Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the
following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for â€, ' for ‘, and ' for '.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard
Em-dashes have been rendered as #8212
Spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
What difference does a critical awareness of imperial history make for the study of British Romanticism? Material that was formerly
the domain of anthropologists, art historians, archaeologists,
military historians and historians of empire has become an
important archive both for re-thinking canonical texts and
for re-imagining the social and cultural dynamics of Georgian
society.
My concern here is not simply one of disciplinary exclusion—although that is an important issue—or of expanding the field of enquiry yet again. The question with which I opened this essay does not pertain simply to questions of “context” or of “canon”. The issue I want to address here is how increasing awareness of the global flow of people, commodities, and cultural products impinges on how we analyze Romantic culture. Obviously, I cannot provide an exhaustive answer to such a question in an essay. What I will do instead is offer a set of linked examples of the kind of analysis that might begin to give a sense of the potential afforded by allowing knowledge of imperial history to permeate close reading and vice versa. I use the word permeation advisedly, because beyond demonstrating how historical context enables cultural analysis, I also show how close reading itself does historical work, and thus cannot be separated from some world beyond the text.
In the process, I am going to make at least two grand claims,
hardly new, but which inform everything which follows. The first
concerns the unabated prosecution of war throughout the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Mary Favret has
persuasively argued, Romantic literature is a wartime
literature, and from the Seven Years War onward Britain’s
wars were global affairs.
Historians as differently motivated as J.G.A. Pocock and Dror
Wahrman have argued that something fundamental happens to
British culture and society during the American crisis. the primary meaning in English of “empire” or
Empire in this sense denoted sovereignty of the British realm over
itself. This primary meaning came crashing into another meaning
of empire following “the momentous if transitory
establishment of an English-speaking universal empire in the
North Atlantic and Alleghanian America” following the
Seven Years War. Instabilities in the governance of this
extensive empire undermined triumphalist rhetoric from an early
stage and thus analysis of the colonial challenge to imperial
rule looked back to earlier moments of instability in the realm.
The recent experience of the historical trauma of civil war and
the hard won sense of stability following the Glorious
Revolution and the quelling of the Jacobite rebellion inflected
all of the responses to the American crisis. “Englishmen
could see that the American programme entailed the separation of
crown from parliament, threatening the unity of
‘empire’ which was the only guarantee against civil
war and dissolution of government, those deep and still bleeding
wounds in their historical memory”.
Losses in America in the early 1780s are inextricably bound up with
reverses in India during the same period. As Linda Colley has
reminded us, news of Haider Ali’s victory over the British
at Pollilur in 1780 arrived in London in 1781 and provoked
‘universal consternation’ in part because the news
coincided with reports of the fall of Yorktown.(270) To
commentators in the American colonies, in Britain and in India
at this time, the East India Company’s hold over territory
in India empire seemed in equal jeopardy. Like the first war
with Mysore in 1767-9, the Second Mysore War ended
inconclusively in 1784, and it cost the East India Company a
great deal both in resources and confidence. According to a
British medical officer stationed in Calcutta at the time,
There appears to be nothing wanting but an European enemy to act in
concert with the country powers, to hurl destruction among the
company’s possessions in that part of the world.
The close affiliation between Tipu Sultan and French forces not
only raised the question of renewed French intervention in
India, but also replicated the trajectory of the American
campaign, in which the French played a decisive role from 1778
onward. Metropolitan anxiety about these defeats was at its
height throughout the 1780s, and when the Third Mysore War
commenced in 1790 both the newspapers and the print satirists
predicted further humiliation of the British forces. Cornwallis
defeated Tipu in the Third Mysore War and the elaborate
settlement which ensued from his victory at Seringapatam played
a crucial part in the shift from anxiety to triumphalism in the
1790s.
In contrast to Stephen Conway’s influential argument that the
experience of the American conflict did not alter British
attitudes to war and empire (315), this essay contends that the
transit from the early 1780s to the early 1790s involved
extremely complex shifts in British subjectification—i.e.
the processes through which subjects make themselves accountable
to normative discourses which in turn recognise and make them
visible—and that these shifts are perceptible in the
cultural field.
