the gazer’s spirit? Does the phrase mean till the
engraving on the gazer’s spirit is transformed into the actual “dead face,” or does it
mean till the engraving is grown into the gazer’s spirit so deeply that “thought no more
can trace”? The “till” clause thus suggests the existence of an end-point to the process
of engraving, only to disappoint the reader: the end-point is unclear, and the process of
engraving thus seems indefinite. The gazer’s spirit being turned to stone thus does not
straightforwardly signify the gazer’s emotional fixity, as Romantic convention might
suggest: it seems also to signify an indefinitely prolonged, passive subjection to an
external creative force. The viewer’s passivity in this figuration furthers her or his
feeling with Medusa, who, by virtue of her deadness, is also passive; passivity becomes
something that Medusa and the viewer share. Moreover, the indefinite temporal
extension of the “are graven… till” clause suggests that the gazer is caught in some kind
of liminal state, akin to Medusa’s state of being caught between the last vestiges of life
and utter insentience.

The indefinite nature of the gazer’s subjection to an unnamed creative agent not only
completes his or her apparent sympathy with Medusa’s very deadness, but also points to
another set of Romantic conventions for thinking about sympathy that the poem
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undermines. In addition to interrogating the necessity of the sympathizer’s assumption

of self-aware consciousness in the object of sympathy, “On the Medusa” presents a mode
of sympathy that defies the traditional distinction between instantaneous and imaginative
sympathy. Like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” this poem represents sympathy for an artwork
in a way that undercuts the philosophical alignment of the visual arts with a model of
sympathy that is both visual and instantaneous. Where Keats’s poem does this by
acknowledging only sympathy that is founded on imaginative effort, “On the Medusa”
does it by slowly revealing the visual sympathy it represents to be an ongoing and thus
not instantaneous phenomenon. The gazer feels with a figure in a painting, and indeed
with the painting itself, and, as the very word “gazer” implies, it is a feeling with that is
visually impelled. Moreover, the allusion to the myth of Medusa striking her victims
into stone by the sheer force of her physical appearance suggests that the gazer’s reaction
here is similarly involuntary – an instinctive, perhaps an undesired, response to a strong
visual stimulus. But where visually impelled and involuntary sympathy is usually
equated with instantaneous sympathy in eighteenth-century and Romantic thought, the
feeling with presented in “On the Medusa” is processual rather than instantaneous.

In representing a viewer feeling Medusa’s insentience with her, Shelley interrogates the
ubiquitous, unspoken, “common sense” assumption that the sympathetic self must be
conscious, or that the conscious self cannot sympathize with a state of being other than
consciousness. A particularly vivid example of such an assumption at work is to be
found in Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy’s role in society. “We sympathize even with
the dead,” Smith observes,
and overlooking what is of real importance to their situation, that awful
futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those
circumstances which strike our senses but can have no influence on
their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of
the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold
grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more
thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the
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affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and
relations. (1.1.13)
Such sympathy relies on an imaginative construction of the impossible: of the conscious
mind’s experience of being a corpse. This type of sympathy, which Smith highlights as
especially important, is thus based on a fiction, for what Smith describes is sympathy for
an explicitly fictive construction of dead “consciousness” – one that the sympathizer
knows to be false. Smith states that we sympathize with the fictive sensory experience of
a corpse, as though a corpse could feel, instead of with the real intellectual or spiritual
experience of souls in paradise or hell. Implicitly, the tangible circumstances of a corpse
make its supposed experience of dead-ness available to a living imagination even though
a corpse experiences nothing, while the unknowable circumstances of departed souls
make their experience unavailable to imagination, even though, according to Smith and
most of his contemporaries, departed souls do have experiences.

This recognition of the paradox of grieving while believing in an afterlife makes Smith’s
theory of sympathy a particularly revealing pairing with “On the Medusa.” Shelley, of
course, did not believe in a Christian afterlife, and so dead-ness to Shelley would have
meant something different than dead-ness as it is represented in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. Although The Theory of Moral Sentiments explicitly presumes a Christian
afterlife, however, according to Smith’s theory of sympathy, deadness for the purposes of
sympathy actually means something much closer to what deadness would mean to an
atheist: a state of being a formerly conscious organism reduced to permanent insentience
and material decay. Smith goes on to state that “our sympathy can afford them [the
dead] no consolation” and that this fact “seems to be an addition to their calamity”
(1.1.13). Because sympathy is the only means we have of alleviating distress, according
to Smith, we are paradoxically oppressed with a yet stronger sense of the urgency of
sympathizing with the dead. As Esther Schor observes, sympathy for the dead in Smith’s
view is “not given freely; rather it is an ‘indebted’ consideration for the moral value with
which the dead endow the living,” and it is this indebtedness that makes sympathy for the
dead “an originary act of sympathy [that provides] the motivation for all subsequent
occasions of sympathy” (5). It is the known impossibility of an effective sympathy for
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the real experience of dead-ness that gives sympathy for the dead its moral weight in
Smith’s system. But effective sympathy is only impossible if sympathy itself is
necessarily the reconstruction in one conscious mind of what it takes to be the experience
of another. “On the Medusa” plays on the idea that sympathy for the dead is equivalent
to sympathy for the purely fictive by representing an object of sympathy that is both. As
I have argued, it also subtly reworks the concept of sympathy itself, making room for an
alternate model of the relationship between sympathy and consciousness – a model in
which sympathy for the insentient need not be based on a falsehood.

When Shelley composed “On the Medusa” in 1819, it was not a new idea that people do
in fact sympathize with the dead; not only had that idea been a cornerstone of Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments sixty years previously, but also it was well
established as part of how Romantic culture conceived of sympathy. Nor was it a new
idea that people sympathize with painted figures, for that idea is the foundational
assumption of most eighteenth-century writing on the “sister arts,” and continued to be
crucial to Romantic understandings of the role of the arts. “On the Medusa,” however,
seems less interested in pointing out the fact that one can and does sympathize with
Medusa than in using the potential for such sympathy as a way of getting past the
conventional boundary between sentient and insentient. If one can feel for the insentient
merely by looking, without relying on the intercession of the imagination, then one might
feel one’s way outside of consciousness, circumstance, or time. Moreover, insofar as the
poem does address the more mainstream ideas about sympathy and the arts available to
Shelley’s contemporaries, it does so in order to subvert them. “On the Medusa” does not
so much collapse the distinction between the two conventional ideas of sympathy as
break them down into their component parts. It suggests that the binary of
visual/instantaneous and imaginative/gradual sympathy is reductive, simply by
presenting a type of sympathy that such a binary cannot account for.

Keats and Shelley address two facets of the same problem: both stage encounters
between a viewer and an artwork in order to push past the limits of a philosophical
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paradigm that could not account for all the possible responses to all the art available to
the Romantics. A Grecian urn might not tell a recognizable story, and might not depict
the passions in a recognizable way – it might be impervious to sympathy according to the
models of sympathy that Keats’s culture acknowledged. Does it therefore fall short as a
work of art, or is a value for the sister arts conceivable that does not rely on an appeal to
sympathy? A viewer might have a powerful response to a painting that is, according to
those acknowledged models, neither fish nor fowl: neither instantaneous nor imaginative.
Is it therefore not sympathy, or can a new model of sympathy be constructed? Can
sympathy, in fact, be thought of without relying on the idea of a conscious self, or could
the experience of sympathy for an artwork be what guides us past the limitations of that
kind of post-Cartesian self-construction? These are the questions posed by “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.”

The ideas about “ekphrasis” that scholars have used these poems to construct strain under
the sheer intellectual sophistication of the poems’ own engagement with the
philosophical issues of sensibility. However influential they have been for later writers
of poetry about art, these poems did far more in their own era than celebrate or aspire to
the atemporality of art, or express the simultaneous appeal and terror of the silent visual
object. They are subtly wrought and substantial contributions to the intellectual work of
the culture of sensibility. Yet, perhaps because of the important role these Romantic
poems have played in the formulation of the broad theories of ekphrasis that have been
popular in literary criticism, even studies of specifically Romantic ekphrasis have often
seen them through the lens of one such theory or another.

The “Ode” was published in a venue devoted to the arts, like the other poems from the
Annals discussed in the previous chapter, and it seems to respond directly to the
Wordsworth sonnet published there before it; “On the Medusa” was never published
during Shelley’s life. The “Ode” is thus more vitally a part of the same ongoing cultural
conversation about art and sympathy. “On the Medusa” is much more an outlier,
recognizably speaking to concerns raised elsewhere in Shelley’s oeuvre, but asking
different questions than the other Romantic ekphrases discussed in this thesis so far. But
“On the Medusa” demands to be read alongside the “Ode” because, while the questions it
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asks may be idiosyncratic, the conceptual vocabulary it uses to ask them is closely
related to that of the “Ode.” Both poems speak back to a long tradition in aesthetic and
moral philosophy of allowing two, mutually exclusive conceptions of sympathy to co-
exist, one framing sympathy as an instantaneous response to visible affective display,
and the other framing it as a gradual response to imaginatively reconstructed
circumstances. Both poems make use of that tradition, and both poems use it counter-
intuitively, tacitly proposing conceptual challenges to its intellectual underpinnings.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” inverts the expected affiliation of the visual arts with
instantaneous sympathy in order to enact an attempt at sympathy that fails, and thus to
make a space for an alternative to the assumption that the arts exist chiefly to evoke
sympathy. “On the Medusa” defies the expectation that visual sympathy be
instantaneous in order to create a space for a mode of sympathy that can take a viewer of
art outside the limits of living consciousness.

Pairing the two poems, then, tells us how flexible an intellectual tool Romantic ekphrasis
could be for thinking about the questions associated with sensibility. Of the many
strands in the complex web of poetic and philosophical traditions that were available to
Romantic authors writing about the visual arts, “On the Medusa” and “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” draw almost exclusively on one: the parallel in moral and aesthetic philosophy
between the two most commonly proposed theories of sympathy and the two most
commonly discussed of the “sister arts.” Yet the two poems draw on this strand of
thought to pose startlingly different questions.

Each chapter in this thesis so far has addressed how one strand in that web of traditions
opened up a space in Romantic ekphrasis for thinking about feeling or sympathy: first the
tradition of poems about art, then the emerging public discourse surrounding the art
world, and here the philosophical traditions of sympathy and the sister arts. The
remaining chapter will do the same, examining how two well-known Romantic
ekphrases revive and make use of the old tradition of allegory in ekphrasis, which had
been out of fashion in the eighteenth century. But it will also do something further, for
the two poems to be discussed there, Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle” and Keats’s “Ode on
Indolence,” also ask a question in common, exploring the role of sympathy and self-
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spectatorship in the moderation of one’s own feelings. In some sense, then, this chapter
and the next accomplish opposite ends, the current demonstrating the flexibility of one
tool of thought made available by art as a subject matter, and the next demonstrating the
especial aptness of another such tool to explore a single problem in the philosophical
tradition of sensibility.
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5 Sympathy, Self-Spectatorship, and Self-

knowledge in Wordsworth and Keats
Two well-known Romantic ekphrases, by different authors, share a striking detail. In
“Peele Castle,” Wordsworth’s speaker praises his patron George Beaumont’s painting for
showing a “pageantry of fear.” In “Ode on Indolence,” far more usually compared to its
more famous sibling “Ode on a Grecian Urn” than to anything by Wordsworth, Keats’s
speaker asks his personified personal demons why they appeared to him “in so hush a
masque.” Pageantry and masque: the words conjure up ideas of Renaissance courts, of
stylized drama, and of transparent allegory.92 What, one might ask, are they doing in
Romantic ekphrastic poems?

One might speculate that masque is no more surprising a thing to find in a Romantic lyric
than ekphrasis itself. Masque was not, as Jeffrey Cox has pointed out, an “eccentrically
antiquarian” form of drama in the early decades of the nineteenth century (125). Cox
cites a number of masques performed or published in London between 1715 and 1819,
including a stage revival of Milton’s Comus in 1815, and he examines Leigh Hunt’s
“learned prefatory essay on the history of the masque,” published in 1815 with Hunt’s
own masque The Descent of Liberty (124). Yet if the form was not eccentrically
antiquarian, it nonetheless maintained its historical associations. Cox observes that Hunt
locates the origin of the form in Italy, arguing that it developed in
England from Italian sources when private masquerades held in great
houses to celebrate events such as a marriage or a birth were merged
with the public pageants of the Tudor monarchs with their allegory and
personification. (126)

92
The OED defines “masque” as “[a] form of courtly dramatic entertainment, often richly symbolic, in
which music and dancing played a substantial part, costumes and stage machinery tended to be elaborate,
and the audience might be invited to contribute to the action or the dancing.” “Pageantry” is “[p]ageants or
tableaux collectively; the public performance or display of these,” while “pageant” is “[a] play in a
medieval mystery cycle” or “a show or play, usually wordless, exhibited as part of a festival or public
celebration.”
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Cox argues that Hunt was able to draw “now on the prestige of an older aristocratic form,
now on the vitality of popular celebrations,” using the conventions of masque both for
sheer dramatic effect and for their historical associations with courtly pageantry (127). If
masque and pageantry maintained their associations with the courtly life of bygone eras,
and especially with copious personification and allegory, then the question remains: what
are they doing in two Romantic ekphrases, given that figuration – allegory,
personification, and symbolism – had virtually vanished from ekphrastic writing for a
century?

Another possible answer is that these two poems are part of the Romantic era’s
enthusiasm for medievalism in literature. “Ode on Indolence,” indeed, evokes the
conventions of the medieval dream-vision, and of the ekphrases that such dream-visions
so often contain – the temple of Venus in “The Parliament of Fowls,” for example, or the
temple in “The Temple of Glass.” Moreover, both “Ode on Indolence” and “Peele
Castle” harken back to modes of ekphrasis that had gone decidedly out of favour in the
eighteenth century, in that they take the works of art they describe to be fraught with
symbolic, even allegorical, meaning. I would argue that both poems do this in order to
pose tacit questions about the fundamental conception of selfhood that underpins the
philosophy of sensibility: both poems are about the potentials and limitations of self-
recognition in the absence of some other person or consciousness. Both ask whether an
individual mind requires another mind to reflect it back to itself. That question has its
roots in eighteenth-century sentimental philosophy. The idea of masque or pageantry is
particularly pertinent to such questions precisely because some of the most influential
eighteenth-century ideas about sympathy are grounded in scenarios in which the self
either is, has, or desires an audience.

Where the two poems by Keats and Shelley in the previous chapter shared an intellectual
vocabulary – the pre-existing sorority of instantaneous sympathy and the visual arts in
eighteenth-century and Romantic discourse – “Peele Castle” and “Ode on Indolence”
share more: they share an intellectual vocabulary of pictorial allegory and its theatrical
counterpart, masque, and they also probe a shared philosophical question about the self’s
potential for autonomy that grows out of the philosophy of sensibility. “Peele Castle”
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and “Ode on Indolence” take up a strand of the ekphrastic tradition that includes Spenser
and Shakespeare. They can also be productively situated in a genealogy of ideas that
stretches back through the age of sensibility to the philosophy of Adam Smith. Keats’s
tacit questions about self-recognition are further from Smith’s than are Wordsworth’s,
and even Wordsworth was not necessarily writing back to Smith in particular.
Nevertheless, “Peele Castle” does offer a revision and interrogation of a culturally
prevalent idea about the relationship between sympathy and selfhood, of which Smith’s
articulation is a prominent and lucid example. Smith’s moral philosophy may not have
been the intended subject of the poems, but it is a useful touchstone for showcasing how
those poems used the conventions of ekphrastic poetry to take on culturally important
questions about selfhood and self-recognition. “Peele Castle” and “Ode on Indolence”
are thought experiments in what one might call self-spectatorship – in finding a way to
see oneself as an outsider would – a concept that lies at the heart of The Theory of Moral
Sentiments.

