The social function of the poetess depends upon class. Samuel Clemens's parody of Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chapter 17) shows that the poetess figure is a transnational phenomenon; and Hawkins performs all of Emmeline's duties, including penning the ode to deceased members of her community before the undertaker gets to the body. But the comic futility of Emmeline's work clearly depends upon its function as a tool for upward mobility within the middle class: Twain's description of the Grangerford's parlor, from the books on the table to the pictures on the wall, make it clear that Emmeline's diseased and ultimately death-dealing obsession with writing mournful occasional poetry is a redounding-on-their-own-heads of the family's class pretensions, etched in the cultural artifacts and educational materials placed strategically throughout their home. In Hawkins's case, her position as a laborer allows her to transform death from the sentimentalist's maudlin obsession into a political point.

Her intent, Hawkins tells us in the dedication, is "to sing the Praises of God, . . . a righteous king, and just laws" ([iii]). And yet, when Hawkins is acting her office of community Poetess, these "just laws" take a few hits. "The Death of Thomas Stoddart" condemns a court and jury that released a young woman "known" by the community to have poisoned Stoddart and his family. The poem ends with threats about her life in the hereafter, perhaps deflecting a political point into a narcoticizing religious truism, but perhaps not, insofar as the poem positions the community against the courts.

Hawkins's intent to celebrate " a righteous king," George III and then George IV, is expressed in several poems dedicated to the Royals. In her poem "On the Death of Princess Charlotte," she makes herself the mouthpiece of British nationalism: "Great Britain may her grief display," she says, and then displays it. Hawkins clearly participates in the nation-building acts of mourning surrounding Charlotte's death (Schorr 196-229). One gets a sense that her sense of national identification resembles the point of view articulated by Walter Scott: he loves Scotland but advocates Hanoverian rule. Though she also celebrates the place of her birth - near "Burnswark hill" ("The Praise of B---," 10), near "the famed camp of Burnswark, where the brave Caledonians fought against the Romans" ([iii]), the nostalgia and cultural pride at work in these poems does not, it seems to me, serve to construct an oppositional, cultural, specifically Scottish nationalism. Rather, it serves to create that illusory sense of British history (as formulated, for instance, in Ivanhoe) so necessary to British nationalism (Ragussis 89-103): "brave Buccleuch of ancient fame" and "[t]he valiant Douglas" are celebrated in Hawkins's poems not as Scotsmen but for being "renowned" "through Britain" (10).

And yet, once again, Hawkins's status as outsider, Scottish and poor, gives a bite to her statements as to the virtue of English landholders and British Kings. One can see in her works the same maneuver that we know, typically, from Blake's Songs of Innocence. A moral injunction repeated by an Innocent obfuscates the fact of oppression, but, when uttered by a revolutionary, it constitutes a threat. "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm," when uttered by "little" Tom Dacre in "The Chimney Sweeper" of Innocence, keeps him happy and warm, as would any opiate, in the face of real oppression, real cold, real misery. But Tom may be slightly older, slightly bigger, and a great deal angrier than figured by the poem: Heather Glen has pointed out that Chimney Sweepers were associated with adolescent sexuality more than childhood innocence (42). If so, his sing-song moral actually threatens to do "harm" to the Sweeps' employers who are, emphatically, not doing their duty (Glen 42-44). Similarly, when Hawkins offers long life to the prince regent as he assumes the throne in "Lines on the Royal Family," her use of "may" could be either angelic or "demonic" (in Blake's sense of the term, as revolutionary energy); her "may" could be either prayer or (demonic) fiat. Given the history of "the prince of pleasure," in fact, Hawkins's demand, "may all the blood royal in virtue increase," in effect tells George IV to shape up.

The epigraph to her volumes is self-deprecating and ironical, from Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: "A book's a book, although there is nothing in't.." Perhaps her belief that her poetry offered moral instructions that she was called by God to disseminate allowed her to assume a much more confident and authoritative voice in her poems. But it is truly amazing to find someone who "receiving a meagre education" (DNB 9.225) could pen the lines "Art and Nature," a dialogue between art and nature personified in which nature describes the secrets she will not reveal, no matter how much human industry is spent in trying to understand them (28-31). While God may in fact give her this message ("I, Nature, work by [God's] decree, / I'm second cause," 31), her sense that she has the ability to make God's case surely comes from her immersion in both the ballad and the poetess traditions since it could not come from the educational prowess she was denied.

Hawkins uses mainly three kinds of stanzaic form. In addition to a four-beat line of rhyming couplets, arranged variously into stanzas with varying rhyme schemes, Hawkins also uses primarily what has come to be known as "the Burns stanza" (Attridge 86): three four-beat lines, a two-beat line, a four-beat line, and then a final two-beat line; only two rhymes are used throughout the stanza, one for the four-beat lines, one for the two-beat lines (aaabab; 444242). The Burns stanza is most clearly Hawkins's element, reflecting an oppositional, specifically Scottish nationalism belied by the content of her poems: Burns's validation in print of their common cultural heritage helped her find a voice. Another form she uses commonly is the ballad stanza, four lines, alternating rhyme, the first and second having four beats, the third and fourth having 3 beats (Attridge 87). The ballad stanza appears in Burns's works and collections, as well as in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Edinburgh, 1803); it is of course imitated in Lyrical Ballads.

But if her use of stanzaic form shows that a high Romantic aesthetic valorizing balladry was conducive to her national and class positions, in fact much of the form of Hawkins's poetry eschews the simple. Hawkins would not agree with Wordsworth that the greatest poetry is prose. Her diction hearkens rather to the educational pretensions of the poetess: it is much more like earlier and less prosaic eighteenth-century poets or like the Della Cruscans, collectively the founders of the poetess tradition (McGann). For instance, Hawkins uses set epithets and images (virtue shines, 9, 50), repeatedly making use of the rhetorical device of euphemism - "vegetable tribe" (13) for instance, for "plant." She also repeatedly uses the devices of allegory and personification. These formulaic devices allow her to appear educated in print, thus giving her an authoritative poetic voice, by virtue of having read other, similar poems. Hawkins reminds us that the poetess tradition educated its audience and induced audience participation in a high culture otherwise closed off to its readers (Montweiler).

Ridiculing Emmeline Grangerford is, of course, only a way of firmly re-delineating crossed class lines. Hawkins is not Grangerford, and her occasional verse not about Stephen Dowling Bots. It is at moments artificial because, like Grangerford's ode, written in the class-defying mode of the poetess, but it is never thin, not written parodically, but thick with implications about the difficulties and joys of forging a national identity and, with it, an authoritative speaking voice when circumscribed by the various pens of class and gender.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. New York: Longman, 1982.
Glen, Heather. "Blake's Criticism of Moral Thinking in Songs of Innocence and of Experience." In Interpreting Blake. Ed. Michael Phillips. New York: Cambridge UP, 1978. 32-69.
McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.
Montwieler, Katherine. "Hemans and Home-Schooling: History, Literature, and Records of Woman." Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 1.2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 10-31.
Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" & English National Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995.
Schor, Esther. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1994.
Stephen, Sir Leslie and Sir Sidney Lee. The Dictionary of National Biography. [London:] Oxford UP, [1963-1965].