Felicia Hemans at "The Grave of a Poetess"

In the final stanza of The Grave of a Poetess, Felicia Hemans completes the turn of her poem from one of melancholy lament at the passing of fellow poet Mary Tighe to one instead celebrating the apparent freedom of expression that follows a poet's earthly death. In closing, Hemans writes to Tighe, "Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground / Thy tender thoughts and high? / Now peace the woman's heart hath found, / And joy the poet's eye" (49-52).

The conceptual weight of these lines is immense, and its tone deceptive. First off, there's the idea, generally uncharacteristic of Romantics (esp. Shelley, Keats, and Byron), of an afterlife, one in which the female poet's voice is allowed to prosper without impingement. Bound to this notion of post-earth narrative liberation is the undercurrent of suppressed thought or creativity imposed upon women on earth (or, British society in this case).

Although it seems uplifting that Hemans realizes that the late Tighe can now fully express herself, there exists concurrently in the poem the lamentable concept that whatever Tighe did leave behind is but a glimpse of what she was fully capable of. With this in mind, Hemans' poem comes off as a bit of a parable. The downtrodden poet Tighe transcends her earthly blight by finding her voice in the afterlife, but those readers and women poets left behind can only speculate as to whether or not Tighe's work ever reached its full potential. Given all this, The Grave of a Poetess ends up carrying a fair amount of dramatic potency, as it both points to repression of the female voice (social commentary) and implies the loss this creates for all of humanity (a lament to the short shrift that female poets and their readers receive by way of such repression). An effective tension is thus lent to Hemans poem through the direct and indirect of injection of her frustrated Romantic yearnings for the attainment of full expression for her and her fellow poetesses, the denial of which leads her to resort to the Christian-like notion of a vindicating afterlife seen in this poem.

Miles Durrance