'Pause, Reader, Pause': Lessons in Mourning by Romantic Women Poets

A familiar strategy of elegy, anagnorisis is a form of teaching or guiding readers to a deep understanding of the poem’s subject through gradual, symbolic imagery and allusion. This paper argues that the spatial construction of the printed page became part of a new mode to gradually teach Romantic readers in the midst of a twenty-year conflict how to properly morn. Not only does spatial construction, as I define it, consist of the interplay of topic and genre on the periodical page, but its building blocks include intricate stanza shifts, locative words, and a collective voice. Mary Robinson’s ‘Stanzas supposed to be written near a tree, over the grave of an officer, who was killed at Lincelles, in Flanders, in August 1793’—despite its precise title—locates the act of mourning in the physical space of the poem. Her changing addresses and pronouns repeatedly tell readers and the gravesite itself what to do ‘Here’ so that correct acts are ‘recorded’ for future generations. Thus, I argue that the aim of such texts is to teach active mourning instead of effusion or meditation on personal loss. Active mourning typically consists of an obligation to the living, attention to ‘recording’ via the printed page, and close reading which is likened to travel. Such construction is reconsidered at the end of the long conflicts between Britain and France by critically overlooked poet Jane Alice Sargant. Her ‘Monody’ abruptly shifts from a meditation on death to a living, speaking ‘Warrior’ who finds a gravesite despite ‘no sculptur’d marble’ to mark it. Sargant’s text implies that ‘This mournful spot’ can only be found through the act of reading. The paper treats these two poems by Robinson and Sargant, respectively, with brief comparisons to other, anonymous periodical poems and to Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’.