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THE SENTIMENTAL POETESS IN THE WORLD: METAPHOR AND SUBJECTIVITY IN LYDIA SIGOURNEY'S NATURE POETRY by Annie Finch Published in Legacy, Fall 1987 
In the revision of American women's literary history that has been taking place over the past few decades, one important area has remained almost completely untouched. While novels, stories, and memoirs by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women are reissued and reappraised every year in mounting numbers, years after Cheryl Walker's The Nightingale's Burden and Emily Stipes Watts's history of American women's poetry, virtually no new revisionist work has been done on American women poets. Apparently, most scholars feel that there was no American woman poet worth reading between Wheatley and Dickinson, or between Dickinson and H.D. The usual explanations offered for this situation do not account for such monolithic neglect of a major part of the American poetic tradition. The dedication with which these literary silences have been respected-even by committed feminist literary historians-suggests that the very existence of this poetry fundamentally opposes our accepted ideas of poetic value. Typically, readers simply dismiss this literature out of hand as "sentimental," as if the label were a self-evident justification for the treatment-and in fact, to most contemporary ears "sentimental poetry" forms a contradiction in terms, a horrifying oxymoron. While sentimental American women novelists like Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and E.D.E.N. Southworth are finally receiving sympathetic and imaginative critical treatment, and work on Emily Dickinson burgeons as never before, "poetesses" like Lydia Sigoumey, Alice Cary, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Frances Osgood remain unread. When feminist scholars do discuss the work of poets like Sigourney, they almost invariably say, like Walker, that it is "amateurish" and "defies reassessment"; for Catherine Sklar, it is "weak" (65); for Susan Conrad, it is "cloying" and "monotonous" and shows "minimal artistic ability" (26). Emily Dickinson's relation with the sentimental tradition is evoked only to show how far she is superior to it. Why should the sentimental poets receive a different critical reception than the sentimental novelists? The alleged aesthetic "inferiority" of sentimental poetry is not a complete explanation, nor is the major shift in poetic taste between the centuries. Scores of "minor" poets of all periods are still anthologized and read, and popular male nineteenth-century poets such as Longfellow, Bryant and Whittier, who write very differently from the typical twentieth-century poetic taste, have remained anthologized and have even found sufficient critical defenders to keep them more or less respectable, or, at least, in print. Nor can the sentimental poets' moral and religious didacticism, conventionality, and limited subject matter fully explain their neglect. Their piety is no more cloying than that of novels like The Wide,Wide World or Uncle Tom's Cabin. Recent critics, like Jane Tompkins, have been able to surpass culturally determined differences in literary taste in examining these novels.4 Yet it is clear that even generally open-minded feminist critics, concerned with understanding rather than with ranking literature, feel perfectly free to pass sweepingly negative judgments on the poetesses. The usual rationales of cloying piety or conventional sentiments have little to do with the neglect of and contempt for these writers; their current reception stems instead from the unexamined assumption on the part of modern readers that all good or serious Iyric poets maintain a subjective, self-centered poetic "authority" in their poems. Before the era of free verse, a reader could classify a poem as such on the basis of its form; today, if a text lacks the central authority of an apparent ego- sometimes referred to as a "strong voice"-many would hesitate to call it a poem at all. This egocentic model of poetry is based on the male-defined poetic tradition of romanticism, within which many of the currently canonized female poets established themselves with great difficulty. Since the poetesses, for the most part, did not struggle with that tradition, they offer a gynocentric alternative model for critics of women's poetry. It is in recognition of this fact, as well as in an attempt to uncover the falsely universal aesthetic implied by the term "poet" in current usage, that I revive for the duration of this paper the discarded term "poetess." The study of poetesses- those writers whom even female poets themselves have hated and disowned- not only reveals an important and influential literary tradition, it helps us to rethink some of our most basic critical assumptions about the nature of poetry and the construction of the canon.
