Editor's Note: Wife of London's famous surgeon, John Hunter, and aunt of Joanna Baillie.  Wrote lyrics and poems.  Active in Bluestocking circles.

Poet and Lyricist Anne Hunter: More than "Haydn's Muse" 

By Joy M. Currie

Critical Essay

Best known for her Scottish ballads and her lyrics set to music by Franz Joseph Haydn, Anne Home Hunter published two volumes, Poems (1802) and The Sports of the Genii (1804). On their own, her poems have attracted little critical attention. Instead, reviewers and scholars have noted Hunter's marriage to the well-known surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, her social life among the Bluestockings, and her relationship to Haydn.[1] But there is much more to the story. In her poetry, she examines the delights and woes of writers, describes the joys of familial love and sorrows of lost love, writes of history and patriotism, and explores social issues of the day. Indeed, her work warrants a new examination, for it includes many themes relevant to her times and draws on the Scottish tradition of "song and legend" that "was there before the Saxon and the Norman came" (Watt 9).

Expectations for British women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included what Mary Poovey calls "the paradoxical commands of propriety-that desire express itself through modesty, that power be deflected into influence, that fulfillment be won through meekness" (242). These expectations were particularly significant for women writers who wanted to publish what they wrote, since to write and publish inherently meant challenging accepted standards of propriety. At first, Hunter followed convention and presented her lyrics for music anonymously: her earliest poem, "Adieu! ye streams that smoothly glide," for instance, "The Lamentation of Mary Queen of Scots," and Haydn's canzonettas (although the composer dedicated the first set to her). She initially circulated these and other poems in manuscript to "a favoured few" (Masson 221).

Those who knew her described Hunter as a woman of "modesty and delicacy" (Nares 638).[2] Similarly, contemporary critics of her poetry tended to appreciate its sweetness, emotion, and propriety. The Monthly Review notes its "beautiful simplicity of feeling and expression" (41:420) but belittles the poet as lacking "boldness and originality of sentiment" and "sublimity of diction" (422). In the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey suggests that her poems "are composed, in general, with an unambitious plainness, that aims only at the natural representation of moderate affection; and escapes the dangers of extravagance, by renouncing all pretension to magnificence, force or novelty" (1:421). A somewhat later critic praises only "Death Song" as worthy of remembrance (Cunningham 214-15). The more favorable review in the British Critic, thought to be written by Hunter's long-time friend Archdeacon Robert Nares,[3] claims that "[h]er poems have long burst from confinement, by their own innate spirit" (20:409), and applauds her for her "feeling and expression":

feeling, devoid of artifice or affectation; and expression, uniting strength with elegance. In the ballad style, her felicity in clothing a simple and natural thought, in the most touching and appropriate language, is such as our English writers have very seldom attained; and they who have achieved it, are classed with propriety among the most elegant of our poets. (410)

The Poetical Register, on the other hand, reminds its readers that some of Hunter's poems "have been long known to the public" and encourages them to see for themselves the merit of both the songs and the longer poems (2: 434).

Even the few twentieth-century scholars to assess Hunter's poetry, including both musical scholars and literary critics, note the goodness of Hunter's personality and the appropriateness of her lyrics for song. Flora Masson, writing of "Adieu,"claims that "[t]here is little in the words beyond a certain musical grace" (221). In his excellent study of Hunter's collaborations with composers, A. Peter Brown writes: "Neither original in thought nor lofty in expression, her lyrics were characterized by their accomplishment, by their concern for proper ladylike topics, most notably by their suitability for musical setting" (39, emphases added).[4] About her new lyrics for familiar songs — "Adieu," Death Song," and "Lamentation" — he observes that "Hunter probably achieved one of the widest distributions of any English woman poet of her day; her poems became a part of the national-song movement in the British Isles" (48).[5] Brown perhaps underestimates Hunter's talent, since he focuses exclusively on the lyrics written for music. But he acknowledges that "in some quarters Hunter's poems were highly regarded," noting that Robert Burns copied two of her poems into his Commonplace Book. An earlier music scholar, H. C. Robbins Landon, gives Hunter's lyrics more credit: her "English texts . . . , although in the pastoral-cum-sentimental English tradition, are far better than Haydn's previous German texts" (3.378). More recently, Valentina Bold points out that Hunter is one of the "exceptions among the generally unchallenging ranks of lady poets" (249).

