English Romantic Poets and Slave Trade: Mind Forg'd Manacles
A social and political perspective on the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Blake.
The period between 1780 and 1832 witnessed the literary movement called Romanticism. The French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, destroyed the feudal order and designated the coming of the bourgeois class to power as well as rapid development of capitalist trade. As a result, the foundations of absolute monarchies were jolted while victorious wars led by Napoleon kindled rebellious spirit in almost all countries of the Old Continent.
During that period the British monarchy was the greatest colonial power in the world which largely depended on the slave trade[1]. The same nation that prided itself on individual liberties was the major European trafficker in human flesh with a colonial system largely dependent on slave labor.
The enslavement of Africans struck the young, hopeful and radical Romantic poets of the nineteenth-century England as the most blatant example of human oppression and the clearest example in which humans were deprived of liberty. Their sympathies were always for the victims of established oppression of all kinds and against all enemies of freedom. But although their poetry refers to, talks about, and draws on the imagery of African slavery the poets ? Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley ? rarely spoke directly against harsh truths of the slave trade and colonial slavery. To put it plainly, the Romantic poets came to recognize the political solutions as inevitable failures, and political poetry as mere versified propaganda that does not last beyond timely or contemporary events and cannot explore motives of deeper significance about human condition.
Meanwhile, radicals viewed concern for black slaves as a clever distraction from wage slavery, the oppression of the English working class and the devastating life of the laboring masses during the Industrial Revolution. The larger concern was, therefore, for the ?enslaved? masses in England. Though the poets and radicals used much the same language ? enchained, enslaved, dark, Satanic ? the poets alone came to understand that all humans suffered the same plights.
The first most obvious protest against slavery conducted by Britain is William Cowper?s poem The Negro?s Complaint[2]. Here we find a portrayal of the enslaved African as a victim whose brutal exploitation had not destroyed his innocence. That innocence both demands compassion from the reader and assures him/her that the slave is not violent ? or savage ? threat (as it was usually presented). It allows the slave to question the colonialists? hypocrisy without alienating the reader in the colonizing nation.
Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there one who reigns on high?
Has he bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from his throne the sky?
Ask him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means which duty urges
Agents of his will to use?[3]
Having gained the reader?s compassion and appealed to his/her religious conscience, Cowper?s Negro is able to overturn their racist assumption and moral superiority:
Deem our nations brutes no longer
Till some reason ye shall find
Worthier of regard and stronger
Than the color of our kind
Slaves of gold, whose sordid dealings
Tarnish all your boasted powers,
Prove that you have human feelings,
Ere you proudly question ours! 4
Another early written romantic anti-slavery poem is Thomas Day?s The Dying Negro5. The poem is a suicide note in verse which considers the dying slave?s feelings and the system that led him to suicide. To illustrate the latter, the poem outlines some hard facts about the lives of plantation slaves, slaves who:
Rouz?d by the lash, go forth their cheerless way
And while their souls with shame and anguish burn,
Salute with groans unwelcome morn?s return.
The horrors of the plantation, and the uncivilized manner in which the Dying Negro was abducted from Africa, are told at some length before being contrasted with the domestic tranquility the slave found in England. The way in which he won the love of the servant girl he planned to marry is told in strongly sentimental terms:
Still as I told the story of my woes
With heaving sighs thy lovely bosom rose;
The tick?ling drops of liquid chrystal stole
Down thy cheek, and mark?d thy pitying soul;6
This heart-warming domestic scene does not last long. The poem concludes with an angry passage in which the dying slave prays desperately to God to whom, with his baptism, he had recently turned. Like Christ himself the slave asks God why he appears to have forsaken him: ? when crimes like these thy injur?d pow?r prophane /O god of Nature! Art thou called in vain? 7
The closing lines of the poem contain a call for revenge, and with his dying breath the poem?s narrator asks God to arrange that the slave ship on which he has committed suicide sinks, and all crew drown. In that moment, he hopes the slavers? prayers will also go unanswered ? the final couplet of the poem8 asks: ? while they spread their sinking arms to thee, / then let their fainting souls remember me! 9
Despite of this initial emergence of anti-slavery literature what followed was the temporary defeat of the cause in 1791, but Romantic writers helped keep the Abolition movement alive in the public eye over the next 15 years. They sought and portrayed various struggles for an order of free imaginative possibility, for loosening of what Blake saw as the ultimate enslavement device mind-forg?d manacles10.
