Romantic Vision and Gothic Balladry: Anne Bannerman's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry

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Timothy Ruppert

First published: 6 October 2013Full publication history

DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12104 View/save citation

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Correspondence: Slippery Rock University, 33 Hiland Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA 15202-1723.
Email: timruppert@yahoo.com

Abstract

Like her women Romantic contemporaries Joanna Baillie and Anna Barbauld, the Scottish poet Anne
Bannerman (1765–1829) took an interest in the imaginative possibilities conferred by the tradition of
British visionary poetics, a longstanding mode of imaginative production engaged by authors such as
Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and many of the canonical Romantics, including William
Blake, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Evoking the style, conventions and disruptive
objectives of Judeo-Christian scriptural prophecy, visionary poetics created an opportunity for authors
to express unpopular and even radical ideas within culturally sanctioned literary frameworks such as
dream narratives, portrayals of seers and imaginative accounts of mystical or otherworldly experiences.
In her second published volume of poetry, 1802's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, Bannerman makes
use of several themes, images and tropes associated with visionary poetry in what appears at first
glance to be a volume of Gothic ballads. That pieces such as ‘The Prophetess of the Oracle of Seäm’ and
‘The Prophecy of Merlin’ place her Tales within the context of vatic literature becomes more compelling
when we consider how Bannerman redraws certain conventions of the visionary subgenre and so
transforms the Gothic idiom.

A contemporary of Joanna Baillie and Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, the Scottish poet Anne Bannerman,
though a fascinating and provocative Romantic voice, is a woman of whom we know very little and
whose poetry remains unfamiliar. We have only a few critical treatments of her poetry (including
contributions from Adriana Craciun, Andrew Elfenbein, Diana Long Hoeveler and, most recently, Ashley
Miller) and a mere sketch of her life. After producing two books (1800's Poems and 1802's Tales of
Superstition and Chivalry, the volume to which I shall soon turn) and enjoying the friendship of Sir
Walter Scott as well as the support of his coterie (Craciun 157–58, Behrendt 228), Bannerman lost both
her mother and her brother, thus finding herself in serious financial peril (Craciun 156–58, 2004 Luttich).
She brought out a new edition of her two previous volumes in 1807 and dedicated the reissue to Lady
Charlotte Rawdon (who in 1805 helped her to pursue a pension from Lord Melville) (Craciun 158);
nevertheless, her books' modest sales – and her friend Robert Anderson – compelled her to abandon
poetry and to work as a governess (Craciun 157–58, 2004 Luttich). She died in Scotland in 1829, her
health devastated, and her poetry forgotten (Behrendt 228, 2004 Luttich).

Today, her still-faint literary reputation proves a loss for both students and specialists interested in 19th-
century British literature generally or Romantic women writers particularly. Her continuing absence
from all save a very few studies seems especially regrettable in view of what her ardour for success and
belonging can teach us about literary relationships and ideas of poetic tradition during the Romantic age
in Britain. Bannerman's deep admiration for fellow countrywoman Baillie serves to illustrate my point:
as Craciun recounts in her Fatal Women of Romanticism (2003), Bannerman so revered Baillie that, in an
1807 poem entitled ‘Verses to Miss Baillie, on the Publication of her First Volume of Plays on the
Passions’, she likens the elder woman to William 1997 Shakespeare (181) and so glorifies Baillie by
placing her on the highest tier of national literary art (181). Through her speaker, Bannerman casts
Baillie as a visionary guide, a traveller of the skies not unlike, in some respects, Dante's Virgil or Geoffrey
Chaucer's eagle in The House of Fame (circa 1379–80). Baillie's dramatic power reflects the author's
privileged witness: ‘Warm from these visions of eternal hue / Thy daring hand the soul of Monfort drew’
(Bannerman Poems 109). That Bannerman happily claims for herself, according to Craciun's reading of
the lines, the twofold part of loyal companion and rightful inheritor also bears relevance: ‘Thro' realms
of beauty, and thro' darkest night, / [My] soul hath trac'd thee in thy towering flight’ (qtd. in Craciun
181).

If she saw Baillie as having or even being a Muse of Fire, ascending the brightest heaven of Romantic
invention, her ‘Verses’ then suggests that Bannerman wants more than to praise a famous
contemporary because its language, scene and imagery position the poem, at the level of ambition as
well as of convention, within the tradition of British visionary literature. Unlike the ‘Aristotelian’ or
mimetic and imitative wit tradition that is its counterpart (1991 Shawcross JMI 71), this ‘Platonic’ legacy
(1991 Shawcross JMI 71) involves the oracular, the epiphanic and the theopneustic, and its poets strive
both to rethink history (1979 Wittreich VP 36) and to humanise revealed truth (or Truth) as a way to
transform for the better some part of our world (1979 Wittreich VP 50). And if her ‘Verses’ invites us to
see and to value Bannerman as a decisively visionary Romantic poet, then her Tales of Superstition and
Chivalry (1802) justifies why we should reconsider her in this way, as I hope to show in this discussion of
the collection's major pieces. More precisely, in what follows, I want to present Bannerman neither as a
Romantic anomaly nor as a woman hopelessly caught up in a seemingly contrived and extravagant
Gothic idiom but rather as a rightful heir to an important British legacy of poetic vision and prophecy, an
inheritance bequeathed by Chaucer, Shakespeare and John 1957 Milton (among others) and best
understood as transformational and life-affirming in nature.

