— The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska —

British Poetry of the later Eighteenth and Earlier Nineteenth Centuries

Bibliographical and Contextual Apparatus

Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. London: Vernor and Hood, 1802. Pp. vi+144.

Descriptive Essay

In 1802, Anne Bannerman published a volume of poetry titled Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. Just as the title claims, the ten balladic poems within the 144 page volume are ghost stories set in dark, mysteriously gothic Arthurian-type legends involving characters of vast array who are capable of instilling fear when organized and implemented properly in a story line.

A stirring prologue opens the volume. It reads:
          Turn from the path; if search of gay delight
          Lead thy vain footsteps back to ages past!
          Frail are the blighted flowers, and thinly cast
          O'er the dim regions of monastic night.

          Yet in their cavern'd, dark recesses, dwells
          The long-lost Spirit of forgotten times,
          Whose voice prophetic reach'd to distant climes,
          And rul'd the nations from his witched cells;

          That voice is hush'd!...But still in Fancy's ear
          Its first unmeasur'd melodies resound!
          Blending with terrors wild, and legends drear,
          The charmed minstrelsy of mystic sound,
          That rous'd, embodied, to the eye of Fear,
          Th' unearthly habitants of faery ground.
The prologue intends to encourage the reader to continue reading into the body of the text. The 'terrors wild, and legends drear' are clearly intended to incite the excitement and fear necessary to make a good ghost story. Such active language seems to promise a good scare for those venturing on into the volume of poetry. The ten haunting poems following the prologue embody the superstitious quality briefly displayed by the prologue. Unfortunately, the curdling of blood fails to reach a full boil because Bannerman repeatedly stops the heat precisely at a point where a frightening climax is anticipated.

Bannerman begins her poems, most of which are constructed of quatrain, balladic stanzas, with descriptions that set the scene for the expected, mythically haunting action promised by the prologue. These descriptors display Bannerman's excellent ability to incite fear and build suspense within the reader. She writes using phrases like, "shrinking feet" (69), "wild sea-shore" (80), "An awful cov'ring made:/ And then that sky, of dusky red,/ The dead of night had been less dread/ Than that uncertain shade" (104), and "A wind blew up,…it was sultry warm,/ It shook the saddle-vow!/ But not one hair of that bristly mane/ Was waved to and fro…" (116). Bannerman organizes her words in this manner throughout all ten poems, revealing her natural talent for creating images capable of instigating fearful emotions.

In "The Prophetess of The Oracle Of Seam," Bannerman conjures a dark, foreboding image:
          Round Seam's isle the black waves boil
          On the rough, rough rocks below,
          And none can tell the date or time
          Since they were tossed so!

          Yet there comes a night, at the equinox height,
          When the waters sleep below,
          And a sound is heard, that stoppeth not,
          Like the shrieks of a soul in woe!

          'Twas on that night, when the winds were dumb,
          And the tossing waters still,
          That a ship was 'nighted, on her way,
          By the rocks of Seam's isle. (19-21)
The waves that 'boil,' the 'rough, rough rocks,' and the eerie sound compared to 'the shrieks of a soul in woe' charm the reader's senses. Bannerman begins all of her poems in much this same way. This specific excerpt not only displays Bannerman's descriptive talent, but also her love for the exclamatory. In the sixteenth stanza, a reoccurring use of the exclamation point begins. By the twenty-first, it becomes so common that two exclamation points exist per stanza. This subsequently agitates and stirs excited emotions.
          Sorely wrung was every heart,
          Within that ship, that heard the tale!
          They listen'd still, in dumb despair,
          By the unmoving sail!