One of William Blake?s poems that explicitly deals with slavery and race relations as a direct consequence of the former is The Little Black Boy11
In the first verse, the black boy feels physically inferior to his white
8Electronic source ? www.brycchancarey.com
9The poem was extremely successful, and the second addition appeared in 1774. This edition was expanded and contained an essay opposing slavery, formally dedicated to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The essay contains an attack, among the first of its kind, on the hypocrisy of the British colonists in America. Reprints of the poem continued to appear in the nineteenth century.
10 A line from William Blake?s London (Songs of Experience). It is one of his most powerful political poems. In the poem he singles out the Church and the King for their part in the oppression (as P.B.Shelley later portrayed in the Devil?s Walk, Masque of Anarchy and Prometheus Unbound). The symbolism of the mind forg?d menacles may represent the tradition and institutions that stopped the people of London from following the example of revolutionary Paris (the French Revolution - 1789) and overthrowing their oppressors in Church and State.
11The song belongs to The Songs of Innocence. The Songs dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of basic Christian values, he also exposes--over the heads, as it were, of the innocent--Christianity's capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty. The Little Black Boy was composed in 1788 (in the dawn of the anti-slavery movement). Its key feature is the power-shift between the black boy and the white boy that occurs in the course of the poem.
counterpart:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child;
But I am black as if bereav?d of light.
The English child is compared to an angel while the little black boy is pictured as unenlightened pagan. But the black boy after his mother?s explanation of his skin-color convinces himself that his dark skin actually has the positive effect of enabling him to get closer to God. Once in God?s kingdom, he (the black boy) will actually become stronger than the white but will not retaliate towards the white boy but show compassion instead. To avoid chauvinism Blake suggests that God?s kingdom color is irrelevant. Both white and black skins are described as clouds that can not change the essential brotherhood of man and most importantly our shared humanity:
When I from black and he from white cloud free
I will be like him and he will then love me.12
Blake?s awareness of the slavery issue has also been well discussed in Visions of the Daughters of Albion13, thus, making explicit the connection between racial and gender oppression. The poem is a debate on free love with allusions drawn to the rights of men and women as well as the injustices of sexual inhibition and prohibition, Negroes and child slavery in particular. It represents a dramatized discussion on the related questions of
12Electronic source ? www.bartleyby.com
13The poem was written at a time of a heated debate over the question of slavery begun its Parliamentary phase in 1789, coinciding with the French revolution and the revolution of slaves in 1791 in French St. Domingo. It reached its height in 1792-1793 when the whole nation was against Negro trafficking. The story in the poem is briefly this ? Oothoon, a virgin, loves Theotormon and is not afraid to enter the experience of love. She flies over the ocean to give him the flower of her virginity. But on her way she is seized by Bromion, who rapes her despite her outcries in order to increase her market value. Her lover responds not by coming to rescue but by accusing her and Bromion of adultery and secretly laments his fate and hers. Oothoon and Bromion therefore remain in the relationship of slavery while Theotormon failing as a lover continuously weeps. Oothoon argues that she is still pure and able to bring her lover the flowers of joy and desire but cannot for she accepts Bromion?s definition of her as a sinner. Although ready for love Theotormon?s indecisiveness threatens to turn her love-call into an ironic masochism.
moral, economic and sexual freedom and an indictment whose code separates bodies from souls and reduces women and children, nations and lands to possessions.
