2018 – Page 59 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Ann Taylor’s ‘My Mother’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘My Mother’ is a famous poem, but its author is not so well-known. Ann Taylor (1782-1866) was not only a popular poet (who is best-remembered, in so far as she is remembered at all, for her verses for children) but also a literary critic of some repute. But it is for ‘My Mother’ that Taylor is now chiefly known.

My Mother

Who sat and watched my infant head
When sleeping on my cradle bed,
And tears of sweet affection shed?
My Mother.

When pain and sickness made me cry,
Who gazed upon my heavy eye,
And wept for fear that I should die?
My Mother.

H. Rider Haggard’s She: A Bestselling Fantasy

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle sings the praises of one of the most popular novels of all time

This column, Dispatches from The Secret Library, is named after my first book aimed at a general (rather than narrowly academic) readership, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, the idea being to examine lesser-known books which were once much more popular than they are now. This week’s book is slightly different in that it’s still in print and enjoyed by a fairly large group of people (to judge from the fact that there are still quite a few good editions in print), but I think it qualifies as a ‘secret library’ book because its present popularity is nothing compared with its past success.

10 of the Best Poems of Farewell

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Poets are often at their most poignant when saying goodbye – to lovers, to lost loved ones, or to a part of their lives they have left behind. Here are ten of the greatest poems about saying goodbye or farewell.

They range from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century, and show how, when it comes to writing valedictory verses, poets have produced some of the most moving and ingenious poems that say Goodbye…

A Short Analysis of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Geoffrey Hill, who died in 2016, once defended ‘difficulty’ in poetry, arguing that ‘genuinely difficult art is truly democratic’. Human beings are complicated, so any poetry that is to be worthy of us should reflect our complexity, whether moral, emotional, or intellectual. ‘September Song’ reflects Hill’s dedication to this principle, tackling one of the most ‘difficult’ subjects for a poet to write about: the Holocaust. ‘September Song’, which can be read here, was published in 1968.

The poem is grimly prefaced by the birth and death dates of a child who, we are told, was ‘deported’ in 1942. As we read on, we realise that ‘deported’ is a military euphemism, and the child was in fact killed in 1942, aged just ten years old, presumably in one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The (fictional) child’s birth date, ‘19.6.32’, is significant: this is the day after Hill himself was born.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: Dystopia before Dystopia

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the looking-glass world of Samuel Butler’s pioneering anti-utopian novel

When I was an undergraduate English student at Loughborough fifteen years ago, I took an optional second-year module called ‘Other Victorians’. As this title implies, the module was intended as a sort of companion-piece to the core module ‘Victorian Literature’, which covered the canon of Victorian writing. On the one hand, you had George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. On the other, you had Florence Nightingale’s essays, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) would stand firmly in the latter camp containing those ‘other Victorians’. His anti-utopian novel is part science-fiction, part social commentary, part adventure fantasy, part comic satire. Like many experimental Victorian works of literature, it resists easy categorisation. Is it even a dystopian work, a forerunner to Brave New World, We, and Nineteen Eighty-Four?