William Hodges’s
How are we to understand the inaugural gesture of the first chapter,
which opens with a detailed account not of the Company’s
victory over Chait Singh’s insurgency, but of the
Company’s humiliating defeat at Pollilur? It is important
to recognize the chain of associations invoked by this material.
The loss at Pollilur resulted in the captivity and enslavement
of numerous British soldiers. As Kate Teltscher and Linda Colley
have demonstrated, accounts of their forced conversion and
circumcision were widely circulated throughout the 1780s, and
they generated significant anxiety regarding the blurring of
lines between Mysorean and British identities.
This entire assemblage of associations establishes a frame of imperial anxiety and, like Giles Tillotson, I believe that the war with Mysore casts a long shadow in the
I prepared eagerly for a tour through the country; but my route was scarcely fixed, when I was interrupted by the great scourge of human nature, the great enemy of the arts, war, which, with horrors perhaps unknown to the civilized regions of Europe, descended like a torrent over the whole face of the country, driving the peaceful husbandman from his plow, and the manufacturer from his loom. (5)This image of the manufacturer separated from his loom is extremely important not only because there is an implicit comparison between his inactivity and the inactivity of the artist, but also because this trope becomes a lynch-pin in Hodges’s later account of the banyan tree. At this point in the text, the populace is starving and the reader is starved for images. This passage is followed by an extended and detailed account of the British reversals and by the introduction of the volume’s first plate—a view of the great pagoda at Tanjore, which Hodges emphasizes was worked up from “an accurate drawing from Mr. Topping.”
From the period immediately prior to the passing of the Regulating Act to the East India Company Charter Act, the governance of the East India Company generated significant controversy regarding the appropriate form and quality of colonial rule. Michel Foucault, in his essay
The banyan tree (the boughs...bending to
the earth, take root and grow up again like the
mother-plant, whence one of them will have forty bodies
and upwards, and spreading themselves far around afford
shelter for a regiment of soldiers under its branches;
which bearing leaves that are ever green, afford a noble
shade. Under these the gentoos frequently place their
devotees reside, and perform those penances which appear
extremely surprising to all Europeans....
The tree’s reproductive strategies and its physical extension
provided figural possibilities which were capitalized on in
different ways at different historical moments.has the quality of extending its
branches, in a horizontal direction, to a
considerable distance from its
James Forbes’s famous
descriptions of banyan trees in
Understanding Hodges’s intervention in this figural economy requires that we recognize the most important prior European visual representation of the banyan tree. Bernard Picart’s discussion of Tavernier’s account of “the penitance of the faquirs” in
That monstrous excess is figured forth by the face on the
tree’s trunk, which occupies the centre of the
composition, and which is framed by the central temple.
Picart’s adjoining text identifies that face: You
may see, says he [Tavernier], about the Borders of Surat,
under a spacious Tree where the Banians resort, several
Pagods, consecrated to their Idols. The Pagod that leans
against the Body of the Tree is dedicated to
Mamaniva is a corruption of
Mahadevi the great mother goddess of Hinduism, therefore both
the metonymical and metaphorical correlations of the image
conspire to represent Hindu religion, and by extension, its
practitioners, as a monstrous mother which reproduces either
autonomously or with its own children. In this light, the
framing function of the central pagod gains a certain eloquence
because it effectively envaginates the face. The
hyper-maternalization of the scene effectively evacuates the
father from this visual and textual assemblage.
Hodges’s rendering of the banyan tree effectively interrupts
the entire network of associations mobilized by Picart and
performs a complex series of displacements. Again the key lies
in compositional adjacency, in the disposition of the
image’s component elements. A metonymic relation is built
between the two shaded figures and the tree. In contrast to the
Picart image, the two figures are unloading the boat on the
extreme left so the tree is adjacent, not to fanaticism, but to
idealized labour and prosperity. This specifically contrasts
with the Bramin from Picart’s text who ostensibly profits
from the “superstition” of the votaries. This
substitution of one kind of accumulation for another is crucial
to Hodges’s textual description of the banyan tree:
I proceeded from Sultungunge to Bauglepoor, where
my pursuits were promoted with a degree of liberality that
peculiarly marked the mind of the gentleman [Augustus
Cleveland] who then governed this district; and of whom,
in common gratitude, I must ever speak with veneration and
esteem. At the entrance of the town of Bauglepoor, I made
a drawing of a banyan tree, of which a plate is annexed.