It has been argued that Blake used Mary Wollstonecraft?s14 questioning of the issues of race and slavery in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) where she comments on the racial and gender exclusions:
Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subjected to prejudices that brutalized them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man? Is not this indirectly to deny woman reason? 15
Therefore, Blake elaborates on the psychology of the colonial Theotormon?s chauvinism (since he was not the first to take the flower of virginity) and his own mental as well as moral oppression of both woman and African in the character of Oothoon who is the victim of colonial and sexual violence16.
Also, one of the greatest Romantic poets, according to many critics, William Wordsworth helped change the widespread demonization of the Haitian revolutionaries or ?black Jacobins? in his admiring sonnet To Toussaint L? Ouverture17 which can also be seen as a variation of ?the dying slave?18 theme:
O miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Will you find patience? Yet die not; be thou
14The famous suffragette who boldly pledged for women?s rights. She was the wife of William Godwin (the author of Political Justice) and the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (the author of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus) the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley (the author of Prometheus Unbound)
15Chapter IX entitled ? Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise From the unnatural Distinctions Established In Society) - electronic source ? www.oregonstate.edu
16The whole text of the poem can be found on http://orbita.starmedia.com
17The poem was composed in 1802. It depicts deceiving Napoleon?s forceable attempt to re-enslave the blacks of St. Dominque. Toussaint led a heroic and bloody revolt in which the French army and plantation managers were slaughtered. After setting himself as quasi-emperor, Toussaint, the ?most unhappy of men? was captured and locked up in a French prison where he spent the short remainder of his life.
18Theme introduced in Thomas Day?s The Dying Negro
Life to thyself in death; with cheerful brow
Live loving death, nor let one thought in ten
Be painful to thee?19
Although Wordsworth offers this brave revolutionary the joys of
Heaven, he somehow avoids focusing on tangible and explicit moral purpose of his revolutionary deeds and focuses on the imaginative consciousness of humanity:
There?s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget theee: thou hast great allies:
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man?s anconquerable mind.20
Wordsworth?s poem The Brothers21 also provides another example of how interpretation of landscapes during the Romantic period provided a medium for thinking through everything connected with colonialism and slave trade in England.
After spending twenty years as a sailor in the West Indies and obtaining some small wealth/ Ac?quied by traffic there, Leonard Ewbank returns to his birthplace with his determin?d purpose to resume/ the life he liv?d there. The word traffic is relevant here because it means that he has been involved in the traffic in slaves an interpretation reinforced by his being at one point in slavery among the Moors/Upon the Barbary Coast.22
Leonard?s main purpose for coming back to his birthplace is to reunite
19Joan Baum, Mind-Forg?d Manacles, Slavery and the English Romantic Poets, North Haven, CT, Archon Books, 1994, p. 14
20Ibid., p. 146
21The poem is a rewriting of S.T.Coleridge?s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is a critique of colonialism without the supernatural elements Coleridge used. It also seeks to convey through a dialogue of a sailor with a native son (this time a priest instead of Coleridge?s wedding guest) that being at home isolated from the outside world is no longer possible. Also, Wordsworth reflected on one of the oldest texts in the Western tradition Homer?s The Odyssey where the main character experiences a similar disorientation (book 13) when he awakens on the island of Ithaca. In The Odyssey one can see the beginning of colonial hybridity since it is the first major poem to deal with the catastrophic consequences of colonial conflict.
22Electronic Source ? www.everypoet.com
with his brother James. Unfortunately, he finds not only that he has been dead for 12 years but also that he himself is dead to his community and that there is no return. What is also significant is that he speaks with the local priest (God?s messenger on earth) who tells him that it is too late to seek redemption for his evil deeds (selling human flesh).
Another poem about a failed homecoming after years of service in the name of the British colonialism is Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.23 Although it has been interpreted as the story of crime, punishment and redemption where we find the grey-haired mariner full of remorse because of the act of evil against nature (the slaughter of albatross) and inability to appreciate the sanctity of life, recent postcolonial literary interpretations consider the poem as the expression of enormous suffering produced by colonialism and human flesh trafficking. The cost of it usually returns in the form of guilt-ridden and almost driven mad tropical invalids who roam through the land as cursed wanderers narrating the story.
