<1> To read ethically, we must resist the impulse
to impose our own values on the literature of the past (or even
the present). Such an approach to reading, never easy, can be
more complicated than usual when attempted in the service of
occasional poetry—poetry written to a specific occurrence, often
to a specific person or audience—and ethical reading can be
further challenged when gender roles come into play. In tribute
to the “occasion” of being asked to write an essay for Aphra
Behn Online (i.e, the publication of British Women
Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Paula
Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia), I will discuss two
eighteenth-century occasional poems in which a speaker of one
gender addresses a friend of the other gender: Swift’s 1719
birthday poem to Stella and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s
Petition” written to her friend Joseph Priestley.
<2> In this essay, I will
suggest that our reading of each poem depends upon our “hearing”
the poem as it must have “sounded” in its original context.
I will further argue that the best way to do that is to read the
poem aloud or to perform it, not in our own voice, but in the
voice of the text’s speaker. Defining my approach is insight
offered by Backscheider in an earlier work,
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry. She notes
that “[r]eading aloud was a major social and domestic activity”
in the long eighteenth century (12). Many of the poems that
found their way into print “were short and topical and delivered
a familiar experience or emotion in simple language” (12). To
achieve an ethical performance of any poem is to try to
recapture that original voicing. And to do so, we must listen
and resist the temptation to “overhear,” in two senses of the
word—to over-interpret and to hear as though we are
eavesdropping. Both approaches to “hearing” in “life” produce
misunderstandings; the same can be said of art.[1]
<3> This essay is pedagogical
in focus in two ways. First, it is a time-honored classroom
strategy to read brief poems or parts of poems aloud to convey
the beauty of poetic language with the correct emphases and
intonations. However, many of us (myself included) rely on our
love for the particular work to fund that moment. I do not think
many of us “prepare” the poems we perform, but we would be wise
to do so. This essay will argue that point. Additionally, our
preparation for any given performance of a poem can model for
students the level of research and thought necessary to “give
voice” to eighteenth-century occasional poetry. The following
discussions are offered, therefore, as student guides as well as
collegial advice. I tested this approach in an Honors
Introduction to Poetry course in which students were asked to
prepare an oral reading of a poem. In setting up the assignment
for them, I shared the Swift and Barbauld poems and the
rationales and analyses I include below. Their own readings and
explanations took about fifteen minutes per student. My
class was relatively small, so we could thoroughly discuss each
student’s decisions and the resulting performance. I did not
require a written essay, though, certainly, the assignment could
be modified in that direction, particularly with poems that will
not open themselves fully without some historical
contextualization (thus requiring a good bit of research on the
student’s part).
<4> My own understanding of
the Swift and Barbauld poems I chose to prepare depended on
significant biographical research regarding the addressee as
well as the poet in question. Indeed, I felt invited by each
poet to undertake some scrutiny of the person to whom he or she
spoke as the identity of each addressee was a primary part of
the poem’s strategy and appeal. While it is true that each poem
was generated in private circumstances characterized by intimate
conversation signaled by distinct and pervasive traces of
orality and domesticity, each poem also had a print life early
on (supervised by the poet). As such, each had an original
public audience that experienced the poem as quoted material or
material overheard. In other words, the fact that the poems were
printed by the authors (Swift’s in his 1735 Poems on Several
Occasions and Barbauld’s in her 1772 Poems,
published under her maiden name Anna Letitia Aikin) evidences
the authors’ desire to be heard beyond the first audience but
with the first audience in mind.
<5> Redemption of meaning (to
allude to Stanley Cavell’s term for ethical reading) of each of
these poems has proven difficult for “eavesdroppers” and
interpreters due to controversies surrounding the identities of
Esther Johnson and Joseph Priestley.[2]
In other words, while the poems demand that we discover
something of the identity of the addressees, the biography of
each has impeded our understanding to some degree. In Stella’s
case, we are troubled with questions and speculations. Was
Stella, as Samuel Johnson portrayed her, Swift’s secret wife,
living in “sorrowful resentment . . . under the tyranny of him,
by whom she was in the highest degree loved and honoured”? (336)[3]
According to Johnson, the marriage took place in 1716, three
years before the poem in question. By 1719, Esther Vanhomrigh
was a part of Swift’s life as well; she was living in Dublin,
pining for (and sometimes enjoying) Swift’s company to Stella’s
chagrin. Do these biographical details matter? If we think of
them and credit them, they certainly color the poem.