This is one of those curious productions of nature which
cannot fail to excite the attention of the traveller. The
branches of this tree having shoots depending from them,
and taking root, again produce, and become the parents of
others. These trees, in many instances, cover such an
extent of ground, that hundreds of people may take shelter
under one of them from the scorching rays of the sun. The
care that was taken in the government, and the minute
attention to the happiness of the people, rendered this
district, at this time, (1781) a perfect paradise. It was
not uncommon to see the manufacturer at his loom, in the
cool shade, attended by his friend softening his labour by
the tender strains of music. There are to be met with in
India many old pictures representing similar subjects, in
the happy times of the Mogul government. (27)
In
the text, the tree offers shade and sustenance to all who come
under its canopy and it is figuratively linked to Augustus
Cleveland’s, and by extension Hastings’s, management
of the region. Its vitality and, above all, its naturalness
accrue to the governmentality of the East India Company, and
thus it ostensibly stands as a figure of prosperity, hope and
stability in a time of war and economic uncertainty.
The text achieves this rhetorical sleight of hand through the
careful management of adjacent sentences and figures. The first
sentence indicates that it is Cleveland who not only governs the
district, but also fosters Hodges’s artistic production.
This has a kind of inaugural effect because Hodges ostensibly
made no art in Madras during the campaign against Mysore. This
frames the next four sentences which specifically address the
banyan tree. The final three sentences of the paragraph then
suddenly cut back to the framing issue by speaking directly
about good governance. If we break the paragraph into these
three, the gap between the internal description of the tree and
the framing remarks on governmentality become immediately
conspicuous. It is literally the paratactic adjacency of the
frame to the internal description that allows the tree to figure
for good government. And each of the sentences of this internal
unit is notable for how it re-writes prior descriptions of the
banyan tree. By describing the tree as a natural curiosity which
“cannot fail to excite the attention of the
traveller”, Hodges invokes the long line of travel
narratives and quasi-scientific accounts of Asia, which includes
Tavernier, Picart and Fenning. However, the subsequent sentence
performs a key divagation from these prior discourses when it
refuses to refer to the tree as a mother and when it rigorously
separates the child-like dependent shoots from the newly rooted
“parents of others”. This effectively counters not
only the feminization of the tree, and hence its connection to
Mamaniva in Picart, but also replaces non-normative sexuality
with a carefully managed sphere of reproduction where parents
and children are never confused.
The final three sentences of the paragraph play out the implications of Hodges’s re-writing of prior discourses on the banyan tree with an uncompromising logic. When we jump the gap from the fifth to the six sentence, Cleveland’s good governance has generated a paradise on earth. In light of the prior evacuation of the tree’s metonymic and metaphorical connections to Mahadevi, this declaration seems to imply that Cleveland, and by extension, the East India Company, operate as a benevolent God who, rather than inculcating fanaticism and non-productivity, fosters both commercial and artistic production. This helps explain why the religious elements of Picart’s image are invoked but visually contained in both the church-like building in the background and the walking figure in the foreground.
The face of Mamaniva is doubly displaced, and I would argue that
this doubling poses a series of complex problems. The
architectural element in the background still occupies the
precise centre of the composition, but it no longer frames the
trunk and if anything its tiny church-like spire replaces the
envaginated female face in Picart with a certain quiet
phallicism. Could we not argue that the monstrous mother of
Hinduism has been replaced by a pagod whose undecidable
construction suspiciously resonates with the Christian discourse
used to legitimate Cleveland’s governance? The
compositional displacement and the undecidable architectural
element figures forth a form of Hindu culture dissociated from
fanaticism at precisely the moment when the question of
Chrisitianizing the Asian subcontinent is very much in the air.
