Author: Porter, Anna Maria (1780-1832)
Title: Ballad Romances, and Other Poems.
Date: 1811
Descriptive and Critical Essay
Anna Maria Porter’s poems cover many topics including life, death, youth, and happiness. Her 1811 collection is comprised of ballad romances and miscellaneous poems, and they take forms of either traditional stanzaic poems or sonnets. The ballad romances focus heavily on a built-up narrative storyline. Poems such as “Eugene,” “Lord Malcolm,” and “The Prince of the Lake” tell stories of youthful couples finding their way to and through the afterlife.
In the case of “Eugene,” Porter describes a young child who has died and is experiencing the afterlife in a way that it isn’t traditionally thought of among conventional society. Though many who survive him mourn the death of Eugene, a young boy gone too soon, Porter describes him as now reveling in the new post-mortal world he has discovered and which he may not yet fully understand. Eugene’s grieving family leaves flowers on the young boy’s grave, symbolizing their attempt to make the ugly subject of his death at least more attractive to themselves.
Porter writes a great deal about death and its consequences as well as its rewards. The theme of death carries through to another poem in the ballad romances section, “Lord Malcolm”. This poem is about a Lord who has to go off to war leaving behind his fair lady, Jessie, in order to fight for his kingdom. During his absence Jessie dies and is buried alone without him to look after her. However, while he is engaged on the battlefield, Malcolm notices a voice guiding his path and influencing the decisions that led him there. He notices this presence for weeks and months despite the fact that Jessie has only just died a few days before the battle has ended. The spirit that followed him all that time, it turns out, was his own premonition of his love’s death. This phenomenon of a carrying-over of a spirit is present in some way in almost all of the poems included in Ballad Romances.
Spirits passing through the world of the living is in fact a common theme in Porter’s work. In “The Prince of the Lake,” Lady Anne’s husband has gone off to war and left her to cope with their separation. Soon she is retrieved by a warrior who leads her to her husband’s bed on the dormant battlefield. She sleeps by the man whom she thinks is her husband, only to awaken and realize that it is not her husband but his ghost beside her. This spirit convinces her that life is better on the spirit’s side and coaxes her to join him.
Porter plays with the confines of life and death in almost all of her poems, as the aforementioned examples have proven. Although her poems range over a great variety of subjects, this preoccupation with the nature and influence of the spirit world appears repeatedly in those poems.
A few selected Research Resources
"Anna Maria Porter." ENGLISH POETRY 1579-1830: SPENSER AND THE
TRADITION. JSTOR, spenserians.cath.vt.edu/BiographyRecord.php?action=GET&bioid=36526. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018
"Anna Maria Porter." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Maria_Porter.
Accessed 24 Apr. 2018
"Jane and Anna Maria Porter English Romantic Novelists." History's Women. http://www.historyswomen.com/thearts/Porters.htm. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018
"Porter, Anna Maria (1780–1832)." Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia.
Encyclopedia.com. 24 April. 2018, http://www.encyclopedia.com.
Prepared by Meghan McAuliffe, University of Nebraska, Spring 2018
© Meghan McAuliffe, 2018