The female poets who have been accepted so far into both the mainstream and the feminist twentieth-century canons are taken seriously because their attempts to approach the world as poets are comprehensible within the definition of poetry we have inherited from the male Iyric tradition: although they may subvert and contradict the subjective Iyric "1," it remains crucial to their work. This is evident, for instance, in the studies by Dorothy Mermin on Barrett Browning, by Joanne Feit Diehl on Dickinson, and by Margaret Homans on Rossetti and Dickinson. Because contemporary mainstream women's poetry has reclaimed a central Iyric "l" for women, furthermore, these canonical female poets continue to be read and understood. In spite of major differences in attitude and subject matter, they share with most contemporary female poets (even if unwillingly) the fundamental belief that Iyric poems express a central self. This belief constitutes a definitional bias resulting in a canon of poetry that I will call "the subjective tradition." Typically in this tradition, a poet-speaker reads "meanings into the [literal or figurative} landscape" though always ultimately, to use Geoffrey Hartmann's phrase, "reaffirm[ing the mind's] autonomy vis-a-vis nature"(54). In the type of romantic Iyric that might be called the subjective nature poem, for example, "Ode to a Nightingale" by Keats, Sigourney's contemporary, a central self presents aspects of the world as unchanging objects whose exploration and description can cast light on the speaker's own changing state of mind. The poet-speaker is always the true subject of such Iyrics, in which, again to quote Hartmann, "Subjectivity-even solipsism-becomes the subject of poems which qua poetry seeks to transmute it." The sentimental American nineteenth-century poetesses did not as a rule struggle with this model of poetic subjectivity. Their poetry rarely projects the self into metaphorical readings of the world; it does not effuse from a "poet" in the traditional sense of a seer or "priest" for whom nature is important only insofar as it reflects the individual poetic soul (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 546). Instead, it is structured to allow the natural world an independent identity no less privileged than the poetic self.6 This lack of a privileged central self, in conjunction with the elevation of public, communally shared values such as religion and family love, is what gives their poetry that quality we have defined as "sentimental." Sentimental art exists primarily to evoke emotion (Todd 3), and it seems to presuppose a public community of viewers who will feel what the artist has intended them to feel. The presumption that the audience will react as planned is probably a major reason that contemporary viewers typically dislike sentimental art. The fear of being violated, of being known so intimately by an artist that one can be too obviously manipulated (not in the subtle, secret way of high art, but in a way that is embarrassingly evident to, and easily shared by, any other person), ties in with our fears of uncontrolled intimacy and, perhaps particularly for Americans, with our fears of losing individual power. Worse, sentimental art accomplishes this aim by reversing the crucial hierarchy of reason over emotion. Art that manipulates rational power in the service of communally sanctioned emotions (i.e., naturalistic but sentimental art) can be even more threatening to our individualized personalities than art that chooses to do without rationality altogether (i.e., abstract art). Sentimental art takes our common sense, the weapon we most strongly control, and uses it to undermine our sense of individual self. Such exploitation of reason for the sake of emotion may help to explain the violence with which educated people tend to discount sentimental art during periods when it is out of style, as well as the undercurrent of fear that often seems to accompany the aesthetic reaction, "Yucchk! That's corny!" Numerous works of popular art, including the paintings of Norman Rockwell as well as a host of nineteenth-century painters, are sentimental by the above definition. But it is in poetry, of all art forms, that sentimentality is hardest to accept, because it is there that the post-romantic reader most expects to find the central self reinforced. In contrast to a still-recognized poet like Longfellow, who might be called "sentimentalistic" because his communal, conventional themes appear in poems in which metaphors and Iyrical structures issue from a central poetic self, the nineteenth-century American poetesses wrote poems that are sentimental in structure as well as theme. Lydia Sigourney was the most popular of the large number of popular women poets in the nineteenth century. In her lifetime Sigourney published 56 books, some of which went through as many as 20 editions, and 2000 articles. At one point she received $100 for the publication of four poems (Walker 79). As a more popular poet in their time than William Cullen Bryant, Sigourney preceded Longfellow as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. Now, however, her poetry is not considered seriously as poetry; she is known to most feminist scholars as the absurd and contemptible versiber described by Ann Douglas in her critique of American funereal