The structure of this work by Southey is the title suggests a ballad which is structured into 46 quatrains. The rhyme scheme most generally is ABCB. There are also a couple instances of internal rhyme. Southey also uses alliteration multiple times, for example, "The fiendish force flung her on the horse." In this poem, through a third person narrator and but switches to the narration of the Old Woman without any orthographic cues.
In this poem, Southey gives accounts to a burial preparation for an Old Woman who admits to witchcraft and claims, "I have suck'd the breath of sleeping babes/ the fiends have been my slaves/ I have nointed myself with infants fat,/and feasted on rifle graves." In this poem, Southey examines the relationship of objects and the supernatural and also perhaps the ways in which humans look to objects as means to intervene with the supernatural/ spiritual. In the poem, objects such as infants fat, graves and fiends objectified as slaves are the evidence of the Old Woman's damnation and identity as a witch. The Old Woman however also believes that objects will protect her from the Fiend.
The Old Woman asks her children "the monk her son, and her daughter the nun" to prepare her burial with holy objects in order to protect her corpse. In ways the Old Woman is objectified herself by focusing on the preparation of her corpse. Her children are also objectified through the repetition of their roles as a monk and a nun. Interestingly, both the Old Woman who is associated with witchcraft and her children associated with some form of Christianity depend on objects as a means to intervene with the supernatural. Southey really emphasizes this use of objects by first having the Old Woman describe in detail the way she wants to protect her body. She presents her method of burial through a very descriptive procedure which includes many numerical values such as "three chains to the church floor" and "fifty priests" and "fifty choristers."Southey again emphasizes the role of these objects to the characters of the poem by repeating the objects through reporting the process of her burial as it occurs.
As the poem progresses, we see that the relationship between the people and the objects changes. While at first we see that the Old Woman and her children and the people of the church strongly cling to the objects such as the beads (rosaries), the chains, the coffin, iron bars, the bells and tapers, but as the threat of the fiend grows, their reliance and relationship to the objects weaken: "the monk and nun forgot their bead,/ they fell on the ground dismay'd." Finally after the Old Woman rises without any choice to disobey the Fiend, she literally becomes his possession."At the voice she was forced to obey". At the end of the poem, the Old Woman literally becomes and object of possession and all of the objects depended on by the people of the poem failed to achieve their intended person.
It seems that Southey is critiquing the role of spiritual intervention which humans place on objects.
Questions:
Why end the poem with the objectification of the Old Women and her capture by the Fiend after spending so much time addressing the procedure of the burial? Is Southey critiquing religion here as a means to escape our wrongdoings or is he questioning the role of spiritual objects to intervene with the repercussions of our actions? Did the objects of protection not work because objects are innately unable to intervene with the supernatural/ spiritual or because the humans "forgot their beads?"
The poem certainly enacts a critique of object-center theology, specifically Catholic rituals, which Southey particularly abhorred. Your question about the Fiend is a good one, and might be answered in the figurative language in the final stanzas: the chains melt “like flax” at his touch, he bursts the coffin open with his “voice of thunder,” and his horse’s eyes are “like a meteor’s glare.” These natural images stand in a marked contrast to the symbol of Catholic faith, the beads, which fall useless from the monk’s and nun’s hands. This contrast replicates the tension between the old woman’s unnatural actions and the naturalness of death that she tries so hard to avoid. Perhaps, then, the poem is not antagonistic to objects, but to the reliance on certain kinds of objects to secure spiritual wellbeing.
ReplyDelete