[i]The boy stood on the burning deck
Eating peanuts by the peck;
His father called, he would not go
Because he loved those peanuts so. (“Poetry”)
“The boy stood on the burning deck” by James E McConnell
If you did not know the history behind these lines, you would probably assume it is a poorly-written nursery rhyme. A parody of the poem “Casabianca” that originally narrates a boy dying for his country in war, the verse preserves only the first line of the heroic ballad. But at least the poet, Felicia Hemans, would be pleased to know that her poetry has endured—not only endured, but took on a life of its own that she could not have imagined. How did this transformation happen? How can it be that a poem that addressesthe solemn subject of nationalism gave rise to such farcical parodies? It seems that whatever the readers thought when they wrote the parodies, their understanding of the poem is drastically different from how it was first perceived.
[ii]The answer is simple: a change in readership. Initially published in 1826 in a British literary magazine that had about 5,000 readers, the poem was only moderately received (“Monthly”). But shortly after Hemans’s death, the poem was selected as recitation material for British elementary school children and became the most anthologized work in nineteenth-century textbooks (Robson, “Standing” 151). School children, memorizing and reciting “Casabianca” without knowing the Mrs. Hemans who wrote the poem or her intentions in writing the poem, were free to interpret it (or not interpret it since the main goal was memorization and not actually analysis) as it appeared to them. Reading and reciting the poem aloud bring forth a distinctive feeling of excitement that otherwise would have been buried under the heavy content. Imagine that you’re a fourth-grader and read aloud the following stanza:
They wrapped the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky. (29-32)
Reading aloud really magnifies the energy in the iamb “ti-dum ti-dum ti-dum” meter (Robson, “Standing” 158). The rhythm naturally drives you forward into the next as if you were singing along with beat music. The innate vitality in the meter, therefore, renders the task of memorization more exciting and pleasurable. The simple and straightforward rhymes also make the poem relatively easy to remember, certainly easier than the lines from Shakespeare that the children also needed to learn (Robson, Heart Beats 90). Furthermore, words such as “spendour” and “gallant”, combined with the image of the flag flying high in the sky, convey the sense of pride that the children could relate to when they successfully recited the lines in the front of their class. Even if the poem is about death and contains more somber words such as “despair,” the beats and affirmative adjectives transform the poem from an account of death to a celebration of courage to be enjoyed with pleasantly familiar rhythms. It does not matter that the “they” in these lines refer to the flames that eventually consume the child—better yet, the image of flames surrounding the boy dramatizes him as romantic hero figure to be idolized.
Certainly we cannot blame the school children for “misinterpreting” the poem. After all, the children were free to think about the poem in whatever way that appealed to them regardless of what Felicia Hemans wanted to convey. Moreover, we cannot even know Hemans’s intentions to judge whether the children were misreading (or misreciting) it or not. But how “free” were the children in understanding the poem, presuming that they did at least have some sense of what the poem is about? And if the children really did not have any idea about the message of the poem, how much of their failure to grasp meaning resulted from their own incapability to comprehend because of young age? To answer these questions, we need to trace the chain of events that led the majority of children from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries to come in contact with the poem in the first place.
Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented boom in education that resulted from a series of education reforms. These reforms were largely influenced by the social and political climate at that time and especially by the dramatic rise of the working class. From only a few available schools sponsored by the Church of England and an average education of two years in the beginning and middle of the century, the establishment of free and compulsory education at the end of the century ensured seven to eight years of schooling for more than ninety percent of the children (Robson, “Standing” 152). Because of this drastic rise in education access, regulations and standardization became necessary. To ensure equal education in children across the country, competence in memorization became one measurable effect of learning. The pupils’ recitation to visiting examiners determined whether the school received merit or monetary penalties, and the recitations, in turn, also decided whether the children would be physically punished by their teachers (Robson, “Standing” 153). Under this system, schooling consisted mainly of memorization instead of interpretation, and this contributed to the devaluation of meaning in literary works at an age where meaning, especially complex and subtle meanings, did not come naturally to their audience. Since no one lectured the children on Hemans’s authorial intention or on the historical background of the poem, one might think that they could exercise their unobstructed freedom in construing the meaning of the poem. But in the context of the British school system at the time, it’s reasonable to imagine that the children were too terrified to fail their recitation to think about any deeper significance of the poem at all. Moreover, as they stood in front of the class to recite, it is hard to say whether their energy derived from the exciting rhythmic beat of the poem or their own palpitations. Whatever their interpretations may have been, their understandings can hardly be separated from the circumstance in which the poem was introduced to them.
