Panton, Mary

By Laura Mandell

Critical Essay

Panton's poetry is light, at moments awful, sometimes revealing genius at narrative compression (130-1). What is most interesting about Eloise and Other Poems, published in 1815, is that it is the work of a woman who was a "wreader," in George Landow's terms, of eighteenth-century popular verse. Mary Panton, about whom we know nothing, is an exemplary reader of gift-book poetry, and several hints in this collection of poetry suggest her class as well as what she is reading. Although one poem suggests that she fears "Cold poverty's chill blast" (76), that these fears are more melancholically poetic than real is suggested by the poem's form: it is nearly a villanelle. Panton knows something about form, using poetic terms such as "canto," "sonnet," and "bout-rhymé," and about mainstay poetic devices such as anaphora. But she doesn't know too much: some of her sonnets are sonnets in rhyme scheme only, metrically not iambic pentameter but the tetrameters and alternating tetrameter / trimeter of the ballad stanzaic forms. Her poetic diction signals knowledge of poetry — her poems are filled with eolian harps, vernal flowers, and parian stone — but deviates toward the hackneyed, since tears and dew "begem" everything. Thus, the poems that accord with the poetic evidence and situate her in terms of class are, first, her very funny poem about a thunderstorm, "Stanzas Written at Midnight," which shows that she is in no danger of being left out in it, and her "Address to Fortune" in which she asks for what is a decidedly lower but middle-class existence. In this last poem she asks for books - not in a library, but in "A neat and simple little press" (151), a cabinet that was often used for storing milk in Scottish homes. If Panton inhabited Jane Austen's world, the world of Persuasion, for instance, then, she would have been not a Musgrove but a Hayter, a younger Hayter whose opportunities for education were quite limited.

Panton hopes that her press will be "Of choicest authors full," and here if nowhere else we get our sense that she is a reader of gift books, whose prefaces if not their titles habitually designate their poems as "choicest." But there are other indications as well that Panton is the reader of gift books par excellence, stimulated by them to write: a "wreader." There are only two direct literary allusions. One poem is written on the occasion of "reading the life and poems of H. K. White" (72), about whom I can find nothing except that Southey published in 1823 The Remains of Henry Kirke White. With an Account of his Life. Since Panton's Eloise is published in 1815, she may not have learned about him through Southey, or if she did so, Southey's volumes must have also been printed at an earlier date; but suffice it to say that something about this "uneducated poet" clearly inspired her. And the second explicit allusion is a poem avowedly "In Imitation of 'My Mother'" (127). My Mother: a Poem was first published as "by a Lady" in 1807, an embellished and obviously expensive book containing a poem written by Ann Taylor who was imitating William Cowper's "To Mary." That Panton does not care to cite Cowper's poem as the original text imitated (though Taylor mentions it, at least in subsequent editions) but instead this popular and expensively packaged poem shows her to be a middle-class reader who derives no benefit from showing off her erudition (in contrast, that is, to women who were financially worse off but had pretensions as members of the literati such as Mary Hays and Eliza Fenwick). Moreover, her imitation results in a serious poem, showing that Panton in no way approximates (nor cares to) the high romantic aesthetic that sees such metrics as comic and ridiculous. Thus Byron, in a letter to Murray, refusing a sum of money, perhaps offered for Byron's Memoirs:

P.S. — Can't accept your courteous offer.
For Orford [Horace Walpole] and for Waldegrave
You give much more than me you gave;
Which is not fairly to behave
My Murray!

Because if a live dog, 'tis said,
Be worth a Lion fairly sped,
A live lord must be worth two dead,
My Murray!

Byron makes fun of Ann Taylor, and, in thinking of the form for "My Murray," suggests his knowledge of the original, since Cowper's refrain is "My Mary." In contrast, Panton loved Taylor's embellished poem, not caring where the form originated and reusing it in her own poetry, thrilled with its cleverness rather than sardonic about it, as is Byron.

That Mary Panton was a lower middle class woman writer, schooled by gift books, with no literary ambitions — her poetry suggests repeatedly that she writes in order to ease people's pain (119, 153), including her own (vii) — makes these poems most interesting as artifacts perhaps revealing conflicts caused by gender and class. Clearly all the "Reverend" subscribers of Queen's College, Oxford — Anglican clergy — found in these poems the virtue they would hope to instill in future parishioners. Panton's "The Soldier," for instance, tells a sordid tale about the sacrifice of a young country man to British nationalism, but, so far from indicting the monarchy for its foreign policy, the poem turns tragic death from sacrifice for the rich general, whose life the poor boy saves, into a tale of lost love: though Panton's soldier does "sigh" as he dies, it is for his true love Emma - his sigh does NOT, therefore, "Run in blood down palace walls." "War" clearly marshals pacifist sentiment, but all losses imagined in these poems are personal and familial, not political.

The way the poems treat loss itself is fascinating, and clearly produced by ideological conflict. The ethos of the gift book, and of the poem as expensive word, appears indirectly in Panton's poetry. Economical issues appear here insofar as people are metonyms, and metonyms are signs for universal plots. Every person appears as a bosom, a hand, a heart, a breast, a tear, just as the factory worker is "a hand" in Adam Smith's description of pin-making: the people in these poems are alienated by poetic techniques endemic to gift-book writing, as workers are alienated by repetitive motions on the assembly line. Plots such as youth, lost love, and death are evoked on the cheap with metonymical economy. "The bud," "the storm," "the grave" pretty much give you "the" life with the greatest economy possible, since you see all of it in one particular item rendered universal by the article "the" preceding these metonyms; the bourgeois worldview is universally applied and also compacted into things that seem natural. This poetry's investment in things that can be possessed appears thematically as well: it is not possible in Panton's world to lose anything without going mad. The Anglican subscribers probably thrilled at this aspect of Panton's work. She portrays virtuous constancy with a vengeance: you are either mothered, married, and true, or dead / insane (preferably both).

That said, these poems are interesting for the ways they articulate desires beyond ideology as well. "Mad Marian" gives us a female Othello; we have one insane jilted lover who is male (122); and "Rosaly" is not punished for her faithlessness as much as is "the son of revelry" who tricked her into it. Eloise itself starts in formal, English, educated iambic pentameter but then slips into rural, unlettered ballad meters at the moment that Panton tells us that the object of her description, and thus potentially her own writing, is "a soft celestial song" (5). In short, Panton's poems are incredibly interesting as evidence of the uses to which a reader put popular poetry, writing in its cant both to reconcile herself to ideology and to contest it.

Notes

1. To John Murray, 23 August 1821