<6> The controversy
surrounding “The Mouse’s Petition” has very little to do with
the (literally) incendiary cultural status Priestley would earn
eventually by his strongly expressed views on religious dissent
and revolution. In 1772, events surrounding the Birmingham Riots
and their aftermath (1791-94) were far in the future and
Priestley himself a highly regarded natural scientist,
materialist philosopher, educator, dissenting minister, and
religious historian. Yet Anna Aikin’s poem touched a new,
unexpected nerve in some readers of her day and more of our day
in which the nerve is no longer new but still quite raw. I
refer, of course, to the sensibilities of those in the “animal
rights” movement—not an organized movement by any means in 1772,
but an incipient idea awaiting the voice some thought they heard
in “The Mouse’s Petition.” The poet’s distress at the eager
reception of her poem as an indictment of her friend’s cruelty
to animals (an opinion expressed by the reviewers of both the
Critical Review and the Monthly Review) led
her to add a note to the 1773 version of the poem:
The Author is concerned
to find, that what was intended as the petition of mercy againstjustice, has been construed as the plea of
humanity against cruelty. She is certain that cruelty could
never be apprehended from the Gentleman to whom this is
addressed; and the poor animal would have suffered more as the
victim of domestic economy, than of philosophical curiosity.
(245n)[4]
Anna Aikin, like one of her favorite
novelists, Samuel Richardson, seems to feel authorial intent
should carry more weight than it did in her own day, even before
the New Critics deemed it a fallacy.
<7> Without denying the fallaciousness of a focus
on “authorial intent,” I think it reasonable to assume that the
two poems under consideration are not meant to hurt, insult, or
distress the intended private audience (Stella and Priestley
respectively).[5] Nor do I believe the works are meant to discredit either those
individuals or the poets themselves with the intended public
audience with which they are shared in the first place (the
initial readership of the published poems) or the
assuredly-desired public readership of futurity. It is always
possible, of course, that an author says more than he or she
sets out to say or reveals more than she or he means to reveal.
But to assume as much is going too far; if there are hidden
meanings and unconscious intentions, the texts themselves will
reveal as much under careful consideration. We need to hear the
poems as living language. We need to return the words on the
page to the sound of a human voice.
<8> There is an increasing
awareness that poetry in general pleases best and means most
clearly when it is heard. This idea lies behind both the
University of Maryland’s project Poets on Poets and the
University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary
Writing’s PennSound. I first heard of the latter at the
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2007 annual
meeting which was held in Atlanta, Georgia. In commenting on a
panel having to do with Defoe’s poetry, John Richetti bemoaned
the lost art of poetry recitation and drew our attention to the
PennSound website and the program’s dedication to
reviving this aspect of our literary heritage.[6]
The site features contemporary poets reading and discussing
their own poems as well as literary scholars reading the poems
of “classic” writers. The University of Maryland’s website is
devoted to contemporary poets’ oral presentation (and
interpretation) of Romantic poetry. Poets on Poets
includes a prefatory essay by Jerome McGann entitled “Recitation
Considered as a Fine Art.” Here, he describes the art and value
of poetic performance:
[F]orget about the meanings, they come along
for the ride (they come with the territory). The poem is a
musical score written in our mother tongue. Our bodies are the
instruments it was made for . . . .
The poem will obey if you
pay attention to what you’re doing. Its mechanisms aren’t
difficult, even if they are amazingly flexible. They are
as natural to us as speaking and singing . . . .
The basic structure is
like a double helix—one strand is linguistic—a syntax and a
semantics—the other is prosodic, made of rhythmical and acoustic
units (metre and rhyme). We practice to discover their
synchrony. The two play off each other, and while every
poem permits a personal inflection of its elements, your freedom
is constrained. That constraint is telling you to pay
attention to what you’re doing.
