Today’s Poem: Andromeda

Sweetly and solemnly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals

Gustave Doré, Andromède, 1869 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Andromeda (an extract)

by Charles Kingsley

Blissful, they turned them to go: but the fair-tressed Pallas Athené
Rose, like a pillar of tall white cloud, toward silver Olympus;
Far above ocean and shore, and the peaks of the isles and the mainland;
Where no frost nor storm is, in clear blue windless abysses,
High in the home of the summer, the seats of the happy Immortals,
Shrouded in keen deep blaze, unapproachable; there ever youthful
Hebé, Harmonié, and the daughter of Jove, Aphrodité,
Whirled in the white-linked dance with the gold-crowned Hours and the Graces,
Hand within hand, while clear piped Phœbe, queen of the woodlands.
All day long they rejoiced: but Athené still in her chamber
Bent herself over her loom, as the stars rang loud to her singing,
Chanting of order and right, and of foresight, warden of nations;
Chanting of labour and craft, and of wealth in the port and the garner;
Chanting of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the foremost,
Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father bequeathed him.
Sweetly and solemnly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals:
Happy, who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athené.
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I wish Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) had not gone after John Henry Newman (1801–1890) with quite as much energy as he did. But then, Kingsley did everything with energy, being the kind of hard-driving steam engine the Victorians seemed to mass produce. He was an Anglican priest with a touch of Thomas Arnold’s Muscular Christianity and a portion of John Ruskin’s kind of Christian socialism. A chaplain to Queen Victoria, Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, a canon of Westminster Abbey, and a board member of nearly every working-man’s association in the nation, he still found time to pour out his writings.

Alton Locke (1849), for example, was his social-condition novel about England’s working classes. Hereward the Wake (1865), a faded but still readable historical novel about the Saxons. Westward Ho! (1855), a standard boys’ adventure tale. The Water-Babies (1863), a popular children’s book, for all its near-hallucinatory scenes.

What makes Kingsley a hard sell to my Catholic friends, otherwise sympathetic to the revival of formalist poetry, is that, in an anonymous 1864 magazine review of a history book, Kingsley (always an anti-Catholic) went out of his way to take a swipe at John Henry Newman, calling the Catholic convert someone who justifies lying. The two exchanged a series of increasingly acrimonious letters and pamphlets about the claim, slanging each other up and down the countryside. The dispute culminated in Newman’s classic spiritual autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), so at least some good came of it all. But to read the thin-skinned appendices to that book is to realize how unnecessary the whole spat was.

In the 1913 Victorian Age in Literature (one of my favorite books of literary criticism, which may explain why my own literary criticism fumbles about so much), G.K. Chesterton actually defends Kingsley a little, although that may just be Chesterton’s typical reversal of expectations. In the 1918 Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey favors the Catholic convert over Kingsley, although that is probably because Strachey generally favors Newman in the book’s technique of offering a somewhat-sympathetic secondary figure to help disparage each biographical essay’s main figure (in this case, using Newman to help paint a disagreeable portrait of Cardinal Manning).

But if we set aside the 19th century’s record of Protestant/Catholic dispute, Kingsley emerges as an interesting figure. Like nearly every other of those energetic Victorian machines, Kingsley produced poetry. “A Farewell” was once well known (if only for its now-mocked line “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” although, in context, the moralism of the poem is better than its reputation), together with “The Last Buccaneer” and “The Sands of Dee.”

Engraving of Charles Kingsley c. 1860 (Wikimedia Commons)

But the best of his poetry may be his version of the ancient mythological tale of Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda from a sea monster. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern we have spoken before of attempts to recreate in English the effect of Greek and Latin meters. And the most astonishing — also the hardest to do — is the Victorian ideal of lining up the Latin quantity effect of long vowels with the stressed syllables of English prosody. In “Andromeda,” Kingsley doesn’t pull off this difficult feat, but his accentual hexameter comes relatively close in sound to that ideal. The poem begins:

Ò-ver the / sèa pàst / Crète on the / Syr-i-an / shòre to the / sòuth-ward
Dwèlls in the / wèll-tìlled / lòw-land a / dàrk-hàired / Æth-i-op / pèo-ple

and moves through nearly 500 lines of superior narrative hexameter — six-foot lines of dactyls and spondees.

To my ear, these hexameters sound less singsongy than the “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks” of Longfellow’s 1847 Evangeline — and less awkward than those in Arthur Hugh Clough’s 1848 “The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich” (although there exist some defenses of what Clough was attempting). Kingsley’s 1852 poem flows and reads easily — the best of the longer attempts at classical meters by the indefatigable Victorians. For Today’s Poem we offer the concluding lines of “Andromeda”: “Happy, who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athené.”

Perseus and Andromeda in Charles-André van Loo (c. 1737), Titian (1555), and a Roman wall painting (c. 50)

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