Adam Smith insists much more rigorously than his predecessor David Hume on the
boundaries of the self, and one result of this is that he posits a mode of sympathy that
relies on being the witness or spectator of another’s passions, rather than simply
absorbing them. Where Hume suggests that it is the similar psychological makeup of all
people that allows emotion to pass from breast to breast, and that one person’s “idea” of
another’s feelings “is presently converted into an impression,” which in turn “acquires
such a force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal
emotion” (2.1.11.3), Smith rejects the idea that emotions are so instantaneously and
effortlessly contagious. We cannot, he contends, actually know what others feel, but
rather must make an imaginative effort to reconstruct their feelings. Since we constantly
desire both to offer and to receive “fellow-feeling” (1.2.1), according to Smith, we are
perpetually imagining ourselves in fictive situations – “cases” – that are analogous to the
situations of those we see around us.

Crucial to Smith’s theory of sympathy is his explanation of the effectiveness of

sympathetic consolation. Smith posits that when a sufferer wishes to receive sympathy
he imagines himself in the “case” of a spectator, specifically the spectator with whom he
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is actually interacting. It is in the act of sympathizing with that spectator’s sympathy for
him that he finds his grief moderated: a process that puts the sufferer at a remove from
his own feelings. Smith contends that the sympathy of another person “alleviates grief
by insinuating into the heart almost the only agreeable sensation which it is at that time
capable of receiving” (1.2.2). That agreeable sensation, however, turns out to involve a
complex social and psychological mechanism. “[T]he emotions of the spectator,” Smith
explains, “will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer,”
and “[t]he person principally concerned is sensible of this, and at the same time
passionately desires a more complete sympathy,” which he can only obtain by “lowering
his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him”
(1.4.7). That lowering – although it is aimed at procuring sympathy – is also
accomplished by means of sympathy. “As nature teaches the spectators to assume the
circumstances of the person principally concerned,” Smith claims,
so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the
spectators. [...] As they are constantly considering what they
themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is as
constantly led to imagine in what manner he would be affected if he
was only one of the spectators of his own situation [...] and as the
reflected passion, which he thus conceives, is much weaker than the
original one, it necessarily abates the violence of what he felt before he
came into their presence. (1.4.8)
This sympathy-with-the-sympathizer is not an obscure example of Smith’s theory pushed
to its logical extreme; on the contrary, according to Smith it is the foundation of the most
impressive type of virtue: that based on self-control (1.5.1). It is the type of sympathy
that can account within a sentimental system of morality for virtues other than simple
compassion. Virtue, Smith contends, is achieved by internalizing the abstract idea of an
“impartial spectator” – by creating a “man within the breast” who stands in, when we
decide how to act, for a real observer whose sympathy we would crave.93 We can stand

93
Marshall, tracing the history of this idea prior to Smith, observes that “[t]he characterization of the
impartial spectator as the ‘man within the breast’ […] recalls Butler’s discussions of ‘the witness of
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outside ourselves, according to Smith, by imagining a fictive person who would stand
outside, and sympathizing with that fictive person. It is thus by positing a self that is
more self-contained than Hume’s and a sympathy that requires imaginative effort that
Smith formulates a system in which one must stand outside one’s self in order not only to
receive the pleasure of sympathy but also to function ethically in the social sphere. Thus,
when Wordsworth and Keats use ekphrasis to take up the idea of being one’s own
spectator, they are not simply participating in (or critiquing, in Keats’s case) the
Romantic glorification of the independent individual mind; they are testing the limits of a
concept of selfhood that played a crucial role in the moral framework of the culture of
sensibility.

“Peele Castle” draws on some of the pre-eighteenth-century conventions of allegorical

ekphrasis, and that borrowing enables the poem to enact a process of artistic
interpretation that is also a process of self-recognition: to represent a self that is its own
viewer. By insistently personifying the objects depicted in a work of art, and
intensifying that personification by transposing the conventions of portrait-ekphrasis onto
a poem about a seascape, Wordsworth’s speaker is able to freight that work of art with
allegorical potential. He uses the painting as a figurative vehicle for elements of his own
psyche, interpreting the painting as an allegorical representation of his own mental
struggle, and thus becoming the audience of that struggle. Wordsworth experiments in
using self-spectatorship to moderate his grief, but without an actual or imagined spectator
with whom to sympathize, as though he is trying to remove sympathy from Adam
Smith’s moral equation. Whether or not Wordsworth had Smith specifically in mind
when he composed “Peele Castle,” his representation of self-spectatorship without the
aid of another person, especially as a means of moderating grief, is philosophically
significant – a canny reworking of an important strand of sentimental thought.

conscience’ and Hume’s discussions, in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, of the moral
value of considering how we appear in the eyes of those who regard us. But it is Shaftesbury who
expounds a “doctrine of two persons in one individual self’ and calls for an ‘inspector or auditor [to be]
established within us’” (The Figure of Theater 176).
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“Ode on Indolence,” like “Peele Castle,” presents art as a vehicle of figuration and
allegory, and uses the figure of masque/pageantry to draw attention to what it is doing.
Rather than embedding this move in as thoroughgoing an engagement with the
ekphrastic tradition as Wordsworth does, however, Keats embeds it in a counter-intuitive
repurposing of a very current discourse about art: his speaker uses the analogy of a static
artwork to signify the style of movement adopted by the three figures that appear to him.
Moreover, Keats uses the figurative potential of the visual arts to suggest something very
different than what Wordsworth suggests in “Peele Castle.” Where Wordsworth’s
speaker achieves not just self-spectatorship but also self-recognition by looking at art,
Keats’s speaker uses the very concept of art – an art that is fundamentally apart from
himself and inscrutable – as a way of keeping self-recognition at bay, in hopes of
prolonging a pleasurable state of indolence. Keats’s speaker, like Wordsworth’s,
participates in an act of self-spectatorship mediated by art, rather than by another person,
viewing his own psyche at a distance by figuratively locating it in an artwork. Unlike
Wordsworth’s speaker, however, Keats’s speaker achieves no self-awareness or self-
mastery; the linguistic details of the poem suggest that he neither succeeds in remaining
indolent nor recognizes the change in himself. Where Wordsworth uses the figurative
potential of ekphrasis to push past the conventional limits of self-reflexive subjectivity,
Keats uses it to deflate the claims of the supposedly self-aware subject.

5.1 A Spectator of Oneself: Self-Figuration and

Sympathetic Self-Sufficiency
In a poem about visual art and poetry written some twelve years after “Peele Castle,”
Wordsworth complicates the expected relationship between sympathizer and object of
sympathy. The poem is an untitled sonnet addressed to painter Benjamin Haydon (“To
B.R. Haydon, Esq.”), published in the Annals of the Fine Arts in 1818, and in it
Wordsworth offers a challenge to the very notion that the sympathizer and object of
sympathy are distinct by expressing a fellow-feeling that has been shared all along,
before a sympathetic exchange has taken place. This sonnet draws an explicit parallel
between painting and poetry, bringing the two together under the umbrella term “creative
art.” The sonnet’s speaker (who, like the speaker of “Peele Castle,” inhabits the persona
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of Wordsworth) recognizes in Haydon a counterpart of himself. Addressed to the

promising but financially insecure Haydon from the long established Wordsworth, the
sonnet begins with the statement “[h]igh is our calling, Friend,” suggesting a fellowship
between the poet and the painter in its use of the pronoun “our” still more than in its
address to Haydon as “Friend”. It then generalizes about the artistic profession in a way
that suggests an understanding of the two men’s careers as fundamentally similar. The
sonnet offers more than simply the encouragement that even the great Wordsworth went
through a period of early obscurity, however.
High is our calling, Friend!—Creative art
(Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with etherial hues,)
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part,
Heroically fashioned—to infuse
Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,
While the whole world seems adverse to desert:
And oh! when nature sinks, as oft she may,
Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress,
Still to be strenuous for the bright reward,
And in the soul admit of no decay,—
Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness:—
Great is the glory, for the strife is hard!
The fellow-feeling offered here is not quite a sympathetic transaction after the manner
usually imagined by the philosophers of sensibility. After the opening address, the
speaker never again refers either to himself or to his addressee, but instead offers general
statements about the “mind and heart” of the artist, or the “nature” that may “sink[...]”
under the strain of an artistic career. These generalizations are tinged with just enough
affective display to suggest that the speaker has experienced everything he describes: the
need for courage, the tentative “[f]aith in the whispers of the lonely muse,” the “obscure
distress.” The absence of any distinction between poetry and painting, or even between I
and you, however, means that these experiences belong just as much to the addressee as
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to the speaker. The poem offers sympathy of a sort, on the basis of Haydon’s
circumstances, but it is a sympathy brought about not by the speaker’s imagination of
Haydon’s “case,” but rather by the sheer force of analogy between one artist’s case and
another’s. Wordsworth need not imagine Haydon’s circumstances, because he
remembers them.

Both Hume and Smith claim that it is easier to sympathize with someone whose
circumstances resemble one’s own,94 and Smith hypothesizes that this is because the
imagination is faced with a smaller divide to bridge. Bridging a divide, however, is not
what the sonnet to Haydon shows. Instead, it shows a speaker who describes his own
experiences at exactly the minimum level of abstraction necessary to elide the distinction
between his own circumstances and Haydon’s. By dissolving the difference between
himself and his addressee, the speaker makes his sympathy reciprocal by default. The
addressee must already feel the speaker’s past suffering, because it is identical to his
own; his sympathy with his sympathizer requires no separate effort on his part. In this
poem, the sympathetic spectator (the speaker), instead of initiating an exchange of
sympathy, presents himself as a fellow-sufferer, substituting fellowship, and the mutual
understanding that comes with it, for sympathy in the usual sense. Wordsworth’s
haunting elegy “Peele Castle” challenges common expectations about sympathetic
exchange in a different way, using the art object itself as a placeholder for the object of
sympathy, and thus not only erasing the distinction between sufferer (in this case the
speaker, rather than the addressee) and sympathizer, but also eliminating the expected
presence of a second person to begin with.

Peter Simonsen identifies “Peele Castle” as the poem in which Wordsworth first turns to
ekphrasis – a mode that he used regularly for the rest of his life. Wordsworth does not,
however, turn to ekphrasis as it was commonly written by his immediate predecessors.
“Peele Castle” uses elements of the tradition of subjective-response ekphrasis, and
cleverly repurposes the conventions of portrait ekphrasis discussed in Chapter 2, to

94
For a discussion of this idea in the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, see the Introduction to this
thesis.
 217

construct a complex structure of figuration that governs both the speaker’s interpretation
of the painting and our own interpretation of the poem. Since that figurative structure is
fundamentally allegorical, I shall argue that “Peele Castle” also draws on a third, very old
mode of ekphrasis, virtually unseen in new poetry in England for the whole of the
eighteenth century: the tradition of emblematic and allegorical ekphrasis.

In perhaps the definitive reading of the poem as ekphrasis, James A. W. Heffernan, in

Museum of Words, takes “Peele Castle” as a prime example of what he calls the
“ideology of transcendence”: a propensity of Romantic thought to insist that both visual
art and the images it represents exist outside of time, fixed and imperishable. What the
speaker’s imagistic memory of the castle and the hypothetical picture of “steadfast ease”
that he would have painted have in common, according to Heffernan, is their apparent
existence outside of time. In the speaker’s memory, each day is like the previous; in the
hypothetical painting, there is no movement or change. This vision of timelessness,
motivated by the “fond illusion” of the speaker’s youthful heart, gives way, in the second
half of the poem, to a description of Beaumont’s real painting, which the speaker
interprets as expressing a profound stoicism: speaker and castle alike are able to
“transcend contingency” by being impervious to it (107). Heffernan argues, however,
that the second type of transcendence, attributed to the real picture, is just as problematic
as the first, since it in fact relies on a distortion of Beaumont’s painting. “[T]he almost
level sea in Beaumont’s picture,” Heffernan argues, “is hardly a ‘deadly swell’ evincing
the ‘anger’ Wordsworth anthropomorphically attributes to it” (106); even if one disputes
this interpretation of the sea in the picture, the castle, rather than withstanding the waves,
is visibly crumbling. The objects in the painting do not transcend contingency,
Heffernan argues, and the speaker’s interpretation of the picture proves to be driven by
the same ideology of transcendence that it seems to escape.

Heffernan’s observation that the poem at least slightly misrepresents the painting,
however, could be taken in a different direction. Rather than regarding it as evidence of
delusion on Wordsworth’s part, I take it as evidence that the poem is drawing attention to
its speaker’s interpretive act. That act, I argue, is motivated by the speaker’s apparent
need to view himself from a distance, as if he were his own spectator, in the absence of a
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sympathetic companion. Wordsworth’s speaker does not so much react to the painting as
co-opt it; his description of it differs somewhat from the real painting because it is the
means by which he externalizes his own mental process. The ease with which
Wordsworth’s original readers could compare the description to the real picture ensures
that the speaker’s co-opting of the painting is observable, and the “dramaturgy” of the
poem’s language, as Marjorie Levinson calls it in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems
(113), makes that observable process seem very much like a performance. Wordsworth’s
speaker uses the painting as a prop in a stylized enactment of his own psychological
process. He puts on a show of interpreting objects in a picture as actors performing the
very effort at fortitude that he himself is also performing. The speaker is thus a performer
in and spectator of his own pageantry of inner strength. His projection of his own psyche
onto a painting, in allowing him to become the audience of a drama that in fact unfolds
within his own mind, creates an instance of self-spectatorship that is dependent neither
on the presence of a real, external spectator, nor on the imagined presence of an impartial
spectator, with whom to sympathize. It thus resists the formulation of sympathetic self-
spectatorship that allows Adam Smith to argue that sympathy is fundamental to the
sterner virtues. Wordsworth’s speaker achieves the self-mastery that Smith valorizes, but
he does so without requiring, or reciprocating, the pity of another.

Nothing about the title of “Peele Castle” prepares the reader for the poem’s dense
figuration. The title, “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm,
Painted by Sir George Beaumont,”95 immediately identifies the poem as being about a
work of art, and it identifies it as being a piece of polite social exchange, in keeping with
most eighteenth-century ekphrases: the poem praises a work painted by Wordsworth’s

95
Common academic practice is to refer to the poem as “Elegiac Stanzas,” but, in the interests of
specificity, I will call it “Peele Castle.” Wordsworth wrote in 1808 a poem called “Elegiac Stanzas,
composed in the churchyard of Grasmere, Westmorland, a few days after the Interment there, of a Man and
his Wife, Inhabitants of the Vale, who were lost upon the neighbouring mountains, on the night of the
nineteenth of March last,” and in 1822 he published yet another poem entitled simply “Elegiac Stanzas.”
Texts of these poems are available in Shorter Poems, 1807-1820 and Last Poems, 1821-1850, in the
Cornell Wordsworth series.
 219

friend and patron. The poem’s first line, however, already indicates that Wordsworth is
hearkening back to older kinds of poetry about art. The line has nothing to do with
Beaumont, or with his painting, but rather with the speaker’s very personal reaction to
the painting: “I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!” Like Cowper’s “On the
Receipt of My Mother’s Picture,” this is a poem exploring a very specific viewer’s
response to an artwork – a response conditioned by his personal circumstances. Not until
the eleventh stanza will Wordsworth fulfil the title’s tacit promise that he “commend” his
friend’s painting. And while there is certainly a long tradition prior to the nineteenth
century of poems doing nuanced explorations of viewer response, the delay in the
speaker’s commendation would have been striking to a readership conditioned by
eighteenth-century conventions. Wordsworth’s speaker begins by addressing the subject
of the painting – a common strategy in eighteenth-century poems about portraits – and,
as he does so, a steadily increasing element of interpretation creeps into his recollection
of what he saw when he lived near the castle.96
I was thy Neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!

