4 - Felicia Hemans and the Affections

Summary

They tell but dreams—a lonely spirit's dreams—

Yet ever through their fleeting imagery

Wanders a vein of melancholy love,

An aimless thought of home:—as in the song

Of the caged skylark ye may deem there dwells

A passionate memory of blue skies and flowers,

And living streams—far off!

Felicia Hemans, Songs of the Affections (1830)

In these lines, which appear on the title plate of Songs of Affections, Felicia Hemans describes the poems of the volume through a theory of love. Hemans situates her poems as explorations of a notion of love tied to the ‘thought of home’ but also dream-like and ideal in nature, a love of and from another world. The ‘dreams’ of the ‘lonely spirit’ parallel the ‘passionate memory’ of the skylark's natural home, a simile that recalls poetic treatments of the bird in many early nineteenth-century works. In Romantic fashion, love is linked to longing, to a desire for reconciliation. Hemans expresses in these verses her inability to access the ideal about which she writes: the imagery of her dreams is ‘fleeting’, the ‘vein of melancholy love’ wanders aimlessly, and the memory of home is ‘far off’. How to regain that memory of home, that sense of love, that ideal dream of unity—that is, what she claims to possess in many poems written during the first decade of her career—is the focus of the 1830 volume, especially of its lead poem, ‘A Spirit's Return’.

Love and the affections are central to Hemans's poetry, as the titles of two of her major volumes of poetry demonstrate: The Domestic Affections and Other Poems and Songs of the Affections, with Other Poems. However, scholarship has not adequately addressed exactly what Hemans means when she uses the terms ‘love’ and ‘affection’. Does Hemans use ‘affection’ as a synonym for ‘love’? Are the ‘domestic affections’ about which she writes in 1812 different from ‘the affections’ about which she writes nearly twenty years later? How does Hemans's treatment of love and the affections relate the broader discourses of affect and emotion during the Romantic period? My tentative answer is yes, the affections are directly related to love in Hemans, and, perhaps surprisingly, that there is also continuity between her treatment of the affections in the 1812 and 1830 volumes.