          They press'd around that aged priest,
          As he rais'd the crucifix on high!
          And they look'd for nothing now to come,
          But that they all must die!... (26)

By the point each poem gets to where there is a littering of exclamatory phrases, Bannerman engineers also an intensely haunting buildup of imagery and foreboding language. This, in turn, results in a growing expectation on thereader's part for something to explain the fears that have been festering. The standard approach to telling a ghost story would promise such an explanation, yet Bannerman shifts away from this expected development and instead consistently confuses her reader as any clear resolutrion as to what has happened in her story. The moment when the priest who has found himself to be at the ghost's mercy in "The Prophetess of Seam," for example, dramatically illustrates Bannerman's apparentlyu deliberate frustration of the reader's expectations. She repeatedly teased her readers into believing such a climactic moment to be the point where anticipated climax manifests, yet she does not allow it to do so.
          For he had said the veil was drawn
          That hid the sacrifice within;
          That his eyes had seen the Prophetess
          At that uncover'd shrine;

          But whether his knee had bended there
          Was buried with him in the grave:…
          He felt that doubt more terrible
          Than the terrors of the cave….
The thrill invoked by the stanzas preceding these two make the reader desire to discover what the eerie sound is that haunts the sailors. The reader wants to know who the ghostly prophetess is, as well as what the priest who sees the prophetess does in order to survive. Bannerman's language and style point in the direction of her reader's fears being addressed and the puzzles explained, and yet when the apparent moment of explanation arrives, she skips right over. The truth of what happens in the cave between the ghost and the priest is never revealed, and the reader is left with the same state of mystery with which the poem begins.

Bannerman's dramatic construction in all these poems seems at odds with what the ghost story genre typically promises its enthusiasts. This strange construction occurs in every poem and therefore raises questions concerning Bannerman's reasoning for writing in this way. Having published a positively received volume of poetry entitled Poems prior to Tales Of Superstition and Chivalry, a collection that displayed her ability to excel as a poet, why does Bannerman repeatedly fail to deliver this second time around? Was Bannerman simply unable to realize that each of her ten tales were wanting of a complete and connected story line?

The contemporary reviews of her work were for the most part negative and reflective of a similar doubt of her ability as a writer. Critics who posed such questions seemed to look solely at Bannerman's volume as a vehicle through which she could tell a few good ghost stories and nothing more. In their opinion, she failed.
Perhaps Bannerman's motive behind these ten poems exceeded the narrow scope through which her contemporary critics read her work, however. She exercises, what, in 1802, had no name given to it:  a postmodern approach to her poetry. She begins with the typical format for a good scare by utilizing dramatic language that heightens the senses, and she builds the suspense for several pages. Then she stops, skipping any climactic action by quickly summing up, in a few stanzas, the presence of the myth in the current culture. Bannerman's formula strays from the expected foreshadowed build, climactic delivery, and settling of the aftermath expected by readers of traditional ghost stories. Realistically, of course, life is rarely linear and formulaic in these structured narrative terms. Therefore, to expect all stories to be so predictable could be regarded as being impractical -- and certainly unrealistic. Could Bannerman have seen this seemingly impractical tendency present within her audience and their reading practices and consequently desired to try something new by turning such expectations upside down? It can not be known for sure what Bannerman's motives were when creating her poetry. Yet for one so adept and skilled in engaging the senses through conjured images, it seems naïve to conclude Bannerman simply suffered from inexperience in poetical structure.

Should Tales of Superstition and Chivalry have been published in a time other than the Romantic period (in our own postmodern era, for example), the structure of her ghastly tales might not have been regarded as incomplete but rather as brilliant and inclusive of realistic elements within a stereotypically fantastical genre. Had this happened, the name of Anne Bannerman might not have drifted into the state of relative obscurity in which we find it today.

Appendix A

Table of Contents, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry

Tales of Superstition and Chivalry i
Prologue iii
Errata iv
Table of Contents v
The Dark Ladie 1
(Engraving of The Dark Ladie) 6
The Prophetess of the Oracle of Seam 17
The Perjured Nun 37
The Penitent's Confession 49
(Engraving of The Penitent's Confession) 50
The Festival of St. Magnus the Martyr 63
Basil 77
The Fisherman of Lapland 89
The Murcian Cavalier 97
(Engraving of The Murcian Cavalier) 98
The Black Knight of the Water 109
The Prophecy of Merlin 123
(Engraving of The Prophecy of Merlin) 124
Notes 141