So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene’er I look’d, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never pass’d away.

How perfect was the calm! it seem’d no sleep;

No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep

96
Marjorie Levinson identifies a “dialectical swerve toward subjectivity” in the shift from the title, which
mentions only the painting, to the first stanza, which addresses first the painting’s subject (the castle), then
the speaker’s personal memory of the castle, then the castle’s abstract “form” (Wordsworth’s Great Period
Poems 104).
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Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things.

The speaker here subtly shifts from recalling facts to recalling his own interpretation of
those facts. In the first stanza, he states “I was,” “I dwelt,” “I saw,” and “thy form lay.”
By the third stanza, he says instead “it seemed,” and “I could have fancied that.” Rather
than moving on to say anything about Beaumont or Beaumont’s painting, Wordsworth’s
speaker then describes the picture he himself would have painted, if he could have
rendered his subjective interpretation of the landscape visible.
Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile!

Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss:

Thou shouldst have seem’d a treasure-house, a mine

Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven:—
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.
This hypothetical painting is described in terms that were, in 1807, unusual in a poem
about art: the imagined picture is constructed as aggressively figurative. Objects within
the painting are repeatedly personified both by the attribution of feeling and affective
display to inanimate things and by the speaker’s apostrophe to the castle. Moreover,
within this apostrophe, Wordsworth steadily increases the scope of his figuration. He
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first says that the castle would have seemed a “treasure-house” of “peaceful years”:
within the picture, the castle would have had the appearance of storing a figurative
treasure, rather than the literal goods it was built to protect. In the following stanza,
however, the scope of Wordsworth’s figuration radically expands, from an object within
the picture to the whole of the picture, as the speaker says that the entire painting would
have been a “picture” of “lasting ease.” As Heffernan has observed, “as Wordsworth
moves from remembering what he saw to imagining what he would have painted, his
language grows less visual, more figurative, and yet also more abstract, until at last his
hypothetical picture becomes a painting of ‘steadfast peace’” (101).97 Where Heffernan
makes this observation in order to draw out the irony of a hypothetical picture being
described in less than entirely visual language, however, I would argue that the idea that
a painting can represent an abstraction instead of an object is precisely the point. What
Wordsworth imagines is a symbolic painting: an emblem.

If both the delay in the speaker’s commendation of Beaumont’s picture and the densely
figurative construction of the hypothetical painting would have been striking to
Wordsworth’s readers, what happens after the commendation is still more striking. The
sea, the ship, the sky, and the castle may all be personified, but Wordsworth manipulates
the conventions of ekphrastic poetry that he had inherited from the eighteenth century to
intensify that personification. The commendation of Beaumont’s picture for
appropriately capturing the “spirit” of its (the painting’s) subject borrows the conventions
of eighteenth-century portrait ekphrases, transposing them into the context of a painting
about a seascape.
Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This Work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

97
Note that Heffernan is quoting the later version of the poem, not the original 1807 published version.
The familiar version that Heffernan quotes includes several changes that Wordsworth did not adopt until
much later. According to the editors of the Cornell Wordsworth series, Wordsworth adopted the line “a
treasure house divine,” in lieu of “a treasure house, a mine,” in 1845, and he adopted the line “a steadfast
peace that might not be betrayed” in lieu of “a faith, a trust, that could not be betray’d,” in 1836.
 222

Oh, ’tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well;

Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light’ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
When Wordsworth praises Beaumont’s painting, he does so on the basis of the “spirit
that is here.” The painted scene, according to the logic of this phrase, is not a mere
physical appearance, but rather a being that has a soul or spirit. Wordsworth commends
a landscape painting for something like the same reason that Pope and Cowper commend
paintings of people: for conveying a suitable impression of the mind of the painted
subject. He goes on to give examples of specific affects that represent the “spirit” in
question. Where Pope notes Lady Montagu’s dimples and playful smiles, and where
Cowper recognizes his mother’s “own sweet smile,” Wordsworth admires the “sea in
anger” and the “rueful sky” of Beaumont’s painting. It would be going too far to say that
he treats Beaumont’s landscape exactly as if it were a portrait: he does not say “well-
captured” or “well-painted is the spirit that is here,” but rather “well-chosen,” implying a
recognition that the spirit represented is fictive. Nonetheless, Wordsworth commends
Beaumont’s landscape in language that is conventional in poems about portraits, thus
implicitly attributing a human quality to the elements of the painted scene.

The poem makes no secret of the fact that the figuration of the castle and its environs as
either emblems of peace and bliss or emblems of suffering and fortitude is the product of
the speaker’s state of mind. The transitional stanzas between the description of the
imaginary painting and the commendation of the real one make this explicit:
Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
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And seen the soul of truth in every part;

A faith, a trust, that could not be betray’d.

So once it would have been,—’tis so no more;

I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humaniz’d my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold

A smiling sea and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.
If there were any doubt that the speaker’s perception or interpretation of the castle is a
direct index of something inside himself, the line “be what I have been” resolves it.
Wordsworth could, without altering the meter or rhyme, have offered “see” and “seen”;
given that the speaker is expressing the difference in what he would now choose to paint
when beholding a smiling sea, nothing could be more logical than to say “Not for a
moment could I now behold / A smiling sea and see what I have seen.” He says instead
that he cannot be what he has been: he is, in and of himself, different. I would argue,
however, that the unrelentingly emblematic construction of paintings, real or imaginary,
in “Peele Castle” does more than offer a measure of the change in the speaker from his
remembered to his current self, for that measure could have been given without treating
the castle as if it were the subject of an eighteenth-century portrait.

“Peele Castle” is hardly unique in representing a viewer reacting to a work of art in a

way that is conditioned by personal circumstances, and that reveals something about her-
or himself. Cowper’s “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture,” like “Peele Castle,” is
the imagined utterance of a single speaker who inhabits the identity of the poet himself
and who enacts his own response to the painting. Like “Peele Castle,” “On the Receipt”
is a fundamentally elegiac poem that mourns a deceased family member, that opens with
an apostrophe to the subject of the painting (Cowper’s mother), and that emphasizes the
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memories evoked by the picture. To take a much older and more famous example, the
ekphrasis in “The Rape of Lucrece” represents a viewing subject in a state of emotional
distress who interprets a painting, entirely subjectively, as emblematic of the conditions
causing that distress, much like “Peele Castle.”98

“Peele Castle,” however, is as striking for its difference from these analogues as for its
similarity. The picture to which “Peele Castle” responds does not bear the kind of
obvious relationship to Wordsworth’s grief for his brother that the portrait in “On the
Receipt” bears to Cowper’s grief for his mother: it is very decidedly not a picture of John
Wordsworth. Cowper names his mother in the poem’s title and expresses explicit
longing for her. Even Lucrece, who, like Wordsworth’s speaker, looks at a painting that
is not directly relevant to her circumstances, explicitly compares the painted scenes she
looks at to her own situation. Wordsworth never specifies that it is his brother he
mourns, nor does he explain the relevance of a painting of a ship in distress to John’s
death at sea.99 All he actually says is that his artistic vision and perception of the world
have changed: he responds explicitly to the aesthetic qualities of the picture, and only
implicitly to its personal meaning. His distress is not mentioned until the ninth stanza,
his feeling of loss until the tenth, and his lost loved one – never named – until the
eleventh. “Peele Castle” is about grief, to be sure, and the shift in the tenor of the
speaker’s figuration bears witness to the change in himself. But the poem also enacts the
speaker’s own process of recognizing that change and moderating that grief; to see how it
does so, we need to look as much at the change in the mode of his figuration as the
change in its content.

98
For a more detailed discussion of the ekphrasis in “The Rape of Lucrece,” see the first chapter of this
thesis.
99
Wordsworth’s readers could safely be assumed to understand the allusion, for the sinking of the Earl of
Abergavenny under John Wordsworth’s command was a highly publicized event, but the poem itself
suppresses any and all explicitly personal details. For a detailed study of the relationship between “Peele
Castle” and Wordsworth’s response to the news of John’s death, see Richard Matlak’s work on the subject:
either his article “Captain John Wordsworth’s Death at Sea,” or Part II of his book Deep Distresses:
William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800-1808.
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The structure of the figuration that Wordsworth’s speaker attributes to Beaumont’s

painting is fundamentally allegorical: within the speaker’s interpretation, the painting
functions as an allegory insofar as it contains multiple vehicles that interact with one
another in a manner that is as consistent with their figurative identities as with their
literal ones.100 The castle is more than just an object to which the speaker attributes the
outward symptoms of his own feelings, as one would expect in a conventional pathetic
fallacy. On the contrary, the castle takes on the role of the stoic hero in the “pageantry of
fear” by braving the storm. The very word “pageantry,” suggestive as it is of a highly
stylized, symbolic or allegorical drama, signals the mode of figuration that Wordsworth
is using (and, of course, the word is itself used metaphorically). The presentation of a
sequence of personifications in a procession or pageantry may have been highly
conventional, but it was not a conventional way to interpret a painting within a poem,
and I would thus argue that the word’s use here draws attention to itself – and, by
extension, to the allegorical nature of the interactions between personifications in the

100
I use the term allegory here in its broadest sense, to mean a network of personifications that work
together to convey an abstract meaning. I use it this way, not because the Romantics themselves would
have used it this way, but rather because allegory, in its usual sense, is the term that most readily captures
the point I want to make. As Halmi points out, Romantic literary thinkers such as Coleridge adopted the
restrictive, eighteenth-century definition of the term allegory (9), in which the vehicles of allegory have
little or no identity or meaning other than figuration, and interpreting the text is a purely analytic exercise
in decoding. I thus label “Peele Castle” allegorical with full awareness that Wordsworth himself would not
have used the term. The Romantics’ ideas about allegory, however, are historically idiosyncratic, and their
restrictive definition of the term did not prevent them from using allegorical writing in the more inclusive
sense of the word. Perhaps the most standard definition is that given by Abrams in his Glossary: “a
narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are
contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the “literal,” or primary, level of signification, and at the
same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification.” Frederick Burwick, in Romanticism:
Keywords, gives a comparable definition of allegory before moving on to discuss Coleridge’s famed
objections to allegorical writing. Allegory, he says, is a “play of personification,” in which the
“substitutions [comparable to those of metaphor] are more elaborate and complex because they become
engaged in narrative action, typically aided by the trope of prosopopeia, personifying emotions, beliefs,
values, and institutions, and converting a mental setting into an external, physical landscape” (6). A poem
that is nothing more than a dull exercise in decoding figuration – what the Romantics would have
unhesitatingly called an allegory – certainly fits these definitions, but so do the myth of Cupid and Psyche,
“Whoso List to Hunt,” The Faerie Queene, “A Musical Instrument,” “Goblin Market,” and Animal Farm,
and so does Wordsworth’s treatment of Beaumont’s painting in “Peele Castle.” The objects in the painting
participate in a miniature narrative in a way that makes as much sense at the level of tenor as at the level of
vehicle. The waves, personified as fierce and trampling, buffet the castle, personified as stoic.

I have not encountered the same difficulty in terminology with “Ode on Indolence,” in which the figures
lack any identity other than their metaphorical meaning; Keats’s poem, I think, can safely be labelled
allegorical even by Coleridge’s definition.
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speaker’s interpretation of the painting. Wordsworth sets up the premise for a story
about the relationship between the feeling agent (represented by the castle) and whatever
forces the angry sea and rueful sky represent: perhaps the feeling self’s own bad
passions, or, more likely, a seemingly malevolent world outside the self.

That allegory, however prominent in the poem, is not inherent in Beaumont’s painting; it
is something that Wordsworth “reads into” it, much as Shakespeare’s Lucrece reads
emblems of her own suffering into the painting of Troy. Contrary to J.D. O’Hara’s
assertion that Wordsworth would have been able to “read the picture as easily as ever Sir
Thomas Browne read an emblem or Lamb or Hazlitt a Hogarth print” (74), Beaumont’s
painting is not stable in its signification.101 Even if one chooses to see the painting as an
emblem, one might just as easily interpret the ruined castle as the type of old age
succumbing to life’s hardships, or one might link its uninhabitable state to some kind of
spiritual emptiness. One might point out how ineffectual a safeguard it is for the
struggling vessel in the water, and think of it as an ironic precaution against the wrong
type of attack. Within the real painting, in other words, there is no pageantry of fear and
fortitude; moreover, since “Peele Castle” was first published in a volume that featured an
engraving of Beaumont’s painting as a frontispiece, Wordsworth’s readers would have
been able to judge for themselves the extent of the interpretive liberties the poem takes
with the image.

Given that “Peele Castle” was printed with an engraving of the painting that “suggested”
it, and given that it attributes to that painting a morally commendable allegorical
meaning, it is tempting to argue that Wordsworth treats Beaumont’s painting like an
emblem-book illustration in need of a caption. “Peele Castle,” however, sounds very
little like a caption explicating a morally appropriate interpretation of a work of art. The
poem announces its subjectivity too loudly: the interpretation of the painting that it puts
forward is too obviously individual. Moreover, the speaker’s poetic voice is too

101
O’Hara himself tacitly acknowledges this; his own statement that “the engraving [of the painting] might
surprise those whose impression of it is gained solely from what ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ conjures up” (72) belies
his insistence that its “sense” is “clear enough” (75).
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powerful, his measured tone too hypnotic, and the poem’s language too formal, with its
several apostrophes and its slow transition from a remembered past to an altered present.
In short, if we see “Peele Castle” as the textual portion of an emblem, we do so at the
cost of ignoring some its most notable features.

The crux of the speaker’s figural interpretation of the painting is the word “pageantry”: in
order to see the complexity of the way Wordsworth has his speaker relate to Beaumont’s
painting, we must first acknowledge the kind of speech act that the whole poem is
constructed to be. The speaker’s act of subjectively importing an allegory “into”
Beaumont’s painting is part of his enactment of his own process of mourning – a process
that includes a shift in his perception of his own subjectivity. I do not use the term
enactment here lightly, for the whole of “Peele Castle” is a pageant, in the sense of a
stylized drama in which the speaker interacts with personified abstractions. The speaker
begins by apostrophizing the subject of the painting (the castle), proceeds to describe the
painting obliquely in another apostrophe, this time to the painter, and concludes with two
final apostrophes that double as performative utterances: a farewell to “the heart that
lives alone,” and a welcome to “fortitude” and “patient chear.”
Farewell, farewell the Heart that lives alone,
Hous’d in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient chear,

And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
Some readers might object that the numerous apostrophes make the poem more of a
conversation than an enactment; some would even say that the conversational apostrophe
is so typical of Romantic lyric that it hardly bears comment in “Peele Castle.” Michael
Macovski, for example, suggests that the “recurrence of the apostrophized listener” is
characteristic of Romantic lyric. Macovski argues that “the rhetorical inclusion of even a
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mute listener implies the form of a dialogue,” and that “Romantic apostrophe accordingly
becomes a rhetorical synecdoche or figure for dialogue” (11). My contention that the
apostrophes in “Peele Castle” make it sound more like a soliloquy than a conversation
hinges on an older and more specific understanding of apostrophe, and I would argue that
the type of apostrophe present in “Peele Castle” is very different from the conversational
type of address that can stand in for dialogue in the way Macovski suggests.