In this context the tree itself becomes iconically phallic or
indeed hyper-phallicized. As a huge penis with myriad dependent
penises, this figure for the governmentality of the East India
Company not only puts thousands of years of Hindu religious and
social practices into abeyance, but also equates the Company
with the autonomous production of both food and art. This is
bolstered by the final sentence of the paragraph which links
this new period of productivity to earlier periods of Mughal
stability, presumably under the Akbar’s rule, wherein good
governance fostered art and happiness. This linkage between
Akbar and Hastings not only legitimates Company rule as a
repetition of past models of good government, but also firmly
locates any competent form of Moslem rule in the historical
past. As Tobin, Eaton and others have argued, A blazing eastern sun
shining full on this building, composed of such varied
materials, produces a glare of splendour almost beyond the
imagination of an inhabitant of these northern climates to
conceive; and the present solitude that reigns over the
whole of the neglected garden, excites involuntarily a
melancholy pensiveness....The inside of the tomb is a vast
hall, occupying the whole space of the interior of the
building....In the center the body is deposited in a
sarcophagus of plain white marble, on which is written, in
black marble inlaid, simply the name of
ACBAR
....This fine country exhibits, in its present state, a
melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government,
of wild ambition, and horrors attending civil dissentions;
for when the governors of this country were in plenitude
of power, exercised their rights with wisdom, from the
excellence of its climate, with some degree of industry,
it must have been a perfect garden; but now is all
desolation and silence. (122-3)
Hodges' sense of “pensive melancholy” has multiple valences in 1793—its year of publication—and it is hard not to hear, in the phrase “civil dissentions”, a certain cautionary admonition regarding not only imperial, but also national affairs. In light of the melancholy prompted by this icon of the mutability of dynastic power is thus entirely appropriate that phallic British governance be figured forth not architecturally but rather as a living organism whose extension constitutes a fantasy of paternal self-replication.
The style of paternal masculinity which Hodges associates with both
Akbar and Hastings resonates with the emergence of a crucial
trope—both visual and textual—from Britain’s ongoing
struggles with Mysore. In his careful management of the famous
hostage transaction which ended the third Mysore War in 1793,
Cornwallis, and those representing the event, did everything
possible to suggest that Tipu Sultan’s sons would receive
a form of paternal care previously unknown to them in their
father’s household. This declaration of paternal
benevolence was explicitly mobilized to contrast with the
treatment of British captives by Hyder Ali following Pollilur.
If we take one last look at the banyan tree image we can discern three layers of displacement. In the background, the ancient pagod which framed Mahadewi in Picart’s picture has given way to an image from the future: a small parsonage superimposed on a now obsolete Hindu temple. In the middle ground, Mahadewi’s envaginated face has been erased and the tree itself emerges as a fantasy of phallic British rule. And the ancient religious practices of the faqirs have been replaced by present commerce. And in the foreground, something new emerges. The aged Hindu man looking out at the viewer is not only detached from the past of Picart’s image, but he seems to hail the viewer, or perhaps even Hodges, into a new temporal relationship beyond the conventional aesthetic objectives of the picturesque. It is as though the old man’s gaze establishes precisely what Hodges and by extension his audience desired all along: a relationship which figures forth the artist/observer as a phallic ruler over the subject of the image. Remember Hodges asserts that during the time of truly successful native insurgency there is no art. Here in 1793 following what was supposed to be victory over Tipu, Hodges text can revel in the power of domination. Isn’t that what is coded into the penitential pose of the figure in the foreground, for this is not an intersubjective glance, but a gaze of subjection. And the viewer accedes to the scene of paternal forgiveness perhaps needed to overcome the psychic, governmental and historical impasse occasioned in 1781. In this re-figuring of the past Hodges has sketched the future for himself and for those to whom he wishes to sell the
After his return from India, Hodges’s time was divided between preparing his Indian paintings and drawings for publication either in
But something is amiss. In both Pope and Whitehead, British oaks
have a global reach either through their transformation into
warships in the case of Windsor Forest, or through a certain
political extension in Whitehead.
This figure of the spreading branches of the British oak—here extending across the Atlantic itself—is simply not possible in the 1780s. The loss of the American colonies has lead to a certain restraint in this emblematic figure. But this spatial restraint is supplemented by a renewed investment in the oak’s capacity to figure forth historical continuity: spatial extension gives way to temporal reach.
