Author: Norton, Caroline (1807-77)
Title: The Sorrows of Rosalie. A Tale. With Other Poems.
Date: 1829
Descriptive and Crittical Essay
The title page of Caroline Norton’s The Sorrows of Rosalie. A Tale; and Other Poems opens with a quote from Lord Byron’s work, The Giaour.
Gayer insects fluttering by
Ne’er droop the wing o’er those that die;
And lovelier things have mercy show To every failing but their own;
And every woe a tear can claim, Except an erring sister’s shame.
The quote expresses a theme within the title poem “The Sorrows of Rosalie” about the lack of compassion shown by society towards an unwed mother.
The book opens with an address “To Lord Holland,” Henry Vassall Fox, the 3rd Baron of Holland (1773-1844), a Whig political figure, demonstrating Norton’s affiliation with Whig politics:
Taught in the drawing of life’s joyous years
To love, admire, and reverence thy name,
Though of youth’s feelings few remain the same;
And the dim vista of its hopes and fears
Memory hath blotted out, with silent tears:—
Still in its brightness, even as then it came,
Lined with the half-remembered tales of fame:
That word before my darkened soul appears,
Bringing back lips that speak and smile no more.
Spurn not my offering, then, from that bright shrine
Where hope would place it; but for those of yore
Permit her name, who trembles o’er each line,
In its oblivion to be shadowed o’er
By the bright happy gloriousness of—Thine! (v)
Norton then addresses the readers of the poem in a serious of five rhymed stanzas, each ten of lines and following the style and rhyme scheme of the title-poem, “The Sorrows of Rosalie,” causing this poem to seem like an extension of the earlier poem, though they are listed before the table of contents of the work. These stanzas have a moralistic tone, challenging readers to repent of their sins and avoid temptation, showing that Norton does not wish the reader to believe she is commending the actions of her heroine.
I.
Oh, ye for whom this tale of woe is told,
Who tempest-tost on passion’s stormy deep,
Too weak for virtue, yet in vice not bold,
Irresolutely turn away and weep:
Deep in your torn and wavering bossom keep
One love, beyond all others;—’tis a love
Shall never cost you tears, or bid you sleep
Less calmly on your couch, lest it should prove
A vain and faithless dream by wander fancy wove. (vii)
Norton goes on to condemn those who lead others into sin, though she also encourages the reader to take pity those who fall into temptation rather than condemn them.
The first half of the body of poetry begins with “The Sorrows of Rosalie,” a long narrative poem, followed by a series of shorter poems. The poems in this half of the volume deal with the theme of romantic love, the majority of these dealing with stories of tragic separation or unrequited love.
The title-poem, “The Sorrows of Rosalie,” the only long narrative poem in the volume, is divided into three parts and taking up 77 pages. Each of the stanzas in the poem is ten lines, each numbered with a roman numeral and following the same strict rhyme scheme (ABABBABCC). The first part of the poem mirrors the address to the reader:
I.
Ye marble-hearted ones, whose sighs and tears
Are granted only to a gilded woe—
Whose sick and misdirected pity fears
To look on all that penury can show,
When guilt and want have made a hell below;
In whom the unreal mockeries of the stage
Alone can wake a momentary glow;
Whom griefs impossible, and mimic rage,
Far more that sorrow’s truth and wan disease, engage (3)
Norton blurs the lines between her address to the reader in the beginning of the volume and Rosalie’s address to the reader as the first-person narrator of the poem. The first part of the narrative follows Rosalie’s life living with her father in their idealistic home, her fall for Arthur, and her inner struggle over whether or not to leave her father and run away with Arthur. The second part chronicles Arthur’s disappearance, the birth of her son, and her devastating discovery that Arthur has subsequently married another woman and has no love for her. The third part is the most tragic, as Rosalie discovers her father has died, and she is forced (out of poverty) to beg until she resorts to stealing food for her child and is arrested. Her infant son dies while they are in prison, and the poem ends with Rosalie living in solitary and repentant piety, with God as her sole reliance. As happens also in other Romantic-era poetry, the poem’s references to nature and natural imagery are reflective of Rosalie’s emotional state, such as the “wilderness, a desolate heath” (27) associated with Arthur’s leaving, “blue lightning” (51) which strikes at a time of anxiety, and the “gleamy sun” (67) setting during her final appeal for mercy. Norton also often uses dashes and exclamation points to add immediacy and emotional intensity to the poem, as for instance in the scene in which Rosalie decides to steal food:
XLIII.
I seized it—fled—behind me rose a shout—
On!—on!—my trembling knees could scarce sustain
The weight above—near, nearer came the rout—
On! On!—oh! shall the effort be in vain?