Traditionally, an address to a specific auditor is not necessarily an apostrophe.

According to J. Douglas Kneale, true apostrophe, as it was understood from the Classical
period through the nineteenth century, is a “diversion [that] redirects the speech to
someone other than the original hearer” (151). Kneale rules out any address in the
opening line of a poem, including the opening address of “Peele Castle,” on the grounds
that there is no prior addressee from whom the speaker can turn away. The crucial
characteristic of apostrophe, however, is that its rhetorical effect is intended for the
auditor who hears, or rather overhears, the address, rather than for the addressee. The
location of a direct address in the opening line of a poem does not negate the possibility
that the address is a figurative turning away from an implied auditor. A useful
touchstone for illustrating the difference is a poem like “To My Sister,” which opens
with an address from which the speaker never turns, but it is an address to a person
supposed to be present to the speaker in the moment of utterance; in the strictest sense,
that is not an apostrophe. “Peele Castle,” by contrast, opens with an address to an
inanimate object that is not present, except in the form of a painted representation. The
speaker’s words are not meant to be heard by the castle; they are meant to be heard by an
implied auditor. When the speaker begins to address Beaumont, his words are intended
for the same auditor. When he addresses the abstractions “fortitude” and “cheer,” his
words are still intended for the same auditor. In all three addresses, the speaker’s
utterance may be directed at one object, person, or concept, but the effect of his utterance
is meant for an implied auditor who “overhears” him. The opening apostrophe to the
inanimate and absent castle establishes the expectation that the poem’s apostrophes are
true apostrophes – intended for an implied auditor other than the addressee. The poem
can thus only with difficulty be constructed as tacit dialogue or colloquy. It is much
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more akin to drama, in which the actors’ words are “overheard” by the audience. The
poem is constructed as the acting out, in a stylized form, of a psychological process. The
speaker’s interpretation of Beaumont’s painting as an allegory is part of that process: in
order formally to “welcome fortitude,” he must first recognize fortitude, and he
recognizes it by projecting it onto an object in a painting and then interpreting the
painting allegorically.

While I do not wish to underrate the extent to which “Peele Castle” is so moving
precisely because it is personal and we do know how both the poem and the painting
relate to Wordsworth’s very real loss of his brother, I would nonetheless posit that it is
only by acknowledging the poem’s stylized, dramatic qualities that we can account for its
power. Marjorie Levinson, although she acknowledges the “conspicuous dramaturgy of
the description” of Beaumont’s painting (113), also interprets “Peele Castle” as a poem
riddled with internal contradictions, rather than as a self-conscious acting out of their
resolution, and she suggests that “[t]he narrator […] does not understand the drama
staged by his discourse” (116). If we take the poem to be confessional – to be an
expression of Wordsworth’s feelings rather than an enactment of the process of changing
them – then we encounter the kind of problem that Levinson identifies: the sheer
inconsistency of the speaker’s binary oppositions, the oddity of his finding a gauge of
supposed reality in a painting, and the consistency with which everything he perceives –
both in his remembered past and in his supposed present – is made to reflect the contents
of his own head. Levinson’s reading of “Peele Castle” is built upon a fundamental
recognition of the extent to which there is nothing in the poem that seems external to the
speaker’s subjectivity. Indeed, she interprets the poem as an elegy, albeit an unconscious
one, for objectivity itself: a poem that registers “the loss of a concept of external and
independent otherness” (102). Nowhere is the absence of external and independent
otherness more evident than in the speaker’s description of Beaumont’s painting.
Heffernan, citing Levinson, makes a concerted case for “Peele Castle” moving only from
one delusion driven by transcendental ideology to another delusion driven by the same
ideology; he argues that Wordsworth “implicitly claims that he has found the truth in
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Beaumont’s picture – more precisely in what he takes to be its staging of the conflict
between the raging elements and the persevering castle” (106).

Such a reading stops short of acknowledging just how artificial “Wordsworth’s”

awakening to reality is in this particular poem. Wordsworth, or rather Wordsworth’s
speaker, does not claim to find objective truth in Beaumont’s painting, but instead enacts
or stages the process of projecting a subjective truth there – of investing a morally neutral
painting with a profound but very personal symbolic meaning. Moreover, insofar as we
can see “Wordsworth,” the speaker of the poem, as an actor performing this pageantry of
subjective interpretation, then we can also see that the Wordsworth who composed the
poem chose not to have that speaker actually express much sorrow. In other words, we
can see the speaker acting (behaving, but also performing) with emotional restraint, so
that the poem enacts the adoption of fortitude in its affect as well as in its concluding
rhetorical posture. If we take ourselves, as readers, to be in some sense also spectators of
the speaker’s enactment, the speaker has, without the intercession of a sympathizer,
“lower[ed] his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along
with him” (Smith 1.4.7). The subjective viewer of an artwork here sees himself in the
painting, not because he is too blind to see anything else in it, but because he cannot
recognize his own altered self without the mediation of an interpretable object. “Peele
Castle” treats the work of art, not merely as an object capable of calling up emotions, but
also as a site of self-recognition that is dependent on the viewer’s ability both to see and
to be seen – to suspend the dichotomy between himself as interpreter and the painting as
object of interpretation.

If we compare “Peele Castle” once more to the ekphrasis in “The Rape of Lucrece,” we
can see the importance of its dramatic form. The ekphrasis in “The Rape of Lucrece” is
represented almost entirely in the third person, in spite of the fact that elsewhere in the
poem both Lucrece and Tarquin deliver long monologues. Although Lucrece, like
Wordsworth’s speaker, interprets a painting allegorically in order to come to terms with
her own trauma, she does so silently, and we observe her only with the help of a neutral
and omniscient narrator. Wordsworth’s speaker, by contrast, not only looks at a painted
spectacle, but also adopts the posture of being a spectacle himself. He projects his own
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aspiration of fortitude onto a painting and looks at it, and he also assumes a theatrical
posture of welcoming an implicitly personified “fortitude” in a way that suggests he
either has or requires an audience. The speaker represents an ekphrastic encounter with a
painting (of which he is the viewer) that he figures as a pageantry (of which he is also the
viewer), but he represents that encounter by staging it, thus putting himself in the
position of an actor who is to be watched. By using the poetic form as well as the
metaphor of pageantry, Wordsworth’s speaker is able to be both spectacle and audience –
to be, in essence, the viewer of himself.

If the importance of the dramatic element is highlighted by a comparison to “The Rape of

Lucrece,” the very particular thing Wordsworth does with figuration can be clarified by
comparing “Peele Castle” to another Wordsworthian lyric: a lyric that, as read by Paul de
Man, dramatizes the process of a viewing subject investing an object with symbolic
significance. De Man, in his early essay “Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and
Yeats,” notes a similar enactment in the sonnet “Composed by the Side of Grasmere
Lake,” and he contends that “one can observe the juxtaposition of two very different
attitudes toward a landscape, held together by a dramatic progression which constitutes
the key to interpretation” (126). “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,” however,
hints at a different relationship to the figurative than “Peele Castle.” According to de
Man, the poem’s dramatic progression, from a strictly literal to a deeply symbolic
interpretation of nature, culminating in a moderately symbolic middle ground, is a tacit
commentary on the two-fold vision of nature that Wordsworth offers: to find
“tranquility” in nature, one must be able to see both its material presence and its
symbolic potential at once. The pageantry staged by “Peele Castle” calls for no such
balance. Wordsworth’s speaker explicitly rejects the type of figuration presented in the
first half of the poem, and he not only commends the “pageantry of fear” that he
perceives in Beaumont’s painting, but also adopts pageantry as a mode of expression in
his stylized, performative “welcome” to “fortitude, and patient chear” in the poem’s
finale. Insofar as “Peele Castle” offers a dramatic progression in the speaker’s attitudes
to figuration, it is a progression toward an increasingly allegorical, increasingly stylized,
and increasingly theatrical mode of figuration. Only by drawing on the resources of
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allegory and theatre is Wordsworth’s speaker able to recognize and finally articulate his
own effort at fortitude.

The care with which “Peele Castle” uses its dramaturgy to take on the issue of self-
spectatorship stands yet more strikingly if we compare it to another ekphrastic poem
from the period that seems at first glance to use very similar strategies to explore very
similar issues about suffering and emotional growth . Heffernan situates “Peele Castle”
in relation to two earlier ekphrases: Southey’s “On a Landscape of Gaspar Poussin” of
1795 and William Lisle Bowles’s The Picture of 1803. Southey’s poem treats the idyllic
scene in the painting as a welcome relief from sordid reality. Bowles’s poem, about a
Rubens painting of a summer morning, praises its value as a respite for the world-weary,
but also draws attention to the “disturbing sight of a creeping hunter with phallic rifle in
hand,” in Heffernan’s words (102). Wordsworth’s poem, Heffernan argues, likewise
deals with ideas of “calm and disruption,” but treats these “as stages of a personal
narrative rather than spatially juxtaposed elements of a single picture” (104). If
Wordsworth adapts Bowles’s poetic strategy of juxtaposing calm and disruption in
“Peele Castle,” however, Bowles in turn adapts Wordsworth’s. His poem “On a
Landscape, Painted by Miss Coward, of Bath,” published in 1809, is yet more similar to
Wordsworth’s, and thus offers a yet more revealing contrast: it, too, uses a speaker’s
reaction to a painting as an index of his growth from a past youthful idealism to a mature
capacity to confront hardship.

Both the picture itself and the speaker’s eventual commendation of it in “On a
Landscape” are strongly reminiscent of “Peele Castle,” as though the later poem were
starting and ending with a tribute to the earlier. Like “Peele Castle,” “On a Landscape”
is inspired by a picture that was painted by someone known to the author, and that
depicts a castle, an ocean, and at least one ship. The poem begins
How lovely shines the Pictured Scene, array’d
As with the hues of nature, hills and woods,
And ocean-stream remote! The broad brown oak
Stretches his ancient arms, and length of shade,
High o’er the nearer glens; and the wild ash,
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Hangs wavering on the upland croft, whose ridge,

With distant sheep, amid the goss and fern,
Is dotted: gleams of momentary light
Shoot o’er the long-retiring sands, and fall
Direct upon the battlement and tow’rs,
Of Carey’s mould’ring Castle: the low shore
Stretching far on its level line, reveals
The silver-shining main, that spreads beyond,
To the pale ray of morning: through those hills,
On either side blue-op’ning, the dim sails
Hang, as departing: one, with partial light
Touch’d, ere it fades; the other looks a speck,
Which the first airy spleen would dissipate,
So brief and evanescent seems its shade.
As in “Peele Castle,” the speaker concludes the poem by commending the painting on
the basis of its moral or spiritual fitness – in this case, not for telling the truth, but rather
for offering an illusion that is spiritually useful, saying
…such things I loved,
But loved them as companions of an hour,
Lonely, or said [sad?], forgotten in the crowd.
Still they were near my heart, and still mine eye
Sought every charm of nature; every light
That deck’d her forests, and each ev’ning scene,
When west away the crimson clouds were hung,
Seem’d like a tender thought.
Therefore I prize,—
Though all romantic visions long have flown,
Which never when they flatter’d most, deceived,
Yet wearied oft with many and sight and sound
Of sadness in the living world, I prize
A view like this—as beautiful, as still—
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And pray that peace and happiness may wait

Thy latest years, fair Artist, whose nice touch
Has thus in softest light array’d a scene,
That Happiness and Peace, might wish their own.
More crucially, the speaker of this poem, too, takes viewing the painting as an
opportunity to reflect on the differences between his youthful self and his current, mature
self, remembering a time when a peaceful scene seemed to express the truth of the world.
Immediately after the opening description of the picture, he exclaims
So charms the lucid Landscape! oh, when life
Was new, I thought the smiling world was such,
So sweet, so softly shadow’d! Fancy then
Call’d up all pleasant semblances, that shone
In the aërial distance, and the eye
Of young poetic Rapture, as it glanced
From scene to scene, in vernal beauty gay,
Saw only, in this weary world, the smile
Of peace, and love’s sweet sunshine.
Of course, where Wordsworth’s speaker takes Beaumont’s painting to represent the real
world, full of dangers and disappointments, Bowles’s speaker takes Miss Coward’s
painting to represent the pleasant world he once imagined: Miss Coward seems, in fact,
to have created something much like the picture of “lasting ease” and “Elysian quiet” that
Wordsworth’s speaker claims he would have painted in his youthful naïveté. And
although the symbolic element is considerably less pronounced in “On a Landscape” than
in “Peele Castle,” the painting is still constructed as having some degree of figuration.
The speaker states that he once “thought the smiling world was such [i.e. like the
painting],” implying that the painting symbolically represents an imagined state of the
world. Moreover, he refers to “love’s sweet sunshine,” thus assigning a specific
symbolic meaning to the “pale ray of morning” depicted in the painting. The painting, in
other words, is constructed as possessing a symbolic meaning, and it represents a specific
phase in the speaker’s trajectory of emotional growth.
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The picture is not the only vehicle of figuration in “On a Landscape,” however, and it is
the introduction of a narrative, rather than pictorial, allegory that most significantly
distinguishes this poem’s strategies for thinking about the speaker’s self-hood from those
of “Peele Castle.” The painting may be symbolic, but it is not allegorical – the
components of its figuration do not work together to form an overarching figurative
meaning, nor are they personified – and the allegory that the poem does present is in the
form of a story, separate from Miss Coward’s picture. After assigning symbolic
meanings to the painting, the speaker presents a complex epic simile, comparing the
immature self to a boy who meets and eventually offends a nation of fairies. 102
As the Child,
That play’d in summer by a devious stream,
Enticed by beck’ning Fairies from his path,
Who said “Come follow us, and we will show
Scenes beautiful, and rare;” he follow’d them,
Through subterraneous windings, dark and strange,
Till now they saw a country, fairer far
Than this Terrene: a pale and peaceful light
Sat on the vales, more clear than of the moon,
And softer than the sun’s: aërial youths
With golden “tresses like the morn,” he hail’d
His fellows! "Here, I will for ever live,”
He cried, “I love not the sad earth I left;
Be this sweet land my home.” So day by day,
He sought that land of shadows, till elate,
One morn, he told to Matron Truth the tale,
“And bring,” she sternly cried, “(for I would know
If true or false thou speak’st,) from that strange land
Some token.” By the secret path he sought

102
Bowles includes three footnotes, one identifying Carey-Castle, in Pembrokeshire, as the castle in the
painting, one attributing the story of the child to “Sir Richard Hoare’s Translations,” and the third
providing Hoare’s text of the story.
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The vale of fairies, and at setting sun,

Brought in his hand a golden ball, and show’d
Delighted: when the unsubstantial toy
At once fell from his grasp, and while loud laughs
Of unseen imps were heard, he stood abash’d,
And saw the treasure vanish’d, and the eye
Of Truth more stern. He sought in vain, at morn,
The well-known path, by the same river’s side;
But every trace was lost, and the wild way
For ever hid from mortal search!
So fares
The fond and youthful vot’ry, in the realm
Of gay Imagination!
Having presented this story in the form of a simile, the speaker goes on to parse its
meaning – a meaning that is allegorical in the same sense as Beaumont’s painting in
“Peele Castle,” in that its overall meaning emerges from the interaction of several
personified component figures. The fairies represent “Love, and Hope,” their land “the
realm / Of gay Imagination,” while the scolding of “Matron Truth” represents the “real
ills of this hard world.”
―Love, and Hope,
Buoyant and bright, are his associates then,
All fairy children; and his heart is sad,
When on the real ills of this hard world
He thinks.——He woes [woos?] poor Fancy’s imagery,
And when indignant Truth, with stern rebuke
Appears, he looks around, and they are gone!
So seem’d the scene to me, and so the toys
Of early Fancy shone, when this wide world,
I thought all loveliness, and deck’d with hues
Soft as this Pictured Scene!
These things were dreams
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Brief shadows of a solitary hour,

No more:—for ill beseem’d it, in a world,
Where we must struggle hard, spell-bound to sit
And image airy likelihoods, and forms
That fade, ere we can say they are; and lose,
So idly lose, the dignity of Truth,
Of Virtue, and of Manhood. Else indeed
The poor Enthusiast, till his hairs were grey,
Might still lie dreaming by a summer brook,
In ruminating fancy, gend’ring forms,
Like countless insects, of distemper’d thoughts,
That Wisdom, waking from her sombrous trance,
Would brush away.