When you set out to
perform a poem, you don’t proceed willy-nilly. You
try it out and test its possibilities. There will always
be multiple possibilities. Eventually, in the act itself,
you’ll have to make a performance decision. When you do
that you'll have something else to look at and think about.
What was good about what you did, what wasn’t. And so you
can begin again.
In other words, McGann encourages us to allow
ourselves to be instructed by the poem, deciding word by word,
line by line, how best the verses sound. If we say the words as
they asked to be voiced, we will discover the meaning of the
poem. As he points out, however, there are always multiple
possibilities. Any individual reader will make certain decisions
based on presuppositions about language itself. The more we
know, the better our choices. From a student’s point of view,
this need for knowledge can seem intimidating, but we all know
something about life by the time we come to the reading of
poetry. We begin with what we do know, and if the poem puzzles
us, we try to learn more.
<9> John Richetti’s is the voice we hear reading
the eighteenth-century selections on PennSound, and
among the works he chose to record is Swift’s first birthday
poem to Esther Johnson, his friend and companion whom he called
Stella.
"Stella’s Birthday" (1719)
Stella this day is thirty-four,
(We shan’t dispute a year or more:)
However, Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy size and years are doubled,
Since first I saw thee at sixteen,
The brightest virgin on the green.
So little is thy form declin’d;
Made up so largely in thy mind.
Oh, would it please the gods to split
Thy beauty, size, and years, and wit,
No age could furnish out a pair
Of nymphs so graceful, wise, and fair:
With half the lustre of your eyes,
With half your wit, your years, and size:
And then, before it grew too late,
How should I beg of gentle fate,
(That either nymph might have her swain,)
To split my worship too in twain. (1-18)
[Click
here to listen to John Richetti's reading of "Stella's
Birthday" on PennSound.]
Listening to Richetti’s reading, we hear what
Louise Barnett has called the “intimate and quotidian tone” of
teasing affection that characterizes all of Swift’s addresses to
Stella (28). We also get the sense of “occasion” as the
performance begins with a public announcement and moves to a
personal address. True “hearing,” however, depends on our
performing the poem ourselves and paying attention to the poem’s
“possibilities” (McGann). In the performance we become speaker,
listener, author, reader, and ultimately “poem.”
Preparing to Perform “Stella’s Birthday, 1719” <10> I will now describe my own experience of
preparing to perform this poem. I undertook this project when a
sudden cancellation opened a space on the English III panel at
the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Patricia
Hamilton was the chair of the session that year. Her topic was
“The Pleasures of the (Long) Eighteenth Century” and, as I had
planned already to attend the meeting (held in Louisville), I
offered to step into the gap. I did so in order to help out, it
is true, but also in order to engage in the activity recommended
by PennSound and Poets on Poets: reciting
eighteenth-century verse for others to hear and appreciate. My
presentation addressed the process of preparation and
demonstrated the end result.
<11> To prepare for this
recitation, I began by spending about twenty-four hours with the
words, not struggling to understand, but letting the words carry
me along. I had always imagined the birthday poems as written
tributes—birthday cards, eighteenth-century style. I imagined
Stella receiving her yearly missives and reading them, as I
first read them, silently to herself. Paying close
attention to the actual words of this poem, though, I recognized
a public occasion; I began to hear the poem as a speech, not a
letter, with Swift toasting the birthday girl, perhaps at a
celebratory dinner. The beginning of the poem certainly has a
festive, public tone: “Stella this day is thirty-four, /
(We shan’t dispute a year or more).” Here, in my rendition, the
speaker would pause for laughter or at least a smile from Stella
who was in 1719 actually thirty-eight years old, a fact which
Swift certainly knew since the prose account he wrote of her
life specifically cites the date of her birth as March 13, 1681
(“Death” 227).
<12> After raising his glass
and paying Stella the deft compliment of subtracting years from
her age, the speaker then addresses the honoree: “However,
Stella, be not troubled, / Although thy size and years are
doubled, / Since I first saw thee at sixteen.” Sixteen? Swift
first saw Stella when she was a child of eight. Surely all their
acquaintances knew their story. She certainly did. Why is he
pretending that he first saw her at sixteen?
