The Mouse's Petition - Anna Laetitia Barbauld

The Mouse's Petition, Found in the TRAP where he had been confin'd all Night [by Dr. Priestley.]

Anna Barbauld calls for liberty from patriarchal restraints.

Photo: Copyright Janet Cameron

"If women tended to see differently from men, it was axiomatic in the eighteenth century that they felt differently too," says Stuart Curran in "Romantic poetry - the I altered." From this, and the rise of the woman-poet, emerged the cult of sensibility which Curran regards as "largely a female creation."  We should acknowledge, of course, that men can "feel" too, but what women needed to prove was that they, like men, could also "think." There was, at the time of Romanticism, a great divide, and a conviction that the female mind was defective. From this followed strong resistance against learned women, which hardly provides a "natural atmosphere in which intellectual development is fostered and shaped," as described in Curran's article. Sensibility, as it succeeded in becoming a cultural norm, made it easier for women to assert themselves as writers.

Sensibility Equal to Rationality

Anna Laetitia Barbauld's sad poem, The Mouse's Petition is, in fact, a fable, with many layers of meaning:

"O HEAR a pensive prisoner's prayer / For liberty that sighs; / And never let thine heart be shut / Against the wretch's cries! / For here forlorn and sad I sit, / Within the wiry grate: / And tremble at the approaching morn, / Which brings impending fate."

Stuart Curran says: "Even if addressed with youthful affection to an admired family associate, the poem is a direct assertion of the claims of feminine sensibility against male rationality."  It is a plea, even a demand, that woman should be released from the prison that is imposed upon her due to her gender. It upholds, like other female writing of that time, the assertion that sensibility is, at least, equal in value, to rationality.

"Let Nature's commoners enjoy / The common gifts of Heaven, / The well-taught philosophic mind / To all compassion gives; / Castes (sic) round the world an equal eye / and feels for all that lives."

Beware the Worm you Crush

The poems claims an interconnectedness between all the creatures of the Universe: "Beware, lest in the worm you crush, / A brother's soul you find." This, says, Curran, "... is a literature of psychological exploration, and it is the foundation on which Romanticism was reared."  It gave rise to debates among the literati and bluestockings, as to the comparative values of stoicism and sensibility. Eventually, it became a subgenre, an independent, analytical, feminist poetic tradition encompassing fine-feeling and the sharing and valuing of female experience.

The poem serves a double-purpose, by also countering the work of Dr. Joseph Priestley, a theologian with a strong interest in science and scientific experiments, see article summary. Barbauld took a similar approach to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with dire consequences for her.

Source:

• Curran, Stuart, "Romantic Poetry, the I Altered," Romantic Writings,Routledge,1996.
• Barbauld, Anna, "The Mouse's Petition," The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Ed.W. McCarthy and E. Kraft, University of Geogia Press.

Seamus Heaney - Funeral Rites

A look at how the language in Heaney's poem contemplates the futility of violence, past and present.

Copyright Janet Cameron

This poem reveals the poet consciously seeking an answer to a modern-day problem on two distinct levels, his own remembered past and that of antiquity. It could be read as a cry for the return of traditional Catholic ritual and ceremony, eroded by modern-day life and not so greatly valued by Protestant tradition. It seems Heaney is trying to establish unity of some kind, between Catholic and Protestant belief from a much older tradition, that of stone-age religion.

Funeral Rites begins realistically and personally in the first instance, and is a memorial to Heaney's past, dead relatives. Since the poem compares the natural and consoling ritual of death in the past, it is, essentially, an historical insight, for example: "the dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads" with the present day lack of ceremony, "the coffin lid / its nail-heads dressed / with little gleaming crosses."  The following lines: "Dear soapstone masks / kissing their igloo brows," are a reference to Eskimo culture and, also, to soapstone, which was a soft stone with a bluish tinge, used in Viking times.

The Absence of Ritual

Further allusions in Part II include: "I would restore / the great chambers of Boyne, / prepare a sepulchre."  This is a reference to stone-age tombs, and Heaney seems to be hinting that society discourages the natural human need for ritual to help to allay grief. The Vikings knew better. For Heaney, no Christian ceremony would satisfy both Catholic and Protestant, so the dead must be offered up to an older deity than Christ. He remarks on the "purring family cars" and "muffled drumming" which evokes further associations of ritual.

From Futility to Resurrection

In Part III, the poet speaks of the futility of seeking vengeance: "the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated." The final three stanzas refer to resurrection, as Gunnar, "who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound," and eventually  "...turned / with a joyful face."  Gunnar was a mythological hero, also known as "Gunther".  Through Gunnar, the poem, manages to combine Christian and Pagan resurrection, through a portrait of a hero joyful in death, unavenged yet happy. For both Gunnar and  Heaney, there is something great, fitting and, indeed, joyful, about an honourable ending.

