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Poetic Self in the Poetess Tradition

            One of the most important ways that poetess poetry differs from Romantic poetry is in the poet's treatment and positioning of the poetic speaker or "self."  Romantic poems enable the reader to identify with a strong central poetic speaker who appropriates nature and the world as a vehicle for accessing the poet's own emotions.   In John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale, " for example, the speaker's self provides the sole locus of subjectivity in the poem.  Similarly, in William Cullen Bryant 's "Thanatopsis," where a feminized Nature solaces the speaker with her "voice of gladness," her "smile," and her "healing sympathy,"  the existence of nature is refracted through the lens of the poet's individual self.  Poetess poems, on the other hand, allow nature and the world a more independent existence.  Poetesses over the centuries developed several methods to achieve a balance among subjectivities within their poems.  Innovative (from a Romantic point of view) approaches to metaphor played a key role in this central achievement of Sentimentism.

            Lydia Sigourney is typical of the Sentimentist poetesses in that she rarely personifies or even metaphorizes natural objects in order to make statements about her own feelings.  Her poems are not organized around a central poetic subject or ego, but instead attribute an independent subjectivity, often conventionalized, to nature:  “Then the sea answer’d--”spoils are mine / From many an argosy, / And pearl-drops sleep in my bosom deep, / But naught have I there for thee.” They lend to natural objects voices and identities separate from that of the speaker, who may even address them directly:  “Yes, we have need of thee; / thanks, tree of sympathy.” Perhaps because the poetess, usually a woman, was used to being objectified herself, the speakers in poetess's poems do not take on the role of objectifying central bard.  Significantly, the very few poems in which Sigourney does use nature as a device to describe a central human state are poems celebrating public institutions or involving male speakers, such as the patriotic poem "Connecticut River" (P 13) with its theme of "devotion" for the "fatherland, " or "The Dying Philosopher" (SP 245), in which she adopts the voice of a male persona.

            In the work of early poetesses such as Sigourney, Christianity can play a key role in the Sentimentist approach to nature.  In such poems, God takes on the role of the Romantic subjectivity, and the speaker along with all the poem's human and natural characters are equally objectified in relation to God‚—-called by Sigourney the "One Dread Name."   In a later, less religious poetess such as Helen Hunt Jackson, other strategies allow nature its freedom.  One technique is for the poetess to assert the power to describe nature, while in the same poem undercutting or contradicting her own power.  In Jackson's "The Wall-Flower of the Ruins of Rome," for example, the speaker attributes human qualities to the flower, but the poem ends with a qualification:  "the whole of thy deep spell / I cannot fathom, and thou wilt not tell."   Because of such strategies, a reader of these Sentimentist poems takes away not so much a sense of the power of the poet's self,  as a sense of that which Dickinson might call "Circumference": a world of endless and equal entities in which the poetic "I" is not necessarily more privileged than any other self.

            An even more complex strategy of self-presentation occurs in the work of some early-twentieth-century poetesses.  Though the  lyric self and its emotions are an increasing concern of poetesses of this period, the speaker of such poems does not express her emotions by making metaphors about nature.  Instead, she objectifies herself.  With the projected reader or listener taking on the role of the lover, the speaker of such poems prevents the addressee from metaphorizing her, instead making herself into a wave, a river, a storm, a candle, or a tree, as in the following lyric by Sara Teasdale:

My heart is heavy with many a song
Like ripe fruit bearing down the tree,
But I can never give you one—
My songs do not belong to me.

Yet in the evening, in the dusk
When moths go to and fro,
In the gray hour if the fruit has fallen,
Take it, no one will know.

              Sara Teasdale, “My Heart is Heavy” (1918)

            Through the techniques of  entering in dialogue with nature, the qualifiication of lyric insights, and self-metaphor, the speaker of a Sentimentist lyric refuses to act the part of the central bardic Romantic poet-speaker.  Instead the Sentimentist lyric enacts, through the structure of its own voices, a communal and compassionate multiplicity of subjectivities.