To reassess Bannerman as a Romantic vates seems a particularly timely proposal. When Peter E. 2010
Medine, the late John T. Shawcross and David V. Urban published their edited volume entitled 2010
Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence in 2010, they took an important step toward
revitalising the study of British visionary poetics, an especially promising interpretive framework
popularised some years ago by scholars such as William Kerrigan, Leland Ryken, Michael Lieb and most
notably Joseph Anthony Wittreich.1 Wittreich's work in the 1970s and early 1980s provided the clearest
picture of what visionary poetics is and the best illustrations of how the idea of a transgenerational
visionary aesthetic may affect our readings of authors such as Milton and his Romantic heirs, including
William 2008 Blake, William 1983 Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Shelleys. While the 11
pieces comprising this new book focus principally on recurring themes and concepts in Milton and his
contemporaries, the volume as a whole revalues what I believe to be a generative line of inquiry, one
ideal for Romanticism studies yet largely marginalised after Jerome J. McGann's landmark 1983 The
Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983) set the stage for the prevailingly materialist and
historicist scholarship of the late 1980s and the 1990s. What is more, several works over the last
15 years have used either the basic tenets or the general contours of the visionary poetics theory: I here
have in mind Linda M. Lewis's 1998 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress: Face to Face with
God (1998), Julie Melnyk's book chapter ‘Hemans's Later Poetry: Religion and the Vatic Poet’ (2001) and
Daniel P. Watkins's Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics (2012), a book in
which Watkins discusses Bannerman as an especially radical seer-poet.2

In essence, visionary poetics provides an idea of continuity among authors and texts, a theory of poetic
inspiration and a belief that literature can better the world by transforming human thought and spirit
through language. The seer-poet takes what he or she knows of the past and makes it speak to the
present, so creating new dreams for the future. ‘Typically iconoclastic’, Medine, Shawcross and Urban
contend, ‘the visionary author reforms and reinvents the texts that lie behind him or her’ in a complex
process through which the poet ultimately ‘reinterprets reality and critiques the historical moment’ (VM
xi). Perhaps the ability to bring the human past to bear on both today and tomorrow distinguishes the
legitimate seer; consider the kahuna Pono of Kiana Davenport's Shark Dialogues (1994), who, as a young
girl ‘seemed to have no need for books, intuiting the world from stories told by workers who sat in her
father's house – Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese’ and so ‘grew wise as a navigator’ because ‘she remembered
their stories as if each were her own’ (82). Her prescience, in other words, reflects a narrative
inheritance out of others' pasts, thus allowing her a deep understanding of today, as when she senses
that Queen Lili'uokalani has died (1995 Davenport 82), and of tomorrow, as when she senses that Pearl
Harbor will one day be attacked (1995 Davenport 148). The visionary poet, though, pursues knowledge
of the past selectively and purposefully, as 1979 Wittreich specified years before Visionary Milton
appeared: ‘The interconnectedness of the tradition requires that the poet-prophet give to his precursors
the same diligent study that Daniel gave to Jeremiah and that John of Patmos gave to Daniel’ (MLV xv).
Although he initially uses scriptural precedents to make this point, 1975 Wittreich amplifies the
illustration to encompass Chaucer's influence on Edmund Spenser, Spenser's influence on Milton and
Milton's influence on the first and second wave Romantics (MLV xv). We may in turn ask if this theory,
given fresh life not only by the contributors to Visionary Milton but also by Lewis, Melnyk and Watkins,
helps us to more satisfactorily understand certain women Romantics, whether well-regarded figures,
like Baillie, Barrett, Hemans and Barbauld, or all-but-forgotten authors, like Bannerman.

Naturally, I do not wish to present the theory of a visionary tradition as a stencilling approach toward
any individual talent (to recall Lucy Newlyn's objections to Wittreich's notions of influence) (PLRR 16),
especially in the case of Bannerman. Her unfortunate personal and professional circumstances, together
with the limited body of authoritative commentary presently available on her work, caution us against
too hastily speaking for Bannerman regarding how she saw either her art or her place in literary history.
But this qualification does not militate against the claim that the visionary poetics theory may
significantly facilitate the rediscovery of Bannerman and her work, especially her Tales of Superstition
and Chivalry (hereafter Tales), because more recent variants of the theory favour a greater analytical
flexibility eminently suited to the study of both subordinated classes of writers and individual authors
who never profited from canonical status. This adaptability, I believe, reflects the influence of general
research trends over the last 10 years or so, epitomised by books such as Anna K. Nardo's George Eliot's
Dialogue with John Milton (2003) and Jane Spencer's Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–
1830 (2005). Although not directly engaged with the idea of visionary poetics as I have recounted it,
these superb works contribute to the theory's second life by reconfiguring long-standing conceptions
(and misconceptions) of authorial interrelations and thus better elucidating why and how the heirs
transform their literary inheritances. The transformative impulse – a hallmark of the visionary poet –
suggests an author's courage, spirit and intellectual maturity: rather than acquiesce in a fear of the
past's ‘univocal authority’ (1993 Newlyn 16), the author – George 1999 Eliot, for example – sees her
inheritance – say, the Miltonic legacy – always in light of her own conscience and so brings a clear sense
of herself and her world to bear on the question of the past. Nardo asserts that the great Victorian's
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72) assimilates parts of both Areopagitica (1644) and
Paradise Lost (1667) into Nicholas Bulstrode's struggle with the sinister Raffles (25); consequently, ‘we
see Eliot—without inhibition or reverence for an untouchable authority – developing further and freely
her own words and vision by transforming Milton's words and vision’ (25). Her use here and throughout
Middlemarch of her republican forbear shows Eliot to have achieved the intricacy of craft and the
completeness of authorial identity for which the visionary poet strives.3