By 1792, Haydn began setting verses written and selected by Anne Hunter to music, a collaboration that brought her poetry to the ears of far more people than those who later read her Poems.[6] Although these songs became widely known, Hunter was recognized as a lyricist and a poet long before she met Haydn. "Adieu!" was written for the popular tune "Flowers of the Forest" and published without attribution in The Charmer and The Lark (Edinburgh 1765), in ten Edinburgh "miscellanies" (1765-1786), and in The Scots Musical Museum (1787) (Crawford 177). Burns copied Hunter's "To the Nightingale" (35) and "A Sonnet in the Manner of Petrarch" (called "Sonnet, after the Death of Laura" in her volume) into his Commonplace Book in 1787.[7] Under "To the Nightingale," he inscribes the subtitle: "On her leaving E- C- 1784," (a notation Hunter leaves out of her volume), and gives as the author, "Mrs Dr Hunter," an attribution that suggests she was known more for her relationship to her husband than in her own right as a poet. "E- C- " signifies the Hunters' cottage called Earl's Court, located near Brompton.

Not only did others consider Hunter a skillful writer of song lyrics, she herself placed a high priority on songs in her Poems. More than a third of her verses appear under the category "Ballads and Songs," and she labeled a number of poems simply "Song." The first set of Haydn's canzonettas, published in June 1794, include "The Mermaid's Song" (104),[8] "Recollection" ("The season comes when first we met") (102), "A Pastoral Song" ("My mother bids me bind my hair") (110-11), "Despair" ("The anguish of my bursting heart") (105), "Pleasing Pains" ("Far from this throbbing bosom haste") (94), and "Fidelity" ("When hollow bursts the rushing wind") (109-10).[9] Brown suggests that for the first set of canzonettas, "Hunter probably provided Haydn with an array of text from which he selected a sea song, two elegies, two pastoral songs, and a simile on the storms of being faithful, all reprinted in the 1802 Poems" (54). Most well known of these, "My mother bids me bind my hair," was sung later by Jenny Lind and others. Often sentimental in tone, Hunter's lyrics describe a loss through the absence of a loved one: "Pastoral Song," "Recollection," and "Fidelity"; hope for the elimination of anxiety brought on by earthly fears: "Pleasing Pains"; escape into the sea: "Mermaid's Song"; and hope for remembrance after death: "Despair." In addition to "My mother bids me bind my hair," the most moving of these may be "Fidelity," perhaps because the absent lover is addressed.

Among the second set of Haydn's canzonettas, only "The Wanderer" ("To wander alone when the moon faintly beaming") (101-2) is known to be written by Hunter. Evoking extreme melancholy, this poem offers neither wanderer nor reader / listener hope. Hunter recommended other lyrics for Haydn's use, including "She never told her love" from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (2.4.112). Haydn also set to music two other Hunter poems of great feeling. "The Spirit Song" (107-8), which Haydn incorrectly attributed to Shakespeare,[10] conveys the speaker's loss of a great love, perhaps Hunter's own feelings at the death of her husband in 1793. "O Tuneful Voice" (103) was written for Haydn on his final departure from London.

In addition to Haydn, Johann Peter Salomon composed settings for Hunter's lyrics, including "O Tuneful Voice," "The Fatal Moment" (108-9), and others not published in her Poems, and William Horsley did the same for "May Day" (113-14).[11] George Thomson asked Hunter to write lyrics for some national songs that he was collecting, with Joanna Baillie, John Hunter's niece, acting as intermediary. In an 1804 letter, Baillie justifies Hunter's lyrics for Thomson: "I flatter myself you will be perfectly satisfied. If your people of taste in Edinburgh are disposed to find fault with them, I must really be permitted to say they are very difficult, or rather, in good plain Scotch, they are very misleart" (Letters 94).[12]

To read only the song lyrics, however, prevents the reader from experiencing Hunter's variety and some of her best poetry. The critics are correct when they imply that she stayed well within the bounds of contemporary feminine decorum when writing. She did so by speaking to the concerns of women and by expressing familiar drawing-room sentiments. Her verses include themes often addressed by other women poets of the Romantic period. One of these is "November, 1784" (1-5), not considered one of her best by contemporary reviewers. Nevertheless, here and elsewhere she considers the act of writing and includes a typical disclaimer: "On themes of high import I dare to sing / While Fate impels my hand to strike the trembling string" (1). She continues in a Miltonic vein to convey the sorrows that November often brings the human family: "Chimeras dire" (1), "sons of care" (2), "shades of death dismay the land . . . And lifting high his vengeful hand, / Hurls down the demon Spleen . . . To check the springs of life, and crush the enfeebled mind."[13] Hunter describes women's perseverance in "combating despair" (3). Yet weariness sets in: "Some power unseen denies my verse . . . And Fancy's inspirations end" as "Old Hyem calls the storms around his icy car" (5). While Hunter's anticlimactic final stanza allows poetic failure to conclude the poem, her impression of winter's effect on human health and morale reflects the fact that winter often brought death and despair.