A few yards more, then would end my pain—
I reached a shop—flung down the cross, and said,
“Food for my child!” I could no more restrain
My weakness and my woe—I snatched the bread,
Gave it to him, and sunk lifeless, unconscious, dead! (71)
Though the emotional intensity of the text could easily cause “The Sorrows of Rosalie” to fall into excessive sentimentality, Norton for the most part often captures the emotions of her protagonist without resorting to bathos. Thus, Rosalie is an empathetic character and, unusually, despite the fact she experiences great losses, she does not fall into the often clichéd tropes of insanity or death, but ends her story in melancholy peace.
The following shorter poems also deal with tragic love, with “Elvira; A Fragment” about a female protagonist crazed by unrequited love, “The Young Crusader” about a crusader haunted by the memories of the Moorish women he once loved, and “Linda Alhaya,” which is about the protagonist’s unrequited love for Linda Alhaya. Two translated poems also appear in this portion of the text, one from a French poem “Le Ranz Des Vaches” (both French and English versions appear in the book) which appears to be a translation of a poem of the same title from James Montgomery’s The West Indies and Other Poems (1810.) Two more poems, “Che Di Vos E Di Me Diran?” and “Verdad! Verdad!,” are described as “From the Spanish,” (90) though I could not find the original poems. “The One You Loved the Best,” “To____,” “While I Think of You, Love!,” and “I Would the World Were Mine” also continue the theme of romantic love, but with unknown subjects as opposed to characters and a variety of tones. “The One You Love Best” and “To____” both seem to be voiced by female characters whose love is unrequited, as can be seen in this excerpt from the former:
Once lost—that gladsome vision past—a fairer form may rise
And eyes whose luster mocks the light of story souther skies;
But vainly seek you to enshrine the charmer in your breast,
For still the one you loved the first, she you loved the best. (94)
Only “While I Think of You, Love!,” and “I Would the World Were Mine” are actual love poems. Though there is not a direct break in the volume, the poems following these two mark a thematic turning point in the volume to poems on a wider array of subjects, most commonly death, childhood and sadness. “To a Blind Child” is especially bleak:
Thou wreck of human hopes! whose darkened eyes
No more behold the blue and sunny skies,
Doomed in they joyous childhood’s early day
Blindly to grope along they cheerless way;
Ere yet the bitter tear of sorrow streaming
Had clouded those sweet orbs, or summed their beaming
It was foretold that fate—and now, alas! (101)
The poems following are almost exclusively about death and melancholy. “Love and Marriage” provides the only break in this theme, with Norton describing, possibly autobiographically, a woman in an unhappy marriage. She runs away with the cousin of her husband, only for them to fall out of love, and for her to die while her lover lives happily ever after with someone else.
The poem “Thy Will Be Done” is a poem that grapples with the themes of death and suffering found in the previous poems, but here on a more distinctly spiritual level: Christianity appears throughout the address to the reader and title-poem of the volume. Norton’s poem is not without tension:
Thy will be done!—the faltering lips deny
A passage to the tones as yet unheard;
The sob convulsed, the raised and swimming eye,
Seem as as appealing to their God on high
For power to breath the yet imperfect word. (125)
Norton is most focused on the problem of suffering, addressing orphans, widows, bereaved mothers; her answer to their distress ultimately is submission to divine will. The following poems are more peaceful, though tinged at times with some melancholy, such as “Music’s Power,” which deals with music’s ability to provoke nostalgia, as can be seen in this excerpt:
When sitting in your silent home,
You gaze around and weep,
Or call to those who cannot come,
Nor wake from dreamless sleep;
Those chords, as oft as you bemoan
“The distant and the dead,”
Bring dimly back the fancied tone
Of some sweet voice that’s fled! (133)
With her typical emotional poignancy, Norton addresses common themes of loss and nostalgia, which is especially devastating after all the poetry about losing loved ones. After such a poem, the last two poems in the book, “But thou!” and “I Do Not Love Thee!,” seem jarring and out of place. Their raw and accusative tone almost seems as though they should have been placed earlier in the book. This odd choice in placement is one of the few weaknesses in Caroline Norton’s work, which is otherwise a skilled work of poetry.
Though the work plays to themes that were especially popular in poetry in the Romantic Era, Caroline Norton is an effective poet and is able to express emotion without being overly-sentimental or clichéd, and The Sorrows of Rosalie is definitely a work worthy of appreciation in the 21st century.
Prepared by Molly Noel, University of Nebraska, April 2018.
© Molly Noel, 2018.