poetry in The Feminization of American Culture. In order to illustrate some fundamental strategies used by the poetess, I will examine several poems that Sigourney published in the 1830s and 1840s. Sigourney describes nature poetically, but without using it as mere raw material for her own central self-expression. Only when God plays an important role in Sigourney's poems do they approach the romantic Iyric model of a poet-speaker exploiting the world through objectification; even in these poems, however, God can function as much to objectify the poetess as to help her objectify the world, thus preserving the poetess' sentimental self-effacement. Since metaphor is an indicator of the subject/object relation within a poem, and hence a synechdoche for the way a poet positions her or his poetic self in relation to the world the poem describes, my reading of these poems will focus primarily on Sigourney's use of metaphor. I will discuss some of her nature poems, examples of a type of poem which, by the midnineteenth century, had largely replaced the love poem as the archetypal confrontation between the poetic self and the objectified world. In Sigourney's nature poems, the speaker frequently addresses, describes, or meditates alone on nature, thus providing the poetess ample opportunity to develop subjective romantic Iyric "insight" and to describe nature's transformations in relation to a central poet-self. But, in the vast majority of her poems, Sigourney avoids such self-oriented expressions, concerning herself instead with natural existence as something independent of the self. This fact is clearest on a structural level. While it is obvious that poems in the Western representational tradition almost inevitably "use" the world in the service of poetry, a typical Sigourney poem allows natural objects to speak in addition to the poetess. Though these other voices of course emanate from the poem's author, they function grammatically-and structurally, insofar as they interact with and affect the poetess' voice in the poem-as if they were independent of the poetess. If a subjective romantic Iyric can be diagrammed as a wheel radiating from one central point-one subject to whom all the perceptions occur and from whom all the language issues-, the structure of a Sigourney poem can be imagined as an interaction of lines emanating from two or more subjects. In Sigourney's "The Butterfly" (PO 143), for instance, two natural "objects" hold a conversation:
Structurally, because of its lack of a central poet-speaker, "The Butterfly" is a selfdefining, self-objectifying artifact, the poetic symbols of which objectify themselves in their own voices; it does not have the form of self-expression. The butterfly's voice carries the most authority here, not the poetess'; the butterfly even imposes its own metaphorical meaning onto the child, the only human in the poem. While it is obvious that the views expressed here are Sigourney's, structurally there is no self in this poem with whom the reader can identify at the expense of everything else in the poem. This poem does not provide a reader's ego with the vicarious emotional experiences of "To a Skylark" or "Ode to a Nightingale." Where the romantic poetic tradition leads readers to expect a poem to be an object passed between an authoritative subject-author and an authoritative subject-reader, such a communicative model is disrupted by the dialogic pattern of a sentimental poem like "The Butterfly." Rather than any characteristic of diction or theme, this is probably the major issue confronting those critics who find the poetess' work, to quote Susan Conrad, "lack[ing in] authority" [emphasis mine] (222). Not only does "The Butterfly" replace the poetic authority of the poet as "divine ruler" (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 212) by an encounter with the poet in the root sense-as a "maker"; it also replaces the inherent poetic "authority" of culturally sanctioned meanings with its own internal meanings, seeming to suggest that the symbolism created within its two stanzas is truer, within the poem, than any inherited symbolism. This approach is consistent with Sigourney's artificiality. Paradoxically, Sigourney's conventional religious beliefs, as opposed to Shelley's atheism, for instance, allow her to present her poems and their various allegories and metaphors as imaginative creations rather than as privileged symbolic representations of ineffable personal experience. This freedom with symbolic structures extends even to a Christian symbol: in "The Butterfly" the lily, a traditional Christian symbol of rebirth which might be expected to be on the child's grave for a significant reason, is described as having just "chanced" to grow there; its conventional meaning is resisted. The importance of such created symbolism is emphasized when Sigourney justifies the use of the butterfly as a symbol of transcendence not on her authority as a member of her culture or on her poetic authority, but on the "author"ity of the words she gives the butterfly itself to speak within the poem. The lily, perhaps because it has not helped to create its own significance within the poem but only inherited it, is ignorant, and the butterfly has the last word. To make clearer the radical differences in orientation between Sigourney's sentimental