Some seven decades earlier, as we know, Bannerman aspired to a place alongside Joanna Baillie and the
poets of the British visionary company. With her second book especially, she sought both to summon
the present and to better the future by transforming aspects of the literary traditions that she and her
Romantic contemporaries inherited. From the first, she acknowledges the dangers of pursuing the past.
After quoting the lovesick Satyr of Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590) in an epigraph,4 Bannerman
warns the reader to put her Tales aside ‘if search of gay delight / Lead thy vain footsteps back to ages
past’ (‘Prologue’) because to recover history is to revisit the ‘terrors wild’ (‘Prologue’) of humankind's
yesterdays.5 The ‘voice prophetic’ (‘Prologue’) of ‘the long-lost Spirit of forgotten times’ (‘Prologue’) has
been ‘hush'd’ (‘Prologue’) for all save the poet, whose privileged imagination recaptures ‘the charmed
minstrelsy of mystic sound’ (‘Prologue’) though many years have vanished. But once she accepts an
interpreter's role, as Baillie appears to have known, the poet takes her chances: she may seem quaint or
provincial, like the Isle of Skye Scots who enjoy ‘the second sight’ (Baillie 223) and foretell the future
through ‘a little hole in a tartan plaidy’ (Baillie 223), as Agnes says in The Tryal (1798); or she may lose
herself completely for the sake of becoming ‘a medium’ (2004 Carlson 218), somewhat like a Romantic
Witch of Endor.6 Baillie hints at this fear of professional indistinctiveness in her ‘Introductory Discourse’
to Plays on the Passions and places it at the very heart of her Orra (1812), as Julie A. Carlson notes (218).
Naturally, Baillie succeeded in distinguishing her own work from the influences that acted upon it,
including the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Stephen Duck and Robert Burns, and the Scottish
ballads collected by anthologists such as Allen Ramsay and George Thomson (1999Breen 4–8). With like
determination, Bannerman establishes her voice by way of the volume's ‘Prologue’ and so asserts her
authorial independence even as she announces her book's uniqueness.

We may now begin to better see how the visionary poetics theory can assist scholars today in
interpreting not only well-studied authors like Eliot and Baillie but also a poet like Bannerman, a woman
over whom few readers have troubled themselves during the last 200 years despite her intrepidness and
her gifted imagination. That Romanticists continue to look past her recalls in part the rather cold
response with which the Tales originally met; by all accounts, the volume sold poorly and suffered more
than its share of critical contempt (Behrendt 228, Craciun 156, Elfenbein 131). Stephen C. Behrendt
attributes the book's initial failure to Bannerman's seemingly unsuccessful engagement in the Tales with
Gothicism, a strain of literary production associated to varying extents with women Romantics such as
Ann Radcliffe (The Romance of the Forest, 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Charlotte Dacre
(Zofloya, 1806), Mary Shelley (1999 Frankenstein, 1818) and of course Baillie (De Monfort, 1798) (228).
While it registers Bannerman's real interest in the genre, the volume does not accumulate Gothic set
pieces simply for the sake of establishing a stylistic affinity. Rather, Bannerman appears to have been
attracted to Gothic motifs and imagery as instruments to help her to realise her authorial ambitions.
Indeed, the British literary Gothic provided a fresh aesthetical code that contravened 18th-century
neoclassicism (2004 Watt 119–20) and so afforded writers like Bannerman greater imaginative freedom.
To support this claim, we may look to Christine A. 2010 Colón, who asserts that Baillie too saw the
Gothic as an opportunity for vatic art: because she ‘desperately wishes to stir her audience members'
imaginations and compel them to transform their lives’ (xxiii), Baillie takes advantage of how the Gothic,
ostensibly informed by Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ‘can wake humanity up to the intensity of life’ (xxii) and so ‘shatter the
indifference of individuals’ (xxii) and ‘cause [such people] to act’ (xxiii), ideally, for humankind's benefit.7
Thus, Bannerman in her Tales, like Baillie in her theatre, uses the Gothic with a sense that it possesses a
transformative quality and offers ‘a historical theory’ (2008 Groom 39) beyond its superficial fascination
with mortal violence, sexual menace and dusty supernatural worlds peopled by naïve girls, wicked
monks, vengeful bandits and les belles dames sans merci.

