Patricia Rolland Darling’s Poetical Pieces

By Chantel Lavoie

Critical Essay

One is inclined to hope that Patricia Rolland Darling's poetical pieces are fugitive from some larger, better body of work now lost, although this is unknowable and unlikely. Whereas the book was published in Edinburgh in 1817, Darling died in 1814, of which we are informed in the "Monody on the Death of the Author, Who Died suddenly, 14th February, 1814," which is the first of seven poems by her son, Peter Middleton Darling, that appear at the end of the volume (68). This posthumous collection reads both as homage to a good mother, and as a vehicle for Peter Darling and his sister Jessy to see their own works appear in print — proof of the lingering traces of coterie publication and the often communal nature of a book published under a single author's name. Indeed, the second poem in the book is "A Hymn, Composed by an Officer. . . . sent to the Author by one of his friends" and the final piece, a political "Song," beginning "Dear Pitt!" is said to be by the Late Mrs. Home of Whitefield. Of the twenty-two poems in the eighty-three page collection only twelve appear to have been penned by the author whose name graces the title page.

This title page informs the reader that the book was "Printed for the Author's Family." To underscore Darling's domesticity, almost in contrast to her poetic ambition, eight lines from the first piece printed in the book, "An Advice to a Lady lately married," appear as epigraph between the author's full name and the colophon. This quotation emphasizes that "domestic care" is the most worthy "notice of the fair." The lesson here is that "True happiness resides at home" as opposed to "abroad," and that in this home it is the bride's duty to make her "partner easy" because "Man finds abroad sufficient care." The conventional Preface to Poetical Pieces, in which the author is credited with having written "during her leisure hours, for her own amusement, but never with the intention to publish," follows up on this domestic theme, suggesting that life and art were never at odds for Darling. Here the unnamed family members of the poet dedicate the volume "to their FRIENDS and the PUBLIC," and hope to continue to earn the "future Patronage" of both "by assiduity and attention to the morals of their pupils (they having some time ago commenced Teachers of English and Needle-work.)" These modestly ambitious sentiments reinforce the mutually beneficial relationship between literature and more domestic chores, suggesting that their mother's diverse talents and priorities live on in her fond children.

The poems in this slim volume speak to a variety of forms: we find tetrametric couplets in the initial "Advice" piece, several sonnets (some composed of more than fourteen lines), elegies, and short odes — two of which place the author in opposition to the French Revolution — "On the Death of Louis XVI. King of France" (26), and "On the Tyranny of ROBESPIERRE" (27). There are also epistolary pieces in quatrains, such as "To a Lady," which chides the lady for not recognizing that her beauty and "faultless form" would certainly break hearts (16). The last piece in the book by Darling herself is a convoluted narrative piece in several sections, titled "The Banditti's Cave; or, The Gray Pilgrim" (35-67).

The first poem, "An Advice to a Young Lady, Lately Married," is one of the more interesting pieces here. The poet addresses "Dear Julia," who has undergone the metamorphosis from the single state to that of a wife. In uneven stanzas the speaker wavers in her message as if what should be conventional advice with just a hint of good-humoured teasing will not be thus contained, or at least sustained in her verse. First Darling claims — though it reads also as a warning — that through marriage either "bliss or wo's ensured for life,"(l. 4). Then posing as a "friendly Muse the way would show, / To gain the bliss, and miss the wo" (ll. 5-6). However, she then argues that conditions must already be right: "But first of all, I must suppose, / You've with mature reflection chose" (ll. 7-8). The obvious, ominous message is that no hope can be entertained if the case is otherwise. In the next four lines the speaker is less equivocal:

Small is the province of a wife,
And narrow is her sphere in life;
Within that sphere to move aright,
Should be her principal delight. (ll. 11-14)

It should be her principal delight. But is it? Darling emphasizes the formation of "the tender infant mind" as a wife's duty, as well as encouraging other domestic virtues — frugality and prudence, so that her husband is moved to "bless the day / He gave his liberty away" (ll. 17-18). Such advice echoes countless texts which harp on this small province and narrow sphere, more reminiscent of books like William Kendrick's anti-feminist The Whole Duty of Woman, published in 1752 and reprinted throughout the latter eighteenth-century and into the nineteenth, than of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

At line twenty-one we unexpectedly encounter a bibliographical glitch that harkens back to the epigraph taken from this poem for the title-page. Both this section of the poem and the quotation that welcomes us into the book begin with the same four lines:

Then never think domestic care,
Beneath the notice of the fair;
But matters ev'ry day inspect,
That nought be wasted by neglect; (ll. 21-24)

But the couplet which concludes this stanza in the poem itself: "Be frugal plenty round you seen, / And always keep the golden mean" (ll. 25-26) is not the same as the lines which follow the above passage on the title page. Instead, a substitution has been made from later in poem, grafting lines fifty-nine to sixty-two from the original, where they contribute to a different discussion about keeping a perpetual cheerful countenance, onto the passage in order to conclude (and create) the epigraph:

Abroad for happiness ne'er roam,
True happiness resides at home;
Still make your partner easy there,
Man finds abroad sufficient care. (ll. 59-62)

Why cobble these passages together and create such a discrepancy, a discrepancy obvious on the second page of the book? The only, unfortunate answer is that whoever culled these verses together — most likely the poet's son — believed the best introduction to his mother's poetic voice was an edited one. Not a promising beginning.

