pseudonym Anodos, or 'The Wanderer'; most of her poetry was published after her death.
Although Coleridge did not participate in the feminist debates of her time, her poems contain a subversive sense of anarchic female energy. She believed women had a spiritual identity distinct from men's; she wrote, 'I don't think we are separate only in body and in mind, I think we are separate in soul too.' Some of her poems rewTite earlier texts. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have speculated that 'The Other Side of a Mirror' (1896) portrays the mad Bertha Mason from Charlotte te's Jane Eyre (1847); Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds have argued that 'The Witch' (1907) reimagines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's visionary poem Christabel (1816). Both of these poems demonstrate another characteristic of her writing? presentation of a luminous narrative fragment with little sense of surrounding context. The effect, in the words of Newbolt, her friend, is one of 'very deep shadows filled with strange shapes.'
The Other Side of a Mirror
I sat before my glass one day, And conjured up a vision bare, Unlike the aspects glad and gay, That erst? were found reflected there? formerly 5 The vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair.
Her hair stood back on either side A face bereft of loveliness. It had no envy now to hide io What once no man on earth could guess. It formed the thorny aureole0 halo Of hard unsanctified distress.
Her lips were open?not a sound Came through the parted lines of red. 15 Whate'er it was, the hideous wound In silence and in secret bled.
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179 2 / MAR Y ELIZABET H COLERIDG E No sigh relieved her speechless woe, She had no voice to speak her dread. 20And in her lurid eyes there shone The dying flame of life's desire, Made mad because its hope was gone, And kindled at the leaping fire Of jealousy, and fierce revenge, And strength that could not change nor tire. 2530 Shade of a shadow in the glass, O set the crystal surface free! Pass?as the fairer visions pass? Nor ever more return, to be The ghost of a distracted hour, That heard me whisper, 'I am she!' 1882 1896 The Witch 51 have walked a great while over the snow, And I am not tall nor strong. My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set, And the way was hard and long. I have wandered over the fruitful earth, But I never came here before. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! ioThe cutting wind is a cruel foe. I dare not stand in the blast, My hands are stone, and my voice a groan, And the worst of death is past. I am but a little maiden still, My little white feet are sore. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! is20 Her voice was the voice that women have, Who plead for their heart's desire. She came?she came?and the quivering flame Sank and died in the fire. It never was lit again on my hearth Since I hurried across the floor, To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door. 1892 1907
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1793
RUDYARD KIPLING 1865-1936
Like many children born to upper- or middle-class Britons living in India in the Victorian era, Rudyard Kipling was sent to Great Britain at the age of six to begin his education. For the next six years in England, he was desperately unhappy; his parents had chosen to board him in a rigidly Calvinistic foster home, and he was treated with considerable cruelty. His parents finally removed him when he was twelve and sent him to a private school, where his experience was far better. His views in later life were deeply affected by the English schoolboy code of honor and duty, especially when it involved loyalty to a group or team. At seventeen he rejoined his parents in India, where his father taught sculpture at the Bombay School of Art. By the time he returned to England seven years later, the poems and stories he had written while working as a newspaper reporter in India had brought him early fame. In 1892 he married an American woman; they lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, until a fierce quarrel with his brother-in-law drove him back to England in 1896. Kipling settled on a country estate and purchased, at the turn of the century, an expensive early-model automobile. He seems to have been the first English author to own an automobile?an appropriate distinction, because he was intrigued by all kinds of machinery and feats of engineering. In this keen interest, as in many tastes, he differed markedly from his contemporaries in the nineties, the aesthetes. Kipling was also the first English author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907).
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, India was the most important colony of Britain's empire?the 'Jewel in the Crown,' as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had dubbed it. The English were consequently curious about the world of India, a world that Kipling's stories and poems helped them envision. Indeed, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's husband, wrote of his own experience in India in the early years of the twentieth century: 'I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.' During his seven years in India in the 1880s, Kipling gained a rich experience of colonial life, which he presented in his stories and poems. His first volume of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), explores some of the psychological and moral problems of the Anglo- Indians and their relationship with the people they had colonized. In his two volumes of the Jungle Book (1894, 1895) he draws on the Indian scene to create a world of jungle animals. Capable, on occasion, of constructing offensive stereotypes, Kipling at other times demonstrates a remarkably detailed and intelligent interest in Indian culture, as in his complex novel Kim (1901): amid a welter of representations of different modes of existence, the contemplative and religious way of life of the Indian lama, or monk, is treated with no less respect and sympathy than the active and worldly way of life of the Victorian English governing classes.
In his poems Kipling also draws on the Indian scene, most commonly as it is viewed through the eyes of the men sent out from England to garrison the country and fight off invaders on the northwest frontiers. Kipling is usually thought of as the poet of British imperialism, as indeed he often was; but these poems about ordinary British soldiers in India contain little by way of flag-waving celebrations of the triumph of empire. The soldier who speaks in 'The Widow at Windsor' (1892) is simply bewildered by the events in which he has taken part. As one of the soldiers of the queen (one of 'Missis Victorier's sons'), he has done his duty, but he does not see the empire as a divine design to which he has contributed. Kipling develops a new subject in the working-class imperial soldier (a subject, we should note, who frequently gives voice to deeply racist attitudes), and thus a new way to portray modern social experience.
The common man's perspective, expressed in the accent of the London cockney, was one of the qualities that gained Kipling an immediate audience for his Barrack
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Room Ballads (1890, 1892). For many years Kipling was extremely popular. What attracted his vast audience was not just the novelty of his subjects but also his mastery of swinging verse rhythms. To some degree Kipling's literary ancestry helps explain his success. In part he learned his craft as a poet from traditional sources. His own family had connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, and he was considerably influenced by such immediate literary predecessors as Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne. But two of the forces strongly influencing his style and rhythms were not traditional. One of these was the Protestant hymn. Both his parents were children of Methodist clergymen, and chapel singing, as well as preaching, affected him profoundly. 'Three generations of