<13> Pondering that question,
I decided I would read the line ironically, and, perhaps I would
hesitate between six and teen, bowing to two aspects of the
“truth” of Swift and Stella’s long friendship. The fact is that
in 1694 Swift did leave Temple’s home Moor Park (where he first
came to know the child Esther Johnson) for a year,
and—perhaps—upon his return he found that she had matured
noticeably (the difference between ages thirteen and fourteen
can sometimes be remarkable). Indeed, in his brief biography “On
the Death of Mrs. Johnson,” Swift comments that “[s]he was
sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen: But
then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the
most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London”
(227), a statement that corroborates my sense of a sudden
flowering and Swift’s equally sudden awareness of a mature
beauty, “only a little too fat” (227). Yes, the change seems to
have come at the age of fifteen, not fourteen and not sixteen,
but, as we’ve already seen, Swift is making a point of not
counting the years. At some point in her mid-teens, Stella
ceased to be a child to Swift; she became “the brightest virgin
on the green,” with “hair blacker than a raven, and every
feature of her face in perfection” (“Death” 227).
<14> Encoded, though somewhat
scrambled, in the initial toast, then, are the details of a long
friendship. As the first stanza concludes, we hear affection and
reassurance in the speaker’s voice: “So little is thy form
declin’d; / Made up so largely in thy mind.” The words might
provoke a laugh, for, of course, Stella’s form has not declined;
it has enlarged. I think, however, the text drives us toward a
gentler reading. Fat or thin, Stella is the same as always (she
just thinks she’s less beautiful than she was). Further, to the
speaker, she will always be the same. We understand as much
because the way Swift sets up the lines makes us think he is
going to say “Made up so largely in my [rather than
thy] mind”—as in “I still remember you as I saw you on the
green at sixteen.” Therefore, even though he does not say “my,”
the notion of a Platonic form lingers over the poem.
Stella, he tells us in the biography, was well schooled—by
him—in Platonic philosophy, as well as Epicurean, “the defects”
of which “she judged very well” (“Death” 231). It is clear that
the speaker wishes to convey to Stella that her appeal was never
primarily physical. It was always largely her wit, that is, her
mind, as their study of Plato would suggest.
<15> The second stanza proved
more difficult for me than the first. Here, biography did not
help add texture and meaning as it had in the first stanza. I
still envisioned Swift at the table of a birthday dinner
standing to recite his poem for Stella and their guests. But his
language became more private to me—more obscure. I thought, in
listening to Richetti’s rendition, he felt the same. To my ear,
on the second verse, Richetti’s voice begins in the same
register as in verse one, but as he continues to recite, his
tone becomes somewhat opaque, much less jovial, less teasing,
more sincere. And while he may have been comfortable with what
he was feeling as he read, I found it hard to perform the second
verse satisfactorily on my own.
<16> Yet the difficulty itself
was instructive. What were my stumbling blocks? For one
thing, a new trope enters the poem: “Oh, would it please the
gods to split / Thy beauty, size, and years, and wit, /
No age could furnish out a pair / Of nymphs so graceful, wise,
and fair” is an oblique appeal to the love poem’s conventional
strategy of immortalizing the beloved’s beauty in verse. It is
one of the virtues of Swift’s addresses to Stella that the poet
does not employ that trite device, yet here he seems tempted to
do so. He does not surrender to the impulse, however. Instead,
he provides an almost macabre variation on the theme. The lines
seem suspended in air to me. I am imagining gods picking and
choosing parts from all the ages to fashion two nymphs as fair
as the one Stella is, but it is an unpleasant image. My voice
grew taut as I tried to say the second couplet of this stanza.
But I recovered at the next couplet because I felt the speaker
was back to praising the Stella before him—focusing on the
lustre of her eyes and having them clearly compensate for the
loss in beauty represented by the doubling of years and size.
Wit, of course, is added to the serial account of Stella’s
doubled features, and that brought a smile to my voice as I
recognized the embedded compliment.