Hunter endeavored to instill virtue in her children and applauded it when she found it there. In poems addressed to her son on his thirteenth, fifteenth, and twenty-third birthdays, she urges him to be led by virtue, to "seek useful knowledge, honest fame" (25), and to:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . pursue
The path where truth unerring leads,
Where reason early may subdue
The wild desires which fancy feeds. (27)

She encourages him to "repose" in "friendship, filial love, and tranquil hope" once "the gay pageant charms no more" (30). In a fourth poem to her son, to whom she dedicates her volume, she declares her appreciation for his maturity while expressing her longing to see him again. In "To My Daughter, on Being Separated from her on her Marriage" (33-34), she writes with tender love, pondering when they "shall meet again":

Yet will it be, as when the past
Twin'd ev'ry joy, and care, and thought,
And o'er our minds one mantle cast
Of kind affections finely wrought?(33)

Speaking of and to Fancy in "La Douce Chimere" (9-12), Hunter borrows from, and gives credit to, Milton, who asks in Paradise Lost for his "Holy Light" (3.1) to "[s]hine inward" (3.52) so he can create, since in his blindness he is unable to see Light's "piercing ray" (3.24). Crediting also Cervantes and Petrarch, Hunter praises Fancy's help in her poetic creations: "Through the dim eye thy piercing ray / Beams on the mind a brighter day" (10). Her lines start and end in optimism, unlike Milton's, which begin in hesitation and only become hopeful as he connects himself to other blind poets and prophets. The British Critic admired Hunter's poem except for the French title and an improper rhyme between "cheer" and "Chimere" in the final stanza (20:410), while the Monthly Review objected to an apparent ambiguity in the fifth stanza.

In addition to writing about composition itself, Hunter also praises and mourns a fellow poet in "To the Memory of Chatterton" (21-22), achieving what the British Critic describes as "the very best tribute that has yet been paid to that sublime, but unfortunate, genius" (20:411). Like others who wrote about his death, she deplores the unappreciated poet who was the "wonder and reproach of an enlightened age." Perhaps she felt a bond with the young poet because of their common interest in the familiar subject matter of narrative poetry and the ballad: "Imagin'd deeds of distant years, / Embattled knights and barons bold" (22).

Hunter's "Ballads and Song" section in Poems begins with her already famous "Lamentation of Mary Queen of Scots," which she "adapted to a very ancient Scottish air, supposed to have been [Mary's] own composition" (75). In Mary's voice, the poet expresses the sorrows frequently attributed to the Scottish queen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when her life became a remarkably popular subject of poetry and drama.[14] As in other treatments of Mary, Hunter's Elizabeth I becomes the "False woman" and Mary, the subject of sympathy for her lost "state" (76) and "the days that are gone" (75). Underscoring the melancholy of Mary's plight, Hunter's setting includes birds which fly free--a frequent Romantic symbol--and owls that "from the battlements cry" a warning: "'O Mary, prepare thee to die!'" (76). The equally melancholy "Ballad of the Eighteenth Century" (86-90) contains a common theme skillfully executed. An epigraph taken from Shakespeare's Othello prepares the reader for the story of a woman mad with grief because her husband has cast her aside and taken her children from her: "We speak . . . 'of one whose hand, / like the base indian [sic] throws a pearl away, richer than all his tribe'" (86).[15] The madwoman attends a banquet, seemingly the wedding banquet of her former husband and his new bride. Exhibiting alternating moments of clarity and madness, she flees from the hall as she concludes that her only solace lies in death. The epigraph intensifies the poem's impact, since Othello speaks these words after discovering Desdemona's innocence and immediately before committing suicide. In Hunter's poem, however, the madwoman's former husband neither speaks nor acknowledges any guilt.

Several of Hunter's ballads deal with problems for lovers, whether war, a father's wrath, or unfaithfulness, in "William and Nancy" (81-82) and "The Song at Maria's Grave (114-122); "The Song of the Wandering Lady" (77-78); and "Lelia; or the Maniac's Song" (83-84), respectively. Others explore significant cultural issues. "The Death Song, Written for, and Adapted to, an Original Indian Air" (79-80) was well known before Hunter included it in her Poems, since it had previously appeared in a musical setting.[16] The poem describes a Cherokee warrior's brave and dignified response to torture at the hands of his enemies. Hunter explains at the end of the poem that she wrote it to accompany "a wild air" that she heard a man sing after he had learned it from native American people. She describes the motive for her efforts in Wordworthian fashion: "We look upon the fierce and stubborn courage of the dying indian [sic] with a mixture of respect, pity, and horror; and it is to those sensations excited in the mind of the reader, that the Death Song must owe its effect" (80).