I think we can see something of this in Hodges' picture, for its rendering of power is remarkably contained and in many ways looped in on itself. The oak frames the stags which rest before the seat of the King. All three pictorial elements are the literal possessions of the Crown and each one figures for the Crown. In this sense, they are doubled versions of each other and thus the concentration of power is in a sense overdetermined. That overdetermination suggests that the entire composition is attempting to shore up something that may not be as solid as it first appears. This is only exacerbated by the format of the print itself. Modelled on his iconic pictures of the ruins of former Mughal stability, Hodges’s view of Windsor has the potential to be read not only as the consolidation of dynastic power, but also as a further example of the mutability of empire. In other words, the allegorical relation set up between Windsor and the Tomb of Akbar establishes the British crown as both the substitute for Mughal power and its double. This reaffirms Britain’s claim to governance in the present, but uses the Mughal past to interrogate the future of British rule not only in the colonies, but also at the very centre of the empire. The question posed by the comparison is what will prevent the British state from receding into obsolescence in roughly the same manner as Akbar’s regime?
Hodges’s picture allows us to recognize a similar combination of restraint and overdetermination in what is perhaps the most significant mobilization of the oak figure in the late eighteenth century. I am referring of course to Burke’s use of the oak to figure forth the British constitution in
Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour. (180)As a figure for the nation/constitution the important feature of this oak is its capacity of its branches to give shade, but the animalization of British subjects—whether they be revolutionary grasshoppers or loyal cattle—not only privileges the silence of the cows, but also renders the entire political arrangement quite compact. As in Hodges’s picture, the oak’s protection is nativist; there is none of the extensibility which played such a key role in Pope or Whitehead. This marks a significant curtailment of the diffusion of British liberty beyond the shores of the British Isles. And we need to recognize that this constitutes a re-calibration of imperial governance as much as it does a rejection of Whig suggestions at the time that Burke was writing the
It is for this reason that Burke’s figure sacrifices
extensibility to duration by intertwining the life cycle of the
tree with the bonds of the family: Our political system
is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the
order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed
to permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein,
by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding
together the great mysterious incorporation of the human
race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle
aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual
decay, fall, renovation and progression. Thus, by
preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the
state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what
we retain we are never wholly obsolete....In this choice
of inheritance we have given our frame of polity the image
of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our
country with our dearest domestic affections....
(120)
This is a confusing passage precisely
because the image of “a relation in blood” does not
sit well with “the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation and progression”. Burke wants the constitution
to be both an “incorporation of the human race” and
something which shelters the polity of Britain. This strange
hybridization of blood and oak, human and tree, through its very
overdetermination, performs a rhetorical intensification which
separates him from his predecessors. By collapsing the
distinction between humans and plants, Burke has opened the door
for a racial interpretation of the constitution: “we have
given our frame of polity the image of a relation in
blood”. And this racialization of governance lays claim to
historical constancy by aligning itself with the durability at
the heart of the oak figure. The tension between the symbolics
of blood nascent in Burke’s analogy between family and
constitution on the one hand, and the more subtle invocation of
the tree on the other, not only signals the struggle to
re-define the oak figure for a new imperial era, but also opens
the door for—and perhaps even demands—a re-evaluation of the
relationship between extension and duration in the notion of
British liberty.
As with my analysis of Hodges, we need to go back to the global war
of the early 1780s in order to move forward. In early December
of 1781, less than two months after Cornwallis’s surrender
at Yorktown, William Cowper sent an imaginary “sociable
conversation” to his friend Joseph Hill in which Cowper
articulated his thoughts on the American War. After stating that
he knew of no one up to the task of leading Britain out of the
conflict, Cowper offered the following summary of the state of
the empire: If we pursue the war, it is because we are
desperate; it is plunging and sinking year after year in
still greater depths of calamity. If we relinquish it, the
remedy is equally desperate, and would prove, I believe,
in the end no remedy at all. Either way we are
undone—perseverance will only enfeeble us more, we cannot
recover the Colonies by arms. If we discontinue the
attempt, in that case we fling away voluntarily, what in
the other we strive ineffectually to regain, and whether
we adopt the one measure or the other, are equally undone.
For I consider the loss of America as the ruin of England;
were we less encumbered than we are, at home, we could but
ill afford it, but being crushed as we are under an
enormous debt that the public credit can at no rate carry
much longer, the consequence is sure. Thus it appears to
me that we are squeezed to death between the two sides of
that sort of alternative, which is commonly called a cleft
stick, the most threat’ning and portentous condition
in which the interests of any country can possibly be
found.