Crucially for a comparison to “Peele Castle,” although the story and its allegorical gloss
set up the terms of the speaker’s final commendation of the painting, the speaker
nonetheless never makes the picture itself tell a story, and never locates his process of
coming to terms with hardship within the painting. The painting, in short, enacts nothing
– stages no pageantry – even within the speaker’s very personal interpretation of it. As a
consequence, although the speaker recognizes in Miss Coward’s picture the view of the
world he himself once occasionally indulged in, he does not recognize in it the picture
himself: a feeling agent actively grappling with suffering. In looking at the painting, he
does not become his own viewer.

Self-recognition, of course, is a theme that recurs in the Wordsworth canon: in The

Prelude, in “Tintern Abbey,” and in many other poems. The idea that looking at
something, such as a castle, a sea of clouds, or the banks of the Wye, enables the poetic
speaker to recall some portion of a former self is a recurring Wordsworthian motif. In
fact, Wordsworth’s speaker in “Tintern Abbey” recognizes his former self in Dorothy
much more explicitly than he here recognizes his present self in the painted castle, when
he says to her
…in thy voice I catch
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The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once. (116-20)
“Peele Castle” does something fundamentally different, however. It tests the kind of
relationship between sympathy and the moral functioning of the self that Adam Smith
had proposed, bringing it into productive tension with the kind of self-recognition that
Wordsworth so persistently represents: a self-recognition that involves seeing oneself
reflected in someone or something else, rather than seeing oneself through someone
else’s eyes. The posture of emotional restraint that Wordsworth’s speaker adopts and the
curious doubling that allows him to be his own viewer seem to echo Smith’s moral
theory. These parallels suggest that Wordsworth was drawing on ideas that were widely
circulated in eighteenth-century and Romantic thought, but Wordsworth tacitly
challenges the idea of self-spectatorship that Smith articulates. By making his speaker
both spectator and spectacle, without the intercession of another person, real or fictive, in
the role of observer, Wordsworth interrogates the theory of self-spectatorship, as though
conducting a mental experiment in how necessary sympathy really is to Smith’s theory.
Wordsworth’s speaker does not put himself in the case of a spectator in order to receive
sympathy. Rather, the idea of either a particular spectator or an idealized one is taken out
of the equation. In order to make himself his own spectator without having a companion
with whom to sympathize, Wordsworth’s speaker relies on a work of art to act as a kind
of place-holder for himself, the sufferer, so that he can in turn adopt the position of
onlooker. Insofar as the speaker achieves the kind of moderation of his grief that, for
Adam Smith, depends on the company of a friend,103 he does so alone. “Peele Castle,”
like much of Wordsworth’s poetry, has long been recognized as a monument to a

103
In his discussion of a sufferer receiving sympathy, Smith talks of the spectator as a real person, actually
present and offering sympathetic consolation (1.2.1-1.4.8). In virtually all other contexts, Smith’s
discussion of the desire for sympathy includes both the desire for real sympathy and approbation from real
people, and the desire for the sympathy and approbation of the imagined “man within the breast” – an
internalized figure whose relationship to real people is complex. This figure can sometimes protect our
peace of mind from the discomfort of false accusations, but he must also occasionally be “awakened”
within us by the opinions of real people (3.2.32, 3.3.38).
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particular notion of self-sufficient and autonomous subjectivity; its engagement with

visual art, however, reveals it as a testing ground for the autonomous subject’s capacity
to soothe itself.

5.2 An Obtuse Spectator of Oneself: Self-figuration and

Misrecognition
Unlike “Peele Castle,” “Ode on Indolence” does not explore a specifically sentimental
formulation of the self. Where Wordsworth’s poem, for all that it foregoes sympathy as
a means to self-mastery, is nonetheless recognizably exploring the same questions that
Adam Smith had explored in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Keats’s poem is not. It is
however, asking questions that have continuities with the questions confronted by writers
like Smith and Wordsworth who were dealing with a sympathetic concept of the self.
Keats, too, is asking how a consciousness might achieve self-awareness, and at what
point that consciousness will require someone or something else to reflect its contents
and activities back to itself. Like Wordsworth, Keats is further asking what happens
when that something else is not a person, but rather a placeholder – a non-human object
with the potential figuratively to represent the self to itself.

Like its more famous counterpart “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence” draws on
and challenges an idea that had by this time become common in Romantic thought,
namely the idea of visual art as the motionless and durable preserver of temporal
moments; like the opening stanza of “Grecian Urn,” the poem consistently ascribes to art,
not stillness, but rather movement. Theresa Kelley, in her essay “Keats, Ekphrasis, and
History,” makes a case for Keats’s ekphrastic poems as a group articulating a subtle
resistance to the aesthetic ideals of Hazlitt and especially Haydon. Kelley offers a model
of poetic composition whereby poets make use of the cultural materials they find at hand,
but “contort” them slightly so as to express ideas that may in fact challenge the expected
use of those materials. Kelley carefully qualifies her argument, insisting that she does
not “believe Keats explicitly decided that he would challenge Haydon’s aesthetic
principles,” but rather that the “figural pathways of Keats’s resistance to Haydon are
more subtly embedded in his poems about works of art” (214). Kelley’s insights open up
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the poems’ engagements with these issues, but I would argue that the “Ode on
Indolence” does more than simply question the ideas about the “Sister Arts” that were
prevalent in the art world of Romantic London and that Haydon in particular promoted.
It draws on ideas from the mainstream of art-world discourse to ask a much bigger
question: to stage the process of a consciousness hiding from self-awareness.

Like “Peele Castle,” “Ode on Indolence” explores the limits of self-recognition, although
it does so in a different context: rather than presenting self-recognition as part of a
process of grief and consolation, this poem presents it as part of the speaker’s shift from
inactivity to activity. The poem enacts its speaker retelling an encounter with three
externalized components of his own psyche, and ineffectually trying to contain the effect
of that encounter (namely rousing him from his indolence). As Willard Spiegelman
points out, the fact that love, ambition, and poesy are externalized in an ode on indolence
is striking: a “curious absence.” “Alone among the six odes,” Spiegelman observes,
“‘On Indolence’ neither personifies nor addresses its titular subject” (84); instead, it
personifies three elements of the speaker’s psyche that the speaker himself seems loath to
acknowledge. The speaker’s attempts at containing the effects of the three allegorical
figures, or “shadows,” begin with comparing the shadows to figures on an urn – to
artworks. Their resemblance to art seems temporarily to obscure their allegorical
meaning: it is “so hush a masque” that he does not recognize them. The speaker’s
attempts end with him treating the urn that originates in the vehicle of his own simile as
if it were a real urn, as he insists more firmly (if futilely) on the shadows’ status as
artworks.

As in “Peele Castle,” a crucial word in the speaker’s construction of the three shadows
draws attention both to the allegorical meaning inherent in them, and to the element of
performance in the speaker’s own utterances: the word is “masque,” here meaning
“mask” the first time the speaker uses it, but spelled archaically to conjure up
associations with stylized, allegorical drama. “Ode on Indolence,” like “Peele Castle,”
constructs visual art as fundamentally allegorical, and it, too, is akin to an enactment or a
pageantry. Moroever, like the speaker of “Peele Castle,” the speaker of “Ode on
Indolence” performs an act of interpretation. Where the speaker of “Peele Castle”
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interprets an artwork as an allegory about his own psyche, the speaker of “Ode on
Indolence” interprets an allegory about his own psyche as an artwork. Where
Wordsworth’s speaker performs his interpretation in order to become his own spectator
and achieve consolation and self-mastery, Keats’s speaker performs his to avoid, or at
least postpone, the self-recognition that would force him into literary activity. However
misguidedly, Keats’s speaker seems to equate the very concept of art with an interpretive
opacity that he covets for his own mind, as though, in relegating parts of himself to the
status of art, he could avoid having to know himself. Art, in this poem, is not a
convenient receptacle or vehicle for parts of oneself that one must see from a distance if
one is to see them at all, but rather a mask – a disguise – that the speaker uses to hide
parts of him from himself.

Often thought of as a kind of rough draft of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the posthumously
published “Ode on Indolence” has been comparatively marginalized in studies of
ekphrasis, although it often figures in studies of Keats’s odes. No poem presents a more
compelling case for defining ekphrasis as broadly as possible than does “Ode on
Indolence,” for the status of the three shadows is ambiguous. They bear an obvious
resemblance to works of classical sculpture (they are in sandals and white robes), and the
speaker says that they are “strange” to him, “as may betide / With vases, to one deep in
Phidian lore,” suggesting that their very strangeness is a characteristic of engravings on
an urn, if not of large-scale carvings like the Elgin Marbles. But is there really an urn in
this poem? The most extensive reading of the poem as an ekphrasis is that of Grant F.
Scott, who identifies a key reason, in The Sculpted Word, why the poem is not clearly
ekphrastic by present-day standards even though it does clearly draw on ideas about art
and on the pre-eighteenth-century tradition of poems that treat art as allegorical. The
first overt suggestion that the figures are images in a work of art comes in the form of a
simile. As Scott puts it,
[t]he figures are never fully there, as the urn will be later, and we are
never sure whether they are mere phantom personifications, Spenserian
allegorical figures, or actual characters from a bas-relief urn. Thus,
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Keats’s simile remains elusive: are they like figures on a marble urn, or
are they figures on an urn? (96)
Scott situates “Ode on Indolence” in a tradition of poems about indolence, and reads it
through the lens of W.J.T. Mitchell’s theory of ekphrasis as a gendered encounter. He
argues that the feminized figures on the urn transgress the “ordinary protocol of
ekphrasis,” in which a male viewer gazes at a feminized work of art (97). When the
figures turn their heads and stare at the motionless speaker, they embody “a number of
powerful feminine Others” (118) that Keats, Scott argues, found genuinely threatening. I
would push in a different direction Scott’s insight that Keats’s speaker seems to find the
three shadows threatening. “Ode on Indolence” is, like “Peele Castle,” a poem about
viewing oneself: the speaker is disconcerted by the figures’ movement and gaze, not
because the figures are feminine, but rather because they are figments of himself that he
has wilfully misrecognized.

Keats treats art as a site of ambivalent self-recognition elsewhere, in his famous sonnet
“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” discussed in the previous chapter. The speaker of that
poem recognizes his own artistic limitations when confronted with the Parthenon friezes,
and he enacts those limitations in the poem’s fragmentary syntax – a verbal rendering of
confusion. But while the speaker appears to have achieved a certain self-awareness as a
result of his encounter with the Marbles, that self-recognition is only ambiguously
communicated to the reader. Because what the speaker recognizes in himself is the
limitations of his poetic expressive abilities, and because those limitations are writ large
in the poem’s broken language, they are imperfectly articulated; the speaker’s limitations
are symbolically enacted, rather than cogently described, and these modes of
representation are in this case mutually exclusive. While the “Elgin Marbles” sonnet has
some elements in common with “Ode on Indolence,” however, art in the “Ode” is more
than an object that prompts self-recognition: it is a figure for the self, and a tool that the
speaker ambivalently and ineffectually uses to limit his self-recognition.
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The slippery figuration of “Ode on Indolence” is crucial to its effects, and it is thus worth
looking closely at a preliminary example. The speaker does something peculiar with a
metaphor in which a summer’s day stands in for the state of his own mind; what he does
with that metaphor is a useful jumping-off point for what he does with the still more
crucial simile of figures on a vase. The metaphoric terms in which the speaker describes
his state of mind at the start of the “Ode” eventually seep out of the realm of metaphor
into an ambiguously literal description of the season. The speaker states in the second
stanza that “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence / Benumbed [his] eyes”; in the fifth,
he recalls that his “soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er / With flowers, and stirring
shades, and baffled beams.” Thus far, the language of muted daylight and spring weather
is entirely metaphorical, and refers solely to the speaker’s state of mind. “Baffled
beams,” however, is followed in most editions by a colon,104 and the colon is followed
by four more lines about the weather:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay.
Were these four lines separated from the two preceding them by a period, they would be
almost unambiguously literal – a straightforward description of the setting. The colon,
however, leaves open the possibility that these lines are an elaboration of the soul-lawn
metaphor. The vehicle of the metaphor, while never quite free from its status as a
vehicle, nonetheless spills over into near-reality, as though the speaker were uneasily
shifting from awareness of himself to awareness of external things. This is not the only
instance, however, in which the speaker avoids self-awareness by seeming to forget that
what he is describing originated as a metaphor for his own mind. He does something
similar with an artwork that begins as a vehicle-within-a-vehicle – a simile describing
“shadows” that are themselves personifications – but that eventually, and impossibly,
seems to take on a concrete existence.

104
This is Stillinger’s punctuation, and it was Milnes’s in the original 1848 publication. Stillinger does not
comment on this particular detail, either in The Texts of Keats’s Poems or in “The Text of Ode on
Indolence.”
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Fully a stanza before he explains that he is indolent and enjoying his indolence, the form
of the speaker’s language registers his inaction. The “Ode” begins with a statement in
the passive voice:
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced.
At the grammatical level, the speaker does not admit to doing anything – not even to
seeing. The three figures, by contrast, are the grammatical subjects of all of the active
verbs in the first stanza: they step, they pass, they come again, they are strange to the
speaker.
And one behind the other stepp’d serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again, as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
The eerie image of the figures appearing and disappearing as though on an urn that is
“shifted” gets much of its eeriness from its passive-voice presentation: the figures pass
“like figures on a marble urn, / When [it is] shifted round to see the other side.” As Scott
suggests, the urn in the simile “appears to be propelled by a mysterious force that
challenges the speaker’s autonomy and agency […]. Who exactly does the ‘shifting
round’?” (102). If the figures’ movement seems to be controlled by some other force,
and if the ghostly figures are in turn possessed of more agency than the speaker, then the
speaker’s lack of grammatical agency suggests a profound degree of indolence indeed.

