Author: Godwin, Catherine Grace (1798-1845)
Title: The Wanderer's Legacy; a Collection of Poems, on Various Subjects.
Date: 1829
Descriptive Essay
Godwin, Catherine Grace. The Wanderer’s Legacy; A Collection of Poems, on various subjects. By Mrs. Catherine Grace Godwin. London: Samuel Maunder, 10 Newgate Street. 1829. Pp. [iv] + 277.
Catherine Grace Godwin writes in a beautiful and detailed manner. She ambitiously dedicated her collection, The Wanderer’s Legacy, to William Wordsworth, with his permission. She begins with a lovely, magical “Invocation,” asking in verse that the earth and its spirits guide her writing—“… a mortal Muse, transcendent as those nymphs nymphs/ Divine, that haunt the green Thessalian shades,/ Spirit of Poesie! On thee I call.” (6). The “Invocation” is the first taste of the ethereal and enchanting language that makes Godwin’s poetry so accessible and striking.
After the “Invocation” Godwin follows with “Introduction to The Wanderer’s Legacy” and “The Wanderer’s Early Recollections”. Both of these long narrative poems seem to focus on the same person. “Introduction to The Wanderer’s Legacy” is in 9 line stanzas and tells the story of the Wanderer coming home after years of absence. After returning to find his sister and father dead he says, “Seek me some low and lonely dwelling-place,/ Far from the shock of man’s unholy strife,” (19) whereupon he becomes a hermit and reminisces about his adventures. “The Wanderer’s Early Recollections” follows, and primarily focuses on how the Wanderer came to be a wanderer. It recounts his troubles fitting in with society and tells how he fell in and out of one great love, after his betrothed left him for someone more wealthy. It was the heartbreak of this spurning that led him to travel. Both of these poems tell a difficult and sad tale of the lonely yet rewarding life of this great traveller. Godwin captures themes of love, rejection, confusion, heartbreak, homesickness, nature, and beauty, her lines filled with chilling and lovely imagery, and her narrative poems telling this man’s story in a memorable way.
After these two longer poems, the rest of this collection tells different stories of traveling people and foreign places. Most of Godwin’s work is narrative and the majority of the poems focus very specifically on particular stories and instances. All of these poems have separate characters though, and each one has at least one if not several themes and lessons. A couple of poems fall outside of this category—those being “Petrarca’s Tomb”, “Indian Scenery”, and “Lament of the Chevalier Bayard, when lying sick of a fever at Grenoble”. These poems are more heavily descriptive of specific physical settings and the observations relating to these places, and don’t necessarily include any voices other than the narrator’s thoughts.
One common feature of Godwin’s longer narrative poems is that they are not told linearly. They will often start at the end and then rewind to the beginning in order to tell the story of how the character arrived at the ending. For example, “The Wanderer’s Early Recollections” starts with the narrator wandering through the countryside of his childhood—“I walk the vallies where my boyhood stray’d” (27). He then rewinds to the beginning of his memories and tells the story of his youth. “The Seal Hunters” likewise starts with setting the scene of a terrible storm with a boat in, “tempestuous seas and angry skies;/ Launch’d on the unfathomable wave,/ That yawns an ever-open grave” (105). Godwin then hones the story in on one couple of brothers and how they came to be trapped in this terrible hurricane, stranded, and left to starve to death on an iceberg. Many other poems in this collection follow this pattern, and this narrative style helps set a rather ominous and haunting tone. The reader is always drawn in right away, invited to wonder how the opening imagery will connect to the story.
A final interesting stylistic choice of Godwin’s is to write about many different characters. There are some works that a reader could connect, and the case could be made that many of these stories were encountered by the “wanderer” in “Introduction to The Wanderer’s Legacy”, but this possibility is never explicitly expressed through the poems. However, Godwin writes about a plethora of other characters and their experiences, emotions, struggles etc. She writes about seal hunters, Turkish wives, Lords, Ladies and more. Her storytelling capacity is brilliantly diverse, adding to the overall appeal and credibility of a collection about travelers, life experiences and adventure.
It is not simply her stylistic choices that make her work so captivating, however. The majority of these poems have chilling themes that are oftentimes moral or political or both. Some of her main themes include rejected love, wealth versus happiness, various stages of death and what follows, and of course the growth gained while travelling. Three poems pointedly and specifically call out the mistake of marrying for money instead of love. “The Wanderer’s Early Recollections”, “The Monk of Camaldoli”, and “The Hebrew Girl at the Auto da Fé” all center around the devastation that rejected love causes both parties.