Of the myriad statements of imperial doom from this
period, Cowper’s remark stands out because the metaphor of
the cleft stick captures the predicament of imperial
subjectivity at this moment so vividly. To be cleft is to be
split or divided to a certain depth, but the expression “a
cleft stick” uses the notion of bifurcation to figure the
two horns of a dilemma: as the OED states, it indicates “a
position in which advance and retreat are alike
impossible”. For Cowper, the nation, and by extension the
imperial subject, is entangled to the point of being unable to
move. Disentangling the imperial subject from this painful,
static, almost abject, position involves a phantasmatic
re-configuration of the political beyond the limits of specific
policies and actions. In short, the predicament seems to call
forth a new kind of political and poetic utterance.
For Cowper and others, the reverses of the early 1780s, both in America and in other colonial locales, raised the simultaneous possibility that British culture may die and yet live on in a ghostly form elsewhere. The complex temporality of this ghosting procedure and the figural attempts to keep it under control are the primary focus of the reading which follows. In Hodges, I demonstrated one example of how past losses could be refigured as future domination. Cowper’s
The political dilemma presented in Cowper’s letter
presupposes a strong sense of the integration of colony and
metropole. For Cowper, the loss of America implies the ruin of
England; his thoughts on the non-distinction of England and
America emerge frequently in his letters, but nowhere more
explicitly than in the following missive to John Newton:
I consider England and America as once one country.
They were so in respect of interest, intercourse, and
affinity. A great earthquake has made a partition, and now
the Atlantic Ocean flows between them. He that can drain
that Ocean, and shove the two shores together so as to
make them aptly coincide and meet each other in every
part, can unite them again; but this is the work for
Omnipotence, and nothing less than Omnipotence can heal
the breach between us. (1:569-70)
What is strange
about this account of the American war is that it forgets that
the Atlantic Ocean has always separated the colonies from the
British Isles. Cowper here imagines a pre-revolutionary state
which negates the very material structure of the globe. In this
fantasy it is contiguity that matters most: the shores must
“aptly coincide”. It is a figure of an organic whole
rent asunder, which in some ideal future state could be sutured
together again by none other than God himself. God’s role
here is important because elsewhere in both the poems and the
letters from this period, Cowper emphasizes that this fatal
wound—here it is naturalized as an earthquake—is inflicted by
Providence because England is a “sinfull Nation”
(2:104). Like many other commentators at this juncture, Cowper
felt that England had been hollowed out from within and held
aristocratic dissipation and political corruption to be the
undoing of both the empire and the nation. But as in the
cleft-stick passage, agency has been fully wrested from
politicians and citizens and is transferred to a divine
non-human process. Failed military and state policy not only are
subsumed into a narrative of irrevocable decline and fall, but
also are corrected in a field where men have little or no active
role to play.
Roughly ten years after Cowper’s appraisal of the end of the
American war, he found himself again contemplating the
destruction of the nation, only this time he deploys a cultural
rather than a natural trope for disintegration: I am
entirely of your mind respecting this conflagration by
which all Europe suffers at present, and is likely to
suffer for a long time to come. The same mistake seems to
have prevailed as in the American business. We then
flattered ourselves that the colonies would prove an easy
conquest, and when all the neighbour nations arm’d
themselves against France, we imagined I believe that she
too would be presently vanquish’d. But we begin
already to be undeceived, and God only knows to what a
degree we may find we have erred, at the conclusion. Such
however is the state of things all around us, as reminds
me continually of the Psalmist’s expression—
As a figure, the broken shards
of the nation implied by his allusion to Psalm 2:9 is more
coherent than his strange cancellation of the Atlantic in his
1784 letter, but it still argues that God will break that which
man has made, because Britain has set itself against God.
This same sense of Providential retribution suffuses “Yardley
Oak”, but it is played out not only with more rhetorical
force, but also with more historical specificity:
Cowper’s address does two things.
First it establishes a relation of intimacy between this last
surviving oak and the aged speaker. This is achieved by
constructing the effect of physical proximity between speaker
and oak: the poem’s descriptive specificity is one of the
poem’s most prominent rhetorical strategies. And this
effect of intimacy is intensified almost immediately by the
syntactical ambiguity introduced by the parenthetical phrase in
line three. Cowper’s sudden specification of the
speaker’s age suspends the syntax at the end of line four
and thus allows “A shatter’d vet’ran” in
line 4 to figure not only for the oak, but also for the speaker.