poetics and those of the canonized romantic tradition in America, we can turn to a romantic poem, "Thanatopsis," by William Cullen Bryant. A poem that was published two years before Sigoumey's first book, and the only poem by Bryant preserved in many American literature surveys today, it offers a good example of the subjective nature poem in America in the early nineteenth century. In this poem a feminized Nature directly solaces the speaker with her "voice of gladness," her "smile," and her "healing sympathy." The ocean is "melancholy," the vales "pensive," and the brooks "complaining." The poem's central conceit implies that all this is because the hills, woods, and waters are "but the solemn decorations all/of the great tomb of man." Nature seems equally available as a decoration for man's great poem. The appropriation of nature is subtler in Bryant's "To a Waterfowl": here the poet questions a waterfowl about its evening destination, allowing it some independent identity through the very fact of questioning it. In fact, however, the appropriation of the waterfowl into the poet's meaning-system remains the structuring force of the poem, as the questioning first section is resolved and balanced by the conclusion in which the poet finds out something about himself. At the end of the poem, after the poet has himself answered the questions that he asked the bird earlier and has taken the liberty of informing the bird where it is going-to "scream among thy fellows"-, he makes the poem's ultimate point:
The waterfowl's status as a vehicle has been clear since the moment when the poet answered his own questions himself. Rather than a confrontation with an independent creature, the address to the waterfowl turns out to be a way for the poet to get in touch with his own internal knowledge. Generally Sigourney does not transform nature, as Bryant does, into a book in which to read self-transforming meanings. On the other hand, neither does she disrupt referentiality altogether, as Margaret Homans has described Dickinson doing in order to avoid the patriarchal trap of romantic objectification ("Syllables" 583-86). Sigourney does use language referentially to talk about nature, but she accomplishes this without completely objectifying nature uis-a-uis the poetic self. Significantly, the 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. Aside from these exceptions, none of Sigourney's nature poems transforms natural objects in the service of the poetess' own concerns unless they make it clear that that is what they are doing. Such clarity is often attained through the use of those exaggerated figures which have given her work the epithet "artiLcial."9 The consciousness of artificiality is developed to great complexity near the end of "Autumn" (P 247), where several of the poem's symbols explicitly explain their own significance to the poetess (the complete texts of this and several other Sigourney poems discussed are appended below). Sigourney places the words spoken by the symbols in quotes:
Not only do the symbols describe their own meaning to the poetess; the phrase "ye say," which Sigourney has them address to her, indicates an additional level of selfconsciousness. The words emphasize that the symbolism occurs in the poetess' mind alone, and that the symbols do not seem to represent a truth outside the text of the poem. In other words, the poetess herself is aware that the meanings she sees in nature are constructed ones. This fact is not hidden in any way, but is one of the most apparent aspects of the poem. As a result, this poem cannot be deconstructed in the same terms as a romantic Iyric; the reader in a sense has nothing at all to lose by seeing through the arbitrariness of the poem's imaginary meanings, since the arbitrariness is built into the poem's most accessible surface. This point is reinforced by the poet in the line, "Yet ye still have a voice to the musing heart,/Tree, Stream and Rose..." [emphasis mine]. When the symbols proceed to give a moral at the end of the poem, it is clear that this metaphorical moral, "The soul that admits in an evil hour is not any extra-textual truth but only a further continuation of the poetess' very selfconscious musing. But, by putting the poem's meanings and morals into the voices of the natural objects rather than into her own voice, Sigourney has managed simultaneously to make it clear that all the meanings in the poem are obviously her own fictions and to avoid the subjective self that would be created if she were to draw these conclusions in a central human voice. By foregoing the illusion of unaffected communication about natural facts in favor of this extreme self-consciousness, Sigourney might be said to have avoided the kind of exploitation-of the poet, the natural world and the reader-which is built into the romantic Iyric. Sigourney's preservation of nature's independence is clearly evident in the many instances when the poetic speaker in her poems questions natural objects directly and repeatedly about their motives and perceptions. In "Autumn," for instance, almost every metaphor is embedded in direct questions such as, "Stream! why is thy rushing step delayed?" and, "Rose! why art thou drooping thy beautiful head?"-questions that Sigourney (unlike Bryant) never answers except with other questions. It is typical that in these examples, each appropriative act of personifying nature is in a sense counteracted by the unanswered question in which the metaphor appears. Nature is distanced and mystified as if in compensation for being poeticized. At times Sigourney's refusal to metaphorize nature in relation to a subjective poetic self is pushed to the point where the poetess (structurally speaking, although of course she remains the "subject" of the poem's discourse), must cross the boundary of subjectivity altogether and share in the role of the metaphorized object. In "Oak in Autumn" (PO 71) the speaker, as a "poet," is a natural and self-evident object with predictable attributes as much as is the tree she writes about:
Since poetic creation is a craft independent of the particular circumstances that inspired it, the poetess seems capable of casually entwining her "mesh" around any object without altering her own essential qualities. The other side of this naturalization and objectification of the speaker is that in "Oak in Autumn," as in many poems by Sigourney and the other poetesses, metaphors are presented as something highly negative. Each metaphor is a defeat for someone. The reason for this attitude becomes clear when it becomes apparent that the metaphors threaten the speaker herself: the poetess tries to remain the subject rather than the object of her metaphors, only to lose the battle eventually as winter arrives. The speaker describes the "frost-king," common enemy of both speaker and tree, with various personifications at the beginning of the poem, almost as if she thinks she can protect her chosen oak with this "mesh" of tropes. But when the frost wins, in spite of her poetic efforts, it becomes clear that metaphors are as deadly as frost in this poem. As the tree succumbs to frost it is metaphorized, for the first time, into a "banner-staff' marking the frost's victory. The poetess is next to fall: in the very next line, she herself is defeated by this aspect of the poetic process. Objectifying herself, the speaker describes herself with a single simile:
The poetess and the ostensible object of her poem, the oak of the opening address, have become so identified with each other that the defeat of the one to frost coincides with the loss of poetic "power" on the part of the other. Now that the tree and the poetess who identifies with it have been objectified, metaphorical references to the frost by the poetess are no longer possible, and there are no more of them in the poem. "The Dying Philosopher" is one of Sigourney's only nature poems in which a speaker does transform nature metaphorically throughout, according to subjective conventions. It is a rare male persona poem, and its speaker describes an intense romantic communion with nature:
The trees with their voices and fingers and the breeze that pities the philosopherspeaker could almost have come out of "Thanatopsis." "The Dying Philosopher" ends with a Shelleyan yearning as, in the final lines, the philosopher addresses to the stars his desire to transcend them:
Sigourney's equivalent of the romantic epiphany is almost always a Christian meditation; this kind of explicit interest in sublime transcendence is very rare in her work. The fact that "The Dying Philosopher" does metaphorize nature unrestrainedly suggests not only that the male persona gives Sigourney greater access to romantic subjectivity, but also that her Christian orientation might help her, in the majority of her poems, to preserve nature's independence. In sharp contrast to the poetess, who hardly enters her poems as a subject at all, God in Sigourney's poems is simultaneously an overarching subjectivity like the self in subjective poetry and an ultimate mysterious object, structurally similar to nature, truth, beauty, or the beloved in subjective poetry. This aesthetic function of God may help to explain the vital importance of religion for nineteenth-century American women in general. As well as giving them social and psychological power, Christianity provided, in the form of God as ultimate object and subject, a c.oncept against which to structure their own subjecthood or, paradoxically, to reclaim their own socially structured objecthood as a spiritually significant and ahistorical condition. One function of the God that often appears in Sigourney's poems is to carry the objectification that the poetess might otherwise have to impose on the natural world. Because this frees the poetess from concern about objectifying nature, the poems with religious subtexts directly involving God are often among the most subjective of Sigourney's nature poems. "The Deep," for instance, is one of the relatively few poems by Sigourney in which the poetess speaks in the first person as herself, using the pronoun "1." The poem is therefore structurally much closer to a romantic Iyric than is a poem in her typical second- or third-person voice or even a persona poem like "The Dying Philosopher." The association of the sea with God in "The Deep" also allows the poetess-speaker to sustain an unusually long and metaphorically loaded series of questions in which she compares the sea to God's weaving, sculpture and treasure without any of the usual compensations or qualifications for such metaphorization. Furthermore, although in a nature poem more typical of Sigourney the speaker would not answer her own questions, here the presence of God provides answers. The answers, which refer to God rather than to the poetess, do not seem to be projections of the poetic self as Bryant's answers do, however; they consist of the ambiguous phrase "One reply!" and other, loaded questions: ". . . but one answer? of that One Dread Name? . . ." Paradoxically, the same God that allowed Sigourney to sustain such unusual subjectivity becomes an objectifying ultimate subject himself by the end of this poem. This question-poem's only statement after the opening occurs in its last stanza:
With the "of" of the poem's last line, the subject/object ambiguity becomes grammatically evident: the poetess at the same time desires to learn about God, thus preserving her subje*ive centrality, and from God, now become the poem's other subject, and, one may assume, a more powerful subject than the poetess. The relationship between God and the sea described in the latter reading is one of ventriloquism and manipulation. It suggests, by analogy, a still greater objectification of the poetess: it is as if even in the process of learning about God she will remain, when contrasted with God's greater subjectivity, only a part of nature. In "Niagara," probably the most anthologized and one of the most complex of Sigourney's poems, God's double role as both subject and object is more obvious and more extended than it is in "The Deep." "Niagara" highlights, and unwinds to their ultimate unresolvable conflicts, the difficulties faced by Sigourney's poetic persona in a highly "poetic" subjective situation: the poetess addresses, in the first person, the famous waterfall that was for her culture a widely appropriated symbol of nature's sublime power. In the first stanza, confusion between the appropriate roles for the poetess and the waterfall in this poetic situation are already evident. Which is the subject and which is the object; who is in control of the meanings in this text? The waterfall is described as resistless; if this word is meant in the sense of "unresisting," then how does the water remain "unfathomed"? If it is resistless in the sense of "irresistible," then how is the poetess able to command it? The next adjectives used to describe the waterfall, "terror and beauty," give a clue to this dilemma that underscores the compassion the poetess might feel for a natural object that shares the woman's role of fetishized icon as well as pointing out her participation in the opposing, subjective conventions of romantic nature poetry: the robe "of terror" could mean not only that the waterfall inspires terror but that as an object it is terrified, perhaps because of its very beauty, its objectifiable sublimity. Perhaps the speaker here leaves the waterfall unfathomed out of compassion for it. As the poem proceeds, the sense of the waterfall's subjectivity increases until, like the frost in "Autumn," it overtakes the poetess' own subjectivity. When God clothes the falls in a wreath and mantle in the first stanza-as if, one might think, to further objectify them-he counteracts this by giving them, at the same time, a subjective voice. The waterfall is able to speak one thing with this voice-a "hymn" of "him", with God being the ultimate object at this point in the poem. This makes the waterfall more subjective than either the earth or the ocean, both of which are feminized in comparison with it at this point: (the earth explicitly, the ocean implicitly as it shrinks from brotherhood and plays a parental role towards its billows). But while the waterfall's subjectivity increases, the poetess' reaches a crisis and declines. The crucial moment occurs as her description of the environment around the falls reaches the birds. Unlike the earth water and plants the poetess has described previously, the birds present themselves to her as clear subjects in relation to the waterfall: "bold they venture near, dipping their wing." The poetess at first objectifies the birds anyway, however, carried away by the momentum of her second-person address to the waterfall: she includes the birds in her description without any compensatory poetic devices such as unanswered questions or metaphorization of herself. The poetess's awareness that the act of objectifying the birds has situated her within the subjective poetic tradition is apparent in the phrases "for us" and "our pencil's point" (which replace the earlier "lip of man," a lip from which the poetess as a female might conceivably have disassociated herself, even in the nineteenth century). Just at this point in the poem, however, when the poetess'subjective authorial voice is strongest, her subjectivity begins to turn in on itself. The remarks about poetry's futility signal the beginning of a retreat. The sole God-given "voice" in this poem is, after all, not the poetess' but the waterfall's. In the short last stanza, God and the waterfall begin to function in place of the poetic self and actually to objectify the poetess in a subtle way. The phrase "Thou dost speak alone of God" can be read to mean not only that the falls speak only of God but that only the waterfall is entitled to speak of God, so that the poetess should be silent, an object rather than a subject in her poem. At the same time, paradoxically, such objectification of herself from