<17> I found the phrase “And
then, before it grew too late” confusing at first. What deadline
is impending? Have the gods placed temporal boundaries on this
fantasy Swift has constructed? Or is the sense of “lateness”
simply inherent in the occasion for the poem? I decided that the
phrase was natural to the occasion—a cliché, even—and, as such,
did not require special intonation. Birthdays, after all, mark
the passing of time. Stella’s changed shape is not permanent;
she will change again and again as the years go by. But, however
much she changes, Swift assures her, his admiration will remain
constant and complete.
<18> Still, the final image of the twin, thin
half-lustred, half-witted Stella-nymphs and the split worshiping
Swift-swains is a melancholy image for all that. Imagining the
poem spoken in context, I felt a sense of relief as I envisioned
the speaker turning to the full-bodied Stella whose eyes are
shining in appreciation of such a fanciful poetic tribute to her
lasting attractiveness and the increasing love of her friend.
Even if the image of the two Swift-swains worshiping two nymphs
brought to mind Esther Vanhomrigh, Stella would certainly know
that on this occasion, she had Swift to herself and that in the
poem she is the one with two lovers. The Stella assumed and
addressed by this poem is above blatant flattery. Her eyes are
alive with intelligence, wisdom, and wit as well as appreciation
(in my view), and it discredits her to assume she winces at some
perceived hostility in “dismemberment” or pouts in some fit of
sullen resentment at her friend’s flaws and failings, to which
he, after all, draws sheepish attention.
<19> I hear this poem as an occasional poem, and
so in my effort to understand it, I dramatized it in my mind as
a toast that began with a few biographical details and that
ended with a flight of fancy that would have been understood by
most who were familiar with Swift’s imagination (after all, in a
few years all of London will be celebrating Swift’s experiments
with “size” in Gulliver’s Travels). In an email
exchange I had with John Richetti as I wrote the paper I would
deliver at SAMLA, I discovered that his “listening” and
performing were affected by tradition and form. He notes:
Like all of Swift’s poetry [Stella’s
Birthday, 1719] has a generic tilt, a reversal of the praise of
a mistress (an old trope; see Shakespeare's “My mistress’ eyes
are nothing like the sun”!), but in this case made even sharper
by the joke about Stella’s size, twice as big at 34 as she was
at 16. But I do think you're right that the poem grows darker
and like all poems praising a lover resolves itself into a poem
about mortality and the need to seize the day (like Marvell’s
“To his Coy Mistress”). So “then before it grew too late” is
indeed ominous, even if the lateness applies to both Stella and
Swift.
Without imagining the “toast,” then, the
“reversal of the praise of mistress” tradition would yield the
same feelings, and nearly the same understanding (though
Richetti did say that he felt the opening of his reading too
jovial at this point of his own thinking about the poem, whereas
I continue to feel it appropriately jovial).
<20> Through my experience of preparing this poem
for performance, I can endorse both Ralph Cohen’s sense of the
poem as “teasing” (8) and Ronald Paulson’s reading of it as a
meditation on the relationship between “the physical and
spiritual in Stella” (308).[7]
I thoroughly agree with Edward W. Said that the poem is one of
several of Swift’s written “variations on the theme of
conversation . . . demonstrating the peripheries at which
conversation shades subtly into writing” (54). Barnett, too,
notes the sense of the “Dublin social circle” in the “jocular
Stella poems” (27), a reading sustained in the poem as I feel it
should be performed. Perhaps, even, I can hear a little of the
hostility that Ros Ballaster asserts lies behind Swift’s
treatment of Stella’s body in the poem (173)—though, for me, the
hostility would seem to be rooted in regret at the aging process
and the simple material fact of decay. I see no specifically
gendered aversion here.