This figural ambiguity sets up the possibility for complex
identifications between the speaker and the tree which will have
important political ramifications as the poem unfolds. At this
point it is enough to recognize that this establishes the
potential for precisely the same collapse between the body of
the subject and the arborial figure for governance that animated
Burke’s overdetermined deployment of the oak in the
But this isn’t all that is achieved here. The metaphorical comparison between the oak tree and “the shatter’d vet’ran” also activates the memory of past war—and not the triumphalism following the Seven Year’s War, but rather the sense of loss characteristic of Cowper’s remarks on the American war. I believe that this phrase evokes the wounded veteran of the American war and this oak is shattered like the potter’s vessel alluded to in Cowper’s 1793 letter. The full connotations of this metaphor are not activated until seventy lines later, but it is the central enigma of the poem. In what sense is the tree shattered and in what way is it a veteran?
These questions are temporarily supplanted by an explicit statement
of the desire to venerate the tree, which concludes the first
verse paragraph:
This is a rather startling turn because it
suggests that veneration of the oak is not only a form of pagan
idolatry, but also akin to Adam’s attempt to hide from
God’s view after consciously breaking God’s explicit
proscription. The allusion to Book 9 of
As Balachandra Rajan has argued, the evocation of the banyan tree from Milton speaks directly to the question of shelter (60-1). Adam chooses the tree because it provides shade, or in Cowper’s phrase “gloom”. To venerate the oak for its shelter is to misrecognize it as the banyan and the spiritual cost is, in Cowper’s eyes, catastrophic: it is further evidence of the nation’s alienation from God. In this context, the verb “might” in line 8 ofSo counselled he and both together went Into the thickest wood, there soon they chose The fig-tree: not that kind for fruit renowned But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Deccan spreads her arms Branching so broad and long that in the ground the bended twigs take root and daughters grow About the mother tree, a pillared shade High overarched and echoing walks between. There oft the Indian herdsman shunning heat Shelters in cool and tends his pasturing herds At loopholes cut through thickest shade.... (9.1099-1110)
When we recognize that the capacity to provide shade is precisely the feature of the figure that is so appealing to Burke, then I think the full import of Cowper’s intervention becomes clear. For Cowper, the loss of the American colonies and the predicted failure of the war with France amount to symptomatic signs of God’s displeasure with the corruption of British liberty, both at a national and imperial level. What is remarkable here is that Cowper’s opening verse paragraph activates the entire historical predicament with such iconic specificity: the shattered oak, the banyan tree, the sense of a nation deformed and hollowed out from the inside. But most importantly their collocation suggests that all of these connotations are comparable to one another and to the speaker himself. This collocation lies beneath my decision to consider the banyan and the oak in the same essay, because it implies that these figures, like India and Britain, are bound up in a global historical dynamic.
As the poem unfolds, the two primary elements of the oak figure—extension and duration—are scrutinized historically; and by this I mean that their figural potential is tested against the historical moment of 1791. Cowper’s evaluation of this moment in Britain’s history is dire and the poem is suffused with a sense of past or passing glory. As one might expect, Cowper plays out the “mutability in all/That we account most durable below” (70-1), and traces “thy growth/From almost nullity into a state/Of matchless grandeur, and declension thence/Slow into such magnificent decay.” (87-90) The pun on “state” bolsters the direct assertion that Britain is in a condition of irrevocable, but nonetheless majesterial, decline. It is almost the same language used by Hodges to describe the obsolescence of the Mughal dynasty.