In “The Wanderer’s Early Recollections”, the main character saves the love of his life from the Fever only to catch it himself. When he is sufficiently recovered, he returns, only to be rejected for a richer and more socially prominent gentleman. The grief that this reversal causes him keeps him away from his family until he returns in “Introduction to the Wanderer’s Legacy” (following the inverted style of storytelling) to find them dead. The narrator returns to his lover’s house to try and regain her love, but instead she “…crush’d me with her cruel raillery,/ Till my stung heart writhed powerless in her grasp” (81). Instead she marries a wealthy “… reptile in his loathsome slough” (82). After basically losing his mind for a long period of time, the narrator runs into her at a theatre, and finds her to be a shell of her former self. He notes, “… and the eternal smile,/ Soulless and joyless, now that had usurp’d/ Like some base traitor those fair cherub thrones,/ what spake it, but of falseness to my heart?/ The practiced air of listless apathy”(93). He continues, “Her wedded partner, hied him to the haunts/ of infamy and ruin, there to waste/ A life degraded, and with equal rong/ Repay her scorn and hatred—She repair’d,/ With her inamorato at her side…” (94-95). Here Godwin gets to the heart of the issue. In exchange for money, the two had entered a loveless, cold marriage that forced them to become mean emotionless robots. The narrator goes on to express the things he would have missed if he had in fact married this woman he once idolized so faithfully. Here we see nature and simplicity offering fulfillment in a way that money never can.
The message here is echoed in the other poems mentioned above, and it drives many of Godwin’s characters to madness. In “The Monk of Camaldoli”, Godwin writes, “a daughter’s peace was sold,/ By low ambition to imperious lust./ The powerless to the powerful” (146). This daughter was in love with the man who would become the Monk of Camaldoli. After she dies of a broken heart owing to an awful marriage, the Monk of Camaldoli basically goes mad—“Again, and o’er his madness came a gleam/ Of life’s relinquish’d splendor/…. This could not last—the fierce volcano burns/ Itself to chaos” (147-148). Similarly “The Hebrew Girl at the Auto da Fé” is about a Hebrew woman pleading to a child bride to save her life, although the young queen is powerless to her husband’s order to kill the Hebrew woman. These tales, too, leave us with haunting examples of how valuing wealth and status over love and nature turns hearts cold and senseless.
Godwin brilliantly contrasts this theme with the good fortune of “The Seal Hunters” who are saved from a most certain and terrible death. The seal hunters do honest, albeit dangerous, work. After succumbing to their fate, they spot a ship—“”It is! Or do my senses fail?--/ It is—it is—a sail—a sail!” (136). Upon being rescued they are reunited with their loved ones. The honest and good come out victorious in this poem, whereas the greedy and wealthy are usually portrayed as villainous empty shells.
Godwin also focuses especially on death, the acceptance of death, and what is left behind. “Introduction to the Wanderer’s Legacy” and “The Monk of Camaldoli” both have scenes highlighting what the dying characters will leave behind them. “The Turkish Tombs” shows images of lamenting wives over their husbands’ tombs, and “Ancient Cities” illustrates entire civilizations left in ruins. Works such as these highlight the destruction and pain that is sometimes left behind—all of which eventually is forgotten in the long course of history. “Destiny” tells the story of a man who goes to live in the wild so as to escape the death that took all of his brothers at a young age. Just as the reader comes to believe he is safe, he is killed at the same age as his brothers in a misunderstanding. “Then, booming o’er/ The gleaming waters, came destruction’s shower/ Towards that mistrustless shallop. Fate would not/ Be cheated of her victim—Oswald fell!” (196). Fate always wins. Everyone must die eventually. “The Arabian Mare” similarly tells the story of a horse that runs herself to death to save her master. As she dies, he is overtaken by his pursuers and also killed.
Of course, a final theme that runs throughout all of Godwin’s poems in this collection is the beauty and diversity of the world—the benefits of travelling and the things one sees while engaging with as much of the world as possible. While this element is represented in all of the aforementioned poems, this is where some of her more descriptive poems really come especially into play. “Shores of the Islands of Procita” describes the beautiful place the title names, noting that “Some golden memories…. They flow/ from the rich stores of Nature” (199). “The Blind Minstrel” similarly calls on the sense of hearing to convey similar images of beauty found in the strangest of places—“Music to him was life,/ And he was blest—that old, blind, wandering Bard” (240). Godwin goes on to list all the beautiful features of nature that he didn’t see in his wandering: “Heaven’s rich panoply/ Of crimson sunset, and the moon’s clear lamp/ Of crystal…” (240), concluding by observing that the sounds that remained in the blind bard’s memories were held just as dearly in his heart as any sights that had been denied him might have been. All of these themes help illustrate the morals and ideologies that Godwin finds important. She seems to take issue with the powerful and forceful and instead praises and cherishes the true of heart and the hardworking. She values beauty, nature and exploration. She seems almost to relish the inevitable reality that death is coming for us all and we are helpless in the face of that fact. Whether or not this is reflective of how she lived her own life, we may never know; however, these are the main themes and tones represented in this volume.
Overall, this collection of poems is haunting, diverse, beautiful, and somber. One has but to read any random line of any of the poems in this collection to appreciate Godwin’s descriptive prowess. She realistically captures moral struggles that many people of all times grapple with, making her writing timeless and exceptional. Although her characters and their experiences are wild and most likely largely imaginary, she still manages to draw her audience in. Her work welcomes the heartbroken, the scared and the lost, and offers them a haven. There were several instances where I literally couldn’t look away as her poem exploded to life in my mind. It is no wonder that Wordsworth allowed the collection to be dedicated to him, because the poems found here are all equally well written. Speaking straight to the hearts of the downtrodden, the damned, the adventurers, the persistent, the determined dreamers and many more, Godwin’s engaging work is not to be missed.
Prepared by Abbigail Mazour, University of Nebraska, April 2018.
© Abbigail Mazour, 2018.