Hunter placed friendship and the life of the mind high on life's list of joys. She expresses her appreciation for both when her friend Mrs. Delany received some "Royal Bounty" (18) from the Duchess of Portland[17] and uses this opportunity to also praise her friend:

Born in a fair auspicious hour,
To mark thy lot the ruling pow'r
Both wit and worth assign'd;
Gave thee to pass thy early days
With genius, whose congenial rays
Still animate thy mind. (19)

For the Bluestockings, Sylvia Myers observes, "learning, virtue, and friendship were inextricably linked" (11). In "Addressed to Mrs. G." Hunter's poetic voice again plumbs the resources of her memory and extolls the endurance of Friendship, which "alone remains sublime, / She rises o're the wreck of time" (14). Memory provides access to that friendship even when death separates the individuals.

While her poetry may not explore significant topical issues in great depth or particularity,[18] Hunter mentions at least in passing those issues she finds troubling, as in "The Genius of the Mountains of Balagata" (84-85):

Behold thy sons unpitied bleed,
While wealth and honors crown the deed:
See grasping avarice denies
A moment to their suppliant cries.

Dark deadly fraud, wild horrid strife,
The poison'd bowl, the murd'ring knife,
Combine thy people to annoy;
Rise and avenge them, or destroy!(85)

Speaking to Brahma, the narrator reveals sympathy for the East Indians whose oppression provides wealth for Hunter's countrymen.

Hunter counted other Bluestockings among her friends: Elizabeth Carter and, according to her niece Agnes Baillie, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. Horace Walpole was her friend and remained so after John Hunter's death (Oppenheimer 436-39). Fanny Burney mentions meeting Hunter through William Seward at one of Hester Thrale's parties in 1782 (2:147). In the same year, Thrale was surprised to learn that Anne Hunter wrote the words to "The Death Song," writing in her diary on April 18: "I had no Notion She could write so well" (1: 533). After meeting Hunter again in 1790, Burney describes Hunter as "a very fine woman, and highly accomplished; but with rather too much glare, both without and within" (2:375). Her peevish reaction contrasts markedly with that of her father, Dr. Charles Burney, music critic and historian, who in a letter to Hunter disparages the "rhymers and ballad-mongers" for their ignorance: "for songs intended for good music and good singing, you, dear Madam, and my late old friend Mr. Mason are the only lyric poets who have thought of anything but the wit and the rhymes of their songs."[19]

In her somewhat longer historical poem "Carisbrook Castle" (37-48), dedicated to her friend Elizabeth Carter, Hunter describes the fate of the family of Charles I, imprisoned on the Isle of Wight. She borrows the story from a well-known legend, but according to the Edinburgh Review, she fails to adequately flesh out the "scantiness" of the legend or the character of King Charles in her account (1: 423). Jeffrey "laments" her final lines: "'Tis ours in happier times to prove / The monarch's safety in his people's love." Yet her patriotic sentiment is common in poetry of the period and Scottish poetry from its early stages.[20] In this poem, Hunter argues for poetry, which survives, against "[p]omp, wealth, and pow'r," which are swept away by time's "arbitrary sway" (39). The narrator describes the castle's location in Gothic detail: "a secret dread," "melancholy night-birds call . . . Till forms unknown, unnumber'd rise, / And ages long forgotten swim before my eyes" (41). She sees a ghostly knight, follows him, and listens to his tale. The "spectre" (42) gives a few particulars of some ancient Britons from the isle who have now fallen from memory. Finally arriving at the time of Charles I, he paints a royalist picture of the King's fate, when "on this spot a monarch's fate / Strain'd with disgrace Britannia's state" (44), and then asks the unfortunate monarch:

"Why didst thou seek this luckless strand,
Where for thy life the toils were spread?
Hypocrisy rul'd o'er the land,
Good faith and gratitude were fled." (45)

While she may not have developed Charles I to the Jeffrey's liking, quoting from one of her sources in an endnote, Hunter gives her readers a sympathetic glimpse of the king. Charles identified an old man for Sir Philip Warwick: "That man is sent every morning to light my fire, and is the best companion I have had for many months" (52). In other notes and in the poem Hunter gives evidence of the king's gratitude to a supporter, sympathizes with the his lost position and loss of liberty, proclaiming his rights in ways similar to others who wrote of Louis XVI's lost liberty and life,[21] and mourns the plight of the king's daughter Elizabeth, who died in captivity twenty months after the death of her father (53).