The poem does warrant close reading, if only because of its ambiguity. The predictable advice to prefer cleanliness to finery is followed by the prudishly ambiguous warning: "If once fair decency be fled, / Love soon deserts the genial bed" (ll. 29-30). The early days of marriage are described as being "oft o'ercast by childish strife," (l. 36) which serves as a reminder of the "mature reflection" attributed to this particular young bride, Julia, in the first stanza. Other pieces of wisdom offered are that it is the wife's peculiar care to fix her empire o'er her husband's heart, because a happy marriage is a friendship that will endure beyond time and death. Although we find no direct mention of the vapours or the spleen here, there are nevertheless warnings against peevish tears and "sullen frowns" — further emphasis on the need for wifely maturity (l. 55). Ultimately, since "Heaven gave to man superior sway, / — Then Heaven and him at once obey" (ll. 53-54). Any potential for subversion is drained away by such dogmatic constancy, as such precepts are not questioned, nor is attention paid to the husband's duty to make his wife happy. Darling did not seem to have read, or at least to have been influenced by, such earlier women writers as Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch or Mary Leapor, who questioned Adam's "superior sway" in ways that called into question marriage itself.[1]

Of course, advice to a young bride may not be the place for such doubt, but the poem is frustrating in that the speaker seems to want to have things both ways — as a versified celebration of this blessed union and as (veiled) warning about mixed blessings. As she advises the wife not to engage in disputes with her spouse, nor to let him perceive when she disagrees with him, there is more negative than positive advice in this piece. Yet the conclusion is startling, revealing something about the poet that is inseparable from her voice, and draws into question not only the validity, but also the sincerity behind all that has come before:

But now methinks I hear you cry,
Shall she pretend, Oh vanity!
To lay down rules for wedded life,
Who never was herself a wife? (ll. 91-94)

The comical turn is not unconventional, yet it is our first indication that the poet is herself unmarried, not yet the maternal entity into which she has been framed in the Preface to the book, and far from the beloved mother whose death earns a monody at the end. Most striking is that the concluding couplet of "An Advice to a Young Lady" gives up the cause: "I own, you've ample cause to chide, / And, blushing, throw the pen aside" (ll. 95-96). The diction here is noteworthy: "chide" might otherwise rhyme with bride — a word which does not appear in this poem; and "blushing" is of course the adjectival trope of the bride, here attributed to the poet who has tried, without having conducted her own investigation of wedded bliss, to give not "Advice" but more precisely (and imprecisely) "An Advice." Where does the poet stand? Her introductory pose as a muse would naturally set her apart from marriage, a virgin dedicated to her art, yet at the end of this constricting poem about a wife's obligation to please her mate she acknowledges that her status as an unmarried woman constricts her in this topic. She is an unknowledgeable muse. Much might be made of this final gesture of tossing the pen away, blushing, if it is indeed a metaphorical penis (Gilbert and Gubar 3). Darling rejects the task to which she has hitherto dedicated ninety earnest lines, suggesting that it was a mere exercise, conjecture on her part, and in throwing aside her pen seems to throw aside the as-yet-imagined problems of a wife. The rewards of the poem, then, seem not worth the effort, perhaps holding a mirror up to the exigent duties laid upon the young bride.

Another piece which hints at unanswerable biographical questions is "On Leaving Scotland for America," which is another sonnet of sorts (18).[2] From this piece we might assume that Darling did undertake this journey; from the publication information and her children's input in the book, we can assume she returned. This piece is apostrophic, bidding farewell to the lawns of her motherland, "Where fond maternal love my bosom prest, / And happy infancy past amongst your bowers!" (ll. 3-4). The order of these life experiences is inverted, underlining the poet's status as doting mother before her own childhood. The picturesque and the sublime are meant to come together here in ways that speak to the influence of the fledgling romantic movement:

Ye romantic plains, and blue heather bells,
By Spring's luxuriant hand smiles around!

Ye flinty rocks and tremendous fells,
That frown on him who treads thy mystic ground!

And oh! ye promis'd happiness, whose voice
Deluded fancy heard in ev'ry gloomy grove,

Bidding this aching fearful heart rejoice,
In the bright sunshine of unfading love; (ll. 5-12)

The words "lawns" and "smiles" are among her favourites; they appear again and again in the collection, the latter usually the action of some part of nature (as is "frowns"). It is not a metaphor that works particularly well, though it does speak to a persistent sensibility which feels nature as an animated presence surrounding her. Something sincere shines out from this poem about leave-taking that cannot stop dwelling on what is left behind. The bid of her "aching fearful heart" to "rejoice" is a nice indication of the ambivalence attendant upon going to America. The concluding couplet weakens the poem as it casts another backward glance in a less interesting, less clear way: "Tho' lost to me, still may thy smile serene, / Bless my friend of Scotia's regretted scene" (ll. 13-14).

Nature is important in a number of these poems, not as an effective trope for the poet's emotion (it is seldom so) but as an inevitable force which has been reckoned with in her life, and must find a place in the poems she writes about traumatic loss. "To the Memory of a Beloved Sister" again addresses the poet's friend, Julia, in an attempt to explain the grief the poet feels at the loss of "lovely JESSY" (20, l. 4). Like a rose struck down in a sudden tempest, Jessy was killed by a storm. Whether the storm caused a fatal illness or she was in fact struck by lightning is not readily apparent, though the latter seems likely. The poet does confess with touching sincerity that "When the thunder rolls I tremble at the noise. . ."(l. 16). This poem invites speculations about the darker side of nature's sublime power, even as the impulse toward narrative tends to undermine her prosody:

The storm caught JESSY on her dreary way,
Her brother, laughing, fled from her sight;
He little thought she no more could stray,
To see her sister's family, her chief delight. (ll. 9-12)

That Jessy "no more could stray," which perhaps should read "stay," is another indication of the inevitability of nature's cruelty. The unusual profusion of syllables in the second and fourth line of each quatrain in this poem speaks the poet's overwhelming grief. The lack of metric cohesion between one quatrain and another, though the rhyme scheme (abab) is preserved point toward indecision: it is not a ballad, it is not an irregular ode; it is a voice saying "Thy untimely end fills me with despair," (l. 15) and losing its own timing in the process. The initial address to Julia is not picked up again, not allowed to frame the experience of loss by replacing a sister with a friend.[3]

Following this poem is a more self-conscious in its romanticism, a twenty-line "Sonnet" which laments the loss of a male friend, J—, who fell to his death from a cliff (22). The speaker is haunted by graphic images of this untimely end:

Whilst fancy's powers again to sight restore,
Thy body mangled and distain'd with gore;
And paint thee lifeless, whose benignant mind
Was all that nobly animates mankind. (ll. 17-20)

The diction she employs to address this death is more heroic and more gruesome that that of the poem about the loss of her sister, though both were "unnatural" events which might be considered acts of God. In the piece about her sister Darling claimed that lightning "Displays to man th'Almighty's ire"(l. 8), almost as if the finger of God had reached down to touch Jessy, chosen this fragile flower. By contrast, in this poem about J—, the man's death is attributed to his "love of art" which caused him to "Too rashly dare yon rocks tremendous brow"(l. 12). Romantic sensibility in this piece about the man who ventured, dared and fell is both appealing and repellent, beautiful and dangerous, making this poem is more occasional than mournful.

Whereas some of Darling's titles promise appealing myth-making, often in response to a death, most of the poems themselves disappoint. "To a Lady, Whose Husband fell on the plains of Quebec, at the moment the gallant General WOLFE received his mortal wound," is composed as if by the dying soldier himself (19). It is sickly sweet and, thankfully, brief. Darling would have been very young when the battle for Quebec was fought in 1759 — she may not have been born yet — but it was evidently an event that captured her imagination.

Darling's last poem in the volume is an uncharacteristically long piece titled "The Banditti's Cave; or, The Gray Pilgrim," which borrows from Scottish balladry and gothic romance tradition. At thirty-two pages, 674 lines, it is divided into sub-titled sections. The first, under the original title, contains 512 lines, the second titled "The Recluse," sixty-five lines, a third titled "Song" is ninety-one lines, and finally there is an epigrammatic six-line address to the "Reader." Interspersed between descriptions of the beauties of the Scottish highlands, "The Banditti's Cave" tells the tale of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a death-threat, a double-revelation of the hero's identity, a past wrong righted by the next generation, an account of a rescue (also in the past), a battle between a good clan and a clan of evil bandits, and an unexpected and undeveloped love story. Each of these narrative strains these fails to convince, and the poem, written in a variety of meters and rhyme schemes, often fails at being lyrical.