Both the Gothic and visionary traditions, then, assign foremost importance to scrutinising how the past
affects the present and, for good or ill, touches the future. In several of the ten poems that make up the
Tales, Bannerman presents characters whose haunted lives occasion haunting stories, and these strange
narratives, whether told or retold, test the beliefs and values of those who listen (and, by extension, of
those who read). The volume's first and perhaps best-known piece, entitled ‘The Dark Ladie’, represents
a case in point because the poem interweaves thoroughly ‘studied’ (Behrendt 229) source materials –
including Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Coleridge's ‘Introduction to the Ballad of the Dark Ladie’ and
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's ‘The Thorn’ and Matthew Lewis's Tales of Wonder
(Behrendt 229–30, Craciun 162–65) – into a new vision that speaks to audiences in a lastingly
meaningful way. ‘The Dark Ladie’ gathers a band of knights, fresh from a crusade in the Holy Land, to a
feast at Sir Guyon's seaside castle (on an English coast, presumably). Very soon, though, a veiled woman
appears, enthralling the banqueters with her unnaturally glowing eyes (5–6). She vanishes when
midnight arrives, but not before toasting the guests with wine in a ‘sparkling shell’ (7) and so breaking a
silence that has lasted hours. The memory of her otherworldly voice besets the crusaders throughout
what remains of the night. Her image and her pledge recur: ‘no human voice’, we read, ‘could ever
reach that echo, deep’ (9). The knights speculate on the incident when they reconvene in the morning;
some among the group now distrust their host and think back to their campaigns to ascertain if he
showed then any signs of iniquity (9–10). We find enfolded into the poem's narrative at this point an
account of Guyon's conduct in the East, an ironic passage insofar as the speaker questions Guyon's
formal show of piety but leaves wholly unexamined the climate of brutality fostered by warfare and
ideological conflict:

Dost not remember, well, cries one,

When wide the sacred banners flew,

And when, beneath the blessed Cross,

The infidels we slew.

This same Sir Guyon, erst so brave,

In fight, who ever led the van,

Soon as the Sepulchre he saw,

Grew pale and trembled then? (9–10)

The knight recalls that his commander shivered to hear ‘named the blessed name’ (10) and could not
speak, a revealing contrast to the pitying muteness that troubles Spenser's Guyon when the sight of
Amavia dying crushes his heart (TFQ II.I.42). From the guest Huart, we learn that their host long ago
seduced the dark woman away from her husband and child in the East, but she vanished after Guyon
saw the shining eyes beneath her veil (12–13). She reappears as a spectral entity who haunts her
European lover's castle. Though her face remains hidden by ‘that folded veil that sweeps the ground’
(16), the eerie light of her eyes and the distressing sound of her voice still betoken her presence.

With the bewitched knight at arms of John Keats's ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1820) in mind, Craciun
suggests that the guests may now be ineluctably trapped in Guyon's castle (167); after all, the Dark Ladie
shows that she can enchant the lot of them at will, thus ‘reducing the (male colonial) subjects of the
gaze to silent and immobile objects’ (167).8 But I think it is crucial to recognise that the Dark Ladie does
not perform her ghostly pledge because she wishes simply to spellbind the knights and so render them
victims in a programme of revenge. Rather, she wants to take advantage of having found for her story a
fit audience, somewhat like the small but enlightened readership for whom the narrator beseeches
Urania in Book Seven of Paradise Lost (VII.30–31).9 Her appearance in the banquet hall initiates a series
of events during which her story eventually becomes known to people who will transport that story
beyond the walls of their leader's estate and who will either retell the tale publically or revisit it
privately, within their own thoughts and hearts. In this sense, the Ladie resembles the storytellers of
other Romantic visions, save that she cannot or will not share her past directly with her hearers.
Ostensibly, she has neither the Ancient Mariner's universal command of languages nor Victor
Frankenstein's cultivated eloquence with which to facilitate her audience's transformation.10
Consequently, she recreates her story in herself. Her flight and new life failed to redeem her loss of
familial and cultural belonging, and we have the impression that Guyon cherished her as a war-prize
rather than as a lover. She now reifies her fate in her person: she too is a guest, the faceless, nameless
apparition of a seemingly unknowable foreign woman. As such, she hastens the recovery and analysis of
her story, not to ‘curse’ (Craciun 166) but to enlighten.

By presenting herself to the knights through public and private visions, the Dark Ladie successfully frees
her story from a condition of stasis that keeps its picture of anguished loneliness confined within the
world of Guyon's castle. If the story were to go no farther, then Miller would be right when she asserts
that the Ladie's tale becomes so hopelessly ‘scripted into repetition’ (par. 13) that all resolution seems
impossible and thus the poem at best ‘enacts a fragmented reading experience – a noncontextualized,
unreadable expression and the effects of that unreadability’ (par. 14). Miller portrays the Ladie's
narrative as the very Botany Bay of epistemological geography; that is to say, her story occludes
interpretation to such a degree that we fall into an inescapable trap if we, like Guyon's guests, seek to
understand the Dark Ladie or to know her past through that story. This inaccessibility, though, makes
sense to the reader who realises that Bannerman's poem belongs to a tradition of visionary literature in
which narratives begin to exist fully only after a proper audience – a Wedding Guest, a Robert Walton, a
Margaret Walton Saville, a Pono – explicates and amplifies them, eliciting new knowledge from what
seems numinous, inscrutable, perhaps even beyond the pale of human time and space. From the poem's
outset, Bannerman implies that the knights, or someone among them, will give new life to the sad tale
of the Dark Ladie; why else would Guyon so worriedly await her arrival (4)? He knows that his lover will
appear and that the men must learn her story, enfolded into which they find his own less-than-noble
tale. Whether he is a penitent seeking atonement, like the Ancient Mariner, or an impenitent soul
suffering a worldly contrapasso, Guyon never doubts that his wronged lover will have her say.

‘The Dark Ladie’, then, sets the tone for a volume in which Bannerman attempts to assert her ‘original
genius’ (Elfenbein 142) by rendering the Gothic ballad companionate with the tradition of British
visionary poetry. Her experimentation in the Tales suggests that she valued the Gothic ballad as a way to
question, in the spirit of Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), ‘the Augustan
assumption that the classics provided the proper origins for English literature’ (1999 Elfenbein 142).
With poems such as ‘The Dark Ladie’, she aligns herself with Romantics like Baillie who eschew
neoclassicism in favour of what seem specifically British imaginative legacies, and she does so by
crisscrossing themes and ideas related to the visionary legacy with the tropes and the trappings of
Gothic balladry.

This approach proved a sticky wicket for Bannerman when her collection first appeared because, as I
addressed earlier in brief and as Miller discusses at length, reviewers such as Anna Seward and
anonymous writers for the Critical Review and the Poetical Register voiced their disapproval of her
poetry's nebulousness (pars. 10 and 11). ‘For these critics’, Miller writes, ‘the imagination of the reader
should be invoked, but should not be forced to establish the connection, meaning, or context of images
in the poem’ lest ‘reading becomes a cryptic search’ for interpretive clarity (par. 11). Unwelcome as such
judgements surely were to the poet, the ‘incongruity’ and ‘obscurity’ (Miller, par. 11) for which her
reviewers indicted her help to locate the Tales, and by extension Bannerman herself, within the tradition
of British vatic literature as the Romantics understood it. To clarify, we may consider here, as Craciun
(163) and 1987 Wittreich (‘Work’ 51) have elsewhere, what the frame narrator of Mary Shelley's 1826
novel The Last Man says of the sibylline leaves that she recovers in the Sibyl's ancient Neapolitan cave
and then redacts after coming home to England:

Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me,
their decipherer. As if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic
copy of Raphael's Transfiguration in St. Peter's; he would put them together in a form, whose mode
would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent (Shelley 8).

With these sentences, Shelley makes explicit what Bannerman's poetry implies, namely, that visionary
art always involves collaborative acts of reading and of interpretation that carry stories and ideas
forward in time and through space. Author and audience co-create such art and share the ongoing tasks
of reanalysis and recreation. By failing to appreciate this aspect of her Tales, her contemporaries find
Bannerman needlessly recondite when in fact she follows precedents set long before by poets like
Chaucer, Spenser and Milton.

These thoughts regarding how Bannerman evokes the British visionary tradition may help to elucidate
what apparently bewildered and displeased her second volume's reviewers as well as what perhaps
discourages readers today. The volume's second major piece, entitled ‘The Prophetess of the Oracle of
Seäm’ (hereafter ‘The Prophetess’), exemplifies how Bannerman's poetry becomes more lucid within
the context that I have described. At the poem's heart, we find Father Paul, who survives both a
shipwreck off the French coast and an audience with the sorceress-like figure named in the title. His long
life encompasses a series of experiences in which the Prophetess plays a role, and past, present and
future intersect in the witness that he bears. Paul knows her story well before the doomed vessel nears
her island, and he still conveys that story some 40 years after personally encountering her. In the
ballad's earliest stanzas, an unceasing ‘shriek of woe’ (21) menaces the sailors, who turn to Father Paul,
‘a Monk of the choir of Einsidlin’ (21), for guidance and succour. The holy man gathers the sailors in
prayer (21) before revealing that the wailing foretells their deaths on what is a ‘fated night of sacrifice /
In the gloomy vaults beneath’ (22). He likens their plight to a long-past incident in which ‘that unbroken
groan’ (24) betokened the loss of a ship with all hands save for a priest whom the Prophetess eventually
drew to her ‘unhallow'd shrine’ (24) below the earth. Because he lived, people wondered if he resisted
her or if he acquiesced, participating in the gruesome ceremony that she oversees (25). Abruptly, the
poem takes us ahead in time, to the point when Father Paul finds himself alone and ‘shut from all the
earth’ (27) on the Prophetess's island following the complete destruction of his fellow travellers and
their ship. As he prays for his friends' souls, an invisible force compels him to join the Prophetess in her
subterranean lair (30). She motions to Paul to discard his crucifix, but he does not obey: ‘He knew that
he could only die, / And he was satisfied’ (32). All the while, he recognises how this nightmare recreates
the old priest's ‘miserable hour’ (33) as he approaches a moment of spiritual crisis, a ‘doubt more
terrible’ (33) than the enchantress herself. The poem again leaps ahead in time as 40 years pass,
bringing the former castaway to Einsidlin on Pentecost, ‘the eve of Holy Ghost’ (34). We do not know
whether the ‘aged Monk’ (36) talks to the priest who said mass there (Bannerman refrains from
specifying), but we may be sure that his appearance continues to affect the younger cleric well after
Father Paul departs and thus leaves the celebrant alone in the church:

The priest was still by the altar-rail

On the morn of Holy Ghost;

When the bell was done for matin prayers,

At the feast of Pentecost. (36)

‘The Prophetess’ may strike one at first as a descent into a narrative maelstrom – for her part, Craciun
believes the poem's vertiginously cyclical plot ‘undermine[s] the possibility of narrativity itself’ (172) –
but the ballad establishes a linear storyline through the interaction between Father Paul and the
Einsidlin priest, the single verifiable scene in the piece. Like Coleridge's Rime, Bannerman's ‘Prophetess’
sketches out an improbable story abounding with fantastical imagery in the Gothic vein. But the poems'
respective stories matter far less than the idea that storytelling has not simply an educative but a
transformative effect when a storyteller finds a proper audience, as the Ancient Mariner discovers in the
Wedding Guest or as Father Paul recognises in the Pentecost celebrant. Throughout her Tales,
Bannerman highlights the continuities that narratives create between people, and in her ‘Prophetess’,
she displays the visionary's overarching belief in the ameliorative potential of storytelling by rendering a
picture of individuals brought together through a narrative principally concerned with the testing of
spiritual integrity. The poem's crux thus involves a transgenerational drama of human doubt and faith
played out at Pentecost or Whitsunday, a liturgical feast of some importance to the age of chivalry:
according to Sir Thomas 1971 Malory, King Arthur ‘wolde nat go that day to mete unto that he had
herde other sawe of a grete mervayle’ (Le Morte Darthur VII.1 177).11 Just as ‘The Dark Ladie’ tells a
serious tale of loneliness and remorse through carefully managed Gothic stock devices, so ‘The
Prophetess’ exploits a sensationalistic idiom – especially its propensity for recursion and nested-box
narrative structures – to depict the difficulties of belief and the allure of hopelessness. That Bannerman
understands Gothic conventionality as ‘a tool for audience edification’ (162) again suggests how she
resembles Baillie, who, as Michael 2000 Gamer notes, sought ‘to reform theatre audiences addicted to
“German spectres” by refocusing these very tastes onto more “legitimate” questions of character
psychology and subjectivity’ (130) after the examples set by Shakespeare and others belonging to the
British literary tradition (130). Her use of mise-en-abyme narrative techniques drawn from Gothic
sources therefore proves crucial to how Bannerman represents both the human soul's inquietude and
the human heart's capacity for sympathy and compassion, and in this way, she anticipates women
artists like Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë who also revised their literary inheritances to achieve similar
ends.

Although Bannerman takes fewer risks with structure and content in the book's shorter selections, these
poems indicate all the same that her interest in an experimental poetics persists beyond the two longer
pieces with which the collection begins. ‘The Perjured Nun’, for instance, offers a fairly straightforward
disclosure of its characters' secret pasts while placing the interpretive onus almost entirely on the
reader. In the poem, a woman named Geraldine implores her husband, Lord Henrie, to allow her to
keep a night vigil with him in a distant part of their home, a place reputedly haunted by a holy woman's
ghost (39–40). Henrie refuses, insisting that he ‘must watch alone, at the altar's stone, / In the aisle of
the eastern tower’ (41) but parting with very little of what he knows about their otherworldly visitor.
Geraldine watches her clock through the night and finds she can no longer abide time's passage;
frightened but resolute, she travels to the remote tower (45) where she hears a distressingly slow sound
that causes her courage to fail: ‘She would rush to the stair to meet him there, / If her heart did not
tremble so’ (46). Within moments she faces the apparition of the nun, who tells Geraldine what Henrie
declined to reveal earlier, namely, that Henrie once seduced and then abandoned her: ‘For him! for him!
I resign'd my vows, / And the guilt is on my head’ (47). She predeceases her treacherous lover yet exacts
a mortal revenge nevertheless: ‘For him! for him! I forsook my God, / And his soul unblest shall be’ (47).
The apostate woman then utters a telling valediction:

I hear a call you can never hear,

And I may not now unfold!

Let your soul be at peace, and your watching cease,

For his faithless heart is cold! (48)

The ballad closes as she warns Geraldine to ‘ever shun’ (48) this place, ‘for dark and dread is the haunt
of the dead’ (48). Elfenbein observes that the poem elides both Geraldine's response to these events
and any elaboration of what fate awaits the revenant (146). The poem's indeterminacy, of course,
reflects the volume's tendency toward purposeful inconclusiveness. But the benedictory language of the
nun's farewell to Geraldine – ‘Let your soul be at peace’ (48) – suggests the possibility that she, like Sir
Guyon's guests and the Einsidlin priest, may know freedom from the vortex of history in which some of
the poems' characters find themselves inextricably caught.

Whereas Geraldine appears to benefit from the protective influences of an otherworldly figure, the
young orphan of ‘Basil’ suffers a deplorable loss after he encounters a supernatural being that seems
bent on dispossessing the child. His name recalls the title character of Baillie's Count Basil (1798), a play
set in 16th-century Mantua, but his story bears no resemblance to Baillie's drama of political scheming
and war making. Rather, Bannerman creates an atmosphere in the poem that suggests the timeless and
placeless milieus of folklore or fairy stories. We do know from the outset that Basil lives in a modest
cottage beside the sea and works alongside fishers and boatmen who, with most people, cherish his
kindliness: ‘his heart! …'twas Pity's resting place’ (80). Nature provides fair seed-time for Basil's soul, and
beauty fosters him long before the advent of fear in his life:

Like a wild flow'r of the wilderness,

He grew, amid the mountain air;

The rock had been his cradle-bed,

And never were his slumbers made

The holier for a mother's pray'r! (79)

He often finds solace in a melody of sea sounds to which he assigns an exclusively benevolent aspect:
‘To him it was the even-song / Of some hallow'd seraph-mind’ (81). A lifelong stargazer, the boy takes
‘his picture of a place of rest’ from the heavens and believes the night's loveliness hints of a harmonious
cosmos because the stars' ‘sacred light was so serene, / It settled on his soul like love’ (82). One starless
evening, though, Basil feels a ‘low breathlessness of mind’ (83) as an agonised groaning from the ocean
reaches his cottage door. Soon a ghost, ostensibly the spectre of a murdered sailor whose body washes
ashore, frightens Basil away and takes the child's home for his own (86). The boy's beloved forest now
seems a place of eternal winter (to borrow from Blake's second ‘Holy Thursday’).12 Yet Basil finds in his
own unmediated story the potential, however slight, to transcend his sorrow:

His dreams! the hopes that o'er his soul

Had wander'd of a brighter scene!

They sometimes come to soothe him still,

Such as he imag'd them at even,

When his joy was in the light of Heaven,

Where all was so serene. (86)

The ballad concludes with the implication that Basil covers the sailor's corpse with stones, not simply to
respect the dead but also to make ‘a beacon, on the main’ for the safety of passing vessels (87).

With the boy's impressive act of magnanimity, Bannerman paints the very picture of what visionary art
strives to render, that is, an image of human beings responding to revelations about their world by
transforming some part of that world for the better. Ultimately, the poem interests us not because Basil
faces a supernatural presence; the literal truthfulness of his encounter, after all, can never really be
proved, and his sense of things may reflect his interpretive limitations. Rather, the ballad appeals
because Basil's humaneness continues despite Nature's unfortunate fall. Without help and guidance
such as the orphan Alice Fell receives in Wordsworth's 1807 poem, Basil makes choices that reflect his
capacity to transform his own past and to understand how both Nature and the realm of people may be
recuperated from a basically postlapsarian state.13

Although she uses a universalized background to great effect in ‘Basil’, Bannerman evokes Arthurian
Britain specifically in the volume's last major piece, ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’, a curious and at times
dispiriting work anticipated to some degree by ‘The Murcian Cavalier’, set in medieval Spain, and ‘The
Black Knight of the Water’, set in King Robert's Scotland. In the book's ‘Notes’ section, Bannerman
records John Selden (as annotator of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion), Evan Evans (the Welsh
antiquarian), Spenser and John Lydgate (‘Dan Ligate’) as her immediate sources (142–44). She calls upon
these authors and similar contributors to the Arthurian literary tradition not to assemble a mere
bricolage but rather to create a unique vision, a poem in which a British king and paragon of virtue faces
hopelessness and at the last overcomes it.14