the waterfall's perspective gives the poetess a Godlike subjective authority in the poem: since the waterfall can only speak of God the poetess, as an object of the waterfall's speech in the poem, must become God-which, as the creator of this poem she in fact is, inside the poem. The connection between the poetess and God is emphasized by the reference to God's right hand, evoking a writer's hand; it is possible to read the statement "Thou dost speak/ Alone of God, who pour'd thee as a drop/From his right-hand" as a reference to the writer creating the waterfall within the poem. As her double roles of object and subject develop simultaneously, the poetess' authority and her lack of it are conflated, at the end of the poem, into an internalized version of the transcendent, ineffable sublimity that she might, in a subjective poem, have been expected to project outwards onto the great waterfall. The subject of the verb "bidding" in the final sentence, "Thou cost speak/Alone of God . . . bidding the soul . . . be still" can be read as either "Thou" or "God." If the subject of the verb is "Thou, " then the waterfall closes the poem by asking the poetess' soul, the soul that looks on its fearful majesty, to be still, to remember her own "nothingness," her own objectification, and to stop writing about the world. If the subject of the verb is "God," however then the lines describe God telling both the poetess, as reader of the waterfall, and the reader of the poem to be still. The poetess implores the reader not to objectify her while reading her poem, begging that the reader be wrapped in her or his own nothingness and become one with the God that the poetess is able to objectify, and that is already contained within her poem. At the same time, the God in the poem also bids the poetess, "the soul that looks/Upon" the waterfall in the poem, to be still. The poetess' fears of the assertions involved in nature poetry, both the fears of violating and exploiting nature and the apparently consequent fears of being violated and exploited by readers, have been acffvated during the poem. The sublime romantic epiphany here is not so much something that the reader watches the poetess experience as something that occurs in the lack of consistent distinctions between subjects and objects in the poem-a process in which the reader participates by simultaneously identifying with and objectifying the poetess, the waterfall and God. Many of the exquisite difficulties with poetic objectification apparent in the above reading of "Niagara" are contingent, I think, on the poetess' project in this particular poem: to find meaning in an accepted, culturally acknowledged symbol of the sublime that was commonly supposed to inspire private epiphanies. To the extent that it communalized noncommunal emotion, the waterfall must have put the sentimental attitude to a severe test. The speaker in this poem, privileging a socially santioned feeling of awe in the face of natural power, finds that it does not bind her to her society in a nonindividuated nonegotistical way like the emotions of Christian faith and parental or filial love usually expressed in sentimental poetry of the period; instead, she is thrown by the already existent structure of this awe into the middle of a current of romantic ego. As if in a gesture of defense, "Niagara," unlike the majority of Sigourney's nature poems introduces God blatantly at its beginning. The poetess' subsequent continued attempt at a grand manner in treating a natural object puts her into repeated and direct confrontation with the very poetic processes that she generally avoids. The tension in this poem already prefigures, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the conflict between the sentimental and romantic attitudes that would later structure many of Dickinson's nature poems. Perhaps because of its encounter with romanticism, "Niagara" is, as I have said, currently Sigourney's best-known poem in spite of the fact that it is quite uncharacteristic of her work. In other poems which are less concerned with the poetic process, like "The Coral Insect" (P 167) Sigourney's attitude toward nature is free of such concerns and, in turn, frees nature to be the subject, not the object, of her poem. This true nature poem addresses the mystery of the coral's independent existence-including its possible allegorical celebration of human persistence-without filtering the experience through the drama of an individual human "1." And, far from suffering triteness or amateurishness due to its lack of a central poetic self, "The Coral Insect" seems to be freed by its relinquishing of romantic conventions: the exultant rhymes and triple rhythms reveal a contagious delight in the poetic imagination. In this essay, the definition of the sentimental poetic tradition rests largely on negatives: the absence of a central poetic self and the avoidance of the unequivocal metaphorization of nature. The qualities in Sigourney's poems that do not "succeed" according to prevalent aesthetic standards have been defined in terms of those standards nonetheless, rather than in their own terms. Perhaps this procedure is unavoidable at a time when critical discussion of poetry is so dominated by the assumptions of the subjective tradition that it is difficult to perceive poems from any other perspective. But I hope that before too long it will be possible to see the sentimental tradition as a literary movement in its own right, as a movement having its own roots, its own aesthetics, its own world-view, and its own inheritors. Lydia Sigourney, 1842