The mariner has been more than stunned by colonial experience, he has been traumatized. In the historical context the mariner?s story explores how radical violence directed toward the black impacts the enslavers. Coleridge recognizes that although sailors seem to have greater control over
23Coleridge introduces his tale by describing an old gray-haired sailor who approaches three young men headed for a wedding celebration and forces one of them, the groom's next-of-kin, to hear his story. The story goes like this - during the voyage, the mariner kills the albatross (pious bird of good omen) for no reason. At first his fellow sailors blame him but then when the fog lifts they approve of his action (and so share his guilt). However, when they calm down they change their minds again and blame him, hanging the dead bird around his neck. Soon after the incident Death and Life-in-Death dice for the crew and the latter wins the mariner who alone would live on to suffer for his sin against Nature. When he returns to land, he finds he has to tell his tale and ends his narrative by reminding the wedding guest of the need to love ?man and bird and beast?. In the poem, the Polar Spirit is said to love the albatross, and two other spirits discuss the mariner's fate. To understand the poem's attitude to the natural world it is important to grasp the way the albatross is presented in the poem and the changing attitude of the mariner to the water snakes for whom he felt ?a rush of love? blessing them as the only living things in the world. This is the point where the spell is broken because he pays his dues to Nature ? the albatross falls from his neck (it signifies a moment which initiates him in a process of deeper questioning of himself and of the assumptions underlying his own culture).
their destinies they are treated no better than those they victimize. That is why on the symbolic level the mariner undergoes blackening throughout the poem. There is a striking emphasis on his brown skin ? I fear thee, ancient Mariner?Thou art long and lank and brown?I fear thy skinny hand so brown.24
In The Rime, Coleridge also sharply captures the ruination of the universe that the slave trade caused. His mariner finds this ruination everywhere ? it appears not just in the rotting bodies of birds, men and white woman24, but in heavenly bodies as well as the bloody Sun ? with broad and burning face.25 Even the body of the ship is diseased, it is decaying ? The planks look warped! and see those sails, / How thin they are and sere!26 Coleridge had a slave ship in mind here, where slaves were crammed together below deck. The heat and stench arising from their diseased bodies would rot the very planks. Very often the slaves died due to the inhuman conditions. Their bodies were then thrown overboard into the sea which is rotting because of huge number of cadavers:
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.27
What the mariner sees now he sees through the eyes of the slaves of the middle passage:
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
????????...............
23Electronic source ? www.bartleby.com, stanza 224-29
24As a symbol of a carrier of disease and moral depravity
25Electronic source ? www.bartleby.com, stanza 112-18
26Electronic source, ibid., stanza 520-30
27Electronic source, ibid., stanza 216-19
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood
And cried, A sail! A sail! 28
Thus Coleridge draws a parallel between the experience of the sailors and slaves making the Mariner see the world differently through his own violence. Mariner experiences perceivable emblems of the slave trade ? the specter bark, Life-in-Death and Death (symbols of the primary aspects of colonialism), fever victims, diseased ships - a psychological disease that takes him to several levels of self-confrontation as well as deeper questioning of himself and his own culture making him realize the horrors of the slave trade. That is why his purpose in the world now is to make the Wedding quest realize the horrors of the slave trade as well as the cost of colonial commerce.
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.29
This conclusion is not just a simple moral of an old sailor?s tale but a lesson about how to relate to what is other than self and always bare in mind Blake?s words that everything that lives is holy.30
28Electronic source ? www.bartleby.com, stanza 157-61
29Electronic source - www.bartleby.com, stanza 615
30Concluding line of The Song of Liberty. It is a part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (composed between 1790 and 1793) where Blake attacks the sexual and social morality that, backed by the apparatus of religion and law restrains energy, passion, and genius and condemns people to the spectral half-existence. The very title is partly ironic. The marriage is a dynamic confrontation of contraries in which each must preserve its own identity. For "without Contraries is no progression?. This book is Blake's Principia, in which he announced a new concept of the universe, thus quietly equating himself with Ptolemy and Copernicus (cf. J83:40). Mind, not matter, is the basic substance. This universe is psychological; it is the universe in which we really live. It is egocentric, and differs with each individual, yet is essentially the same . . . . Blake reduced "Good" and "Evil" to mere technical terms, denoting arbitrary and artificial qualities devoid of any real moral significance.