<21> As someone who is inclined to put on weight
from time to time, I can certainly feel chagrin on Stella’s
behalf—and for many years, I did just that when reading this
poem. “Ouch!” I thought when reading the lines about the doubled
size. “Why did he have to say that?” Carol Houlihan Flynn has
reacted with similar defensiveness: “We only know about Stella’s
fat from Swift himself” (124). David Nokes says the lines are
designed to “reduce Stella’s self-esteem” (249). Still, why
should we automatically assume that Stella’s feelings would be
hurt by reference to her size—accurate or not? In
thinking it over, I have to admit that the subject of weight
between close friends and relations can be a topic of
affectionate commiseration, wry humor, or even affirmation of an
unexpected sort. Indeed, in a period of plumpness in my
thirties, I recall my grandmother observing that I’d put on
weight and then adding: “it suits you.” It did not, but that
this painfully honest, fundamentally self-absorbed, and piously
religious woman would lie to make me feel better about myself
was actually quite touching and one of the fondest memories I
have of her. And, I have long recognized that there is another
point I must admit: she truly may have thought it suited me (my
own sense of what I should look like notwithstanding).[8] In any event, even at the time, I felt only love from my
grandmother, not hostility in the slightest. Could not Stella
bear reference to her weight with a similar sense of emotional
nuance? I would think so. This is the woman, after all, who
could hear her rival Vanessa praised as one who “inspired the
Dean to write . . . finely upon her” and say, with a smile, “it
was well known the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick”
(Johnson 332).
“The Mouse’s Petition”
<22> In reading the occasional
poetry of the past, we cannot hear with the ear of the original
audience. But we can hear, if we listen, the voice of the text,
and we can understand, fairly accurately if we are duly
attentive, what it is saying. Of course, if the occasional
poem is offered in the voice of a ventriloquist, we have
additional obligations. In “performing” such a poem, we are
speaking in the voice of the character, not the poet. But
we are also making an effort to hear the voice behind the
voice—the message, as well as the messenger. In the case of “The
Mouse’s Petition,” we have a third obligation i.e., to hear with
the ear of Joseph Priestley whom Barbauld identified as the
mouse’s addressee in a note to the word “Petition” in the title:
“Found in the trap where he had been confined all night by Dr.
Priestley, for the sake of making experiments with different
kinds of air” (36n).
<23> In testing Barbauld’s poem against her stated
intent, that is pleading the cause of mercy, not justice, I
spent a day with this poem, as I had done with Swift’s poem to
Stella. My motive in this instance was similar to the one that
drove my decision to perform “Stella’s Birthday, 1719” at SAMLA.
That is, I wanted to see if performance would “redeem” the poem
in the Cavellian sense. Would voicing “The Mouse’s Petition”
prove that Barbauld’s stated intent was, indeed, the truest
reading of the poem? Or would performance reveal a text with
subliminal intent and covert meaning beyond the author’s
conscious (or admitted) control? Either way, the poem is one I
have long worried over (my interest in Barbauld being a
more-than-passing one), and this essay for Aphra Behn Online
provided an “occasion” for working my way through the poem to a
redemptive reading, one that vindicates the author’s own sense
of her poem.
<24> The first stanza of “The Mouse’s Petition”
seems straightforward enough, echoing in many ways the passage
in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey in which a
caged starling repeats the phrase “I can’t get out”: “I vow”
says Yorick, “I never had my affections more tenderly awakened”
(95). As the last two lines of the opening quatrain suggest,
Barbauld surely hoped her “pensive prisoner’s prayer” would have
the same effect on Priestley and other readers: “And never let
thine heart be shut / Against the wretch’s cries” (3-4).
<25> The second verse, however, complicates
matters by introducing the idea of a “fate” that awaits the
creature at dawn. Like Pope’s lamb whom “thy riot dooms to bleed
to-day” (1.81), Barbauld’s mouse is destined to die in the
morning. But unlike Pope’s creature who, is “kindly giv’n”
“blindness to the future” (1.85) and therefore spends his last
minutes “skip[ping] and play[ing]” (1.82), “crop[ping]
flowery food” (1.83), and even “lick[ing] the hand just rais’d
to shed his blood” (1.84), Barbauld’s doomed victim is a nervous
wreck:
For here forlorn and sad I sit
Within the wiry grate;
And tremble at th’approaching morn,
Which brings impending fate. (5-8)
The mention of “grate” resonates with the
previous verse’s use of “prisoner” as the mouse’s name for
himself. The grate seems more a jail than a cage or a trap, and
the notion of execution may make us wonder what the rodent’s
crime has been. That will not be clear until the sixth stanza
(for there is, indeed, a crime). In the third and fourth
stanzas, the mouse postpones the revelation (his confession, as
it were) by turning his attention to Priestley himself.