When, in this inactive state, he initially describes the three shadows, the speaker presents
them, not as art, but as like art. The word “figure,” with which the speaker first labels the
beings he sees, can mean “graven image,” but it can also mean “emblem or
personification,” or simply “outline of a person” – and these figures are both
personifications and outlines. It is only retrospectively, in the light of the simile, that
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“figures” seems also to mean “graven images.” Even within the simile, the speaker blurs
the line between art and non-art, calling the figures on the hypothetical urn “shades.”
The word’s most direct meaning here is simply silhouette, for “shade” in early
nineteenth-century Britain was a colloquial term for a silhouette portrait (OED). In the
next stanza, however, the speaker will call the figures “shadows,” and the unusual choice
of the word “shades” prefigures the ghostliness of “shadows” as much as it conjures up
the concrete image of “side-faced” images on an urn.

The extended simile in the first stanza is counterintuitive: the commonality between the
three shadows and engravings on an urn is their mode of movement. Like the more
widely studied “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence” concerns itself with the
popular Romantic idea that visual art does not or cannot represent temporal progression.
Where “Ode on a Grecian Urn” explicitly pushes that idea to its logical extreme,
however, “Ode on Indolence” subtly undermines it. Keats here toys with and inverts the
expectation that art can “immortalize” a transitory being, as Cowper had suggested it
could when he blessed “the art that can immortalize / The art that baffles time’s tyrannic
claim / To quench [his mother’s mind or spirit]” (“On the Receipt” 8-10). The three
figures are like art precisely in their means of being transitory: they are like figures on an
urn in that they appear and disappear like figures on an urn that is being “shifted.”
Moreover, they proceed to adopt yet more modes of movement that are very un-frieze-
like indeed: they turn their heads to face the speaker, and then hastily vanish. Stasis, in
this poem, is a feature not of sculpture but of language – and specifically of the narrative
portions of the speaker’s language. Movement, and even disappearance, by contrast, are
here features of figures on urns.

Even within the first stanza, the speaker shifts from figuring the shadows’ bizarre
movement as art-like to explaining their strangeness as a function of their status as art –
as though he has forgotten that they are artworks only within his own similitude. Having
noted that the figures are “strange” to him – perhaps strange in the sense of bizarre, but
certainly strange in the sense of unfamiliar or unrecognized – the speaker explains away
their unfamiliarity. While he does not explicitly claim to be “deep in Phidian lore”
himself, he does say that failing to recognize figures on a vase is understandable to
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someone who is deep in such lore, learned on the subject of the Elgin Marbles.105 One
can read this to mean that he does not recognize the shadows because they are the wrong
type of art: he would recognize them if they were a large-scale frieze, but cannot, given
that they are images on a vase. One could also read it to mean that vases in general are
so inscrutable that even those learned in Greek antiquities do not always recognize the
figures on them. Either way, however, the figures’ strangeness is a function of their
status as figures on a vase. The explanation is a little startling, given that until this point
in the poem there is no vase or urn, but rather three shadowy beings who appear and
vanish as though being propelled on one.

The speaker’s unstable characterization of the figures as like a hypothetical urn or on a

real urn turns into a different kind of oscillation in attitudes in the second stanza. Now
expressing wonderment that he “knew [them] not,” the speaker calls their resemblance to
images on an urn a “masque.”
How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?
The “masque” or mask in which the shadows were “muffled” seems to be their disguise
as immobile urn decorations (or things that resemble immobile urn decorations)
passively being shifted round, and the speaker implies that this disguise obscures their
meaning. (Indeed, this proves to be the case, for it is in turning their heads and thus
adopting a type of movement that is not characteristic of images on urns that the three

105
The Parthenon friezes, or Elgin Marbles, are fabled to have been made by the sculptor Phidias.
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shadows eventually reveal their allegorical identities.) Rather than explaining away the
shadows’ strangeness as natural or understandable, their urn-like movement is now itself
in need of explanation: an obstacle to the speaker’s recognition of them for which the
speaker demands an account. He even tacitly accuses the figures of conspiring in a
“deep-disguised plot” – a plot that is disguised and secret, but also a plot that involves
disguise. In the stanza’s concluding lines, however, the speaker changes his attitude
again, asking, in effect, why the shadows were not plotting to steal away, and why they
did not remain unidentifiable: “O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense / Unhaunted
quite of all but—nothingness?” If, at the start of the second stanza, the speaker takes a
tone of one betrayed because he has not recognized the figures, at the end of the stanza
he takes the same tone because he has.

The speaker’s ambivalent attitude to recognition of the figures corresponds to an

oscillation between past-tense narrative and direct address. “Ode on Indolence” is not
made up entirely of apostrophes, as “Peele Castle” is – on the contrary, it begins with
past-tense narration. The second stanza begins with an interrogative apostrophe to the
three shadows, questioning them about the events just narrated: “How is it, shadows, that
I knew ye not?” The middle part of the stanza returns to narrative: “Ripe was the drowsy
hour.” It is not clear whether this narrative is still addressed to the three shadows – an
elaboration of the speaker’s question about their conduct – or whether he has returned to
the narration in which he refers to the shadows as “they” in the first stanza. The second
stanza concludes with another apostrophe to the shadows, but expressing a very different
attitude, and thus leaving unresolved the question of whether the preceding lines were an
expansion of his first question or a narrative interlude that has changed his mind about
what he wishes to ask.

The crucial word “masque” signals both the type of speech act that the speaker
repeatedly slips into in the second stanza and the allegorical meaning that the shadows’
resemblance to an urn is impeding. The word points us to a set of metaphors and an
element of linguistic construction that “Ode on Indolence” shares with “Peele Castle.”
The archaic spelling of “mask” as “masque” is suggestive of pageantry, for masques, like
pageantry, are a highly allegorical type of drama in which human actors become
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personifications, often by wearing masks. Strikingly, the figures in the poem, far from
acquiring their allegorical meaning by donning a mask, as human actors would do,
conceal it by doing so. “Masque” here signifies a disguise that obscures, instead of
generating, the allegory. Moreover, the speaker’s introduction of the word just before he
recognizes the personifications and just after he himself has launched into an apostrophe
is no coincidence. For a human speaker to address three personified abstractions is, in
effect, to stage a masque. Since the last stanza is also an apostrophe, that element of the
masque recurs, along with the word itself, for, in the final stanza, the speaker asks the
figures to become once more “masque-like figures”: he is here using the term entirely to
signify the figures’ status as allegorical personifications.

The allegorical meaning of the three shadows becomes abruptly clear when they
decisively defy the expectations generated by the comparison to images on an urn, and
move in a way that the simile cannot account for.
A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d
And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
The first was a fair made, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,—
I knew to be my demon Poesy.
The speaker presents the “meaning” of the figures themselves as unambiguously
allegorical in spite of his evident difficulty deciphering it. Once he recognizes them, the
speaker does not say that he guessed at their meaning, but rather that he “knew the
three.” In a poem in which neither art nor metaphor are stable categories, these quasi-
artistic figures evidently have firm identities as allegorical personifications of Love,
Ambition and Poesy. Yet it is only by transcending the normal limitations of images on
urns – by turning their heads and then abruptly vanishing – that the three figures can
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make their identities recognized. In other words, the figures assume their unambiguous
status as allegorical personifications only in the act of rendering yet more questionable
their status as art – as though they cannot be fully bas-relief figures and fully allegories at
the same time.

The figurative meaning of the three shadows, once it is revealed, renders all the more
striking the speaker’s ambivalent justifications of his failure to recognize them, for they
are personifications of elements of his own psyche. If their meaning is as stable as the
speaker suggests when he claims to know the three, then why does it take him so long to
recognize them? Given that all three allegorical meanings pertain to his own desires and
impulses, it is still more bizarre that he “knows” them only on the third time of asking.
Helen Vendler observes in The Odes of John Keats that the speaker projects “onto an
urn-Doppelgänger his internalized ambition, love, and poesy” (24), and she identifies his
“penitent” exclamation at his failure to recognize them as the “single most memorable
moment” in the poem (28). Although I would not necessarily characterize the speaker’s
exclamation as penitent, Vendler is surely right that the tone in the second stanza
registers conflict. The speaker’s shifting attitudes to his own failure to recognize the
shadows have everything to do with the shadows’ status as figures for his own mind.
Moreover, his ambiguous characterization of the shadows first as like images on an urn,
then simply as images on an urn, has everything to do with his failure to recognize them.

After the identity of the shadows is revealed, the speaker’s desire to renounce the figures,
to deny their power, and to maintain his own stasis is made manifest in the repetitiveness
of his language. As he tries to contain the effects of his recognition of the figures, he
uses an almost incantatory form of repetition. At the start of the fourth and fifth stanzas,
the speaker repeats elements of his narration of the moment of recognition in the third,
but with a disapproving gloss each time.
They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition—it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;
For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
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At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep’d in honied indolence;
O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

A third time came they by;—alas! wherefore?

My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine,
Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;
O shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.
“They faded,” he says, echoing “then faded” from the third line of the preceding stanza,
before adding “and, forsooth! I wanted wings: / Oh folly!” The rest of the fourth stanza
is a vigorous repudiation of love, ambition, and poetry, and the order in which the
speaker repudiates the figures is exactly the order in which he identifies them in the third
stanza, thus intensifying the impression that this stanza is almost ritualistically recreating
the previous. In the fifth stanza, the speaker exclaims “A third time came they by,”
echoing “A third time pass’d they by” from the start of the third stanza. Again, he adds
an exclamation of his own disapproval: “alas! wherefore?” Even as he shifts once more
into apostrophe in the final two lines of the fifth stanza, he echoes the opening line of the
second stanza: “O shadows!” echoes “How is it, shadows.” The order in which the
speaker repeats himself at the start of the fourth, the start of the fifth, and the end of the
fifth stanzas is inverted: he repeats these elements in the opposite of the order in which
he had originally uttered them (in the third line of the third stanza, the first line of the
third stanza, and the first line of the second). What began as stalling – an exact repetition
of elements in the third stanza in the fourth – has become regression, as though the
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speaker is trying to move backward toward the poem’s opening. In the act of repudiating
love, ambition and poetry in order to preserve his indolence, he enacts his mental stasis
linguistically.

The desire to resist or contain the shadows’ influence that is manifested in the language
of the fourth and fifth stanzas is revealed to be disappointed in the final stanza; even as
he claims to be banishing the three shadows and remaining indolent, the form of the
speaker’s language registers energy and activity. Having stated in the final lines of the
fifth stanza that the moment of their turning to face him was an appropriate “time to bid
farewell,” the speaker attempts to bid them farewell in his present moment.
So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye phantoms, from my idle spright,
Into the clouds, and never more return!
The speaker’s farewell to the figures and his imperative to them to “vanish” and go back
to the urn are an exercise in futility. They have vanished, and it is their very vanishing
that has roused him from his stupor and disturbed his indolence in the first place. (Most
obviously, the fact that what we read is an ode suggests that the speaker has not
succeeded in banishing his demon poesy; the speaker is actually uttering poetry in the act
of banishing that “maiden most unmeek”).106

106
As Joel Faflak observes, where his predecessor De Quincey had attempted to “psychoanalyze the
psychic process of poetry within prose,” Keats “moves back into poetry to explore how this process
functions firsthand. He psychoanalyzes within the contemplative form of Poetry its self-observational
other – the poetry of Poetry” (201). In “Ode on Indolence,” Keats explores the process of being roused
from indolence to write a poem, but he does so within the poem, making the success of the rousing a
foregone conclusion.
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That contradiction is writ large in the linguistic mode of the final stanza. The past-tense
narrative entirely gives way to performative speech acts (farewells, banishments,
imperatives) and apostrophe. The repetition and passive forms of speech that
characterize much of the narrative portions of the poem make a final, rather halting
appearance, as though in their death throes – as though the speaker’s very mode of
indolent speech has fractured. He says, for instance, that “for the day faint visions there
is store,” but not until after he has said “I yet have visions for the night,” substituting a
“there is” construction for the more decidedly active “I have” construction. This second
line reads awkwardly, as though he has caught himself making himself a grammatical
subject, and hastily corrects the slip. In the very act of banishing the “phantoms” back to
the “dreamy urn” to be once more “masque-like figures,” the speaker ironically ceases to
be merely a viewer of the figures and becomes, for the second time, an actor. Since the
linguistic form of his apostrophe contradicts its substance, he is an actor whom we view
with a certain ironic distance – if not exactly a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce, not a hero
of self-perception and self-consolation like Wordsworth’s speaker either. Keats, far from
unambiguously identifying his speaker with himself, here allows his speaker to proclaim
rather grandly a banishment that is patently ineffective.

The fact that the speaker’s language in the final stanza strongly suggests his futile desire
to remain indolent sheds some light on the problem raised by Grant Scott, quoted earlier:
[t]he figures are never fully there, as the urn will be later, and we are
never sure whether they are mere phantom personifications, Spenserian
allegorical figures, or actual characters from a bas-relief urn. Thus,
Keats’s simile remains elusive: are they like figures on a marble urn, or
are they figures on an urn? (96).
By the end of the poem, the speaker commands them to “be once more / In masque-like
figures on the dreamy urn.” The urn may be “dreamy,” perhaps even “dreamed,” but it is
still “the dreamy urn,” not the hypothetical “a marble urn” of the opening stanza,
implying that it has somehow spilled out of the simile and acquired a real existence.
That implication, however, is in the realm of the speaker’s wishful thinking – part of the
final stanza’s bold but ironic performance of speech acts that have the opposite of their
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stated effect. As long as the three shadows moved only in ways that could be
characterized by the analogy of images on an urn, their meaning remained opaque to the
speaker; and as long as their meaning remained opaque, he remained indolent. In
demanding that the shadows resume a real status as images on urns that they appear
never to have had, the speaker is demanding that they be more decisively contained than
ever by the similitude. He is demanding that they cease to have existence beyond the
vehicle of a simile that described only part of their movement – the part that had no
effect.

For Scott, “Ode on Indolence” is the poem in which the work of art actually is
threatening to the viewer, because it actually does turn and gaze right back. The
observation that the three figures are at their most threatening to the speaker at the
moment in which they turn their heads is a crucial one, and it is certainly at that moment
that the speaker’s desperate repetitions and repudiations begin. It is the figures’ forcible
imposition of their own allegorical meaning, however, as much as it is their reciprocal
gaze, that seems to distress the speaker. The subtext of the speaker’s injunction to the
figures to return to the “dreamy urn” on which it is not really clear that they were ever
located is the idea that, if the figures could only be persuaded to stay art – to stop turning
their heads, to stop defying the limitations that were assumed by Romantic thinkers to
pertain to art – then they would have no intrinsic allegorical meaning, and their
interpretation could be controlled or neglected by the viewer.