Anne Hunter played several roles in life. She acted as hostess for her friends and those of her husband, sometimes moderating his occasional abrupt demands that their guests "drink [their] wine" or when he appeared and asked "the present company [to] retire."[22] Her friendships with other writers and intellectuals directed her to topics of social concern and undoubtedly encouraged her to publish her Poems under her own name. Within her literary sphere, Hunter wrote modestly but passionately about love, about the proper behavior for her children, and about the suffering of others. While her song lyrics produced most of her fame, she inspired at least one other poet. Joanna Baillie wrote of Hunter in her memoir to her nephew: "To write as she did was far beyond any attempt of mine, but it turned my thoughts to poetical composition" (9). Only if we do more than merely "allow her book a deserved place on the dressing room table, or parlour window," as the Annual Review (1:650) suggests, can we begin to assess the validity of Baillie's judgment.

Notes

1. Robert Nares calls Hunter "Haydn's Muse" after her death; "Memoir of Mrs. John Hunter, by Archdeacon Nares," Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 7, ed. John Bowyer Nichols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1848), 639.

2. Horace Walpole was grateful for Hunter's "distinguished goodness" to him (440), qtd in Jane M. Oppenheimer, "Ann Home Hunter and Her Friends," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 1 (July 1946): 434-45. The Annual Review 4 (1805) describes Hunter and her poetry thus: "what comes from the pen of the widow of the great John Hunter will always meet with a warm reception from those who know the excellences of her head and the virtues of her heart" (624).

3. See Oppenheimer, 434-35, and A. Peter Brown, "Musical Settings of Anne Hunter's Poetry," Journal of the American Musicological Society 47 (1994), 42, n.6.

4. See also Stephen Behrendt's reaction to Lauchan Maclean Watt's dismissal of Hunter's lyrics in his Introduction to this collection.

5. See also Thomas Crawford, Society and the Lyric (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), 177.

6. Flora Masson suggests that Haydn's music provided a means for Hunter's lyrics to be "read and sung all the world over by people who never heard the name of Mrs. Hunter," "Mrs. John Hunter, the Surgeon's Wife," Blackwood's 177 (Feb. 1905): 221.

7. See William Jack, "Burns's Unpublished Common-place Book," Macmillan's 40 (May 1879):128-29.

8. Nares reports that "'Mermaid's Song' . . . was founded on an Italian original, freely translated," "Memoir," 640.

9. Listed in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 3 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 258. Except for "Mermaid's Song," Hunter called all of these "Song." The first lines and page numbers from her volume are given here in parentheses following Haydn's titles.

10. Landon suggests that perhaps Haydn confused it with "She never told her love," 3:395.

11. See Brown, 78 and 86, n. 72. Brown speculates that Salomon was unaware of Haydn's music for "O Tuneful Voice," 73.

12. Baillie's editor, Judith Bailey Slagle, gives the meaning of "misleart" as misguided (SND), 94, n. 4. See also Brown, 87.

13. "Chimeras dire," Paradise Lost 2.628.

14. See Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

15. "[Y]ou speak . . . of one whose hand / (Like the base [Indian]) threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe," (Othello, 5.2.342, 346-48); The Riverside Shakespeare, Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 1974.

16. Hunter tells us of the publication, 80. An anonymous essay, "The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians," The Musical Antiquary 3 (1911-12), 167, and Brown, 47, provide the earliest publisher: London: Preston, 1784.

17. Hunter herself received financial assistance for two years after her husband's death from the "Royal Bounty" through the efforts of Archibald Macdonald, Lord Chief Baron, and William Eden, Lord Auckland. See Oppenheimer, 441, and Masson, 230.

18. Jeffrey claims that "her subjects are not often very arduous or extensive," 412; the Monthly Review complains that her subjects have been "exhausted" and her language is sometimes vague, 424.

19. Qtd. in Kerry S. Grant, Dr. Burney as Critic and Historian of Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 185, and in Brown, 88, n. 76.

20. See Watt, 19.

21. See, for example, Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants 2. 54-55. Smith also writes with sympathy about Louis XVI's family, 2. 127-64.

22. Masson, 225, quoting from Drewry Ottley, Life of John Hunter.

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