A touching, historical insight has been spelled out for us, and tells us that revenge achieves nothing, only an endless cycle of violence. Humankind needs to seek beauty, as Gunnar sought beauty, and not revenge.

Heaney, Seamus, "Funeral Rites" North, Faber and Faber, 1993.

With acknowledgement for several allusive, handwritten notations in my second-hand copy by an anonymous author, duly verified.

Moniza Alvi - A Poet Caught Between Two Cultures

A Sense of Isolation Informs Alvi's Work - Image copyright J Cameron

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city. She moved to England when she was a baby in 1954. She grew up in Hertfordshire and went on to study at the University of York and the University of London. Her first collection, The Country at my Shoulder was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes. She has also worked as a teacher.

Her poem, Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan from her collection Carrying My Wife, refers to her father and family of aunts who remain in Lahore. A variety of colourful presents of Pakistani clothing heightens her sense of alienation and makes the mixed race poet question her Westernisation.

'They sent me a salwar kameez / peacock-blue / and another 'glistening like an orange split open...'

The split-open orange may be a metaphor for the separation that Alvi feels from her Asian country of birth. It heightens the importance of how belonging to a specific group constitutes a basic human need, without which the psyche is fractured and bewildered. After describing the fine Pakistani clothing, whose bright colours portray a sense of the exotic and of 'otherness', she tells of her aunts' appeal:

'My aunts requested cardigans / from Marks and Spencers...'

The theme of the woman poet

 
A recurring theme throughout the tradition of women's poetry is the female poet's sense of isolation. This isolation happens for many reasons, suppression of female creativity and accusations of insanity, as well as patriarchal and social pressures. Alvi's poem decribes this feeling from her viewpoint. Specifically, she writes out of her sense of loss and from a very personal identity crisis caused by the clash of cultures. These vastly contrasting cultures, Asian and British, in opposing each other, actually present Alvi with a sense of being caught between the two and thereby belonging to neither.

Unsurprisingly, the poem has been appropriated for use in a GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) Rapid Revision publication. Clearly its function is to help bridge the gap between the cultures by increasing sensitivity to the problems of people of mixed race. Perhaps the poem serves another purpose, of reader-identification, for those who are in a similar position to Alvi may find comfort in empathising with a fellow-sufferer. The most poignant aspect of the poem is the poet's apparent helplessness, for Alvi seems to have relinquished all hope of changing her situation.

It might be helpful to contemplate specific events that may have heightened Alvi's sensitivity:

'My mother cherished her jewellery - / Indian gold, dangling, filigree, / But it was stolen from our car.'

Of course, thefts must also take place in Pakistan, but the reality that her mother's jewels were stolen injects an emotional and rather hostile element into the poem. The premise seem to be that England has asserted herself and, as a result, Pakistan has been confiscated. Such painful experiences must sour expectations.

Invading male territory

In her book, Women Writing About Men, Jane Miller examines the theme of women's fear in invading men's territory. 'If women cannot justly be regarding as conspiring with men's oppression of them, they have certainly not found it easy to tackle men's determinations of them in quite the same language that men have used to colonise them. Dependence, like a colony, is maintained through fear.' Miller compares women's fear with an immigrant's fear. '[T]he disorientation of anyone who leaves the place where they were born...to enter a foreign country alone.' Possibly an element of Alvi's sense of alienation may be based on this immigrant's fear, compounded by the common fear of being a woman in a patriarchal society.

Therefore, as a woman-poet of mixed race, she suffers a double-bind. Miller says that women remain immigrants for most of their lives, leaving their mothers and entering a world of men whom they must trust yet distrust. If they must also overcome a sense of alienation from a cultural split at the roots of their existence, it is little wonder that they write of their confusion, caught as they are, between the two cultures. Moniza Alvi, detached from both Pakistan, her country of birth, and her current home in England, on receiving presents of colourful, luxurious Asian clothing, writes:

'I longed / for denim and corduroy / My costume clung to me / and I was aflame / I couldn't rise up out of its fire / half-English...'

Perhaps such uncomfortable differences can be more easily overcome when cultures overlap, or share, at least, some common customs. :

Sources:

The Country at my Shoulder, Moniza Alvi, Oxford Univesity Press, Oxford, 1993

Carrying My Wife, Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe, Northumberland, 2000

GCSE Rapid Revision, English, Mike Royston, published for W.H. Smith by Nelson Thornes Ltd., Cheltenham, 2000

Women Writing About Men, Jane Miller, Virago Press Ltd., London, 1986

Copyright Janet Cameron