Coleridge?s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is among the first great Romantic narratives to question colonialism by interrogating the colonizers themselves. It powerfully suggests how far ?colonial disease? and death were understood as fitting retribution for the crimes against nature and man.
Although a radical and revolutionary poet of the time who fought against all injustices in the world, a pacifist and an altruist, Percy Bysshe Shelley did not speak so openly about the British slave trade. Mostly concerned with the Monarchy?s bad domestic policy which as a result had starving and ?enslaved? masses in England he only indirectly referred to its foreign affairs including the slave trade. Throughout one of his greatest lyric dramas Prometheus Unbound 31 (spring 1818-winter 1820) he draws some allusions to the problem of slavery since the main character Prometheus (Forethought) is enslaved by Jupiter (Evil). In one striking instance, Asia (Love) asks Demogorgon (Necessity) a question about the problem of mastery and slavery when she inquires about Jupiter?s position in the universe:
? but who reigns down Evil,
the immedicable plague, which, while
Man looks on his creation like a God
And sees that it is glorious, drives him on
The wreck of his own will, the scorn of earth,
The outcast, the abandoned, the alone?
Not Jove: while yet his frown shook heaven,
Ay, when his adversary from adamantine chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is the master? Is he too a slave? 32
This means that both tyrants and their subjects are equal not before
31Prometheus Bound written by the father of Greek tragedy Aeschylus was the touchstone for the making of Shelley?s new myth about defiant Titan Prometheus (the name in Greek means forethought and imagination) who manages, through the process of his own purification and redemption with the help of love (epitomized in Asia), to victoriously conquer the tyrannical God Jupiter (Roman name for the Greek God Zeus) the symbol of all evil.
32The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (Prometheus Unbound) Wordsworth Editions Limited, Hertfordshire, 1994, Act II, p. 183
God but before TIME which is the only ruler in the universe. Everything is
subjugated to time but there is one force superior to it ? LOVE - which withstands all. It unites everything separated and different. Hope, on the other hand, based on human love is the hope directed towards the future for the purpose of recuperation of the whole humanity.
Unable to cope with the newly created order in the world, Jupiter comes to the place of the enslaved and begs for mercy as the enslaved had begged not long time ago. His last words before he drowns into the waves are:
Ai! Ai!
The elements obey me not.
I sink dizzily down, ever, for ever down.
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory! Ai! Ai! 33
In postcolonial interpretation, Colonial Britain (Jupiter) is, therefore, destroyed by its own posterity (Demogorgon) thanks to the redemption of the whole nation (Prometheus) achieved through love (Asia) and time. The humanity full of love, faith and freedom, now, is liberating itself from all sorts of oppressions and restraints:
The loathsome mask has fallen; the man remains-
Sceptreless free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise but man.
Passionless? No, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves.
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might over soar
The loftiest of unscended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.34
33Ibid., Act III, pp. 187-88
34Ibid., Act III, pp. 194-95
In these last stanzas, Shelley expresses a belief that a possibility of reform is a moral responsibility of the whole nation. In his opinion social chaos, colonization and wars are reflections of weaknesses of all kinds which incapacitate political reforms unless people find strength to reform their own nature first and exchange malignant hate with unselfish love.
Shelley?s poem Ozymandias34 is very much a poem about colonial space which sees the degraded and depopulated regions as a sign of the continuing survival of desolating power. The poet finds ecology and politics inseparable. Therefore, this poem is his most powerful depiction of the relation between poor government (colonial Britain) and degraded physical environment (Africa). Ozymandias has been read for a long time as a dramatic irony but in fact it has a very simple moral.