But Cowper’s description of the tree focuses our attention on
the tree’s boughs and on the hollowing out of its trunk:
I want to look at the fate of the boughs and
trunk in turn, because the loss of the former has an
extraordinary effect on the latter, and because it is in the
destruction of these elements that the reader gets a sense of
precisely how and why this tree is a “shatter’d
vet’ran”. After declaring the tree’s
“magnificent decay”, the speaker brings the tree
within the orbit of human affairs:
It is hard not to think of Pope’s
But nestled within this fairly explicit critique is a very subtle
gesture. Imperial war is evoked by the pun on “tortuous
arms”, but by focussing the reader’s attention on a
fairly arcane element of ship-building—knee timber—Cowper
consigns the “arms” figure to the notes, only to
activate it in a surprisingly brutal fashion in the next verse
paragraph. At the most explicit comparison between the oak and
the state, the speaker suddenly discloses that the tree affords
no shelter because it has no limbs:
The suspension of the tree’s lack of
limbs until this point is extremely shocking because it disjoins
this particular tree from the usual political connotations of
the emblematic oak figure. And yet the figure of the
tree’s arms reveals itself to be exceedingly complex. If
we understand arms to signify the martial capacity of Georgian
England, particularly its naval strength, then the poem
recognizes that the diffusion of liberty which was so integral
to early theories of empire relies on the felling of oaks such
as the one being addressed by the speaker. But the corruption of
ministers, and the implicit sinfulness of the nation, have
generated a situation where “Thine arms have left
thee” in both senses of the word. After the loss of the
American war, one can no longer simply assume that Britain can
successfully protect its imperial holdings through force of
arms, nor can one assume that the symbolic shelter afforded by
the boughs of the constitution will protect the citizenry. The
implication is that both the military, and what Burke described
as the frame of the polity, have been “pulverized by
venality”. So the reader is presented with a particularly
dangerous situation where the diffusion of liberty through
empire—here figured by the propagation of ships from oaks—has
undercut one of its fundamental principles—the notion that the
state through its laws will, like the oak, shelter the people.
It is the same organic loop that allowed Cowper to understand
the loss of America as equivalent to the loss of England.
With the loss of its arms, the tree’s capacity to figure
forth shelter has been permanently compromised. From this
figural dismemberment comes a different possibility for
metaphor. This tree becomes notable not for its arms, but for
its screaming mouth:
This oak tree tempts no one because it
offers no shade and provides no suitable timber for arms. With
the capacity to subdue enemies and to provide shelter for the
polity shorn away, the tree becomes a remarkable figure for the
poet. It becomes a mouth calling for sustenance from the sky so
that it can sustain the only thing worth sustaining—its roots.
The speaker goes on to narrate a
remarkable scene in which the uprooting of a myrtle tree
yields “Black bloody drops distill'd upon the
ground” (3.29). The tree eventually speaks and
reveals that in death Polydore has been transformed into a
myrtle tree. If we allow this allusion to play out then
the speaker’s encounter with the Yardley Oak
presages a restoration of empire. I would like to thank
Theresa Kelley for directing me to these lines.
It is in this light that the poem’s truncated ending—the poem
remained incomplete—gains its resonance. At the very moment that
the speaker declares that the tree is bereft of arms and
un-memorialized, he also insists that the tree endures:
The question which remains is what is to be
done with this “sweet force” in the face of
decrepitude. What is the dismembered tree/nation/poet to do? The
“yonder upstarts of the neighbour wood” are
presented as signs of the future. The fact that the poem does
not specify their species is, I think, important because
“upstarts” may be referring to the revolutionaries
of a neighbouring nation—especially at the time when this poem
was composed.
But whether Cowper is referring to France or to new patriots in
Britain is not crucial. What follows in both the cancelled and
the retained versions of the poem is an explicit adoption of a
pedagogical stance. Since the “shatter’d
vet’ran” can no longer speak, its double, the
oracular poet, must perform:
The way “Myself” is stranded at
the beginning of line 141 is for me one of the differential
marks through which we could define Romanticism, for it is here
that an entire political narrative, an entire political
symbolics, is suddenly transformed into an example of what not
to do. History’s dismemberment of the oak has allowed the
poet to suddenly and boldly speak to and for the figure in what
is described as a theatrical space. But he does so while
“seated here/On thy distorted root”. He does not
become the tree, but rather contends with disfiguration. It is
in this light that the poem’s obsession with the contorted
structures of the ruined tree, its distorted roots and tortuous
arms, is so important. The figure has been disfigured and that
spectacle demands a performance where private desire and public
discourse intersect in a profound engagement with the past. In
retrospect, could we not simply state that Cowper’s sense
of dismemberment, traceable to the global crisis which would
reconfigure the Atlantic imperium and re-orient the entire
project of empire, has called forth the performance of
Romanticism? That the poem leaves off at this point is apt, not
only because the September massacres would so radically call
into question the hope expressed for the “Spring”,
but also because Cowper had cleared the ground, or allowed
future readers such as Wordsworth and Clare to see how the
ground was cleared for their future utterances.