James Wells Champney, Schoolroom at the Mill and Bars: Recitation Day (1877–87)
But what about the pride and patriotic sentiments so blatantly expressed in “Casabianca”? Even if some subtler meanings can be colored by the particular conditions the children were in, surely they should have realized the glorification of the boy as a hero in the last two lines by themselves : “But the noblest thing which perished there, /Was that young faithful heart” (39-40). The children, however, seemed not to have interpreted but directly internalized the lesson through the compulsive repetitions that served to meet the education standards imposed by the British government. Growing up in the patriotic society, the lessons of filial and civic duties were well learnt before fourth grade. The boy’s act of sacrifice in “Casabianca”, therefore, serves more as a confirmation of the children’s preexisting beliefs than material for analysis that requires their thinking. Indeed, American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s response, written more than a century later after the publication of Hemans’s “Casabianca”, illustrates the parallel she saw between the boy in Hemans’s poem and the school children who recited the poem. In the poem, also titled “Casabianca”, Bishop compares the schoolroom platform where the schoolboys recited “Casabianca” to the burning the deck the boy stood on (lines 1-3). The boy and his decedents are similar in their steadfast devotion to their country, but this fidelity becomes their only identity, as Bishop opens her lines with “Love’s the…” (1) and substitutes the subsequent object with the schoolboys, the other sailors who also died in the naval battle but brushed aside in Hemans’s poem, and “the burning boy” (line 10). In committing the acts of love, the boys lose their own identities and become the love they stand for. They become the symbol of loyalty that they strive for through both their literal and metaphorical self-sacrifice.
While Bishop’s response is illuminating, it also complicates the reading of “Casabianca” for readers today who want to make sense of the original “Casabianca” in an unrestricted way. It seems that simply erasing the name “Felicia Hemans” and her history from our thoughts is not enough to obtain the readers’ freedom, because we have new questions to worry about: what does it mean to have two poems called “Casabianca” that are so closely related? Should Bishop’s poem be regarded as a poem in its own right or as a part of the whole “Casabianca” phenomenon that need to analyzed together as a whole? Can we really ignore the effect of the parodies that have become ubiquitous, even if we have not read all of them?
An obvious solution to these problems is to simply read Hemans’s “Casabianca” by itself and shut our eyes to any other source that may cloud our understanding, be it scholarly or not. This solution, however, soon becomes less promising if we think about the situation in which we encounter the “original” “Casabianca” in the first place: in a neatly anthologized textbook for English class, likely juxtaposed with other popular Romantic and Victorian poems fortunate enough to have remained over time. In this highly artificial situation, our response to the poem, perhaps already biased by what we’ve read about general Romantic and Victorian literary styles that have been curated by others, are largely based on our personal values. But where do our own values come from? While we individually form our own opinions, the larger sociological, historical, and cultural backgrounds also play important roles. This does not mean that we cannot interpret the poem in our own ways or that no one can escape the influences of these larger backgrounds—indeed, people in similar environment often end up with quite different value systems, and each reader has a slightly different image of the burning boy and a distinct attitude towards him that cannot be shared by another. Nonetheless, changes in filial responsibility over time and the extent of nationalism that is accepted as social norm also impact our judgements. When we deem the boy not as a heroic figure but a victim under unresponsive patriarchy, it would be wise to consider whether this presumably “free” thought is bounded by the cultural beliefs of our own time. Similarly, literary style has changed significantly since Hemans’s time, and by today’s standard, “Casabianca” would be an example of a “bad” poem in not only its meter and rhyme but also its patent sentimentality (Lootens 120). When the once standard literary convention has already become a cliché, how are we to judge the merits and faults of poetry written in such style?
As readers of a piece of literature, we automatically adapt the piece to our own situations, but this unconscious adaptation does not guarantee our freedom, even if the author’s intention is set aside. So how can we claim the reader’s freedom that we desire? One way, counterintuitively, is to go back to where “Casabianca” came from. An objective reading demands us to examine the history that allows it to exist in its forms today, both in the poem itself and in its numerous parodies. This approach is difficult, since its history is invariably loaded with more biased interpretations, and we may eventually get caught in the myriad opinions of others. Another way, perhaps more counterintuitive than the first, is simply admitting that we do not indeed have as much freedom as we would like, and to be a reader is always to exist in a larger background that unconsciously influence our interpretations. But this acknowledgement is liberating because you know that others, too, whether scholars or school children, are also bound by the same constraints. The meaning that you interpret will always mean something uniquely to you, and that’s a freedom that no one can take away.
This essay was read by Miranda Wang.
[i] This essay is inspired by two sources. The first is a prompt for my Literary Theory class: It is the reader, and neither the text not nor the author, who determines the meaning of a poem, novel, play, or movie. Writers lose control of what they write. You already have—and have perhaps never needed—permission to play with a text or to adapt it to your circumstances. You shouldn’t be bound by what the author meant or by a concern for what a given collection of words “really means.” The second is Roland Barthes’s essay, “The Death of the Author.”
[ii] The Monthly Magazine, n.s.2, 1826, p164. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044092623271?urlappend=%3Bseq=174.
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. “Casabianca.” North and South. Boston: Houghton, 1946. 6.
Hemans, Felicia. “Casabianca.” The Monthly Magazine. August 1826. Web. 20 Apr 2018. Google Books.
Lootens, Tricia. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton University Press, 2016.
“Monthly Magazine and British Register, The.” Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900. Web. 22 Apr 2018.
“Poetry Friday: Parody.” Semicolon, 25 Sept. 2009, www.semicolonblog.com/?p=7063. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Robson, Catherine. “Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History.” PMLA 120.1 (2005): 148-162. Web. 20 Apr 2018.