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! 35
Although tyrant?s affirmation of his omnipotence is arrogant and contemptuous of its human cost it does not last very long. Shelley looked at depopulated nature (the desert) to find a far more present monument than the broken sculpture, showing tyranny?s subjection to time36. Tyranny is ruin and Shelley?s intention is for the readers to realize that tyranny survives stamped only on these lifeless things. On the symbolical level this indicates that the British colonial empire will soon be destroyed but it will leave desolation and despair in colonial lands as reminiscences of its tyranny.
As far as George Gordon Lord Byron and John Keats are concerned they also shared the opinion of the aforementioned poets concerning the political changes that should take place in the world. Confronted with harsh
34The poem written in 1817 expresses Shelley?s thoughts about the transience of tyrant?s power who ruled only by authoritarian regime. When he is overthrown what is left are the ruins both ecological and political.
35Electronic source ? www.poets.org
36As in Prometheus Unbound the only ruler in the universe is time
social reality of Britain and Europe in general, they too defied the system of inhuman exploitation of people, police repression, moral hypocrisy and political malice that the English nation was exposed to in the nineteenth century. Despite of that fact both Byron and Keats, as other Romantic poets of the period, did not focus so directly on the problem of colonialism and slave trade.
Generally speaking, Byron was a poet of subjective feelings in literature, personal hatred and contempt towards the society as well as a passionate freedom fighter in the name of democracy and freedom in the world.37 However, although at one point in drama Manfred38 Byron asks (through his hero Manfred) Obey? And whom? The spirits / Whose presence I command and be the slave / Of those who served me? 39 this could really not be attributed to the British involvement in the slave trade. Interestingly enough he, otherwise, wrote about the oppressed peoples40 all over the world and actively participated with the Greeks in their freedom fight against the Turkish rule41.
Keats, on the other hand, although quite supportive of reforms and democratic changes in England was mainly an artist and an aesthetician. That is why, in his work, the reader encounters poet?s steady-fast wish to devote to the suffering of the whole mankind. But still his main aim remains
37Byron died on April 19th, 1824 in Missolonghi from fever he contracted serving Greek and European freedom ? young, energetic and rebellious just after his poetic genius had achieved its full expression.
38In the drama Manfred (1817-1818) we find the hero suffering enormous self-inflicted as well as guilt inflicted by others. He is burdened by past memories which at the same time torture and attract him. He attributes his prick of conscience to the indifference of the world whose renegade he has become.
39Electronic source ? www.bartleby.com, stanzas 158-60
40Byron wrote about the subjection of Italian and Spanish people
41P.B. Shelley?s lyric drama Hellas (1821) was also inspired by Greek struggle for independence against the Turks. In the drama Shelley points out that although enslaved the Greeks will be victors in the end (because of their stoic sacrifice) while the Turks blinded by their victories on the battlefields do not see that they will soon become the enslaved. Again, as in Prometheus Unbound and Ozymandias, Shelley points that everything is subject to time even the worst tyrants.
to experience beauty in the work of art and devote it to humanity. Like Byron, he too, did not speak openly against British involvement in the slave trade. However, if we deconstruct his poem Lamia42 (although the setting is clearly Greek) we find the images in the poem parallel with those of African travel narratives. This, of course, comes as no surprise taking into consideration the relationship between Africa and Britain between 1818-1820 exactly the time when Keats wrote and published Lamia43.
The story is the one of mystery, uncertainty and doubt, a story in which one culture (in this case African) lost identity while the other (British) gained patronizing power. This dangerous clash between light and dark cultures underlies the structure of Lamia from the very beginning. This is precisely why Keats situates the poem at the dawn of history of conquests and colonization of tyrannical military takeovers when the English fairies: drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods while King Oberon?s bright diadem / specter, and mantle, clasped with dewy gem / Frightened away the Dryads and the Fauns.44
What is significant here is that the conquests tend to get whiter as the Satyrs ? associated with dark-skinned people ? are overtaken by Oberon whose name comes from Latin word albus which means white. Establishment of whiteness so early in the poem pinpoints Lamia?s dark origins. She is Prosperine and Eurydice in one, with dark features coming
43Lamia is a love story between a master (Lycius) and the elfin slave (Lamia). Although given her freedom Lamia still remains Lycius?s possession but as a wife. Lamia?s existence is endangered by Appolonius (symbol of Britain?s destructive side) and his desire to define her elfish nature within the mundane world. Despite his possessive love for Lamia, Lycius succumbs to his mentor?s wish to restrict her existence and identity to earthly name. After having named Lamia a serpent and exposing her publicly during their wedding ceremony (that should have united the two lovers) Appolonius achieves his aim at the cost of the two lovers? death.