<26> In these stanzas, the mouse amusingly
demonstrates that he has profited from his residence in
Priestley’s household. He has learned enough of the scientist’s
various causes and commitments to be able to formulate arguments
that make use of Priestley’s own language and views. He begins
coyly enough:
If e’er thy breast with freedom glow’d,
And spurn’d a tyrant’s chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain. (9-12)
I cannot imagine the reader who would reject
the association with those who fight tyranny, but Priestley, in
particular, had cause to identify with the mouse’s conditional
clause, for he had recently “denounced the government for
attempting to ‘enslave’ the American colonists” in his 1769
The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and her Colonies
(McCarthy and Kraft 71 n1; Schofield 212-13). The speaker
might be pressing it, however, with the suggestion that
Priestley is an oppressive force detaining the “free-born
mouse.” After all, the “free-born Englishman” was liberal cant
by this point in time (having been a “patriot phrase” during the
reign of George II). Is the mouse suggesting that any degree of
control is oppression, that any exercise of power, tyranny? As I
found it impossible to say the phrase “free-born mouse” without
a hint of irony, I had to conclude that Barbauld herself views
her little speaker with some amusement.
<27> Indeed, even the mouse seems to recognize
that the political argument has fallen a little flat (or become
a bit ludicrous), as in the next verse, he takes a different
tack. He even signals a new beginning with the repetition of the
exclamation with which he began the poem—“Oh!”—before moving on
to an argument centered on the joint theme of hospitality and
humility:
Oh! do not stain with guiltless blood
Thy hospitable hearth;
Nor triumph that thy wiles betray’d
A prize so little worth. (13-16)
But is the mouse really guiltless? And is the
prize worthless? The speaker is trying desperately to argue both
cases, but Priestley actually needs the small creature for his
experiments (making the mouse a thing of value). And, moreover,
the mouse has no legitimate claim to the hospitality he demands.
What well-regulated (or even poorly regulated) home welcomes
rodents?
<28> While Barbauld’s approach partakes of the
beast fable, it also differs from that genre in that her
narrative is set in the real world (Clute and Grant). The mouse
can talk and write, but he is still a mouse—a recognized and
unwelcome guest in many a house, in the same category as roaches
and bugs and snakes. The next two stanzas make that point clear
as the mouse reveals his relationship to the Priestley home and
asks for a kind of freedom he willingly relinquished when he
began poaching off the family rather than making it in the wild:
The scatter’d gleanings of a feast
My frugal meals supply;
But if thine unrelenting heart
That slender boon deny,
The cheerful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given;
Let nature’s commoners enjoy
The common gifts of heaven. (17-24)
Still casting Priestley as hard-hearted, the
mouse has begun to admit that his presence in the household may
not be welcome. Interestingly, the logic has become almost
syllogistic, taking two quatrains to unfold. “I just eat a
little, but if you don’t want me to have the crumbs from your
table, please let me go into the wild, for, after all, I’m a
commoner of nature and I should be able to enjoy what nature
gives us.” In formal logic:
Some creatures have a right to eat in Joseph
Priestley’s home.
All creatures have a right to eat in nature.
I am a creature; therefore I have a right to eat in nature—but,
maybe not in Joseph Priestley’s home.
<29> Despite his seeming concession, the mouse has
returned to a political reading of his situation. He is a
commoner; Priestley, an aristocrat, at least an intellectual
aristocrat, as the next stanza implies:
The well taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives. (25-28)
Priestley is a god of sorts, to the mouse
now. Yet the little creature cannot rest easy in his dependency.
