Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Editions cited
- Introducing Victorian poetry
- Part I The forms of Victorian poetry
- Part II The rhetoric of Victorian poetry
- Introduction to Part II
- 4 Poetry, technology, science
- 5 Poetry and religion
- 6 Poetry and the heart's affections
- 7 Poetry and empire
- 8 Poetic liberties
- 9 Resisting rhetoric: art for art's sake
- Part III Coda Close readings
- Glossary
- Notes
- Further reading
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to Literature
7 - Poetry and empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Editions cited
- Introducing Victorian poetry
- Part I The forms of Victorian poetry
- Part II The rhetoric of Victorian poetry
- Introduction to Part II
- 4 Poetry, technology, science
- 5 Poetry and religion
- 6 Poetry and the heart's affections
- 7 Poetry and empire
- 8 Poetic liberties
- 9 Resisting rhetoric: art for art's sake
- Part III Coda Close readings
- Glossary
- Notes
- Further reading
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Summary
The loyal to their crown
Are loyal to their own far sons, who love
Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes
For ever-broadening England, and her throne
In our vast Orient.
Alfred Tennyson, “To the Queen” (1873)We took our chanst among the Kyber 'ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills,
An' a Zulu impi dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller.
Rudyard Kipling, “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” Scots Observer (March 15, 1890)But those who slay
Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs –
The death of innocences and despairs;
The dying of the golden and the grey.
The sentence, when these speak it, has no Nay.
And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.
Alice Meynell, “Parentage” (1896)The Albert Memorial across from the Royal Albert Hall in London was built between 1863 and 1872 to memorialize Queen Victoria's husband after his death in 1861, but it is also a serviceable metaphor of poetry's relation to empire. The Gothic Revival design selected by architect George Gilbert Scott is meant to suggest unbroken national tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages. Sculptures on the monument designate crucial components of the nation Albert served. One group, for example, lauds British manufacturing and engineering. Four other groups represent the continents but offer imperial as well as geography lessons.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry , pp. 191 - 213Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010