44Electronic source ? www.photoaspects.com
from Lamia?s45 mythological status as Zeus?s Libyan mistress (line 248). As the poem progresses, her encounter with white culture destroys her by turning her deadly white46 (line 276) which is exactly what happened to Africa during and after colonization. Moreover, Keats must have intentionally used Lamia?s serpent nature ? a symbol of evil in the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, in Africa, the serpent played a central role in African voodoo47 as a type of fetish worship. As the two cultures clash in Christian ideology, which produced most writings on slavery, African snake worship could only imply devotion to something evil.
In certain way Keats?s Lamia talks about the changing nature of race relations in early nineteenth century Britain as slavery and Africa were brought close to home. That is why he tries to find a place for African experience in the poem. If Lamia is like Africa no matter how much Keats tries to change her symbolic values, evil is written large across the Dark Continent. In a way Keats, also, imposes the question of interracial love story ? the dark mistress who becomes respectable (symbolized by the wedding white that also destroys her) but then plunges into slavery or death again. On the symbolical level this indicates that the blacks could never be equal as the whites although having climbed the social ladder and having gained some respect in the white society. They will always be judged by the color of their skin that painful stigma that will eternally remind them that they do not belong in the white man?s world.
45In Greek mythology, Lamia was a queen of Libya and a lover of Zeus. The jealous Hera stole away her children and the queen driven mad with grief went on child-murdering missions across the country.
46The white color in Coleridge?s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is also a symbol of death that the white civilization brings to Africans
47Voodoo is a dominant religion of Haiti. It plays an important role in the family and community affecting morality, prosperity, safety, relationships and health. The purpose of voodoo rituals is to make contact with a spirit (loa) to gain its favor by offering animal sacrifice and gifts in order to obtain help in every day life activities. Black magic usually associated with voodoo plays a minor role in this religion.
However, in time of changing ideas about race, slavery and mastery as well as an increased cultural exchange between Africans and Europeans this poem, as many before, does not give a straight-forward answer to the painful questions and contradictions that arose in the nineteenth century Britain about the country?s involvement in the largest displacement of people in the history of the world and their inhuman treatment.
It is obvious that the English romantic writers contemplated, debated and, we might as well say, wrote about the African and slave presence in one way or the other, some more explicitly some less. The terms such as slavery, freedom in abstract and even universal ways were used on the large scale in the sense that everyone was a slave to something and seeking freedom from it. Nevertheless, the issue of slavery, the transatlantic trade and Britain?s role in it although well implemented in the historical context of the nineteenth century only remained an issue not fully explored by the English romantic poets who were, at the time, more preoccupied with British domestic policy and the enslavement of their own nation.
[!1] By the 1780s British ships were carrying over 30.000 slaves yearly from Africa to Americas through the so-called Middle Passage
2This poem, written in 1788, was a response to the request of John Newton as a support of abolition in which Cowper presented the voice of a slave in deliberately simple form and diction.
3Electronic source ? www.wwnorton.com
4Electronic source ? www.wwnorton.com
5The poem was anonymously published in 1773 and it is based on historical event known as the Mansfield Judgment (Lord Mansfield ruled that no slave could be forced to leave the country against his or her own will ? precisely the fate of the slave who inspired the poem). The poem itself is a long one, influenced by genre of sensibility, but also representing Africans as noble savages uncorrupted by the ?sordid gold? of ?Christian traffic?
6Electronic source ? www.brycchancarey.com