NotesI would like to thank Joanne Dobson and Martha Ackmann for their careful reading of this essay and their helpful suggestions on all levels of revision, as well as Jay Fliegelman for his consistent encouragement. 2 During the first half of the twentieth century, the few critics who wrote about Sigourney were only slightly less condescending than contemporary cntics. Even Haight's lengthy discussion of her work in the biography, while acknowledging her "sweetness of versification," spends most of its time analyzing the "absurdities" of her style (92). Also see Collin, Green, and Jordan. For scholarship connecting Dickinson with the poetesses, see Dobson and St. Armand. 3 See for example Hyatt J. Wagoner's introduction to Whittier and Gelpi on Bryant. 4 See Tompkins's chapters on Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Wide, Wide World and Douglas's introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin. 5 For a recent discussion of female poets' hatred of the sentimental tradition, see Gilbert and Gubar's "Forward into the Past" (255-56). 6 Certain sentimental poems such as Frances Osgood's "Oh! Hasten to My Side!" or Alice Cary's "The Bridal of Woe" do seem "egocentric" in that they explicitly concern the self's moods and thoughts. These poems anticipate the later development of the poetess tradition as it became increasingly interiorized in the work of such writers as Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Sara Teasdale. To the extent that the religion of romantic love replaces that of Christianity in the poetess tradition, poetesses concentrate more on the individual self. Crucial differences, however, separate even their self-concerned love poems from poems in the subjective tradition. ln the poetess tradition, the self tends to be perceived (and metaphorically described) in terms of the natural world rather than the natural world being perceived in terms of the self. The result is that the self and its moods are created and presented to the reader almost as a kind of natural object or landscape, in a movement very different from the encompassing of external reality typical of the subjective tradition. 7 To this statement Fetterley adds, "she made poetry an acceptable and profitable profession for women" (107). 8Hereafter, P will refer to Sigoumey's Poems, PO to Pocohontas and Other Poems and SP to Select Poems. 9 Two recent theories of feminist aesthetics illuminate Sigourney's recognition of nature's separateness and her conventionality. Schweickart has postulated a feminist model of reading which features an intersubjective construction
Sigourney's attitude toward nature in those poems where she questions it can be compared to the attitude of the feminist reader in this model; nature preserves its interiority and difference, while the poetess as reader puts much more emphasis on the mysteries of nature than on her own response. Sigourney's "artificiality" is illuminated by Elaine Showalter's essay "Piecing and Writing." Showalter makes a connection between the "strongly marked American women's tradition of piecing, patchwork, and quilting" and the structures of contrast and repetition in some nineteenth-century women's texts (223). The patchwork quilt, which incorporates scraps of various already-woven fabrics into a new design, is a useful figure for Sigourney's artificial, conventional nature poems. In an aesthetic much like that of the patchwork quilt, the poems combine inherited idioms and cliches in new ways, not for the sake of realistic representation, but for function-financial, artistic and often moral-and for decorative abstraction Margaret Homans has pointed out that "the romantic Iyric depends on an implicit plot, the plot of male heterosexual desire" ("Syllables" 583-86). Following Iragary, Homans sees the processes of both metaphorizing and linguistic representation itself as hierarchical and essentially masculine (I would say, pahriarchal) while the referent and the vehicle of a metaphor are "categorically feminine" (572-73). Following Homans, we can postulate that the poetess' discomfort with metaphorizing nature is intimately connected with a consciousness that they, as women, are habitually metaphorized as part of nature and that, in the larger context, "appropriation is the relationship between the self-centred Romantic speaker or poet and the feminine objects about which he writes" (Women Writers 37). "The fact that other Christian poets, such as Rossetti (see "Amor Mundi" or "A Rose Plant in Jericho") and Hopkins (see "The Caged Skylark" or the figure of evening in "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves") found it possible to metaphorize nature in the service of Christianity leads me to believe that Christianity did not lead Sigoumey not to metaphorize nature. Rather, it provided her with a means not to do so. (Even in poems by Sigourney that almost seem like religious metaphors, like "Midnight Thoughts at Sea" (PO 149) or "Hymn at Sea" (PO 119), the storms and waves are in fact literal.)
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