He insists on a quasi-equality with the philosopher he has just
praised and, in doing so, embraces a doctrine that Priestley has
vociferously opposed, that of transmigration of the soul
(“Mouse’s Petition” 246n):
If mind, as ancient sages taught,
A never dying flame,
Still shifts thro’ matter’s varying forms,
In every form the same,
Beware, lest in the worm you crush
A brother’s soul you find;
And tremble lest thy luckless hand
Dislodge a kindred mind. (29-36)
Are you a man or a mouse, Joseph Priestley?
<30> Oh, this will not do, and even the mouse
seems to realize it. Appealing to Priestley’s “humanity” or
sense of “duty” will not answer the mouse’s end inasmuch as the
mouse is not human and Priestley’s job is to perform experiments
for which the mouse serves a crucial, if fatal, purpose. The
poem ends with the mouse’s tacit admission that pity is the only
answer to his problem. Politics is not the point. Hospitality is
a ridiculous demand. Identification is even more absurd. The
only hope resides in the goodness of Priestley’s heart. The
mouse ends by pleading, rather than petitioning: Could you
simply see me as a participant in life, just as you are, and let
me live? Who knows? Maybe one day you too will find yourself on
the brink of destruction and someone will have pity on you.
<31> Here is the mouse’s final plea, in his own
words:
Or, if this transient gleam of day,
Be all of life we share,
Let pity plead within thy breast
That little all to spare.
So may thy hospitable board,
With health and peace be crown’d;
And every charm of heartfelt ease
Beneath thy roof be found.
So, when destruction lurks unseen,
Which men, like mice, may share,
May some kind angel clear thy path
And break the hidden snare. (37-48)
The most touching aspect of this ending is
the mouse’s generosity—his wish for health and peace in the home
(which cannot include his presence) and his understanding that
an act of mercy is an act of grace, not to be expected, but to
be hoped for and honored should it occur.
<32> We do not have any evidence that Anna Aikin
Barbauld ever read her own poetry aloud, although I would
imagine that she did so.[9]
If she read this poem to her friend Joseph Priestley, she would
have been functioning as a herald in his court—presenting, in
voice, the request left in writing by the little mouse. This
poem is not a “toast” or a speech; it is a written petition.
Yet, in the end (because it fails to make its case logically) it
becomes a plea in the voice of the mouse. My sense of a
performance of this poem has to do with a “Priestley” reading a
manuscript that rehearses all his favorite political and
scientific notions and references those he rejects as well.
Behind the voice of the mouse, he “hears” the voice of his
friend agreeing with him about, and challenging him on, his
theories. In the final verses, though, Priestley is addressed
sentimentally and sympathetically. The appeal is not proffered
in the service of the mouse so much as it is advanced to remind
the scientist of the feelings of all creation. And, though he
may be moved to release the little creature, he will not abandon
his scientific inquiry. No one—not even the mouse—is asking him
to do that.
<33> As in the Stella poem wherein I imagine a
world in which friends can note weight gain without implying
emotional rejection, in this poem I imagine one reminding her
friend that, although science has a price and progress exacts
penalties, the very necessary demands of research can
yield—occasionally—to merciful actions in tribute to the
sanctity of life. Attention to the structure and diction
of the poem will not sustain the reading of this poem as a poem
about “animal rights” in general (pace Richard Holmes).[10]
Instead, it must be read as clever homage to a friend’s work and
thought couched in a gentle, genial attempt to make him pause to
consider the cost and consequences of his labor and to
acknowledge as much by letting one mouse live.[11]
[Audio of Elizabeth Kraft reading “The
Mouse’s Petition”:]
<34> British Women Poets of the Long
Eighteenth Century makes available poems with which we are
unfamiliar, poems that would benefit from our and our students’
attempts to voice them with full understanding of their
participation in the world in which they were produced. The two
poems I have “worked through” for this essay demonstrate a few
strategies that could fund oral presentation of any of the
poems. To undertake such a task, as I hope I have shown, is to
investigate the times, the poets, the audiences, the occasion,
and the interpretive tradition, as well. In explaining their
choices (in writing or in discussion), students will reveal the
depth of their intellectual engagement as their voicing of the
poem will reflect their understanding of the text and reveal
their interpretation of its meaning.
Works Cited
Backscheider, Paula R. Eighteenth-Century
Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency
