Joseph Sterling (1765–1794)

1.        Joseph Sterling was a poet and antiquary, known as the leading Irish Spenserian of his generation. His poetry centred on romance. An example of this is Bombarino, a Romance (1768), which was an imitation of Tasso, Ariosto, and Spenser. A heroic poem on Richard Coeur de Lion appeared in Poems (Dublin, 1782) as La Gierusalemme soggettita, written in Spenserian stanza form. Included in the same volume are a section of poems labelled Odes from the Icelandic, including “The Scalder” and “The Twilight of the Gods”, an imitation of the Völuspá section of the Poetic Edda, which deals with Ragnarök. This had previously been imitated by Thomas James Mathias. These were prefaced by a short “Dissertation”, which spoke of the legend that Odin had emigrated from Asia and praised the poetry of Thomas Gray. His poems were republished in London in 1789. In the year of Sterling’s death, a collection of his odes was published.

2.        Like Thomas Penrose’s poem, this composition is centrally concerned with the role of the Norse skald in encouraging warriors on the battlefield. In a “Dissertation”, introducing Sterling’s Norse-inspired poems, the skald’s voice is described with a Romantic sense of loss: “The abilities of the Scalder may be compared to the rays of passing light, when launched out into the regions of infinite space, from whence they are never to return, and where their heat and splendour is diffused in vain” (Poems 34). The poem focuses on the rewards of the afterlife, which the poet brings into being. There are two competing visions involved. Sterling explains:

The Flath Innis [also spelled Flaitheas], or Noble Isle, is described; it was the paradise of the Celtæ, and differed in some particulars from Valhalla. In the former the mind was not fatigued with scenes of unvaried carnage; but the imagination was soothed with the most soothing prospects; the sunny landscape and the murmur of the murmurs of the falling stream, were contrasted to the glittering amour, and the shock of encountering heroes. (Poems 35)

3.        The preoccupation with the differences between Gothic and Celtic religion was almost certainly inspired by Thomas Percy’s preface to his translation of Northern Antiquities, in which clear fault lines were drawn.

4.        Nathan Drake, an important literary critic, an advocate of vernacular and Gothic poetry, praised “The Scalder” in the third volume of Literary Hours (1804). He calls it “a beautiful Ode”, and Sterling’s poetry collection is referred to as “little known, though certainly meriting considerable applause”. Drake expresses the hope that the reader will “procure the volume”, since “he will, I have no doubt, be highly gratified in the perusal”. [1] 

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