If “Ode on Indolence” lends itself to studies of the link between ekphrasis and the
controlling gaze, its primary reason for exploring its speaker’s desire not to recognize the
meaning of the allegorical figures – indeed, its reason for drawing on the ekphrastic
tradition at all – nevertheless seems to be to represent a particularly extreme kind of self-
estrangement. Strictly speaking, there isn’t an art object in this poem. “Ode on
Indolence” represents an encounter between the speaker and three figures that are neither
objects of aesthetic enjoyment nor the product of a deliberate act of creation on the part
of an artist. It is the very ambiguity of the figures’ status as art that enables the “Ode” to
make, not merely a work of art, but the very concept of art fulfill a new role. Keats strips
the concept of art of the associations it had come to have – permanence, stasis – and
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destabilizes the notion of art as an identifiable category. What we are left with is a set of
visual conventions (white robes and sandals, a side-faced perspective, figures in
procession one behind the other), and a powerful sense of the figures’ strangeness. They
are strange (unfamiliar) in that the speaker does not recognize them, and they are strange
(unusual) in their mode of appearing to him; on both counts, he compares them to figures
on an urn. It is not that the speaker sees a work of art and perceives it as strange or fails
to recognize it. Rather, he perceives the figures as a work of art because they are strange
– their art-like appearance is “so hush a masque.” The characteristics of art, or at least
the particular kind of art specific to urns and vases, if not “Phidian” art, have become a
way of signifying that which is strange or misrecognized. Moreover, the shadows
Keats’s speaker tries so hard to ignore are figures for his own interiority, and the change
he resists is a change to himself. Like Wordsworth’s speaker in “Peele Castle,” Keats’s
speaker becomes, in the process of an ekphrastic encounter, his own viewer, but he views
himself obtusely, and wilfully so. If Wordsworth’s speaker uses the experience of
viewing a work of art as a means to become reacquainted with himself, Keats’s speaker
uses the abstract idea of looking at a work of art as a means of staying as estranged from
himself as he can: if he cannot truly remain indolent, he can at least fail to acknowledge
that his indolence has been disturbed.

The question of whether an autonomous consciousness can be its own spectator to any
good purpose may seem, at first glance, somewhat removed from the concerns of the
culture of sensibility. It is linked, however, to the concept of sympathetic consolation
articulated by Adam Smith – a concept that, in Smith’s formulation, is crucial to
sympathy’s role in the higher-order morality of self-mastery and the other sterner virtues.
The culture of sensibility that continued to flourish in the Romantic period was not
concerned primarily with promoting sympathy and sentiment, but rather with continuing
to ask sophisticated questions about their role in ethics. And however invested much
Romantic poetry might be in articulating the claims of the poetic self to autonomy and
self-knowledge, in these poems such supposed autonomy and self-knowledge is
interrogated in ways that highlight their connection to the intellectual culture of
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sensibility and the moral philosophy that gave it its intellectual momentum. “Peele
Castle” recombines the conventions of pre-Romantic ekphrasis to show an autonomous
self that requires no sympathetic spectator; by contrast, “Ode on Indolence,” in deflating
the claims of such a supposedly autonomous self, tacitly re-inscribes the necessity of a
human interlocutor in the moral functioning of the self – not necessarily a sympathetic
interlocutor offering consolation, but some external consciousness that can jostle the
mind out of its fantasies about its own state. “Ode on Indolence” does not seem to be
speaking back directly to the ideas articulated by Smith, but it does seem to be speaking
back to those implicitly tested by “Peele Castle,” as though picking up the thread of the
conversation without directly addressing the first speaker.

This chapter has explored how a very specific tool could be used in two different poems
to explore a very specific kind of question: how the trope of pageantry or masque, used
in an ekphrasis and drawing on the very old tradition of treating artworks as allegories,
could be used to explore ideas about self-recognition, self-awareness, and self-mastery.
These questions, especially as they are inflected in “Ode on Indolence,” do not bear the
same direct and irrefutable relationship to moral philosophy as do the questions about the
type and purpose of sympathy the visual arts could prompt explored in the previous
chapter, or the questions about viable processes of grieving explored in the first chapter.
Nonetheless, the questions about self-recognition – and the possible uses of self-
spectatorship mediated by art – posed by “Ode on Indolence” and “Peele Castle” share
recognizable continuities with ideas drawn from moral philosophy. The shift of those
questions away from the form that is traceable in Adam Smith’s work is a measure of the
flexibility of the culture of sensibility. The fact that poetry about art accommodated the
intellectual needs of such differently modulated incarnations of the same set of questions
likewise attests to the adaptability of the discourses that art as a subject matter brought
with it.
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6 Conclusion
6.1 Ekphrasis and Sensibility After 1820
I once planned to extend the historical scope of this thesis at least to 1830; in looking at
ekphrases of the mid 1820s, however, I became convinced that I was seeing a phase of
British cultural history distinct from the one I had been examining, and that doing justice
to it would require as many chapters again as the five included here. To extend the
investigation of Romantic ekphrasis and the culture of sensibility past the early 1820s is
to confront the questions of just how much ekphrastic poetry was produced during those
decades, why it became so inordinately popular, and what role particular poets and
publication venues had in popularizing it. It is also to confront the questions of how the
literature of sensibility was evolving, and whether it can be thought of as part of the same
phenomenon as Victorian sentimentality. The question of whether ekphrastic poems
dealing with the questions of sensibility or sentiment began to look different in the mid-
1820s, just as ekphrasis itself was gaining in popularity, has the potential to shed light on
bigger issues surrounding the liminal decades between what are conventionally thought
of as the Romantic and Victorian periods. It is well beyond the scope of this thesis to
answer those questions, but it is nonetheless worth considering what it would look like to
confront them.

In his article “Late Romantic Ekphrasis,” Peter Simonsen has identified the 1820s and
1830s as a period of “unprecedented proliferation” of ekphrastic writing (319). In
addition to the obvious choices – Hemans and Landon – Simonsen names several
authors, such as Leigh Hunt and Thomas Hood, not to mention the ekphrases
Wordsworth composed in the last two decades of his career, to which Simonsen has
devoted a separate book entitled Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts. In the decade
after the death of Byron, however, it was Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon
who had virtually no rivals for prominence in the poetic marketplace. A study of
ekphrasis in this period of its newfound popularity would thus need, above all else, to
account for the staggering ekphrastic output of England’s two most popular “poetesses.”
As Grant F. Scott has observed in “The Fragile Image,” “Felicia Hemans wrote more
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ekphrastic poems than the major Romantic poets [i.e. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Percy Shelley, and Keats] combined, thirty-eight to be exact” (36).

Terence Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, in the “Life of Letitia Elizabeth Landon” that
accompanies their online edition of The Keepsake of 1829, make the still grander claim
for L.E.L. that she “wrote hundreds of poems about art.” If one defines “poems about
art” broadly enough, this is perhaps not an exaggeration. Landon wrote at least forty-
eight lyric verse ekphrases, in addition to a long, narrative poem called The Vow of the
Peacock that was inspired by a painting, countless ekphrastic passages in other narrative
poems such as The Troubadour and The Golden Violet, a series of fifteen poems labelled
“Subjects for Pictures,” several other poems with similar titles such as “Outlines for a
Portrait,” a series of poems labelled “Medallion Wafers”107 that imagines the
circumstances of the correspondence to which the wafers might be affixed, a few poems
like “The Painter’s Love” that are tangentially related to the visual arts, and at least one
short story that pivots around the interpretation of a painting. To be sure, much of that
ekphrastic output was driven by the literary marketplace: Landon wrote poems to go with
prints in the elegant literary annuals. But much of it was spontaneous. In fact, although
Landon published a poem called “Juliet After the Masquerade” in The Literary Souvenir
of 1828, where it was printed beside an engraving of Thomson’s painting by the same
name, her better-known work by that title is a different poem. It was published three
years earlier, in a volume of Landon’s own compositions (The Troubadour), and without
pictorial accompaniment. It is this earlier poem, along with one of its fellows from the
same volume, that I shall here take as test cases of how ekphrastic poems in 1825 might
be read.

“Juliet After the Masquerade” is one of twelve “Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures”
published in The Troubadour; Catalogue of Pictures, and Historical Sketches. In 1825,
when The Troubadour was published, Landon had already made a name for herself

107
Medallion wafers were a type of fashionable stationery accessory: elegant and brightly-coloured seals
for letters, usually bearing the image of an antique medallion or seal, often in white against a coloured
background. For a description of how they were made, see the Saturday Magazine for February 16, 1839.
 258

writing poems for the Literary Gazette, worked as the Gazette’s chief reviewer,
published two books of verse, received a number of positive reviews, and been beset by
the first of many rounds of scandal and gossip. The Troubadour is thus what one might
call high L.E.L. – a work of her early maturity. It predates her development of a satirical
narrative style in her novels,108 but it is the work of an established professional writer
who had already positioned herself in the marketplace as a consistent producer of
languid, richly sentimental writing, not the work of a literary ingénue. Moreover,
Landon had already published eighteen ekphrastic works by 1825. “Poetical Sketches of
Modern Pictures” begins with an epigraph from one of Landon’s own poems from the
Gazette; it was her most ambitious series of ekphrases to date, but, as her epigraph
reminds us, Landon had already established herself as a poet deeply inspired by the
visual arts.

6.2 L.E.L. in 1825: A Test Case

Given the lush style, improbable plots, and romanticized settings of the works for which
Landon is best known, it may come as a surprise to her readers that many of her
ekphrases register a suspicion of the visual arts as false, fictional, even misleading. In
fact, I would hypothesize that Landon’s ekphrastic corpus can be read as a sustained
exposé of the emotional consequences of living in a world saturated with visual art. A
short poem entitled “Moonlight. T. C. Hofland,”109 published in the Literary Gazette in

For a discussion of Landon’s satiric, novelistic style, see Tricia Lootens’s essay “Receiving the Legend,
108

Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition.”

109
I have found three paintings by Hofland that this poem might be referring to. One, entitled Windsor and
Eton from Clewer Meadows by Moonlight, painted in 1820, features a boat on still water and some sleeping
cows and geese on the shore in the foreground, with the buildings of Windsor and Eton in the distance.
The second, entitled Moonlit Landscape (date unknown), depicts a more or less Italian-looking city rising
on a hill beside a river, with drooping trees on the opposite bank, a boat beside them, and an arched bridge
in the middle background; in the immediate foreground, a road runs through some tall grass and low
shrubs. Images of both are available on the BBC’s Your Paintings: Uncovering the Nation’s Art
Collection website. The third and most likely painting, entitled An Ancient City – Moonlight, was
exhibited in 1820, according to The Exhibition of the Royal Academy 1820 (20). In 2012, the original
painting was held by Richard Taylor Fine Art, but the firm appears to have sold the painting, which is no
longer available for preview on their website. The painting must have been a success, for Hofland painted
several other signed versions of the same picture, mostly dated to 1829, and variously titled Italianate
moonlit river landscape, thought to be the River Tiber, Rome or Moonlit View Of An Italian City. These
are widely available online, for example at www.arcadja.com and www.mutualart.com. In all versions of
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1824, illustrates this suspicion nicely. The speaker begins by expressing delight in the
escapist beauty of the painting, exclaiming
A luxury of deep repose! the heart
Must surely beat in quiet here. The light
Is such as should be on the poet’s harp
When he awakens his first song of love,
Echoed but by the wind and nightingale.
There is a silver beauty on the leaves—
The night has given it; and the green turf
Seems as just spread for fairy revelling.
The last five lines of the poem, however, exhibit a marked turn; indeed, the speaker
literally turns from the painting, stating
I will not look on it—it is too fair!
Its green, moonlighted loveliness but mocks
The hot and hurried scenes in which we live.
GOD! that this Earth should be so beautiful,
And yet so wretched!
The poem’s form underscores its suspicion of aesthetic conventions. Its twelve and a
half lines of iambic pentameter with a turn after the eighth line invoke the conventions of
the sonnet, but stubbornly reject any of a sonnet’s strategies for creating aesthetic
closure: a fourteenth line, a rhythmically closed ending, or rhyme. The speaker’s
enthusiastic embrace of the painting’s beauty, and her110 hopeful speculation that “the
heart / Must surely beat in quiet here,” suggests the profound appeal of the painting’s
aestheticized landscape, and the refuge for “the heart” it seems to offer, but her rejection

the picture, two peasants stand on a grassy bank in the foreground. Buildings rise behind some trees on the
opposite shore, and the city is visible on both shores in the background. The picture is dominated by the
river itself, with several red-and-white covered boats and an arched bridge, and by the impressive
silhouette of the nearest buildings against the moonlit sky.
110
Or his. As with the Mitford sonnet discussed in Chapter 3, there is no indication of the speaker’s gender
in this poem.
 260

of the painting as “too beautiful” indicates the emotional cost of that escapism. The
speaker first explains that the painting’s beauty only “mocks,” rather than providing
substantial refuge from, the real world; she then bursts into an impassioned exclamation
that registers the psychic pain caused by the juxtaposition of a “green, moonlighted
loveliness” that is not real with the “hot and hurried scenes” that are. Breaking off mid-
line, the speaker seems not only distraught at the inevitable failure of the painting to
provide true “repose,” but also artistically hindered – her own poetic utterance cut short
by her problematic exposure to the very artwork that prompted it.

The longer and more ambitious poem “Juliet After the Masquerade. By Thomson”
(1825), although it is couched in L.E.L.’s signature opulent style, is nevertheless a
searching investigation of the dangers of the emotional life aspiring to the ideals of art. It
draws attention to the instability of the relationship between a viewer’s feelings and a
work of art, and it implies that the arts – including literature – are complicit in the
emotional mis-education of impressionable young readers and viewers. Riddled with
equivocal language, the poem makes the works of art and literature that Juliet encounters
do double duty. On the one hand, it uses them to pick up elements of the Romeo and
Juliet story, and thus to showcase its own aesthetic consistency with the painting that
inspired it and with the play that inspired the painting. On the other hand, within the
self-contained “reality” of the story, the poem also reveals glimpses of Juliet’s deeply
ambiguous relationship to the various artistic productions that surround her. What
initially looks like a poem in which Juliet fulfills part of her destiny turns out, on closer
inspection, to be an interrogation of the idea of destiny: Juliet’s “fate” is not the decree of
a higher power, but rather the result of her cultural conditioning by the arts. The poem
acts as a commentary on how the Romeo and Juliet love story functions in L.E.L.’s
culture – as a model of “true love” to which young girls, according to the logic of the
poem, aspire at their peril. Moreover, the subtlety and equivocation of Landon’s
language leaves her own readers, should they happen to be young girls, with an
interpretive choice. The text is overtly didactic only in its repetition of some hackneyed
sentiments about the inevitable sorrows of love, and can thus be taken two ways: either
as an attack on the kind of acculturation that leads young girls to form doomed
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attachments, or as an aesthetically appealing set-piece that recycles the Romeo and Juliet
story and thus perpetuates the impractical ideal of love even unto disaster.

“Juliet After the Masquerade” carefully situates itself in a tradition of retellings of the
Romeo and Juliet story. Many of the objects it mentions are specifically represented in
the painting after which it is named: the couch on the terrace, Juliet’s “cap and plume,”
her lute, two marble statues, and even the “white cloud o’er the moon” that the speaker
will not mention until the final four lines. In fact, although the poem adds elements that
are not in the painting, it subtracts as little as possible, and certainly introduces nothing
that contradicts Thomson’s construction of the scene.111 In thus elaborating on the scene
without altering anything already represented, the poem adopts the same strategy with
respect to the picture that the picture adopts with respect to Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet. Thomson’s painting represents a character from Shakespeare’s play, but not a
scene from the play. Rather, it presents Juliet in the moments between the masquerade
and the famous balcony scene, presumably in the interlude during which Romeo is
evading the jests of his friends. This particular painting thus offers an opportunity to
enter the tradition of telling the Romeo and Juliet story without actively rewriting it, and
Landon carefully avoids challenging either Shakespeare’s play or Thomson’s painting on
any details of their renditions of the story.

