Ryan D. Stewart and Dr. John Talbot, English

James Henry (1798-1876) was an Irish classicist most well known for his long and eccentric commentary of Virgil’s Aeneid—Aeneidea, or Critical, Exegetical and Aesthetical Remarks on the Aeneis—and known to some extent for his work as a physician and his penchant for pamphleteering. In the mid-1980s, however, Christopher Ricks—a prominent Victorian scholar—discovered a privately printed volume of Henry’s poetry “‘unopened’, as the book dealers say,” (meaning the pages had not been cut) as he was browsing the stacks at the Cambridge Library. He included some of Henry’s poetry in the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), which he edited. He went on to publish a selection of his favorite Henry poems in the Selected Works of James Henry (2002), which he also edited.

At the personal request of Ricks, my mentor was to put together an article on the influence that Henry’s classical studies had on his poetry. I first became interested in the project as Dr. Talbot described it to his class in which I was currently enrolled. I began to help him with this area of study, which developed into my own study of how Henry fit into the literary tradition of other British writers that wrote at the same time as he did.

Upon initial examination of Henry’s poetry, I suspected that he would fall somewhere into the tradition of other British Victorian poets of which he was a part. I expected that he would deal with issues that were common to poets of the Victorian era, such as religion, science, the reconciliation of religion and scientific discovery, industrialism, and common Victorian social concerns. I anticipated that he would treat these Victorian hot topics in a way that was similar to most other poets of the Victorian tradition. In this way, I expected that I would be easily able to place Henry in the Victorian period and find sufficient analogs among his Victorian contemporaries to provide fruitful and concise comparisons linking Henry to the current movement. However, as I got deeper into my research of James Henry’s poetry, I found him to be much more modern feeling.

Henry’s form is maybe the first indication of his modern feel. When compared to Alfred Tennyson’s ruminative, lofty iambic form in such poems as “Crossing the Bar,” Henry’s tumbling, almost bouncy trochaic form when talking about the same subject—death—seems odd. Both poems talk about death and how the poet imagines he will feel at the moment of death. In his grand, contemplative feeling iambic meter, Tennyson tells his readers that he would have no “sadness of farewell” because he hopes that he will see his “Pilot” (God) “face to face” and sail out to sea with him. Henry’s jaunty trochaic meter in the poem, “Death, I’d beg one favor of thee,” is a sharp contrast to Tennyson’s meter for the simple fact that trochaic and other falling meters have a tumbling, bouncy, sing-song quality when compared to Iambic and the rising meters, which seem more contemplative and deliberate. For this reason, Henry seems more modern in his treatment of death when he speaks of how he would have no farewells at all when he dies and the parting is forever, bouncing along in his trochaic meter. The coupling of such a serious topic and such a tumbling, bouncy rhythm is something much more common in modern poetry, generally speaking, than in Victorian poetry.

When compared to Swinburne, Henry once again seems to be gravitating toward a more bare modern style rather than the intricate, sometimes decadent style of the Victorians. Swinburne, in his “Dolores,” uses a complex and intricate meter that is often unvarying for several stanzas and couples it with rhymes that are very complex themselves. Swinburne is often not content to just rhyme the final sounds of his words, but—as is the case with this poem—he rhymes several sounds, even if his rhyme includes previous words. For example, in “Dolores,” he rhymes the word dolores with adore is. The final unstressed schwa sound and s are not enough for Swinburne, who also rhymes the preceding –ore in both lines. To do this demonstrates a carefully thought-out form that Swinburne often seems to value at the expense of theme. Henry’s language, in his poem, “Pain,” dealing with the same topic, is very pared down and absent of filigree when compared to Swinburne. He holds his perfect trochaic meter throughout, but cares nothing about rhyme, where Swinburne maintains a more complex meter and elaborate rhyme. This pared down style of Henry’s is more modern than Victorian.

Henry does indeed broach many of the same topics as his Victorian contemporaries. His poem “Man’s Universal Hymn” is atheistic and critical of Christianity in a way that is similar to many other writers of the time, such as the later work of Percy Shelley and the Bible criticism of George Eliot and others. However, while Shelley and Eliot seem deeply concerned with whether or not their religious questioning is well founded in their writing, Henry’s writing doesn’t have the same feel. He tumbles through his poem in headlong trochaics and a sarcastic style which presents an air of satire that makes his writing seem somehow less disturbed by the religious doubt so common to the time.

In this and other areas, Henry’s style and choice of topics suggest a more modern feel than that of his contemporaries. Whether Henry is more or less concerned about religious doubt in the Victorian era than other Victorian poets is up for debate, but that Henry’s writing seems less concerned than his contemporaries is sure. Additionally, Henry expresses the opinion that women and men should be treated equally—not terribly common to most male, pre-suffrage writers. Also, his medical pamphlets seem ahead of their time in suggesting moderation as the key to a healthy life, in opposition to many of his contemporary physicians. All of these elements suggest a more modern style by which Henry seems ahead of his time.

I have not yet entirely finished my study of James Henry’s poetry; however, I am collecting my research into a formal paper that will open up the first critical discussion on Henry’s poetry in relation to his British contemporaries. My intention is to polish this paper that it may be publishable in a professional literary journal. I hope to submit the paper to reputable journals in the near future and to possibly use the paper as a chapter for a Master’s thesis and/or Doctorate dissertation in the coming years.

References

• Christopher Ricks. “Introduction.” Selected Poems of James Henry. New York: Handsel Books, 2002 (17).
• Referring to lines 11 and 15 of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” respectively. Robert Hill, Jr., ed. Tennyson’s Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999
• These rhymes come from “Dolores,” lines 85 and 87 respectively. Swinburne, Algernon. Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon. ed. Kenneth Haynes. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.