The fidelity of “Juliet After the Masquerade” to an existing tradition points to a double-
entendre at the end of the first verse paragraph that in turn registers a subtle ambivalence
toward the tradition in question. Mentioning the couch, the poem’s speaker specifies that
it is the very couch on which Juliet had been seated earlier in the day to read “some
minstrel’s love-lorn page.” The speaker then interjects “Alas, tears are the poet’s
heritage!” This interjection can be interpreted variously. It can mean that poets are
prone to sorrow or usually have unhappy love lives – the interpretation that most closely

111
Not all of Landon’s ekphrases are so true to their source material. For example, the poem that
immediately follows this one, “The Combat,” considerably censors the content of the painting that inspired
it. In “The Combat,” Landon mentions neither the woman clinging beseechingly to the conqueror’s thighs
and groin nor the inordinate nudity of all the figures in William Etty’s The Combat: Woman Pleading for
the Vanquished. Landon’s poems describe a woman who flings herself down in despair before the
conqueror.
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aligns it with Landon’s own very successful poem “The Improvatrice” and with the
tradition of Mme. de Staël. It can also mean that tears, sorrow, and unhappy love are the
inherited subject matter that poets have to work with. The ambiguity of this statement
hints that Landon’s choice to represent doomed love might not be a free choice, and that
the poem’s fidelity to its sources does not necessarily constitute endorsement of them;
Juliet’s story, with its tragic ending, may be “the poet’s heritage” rather than the poet’s
chosen subject.

The poem’s equivocal language renders it ambiguous whether the parallels between
Juliet’s feelings and the objects around her are really “there,” objectively described by an
omniscient speaker, or whether these descriptions are focalized through Juliet, who
perceives the world through the lens of her own feeling. The speaker says of Juliet’s
terrace that “[i]t was a solitude / Made for young hearts in love’s first dreaming mood.”
Outside the “reality” of the poem’s world, this statement is literally true, since the
solitude was in fact “made” by a painter for the fictional figure of Juliet. Within the
poem’s world, however, it begs the question: made by whom? The speaker then
describes
Two graceful statues of the Parian stone,
So finely shaped, that, as the moonlight shone,
The breath of life seem’d to their beauty given,
But less the life of earth than that of heaven.
’Twas PSYCHE and her boy-god, so divine
They turn’d the terrace to an idol shrine,
With its white vases and their summer share
Of flowers, like altars raised to that sweet pair.
There can be no question that the statues of Eros and Psyche have parallels to Juliet’s
feelings, alluding as they do to the mythic, allegorical marriage of love and the soul and
the soul’s subsequent, hard-earned immortality; Juliet is in love, and she is about to
achieve immortal fame as a figure in art and literature. It is less clear, however, whether
that parallel is the work of some higher power who knows Juliet’s fate and has equipped
her with appropriate statues, whether Juliet falls in love because she has been taught by
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the presence of the statues to consider love and her soul as belonging together, or
whether the statues are the result of an improbable but unimportant aesthetic decision by
the painter, Thomson – meant for the viewer of the painting and the reader of Landon’s
poem, but not for Juliet. The language of divinity, and the grammatical agency given to
the statues in the statement “they turn’d the terrace to an idol shrine,” perhaps suggest
that Juliet’s world is overseen by a higher power who orchestrates such coincidences.
But the word “seem’d” tidily and preemptively undercuts that suggestion by implying
that the statues’ lifelike appearance is an illusion that only Juliet sees.
The poem’s account of how Juliet relates to literature and music is the turning point at
which the text begins strongly to imply that the arts have conditioned Juliet to fall in
love. The speaker recounts that Juliet
… murmur’d over many a snatch of song
That might to her own feelings now belong;
She thought upon old histories she had read,
And placed herself in each high heroine’s stead,
Then woke her lute, – oh! there is little known
Of music’s power till aided by love’s own.
And this is happiness [...]
In this account, we have ready access to Juliet’s interiority. It may or may not have been
Juliet to whom the statues seemed alive, but we now know that Juliet’s feelings line up
with the feelings expressed by the songs she sings, and we know that she imagines
herself in the “stead” of fictional characters. Moreover, we learn something about her
past experience. We know, now, that she has learned these snatches of song that did not
at the time belong to her own feelings, that she has learned to play the lute without
having “known / Of music’s power,” and that she has read old histories. Now that she is
in love, she can inhabit the “I” of the lyric speaker when singing love songs. She can
also imaginatively inhabit the role of the heroine of a romance more fully than when she
had initially read the “old histories.” Juliet’s act of imaginative identification with the
high heroines of romance is phrased in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from
Smithian sympathy: she “placed herself in each high heroine’s stead.” This phrasing,
however, belies the conspicuous difference between what Juliet is doing and Smith’s idea
 264

of putting oneself in someone else’s “case” in order to understand his or her feelings.
Juliet is pointedly not trying to understand someone else’s feelings by thinking her way
into that person’s circumstances. Quite the opposite: the fact that she places herself in
“each high heroine’s stead” now, when her own feelings already correspond to theirs,
suggests that falling in love has made such imaginative identification more personally
satisfying. It is no coincidence that Landon’s speaker says “this is happiness”
immediately after representing Juliet comparing herself to the heroines of romance, for it
is precisely her new-found ability to identify with such heroines that seems to make
Juliet happiest.

The subtle insinuations that art and literature have conditioned Juliet to fall in love offer
a powerful commentary on the poem’s self-conscious alignment with a tradition. Within
her world, Juliet is an ingenuous reader of histories and viewer of artworks, but in the
reader’s world she is the subject of an enormous body of literature and art. She may
imaginatively adopt the subject-positions of heroines of romance, but she is also a
literary heroine in her own right. Having no less famous a “high heroine” than Juliet
imagine herself in the “stead” of heroines she has read about seems calculated to appeal
to young readers who would like to imagine themselves in Juliet’s “stead,” as though the
poem makes Juliet over in the image of its own readers, but I would suggest that in fact
Landon’s Juliet is a cautionary example.

The poem concludes by foreshadowing Juliet’s own tragic death, but first it takes her as a
pretext for a generalized prediction of love outlasting the happiness it produces:
And this is happiness: oh! love will last
When all that made it happiness is past,—
When all its hopes are as the glittering toys
Time present offers, time to come destroys,—
When they have been too often crush’d to earth,
For further blindness to their little worth,—
When fond illusions have dropt one by one,
Like pearls from a rich carkanet, till none
Are left upon life’s soil’d and naked string,—
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And this is all what time will ever bring.

Speaking from within the reality of the poem, the speaker here seems to know nothing of
Juliet’s future, and to utter only a universal piece of wisdom. This passage is not only
lengthier than the foreshadowing specific to Juliet that follows, but also written in an
idiom of apparent sincerity that stands in contrast to the later passage’s careful
conventionality. Repeating “when” in clause after clause, the speaker seems to pick up
momentum, as though becoming more vehement with each subsequent prediction. The
first “when” clause is only a single line long; the second and third each take up a couplet;
the fourth is three lines long. The series of “when”s concludes with the summative
comment that “this is all what time will ever bring,” the word “all” emphasizing the
cumulative nature of the speaker’s list of future woes. The simple statement that “love
will last” is overpowered by the momentum of the “when” clauses and their grim
predictions of misery. As the passage reaches its climax, its diction takes a momentary
plunge into the ordinary that intensifies the impression of the speaker’s sincerity by
breaking the stylistic veneer that the rest of the poem uniformly displays. As the speaker
compares fond illusions dropping away from real experience to beads falling from a
necklace, the diction plummets from the highly wrought, poetically conventional “pearls”
and “carkanet” to the emphatically ordinary “soil’d and naked string.” Coming as it does
immediately after the speaker has labelled Juliet’s new self-identification with literature
as “happiness,” this passage, with its impassioned warning of the miseries of love, seems
specifically to deflate Juliet’s potential as an appealing “high heroine” with whom to
identify.112

The final lines of “Juliet After the Masquerade” predict Juliet’s own misery and death
specifically, breaking off from the preceding passage’s display of apparent sincerity to
remind the reader of the poem’s place in a poetic and artistic tradition. The speaker turns

112
This passage also subtly points to some of the hints in the text of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that it
should not be taken as an aspirational model of true love – hints that Landon seems to have been astute
enough to catch. Romeo and Juliet’s love, which has for centuries been taken as an archetype of perfect
love in spite of those hints, appears perfect precisely because the protagonists die abruptly. Shakespeare
compressed the narrative of his source materials so that Juliet and Romeo die within a few days of meeting
one another – their “fond illusions” about one another never drop away. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s
compression of the story, see Jill Levenson’s Introduction to the Oxford Romeo and Juliet.
 266

from the generalizations about love to ask about the future of the particular love story at
hand, saying
— And that fair girl, — what can the heart foresee
Of her young love, and of its destiny?
The question is pointedly rhetorical. The heart does not need to foresee anything, for
everyone knows exactly what will happen to Juliet. Without explicitly acknowledging
this, however, the speaker answers her own question by drawing attention to a visual
detail, saying
There is a white cloud o’er the moon, its form
Is very light, and yet there sleeps the storm;
It is an omen, it may tell the fate
Of love known all too soon, repented all too late.
The speaker’s observation of the white cloud, a detail drawn directly from Thomson’s
painting, re-establishes the poem’s connection with a very specific work of art.113 By
identifying the cloud as an “omen,” the speaker draws attention to the fact that this visual
detail is someone else’s aesthetic choice – not a coincidental bit of scenery, but rather a
detail selected by an artist to carry symbolic weight. Moreover, in order for so “light” a
cloud to function as a symbol of future sorrow, both the artist who painted it and his
intended viewers must know the story of Romeo and Juliet.

The final six lines of “Juliet After the Masquerade” may seem clumsily obvious as mere
foreshadowing, but their real purpose is to bring the poem’s construction of Juliet as a
cautionary example into immediate juxtaposition with its self-conscious alignment with a
literary tradition. In highlighting how scrupulously faithful she is to that tradition,
Landon ironizes that fidelity. Even while she reproduces the appealingly naive, starry-
eyed adolescent love of the Romeo and Juliet story, Landon draws attention to just how
much a reproduction hers is. At the same time, she takes the Juliet story as an
opportunity to represent a naive reader whose experience is shaped by her reading, and to

113
Of course, the concluding couplet also echoes Shakespeare’s Juliet: “My only love sprung from my only
hate, / Too early seen unknown and known too late” (1.4.251-2).
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offer a vehement warning of the sorrows of such experience. Implicitly, Juliet and her
tears may be the poet’s heritage, but the lesson offered to impressionable young readers
is the poet’s choice, and L.E.L., so often denigrated in the century after her death for
supposedly writing poetry of unrestrained passion, chooses to do something more than
offer yet another doomed heroine as a model of femininity. In fact, she moves the
burden of choice onto the impressionable reader herself, offering a poem that can be read
either as a pretty elaboration on the Juliet story or as a tacit condemnation of the way
stories like Juliet’s have functioned in Western culture. Visual art, in “Juliet After the
Masquerade,” is part of a matrix of cultural productions that risk educating the emotions
in problematic ways. By simultaneously highlighting her own and Thomson’s fidelity to
a tradition and that tradition’s complicity in a certain kind of emotional mis-education of
girls, Landon recuperates Thomson’s painting, showcasing its visual detail but
appropriating its construction of feeling for her own purposes.

Landon’s shrewd challenge to literary and artistic sentiment, buried within a poem that
seems at first glance to luxuriate in that very sentiment, offers a tantalizing glimpse into
the ekphrastic poetry of her era. Even Landon’s immense oeuvre of poems about art,
however, let alone two examples, cannot single-handedly answer the question of whether
ekphrases of sensibility changed their character, or took up fundamentally different
questions than they had in the preceding decades. The question remains an intriguing
one, offering as it does a possible window into the continuities and shifts in the culture of
sensibility as the nineteenth century wore on.

6.3 L’Envoi
This thesis is a study of what happens when writers of immense intellect who care deeply
about what it means to act or live with goodness and integrity engage intellectually with
some of the buzz-worthy cultural productions of their day, and with the discussion, the
philosophizing, and, yes, the sheer chatter, that makes up the buzz.

Perhaps it should thus not be a surprise that this thesis once contained an extended
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reading of a piece of pop-culture. It was located in the chapter on “Ode on a Grecian

Urn” and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.” It was a clever reading of an episode
of Doctor Who called “Blink,” featuring the terrifying and undeniably ekphrastic
monsters the Weeping Angels – murderous, time-shifting statues that can move
unimaginably fast, but only when no one is looking. Suitable for a conference paper, the
reading of “Blink” has been cut because it did not fit especially well in the genre of a
doctoral thesis. That reading, however, was an important part of the process of writing
this particular thesis. Doctor Who (and the fuss in the fan community about it) is part of
how I think about my world, just as the Elgin Marbles (and the fuss in the fan community
about them) were part of how Keats thought about his world. Art and museums were one
of the trendy new social experiences for the Romantics, and they used the materials at
hand – this brave new world of pictures and galleries and books of prints – to think more
profoundly about the questions that mattered. It is my hope that, if we can see them
doing so, we can learn to do so ourselves. The chic and newly accessible media of our
own day are not oil paints and marble, but rather films, television, dystopian trilogies,
blogs, tweets, and YouTube videos. Scholars who study prestige subjects like Romantic
poetry often ignore those genres. But Keats wouldn't have. Keats didn’t. No doubt
many intelligent people in Romantic Britain did not use the visual arts as a “way in” to
the conundrums that face human decency in an alienating world (Coleridge, for example,
did not). But Keats did. Shelley did. Wordsworth, Mitford, Cowper, and others – they
did. I have used their use of the visual arts, as I have used Doctor Who show-runner
Steven Moffat’s use of the visual arts, and as I have used a thousand other artefacts of
cultural production, to think through those conundrums. The excising of “Blink”
notwithstanding, this thesis is itself an artefact of my own will both to use cultural
productions to think, and to see how great minds of a previous era used cultural
productions to think, about how people relate to one another.

Eighteenth-century moral philosophers identified a problem with sympathy: the limits of

our ability to extend it to those who are remote from ourselves. That problem is not
getting less urgent. In the world that has been so grossly mislabelled a global village, our
smallest actions, even the well-intentioned ones such as eating quinoa, have
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consequences for those we will never meet. In terms of the effects we have on each
other, the world is small. But we are more than ever isolated from each other. We have
less and less face-to-face time even with our closest friends. Economic inequality is
growing, rendering our understanding of the lived experience of others more abstract –
even those in our own culture, our own city, our own neighbourhood, if they happen to
be of different economic strata. Our failures of compassion have never been more of a
problem than now.

Com-passion. Sym-pathy. The words are cognates. We are not the first
generation, the first era, of imperial, capitalist, anglophone culture to confront these
questions. What is most valuable about this project is the question of how the Romantics
did and how we might use the arts to attempt, even if in vain, to conceive of a
compassion and a goodness and a clemency that are up to the challenge the world throws
at them.
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