On the eve of the Battle of Camlan (Bannerman's spelling), King Arthur leaves his castle to attend a
secret meeting with the wizard Merlin, who tells Arthur something that troubles him greatly (125–26).
The king ponders Merlin's worrisome prediction until dawn breaks on the day of combat, revealing ‘the
rebel bands’ (127) massed along the field's riverside slopes. Modred, the opposing commander, falls to
Arthur's sword (129), but Arthur too receives a mortal wound (130). His surviving knights try to free
Arthur from his armour but fail until they wave the king's ‘witched sword’ (131) over him ‘twice in
Merlin's name’ (131); then ‘the cross-lace open'd wide’: ‘But that mail was hollow as the grave, / Nor
form, nor body there’ (131). The poem now turns to the king's voyage with the Queen of the Yellow Isle
over an astonishingly still and beautiful sea (132). At first entranced, Arthur eventually recalls the touch
of a ‘hand of blood’ (135) that he felt ‘in Merlin's cell’ (134) when the sorcerer foretold the king's fate
(134). Finally, the magic ship lands at an island where the Queen of Beauty awaits (136). Despite her
considerable loveliness, Arthur hesitates to take a cup of wine from her because the libation she offers
reminds him of a vision he had while consulting with Merlin (136–37). Within moments of accepting her
gift, his deep fears come to pass ‘when something, like a demon-smile, / Betray'd the smooth disguise’
(138) and the Queen of Beauty shows herself to be the creature with the hand of blood (138). The being
reiterates Merlin's prediction that Arthur ‘must slumber’ (139) with only ‘the murmurs of the wave’
(139) to mourn him there. Yet the king refuses to yield, realising that though much is taken, much
abides: ‘And Arthur knew he would return’ (139). Arthur's sanguineness may seem an authorial
interpolation designed to lessen the bleakness of a poem in which life appears inhumanly mechanical
and fatalistic. But Bannerman recognises that hope has value only when confronted by what threatens
to negate it. In this respect, she resembles the Bristol poet Anne 1796 Yearsley, whose volume The Rural
Lyre (1796) ‘describes the difficult path that must be traversed if liberty is to be found’ (2010 Watkins
286).15 Bannerman also privileges Arthur's interpretation over Merlin's image of history as a closed
system because, in the end, Arthur determines what the prophecy signifies and so recasts a curse as a
blessing. Here, she recalls but remakes Shakespeare's Macbeth (circa 1606), a play in which a noble
Scottish general becomes a regicide and later a merciless tyrant not because the Weird Sisters foretell
his bloody progress to the throne but because he chooses the worst possible actions to bring what the
Witches say to pass.16 In ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’, Arthur frees himself from a scripted destiny through
an act of revision or re-envisioning beyond the imaginative faculties, and indeed the humanity, of a
person like Macbeth.

In her ‘Notes’, Bannerman glosses the passage in question by recounting the story of Morgan le Fay
bearing Arthur away to Glastonbury to heal him (144). To this note she adds an intriguing supplement
regarding her management of Arthurian lore:
It will not perhaps be very consonant to popular feeling, that legendary tradition has been violated in
the fate and disposal of this great, national hero. But it is all fairy-ground, and a poetical community of
right to its appropriation has never been disputed (144).

While seeking in part to placate her readership's conservative faction with this statement, Bannerman
more importantly asserts here a theory of imagination and authorial practice entirely in keeping with
the British visionary legacy as I have described it over the course of this discussion. By framing her
poetry within this context, she claims both authority and originality not simply for her work but for
herself as well. Moreover, she again puts us in mind of Baillie, whose debut volume – published by the
radical bookseller Joseph Johnson in 1790 – establishes a similar relationship to the literary past in
poems such as ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’, subtitled ‘Somewhat after the Style of Our Old English Ballads’,
and ‘A Story of Other Times’, subtitled ‘Somewhat in Imitation of the Poems of Ossian’.17

At present, Romanticists continue to sharpen our understanding of Baillie as a special kind of reformist
writer, that is, as a British vates – the on-line Romantic Circles Praxis Series July 2008 issue, entitled
Utopianism and Joanna Baillie and edited by Regina Hewitt, provides a case in point. Few such advances,
though, have enhanced our knowledge of Bannerman within recent years. To my mind, the visionary
poetics theory offers Romanticists a sound approach to Bannerman and her neglected oeuvre, and,
more generally, has the potential to illuminate the work of other Romantic and early Victorian women
writers who merit our consideration, for example, Helen Maria Williams, Louisa Stuart Costello, Caroline
Norton and Grace Aguilar. Because Visionary Milton helps to refocus the theory as a valid critical
methodology, we have now a unique opportunity to recover Bannerman, a woman who belongs among
the great visionary Romantics.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Daniel P. Watkins, who introduced me some time ago to both Bannerman and the
visionary poetics theory.

Notes

For a discussion of these writers as theorists of British visionary poetics, see Shawcross, ‘Milton and the
Visionary Mode: The Early Poems’, Visionary Milton 3–6.
2

Watkins's treatment of Bannerman appears in Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary
Poetics, 18–28. Watkins sees the Tales for the most part as a definitive break with the British visionary
tradition (22–3).

For a reliable edition of Eliot's novel, see Middlemarch, edited by Hornback (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999).

For an English translation of this speech, see Donno 73–76. For a critical edition of Sir Richard
Fanshawe's 1647 version of Il Pastor Fido, see Staton and Simeone.

Because Bannerman does not number the verses in her Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, my
parenthetical citations refer to page numbers in the 1802 Vernor and Hood edition.

For more on second sight in 19th-century British literature, see Thurschwell 87–105.

Colón elaborates on this point in ‘Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the
Sublime’ in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory 129–
142.

For an authoritative text of Keats's ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad’, see John Keats: Complete
Poems, edited by Stillinger (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003) 270–71.
9

For an authoritative text of Milton's Paradise Lost, see John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose,
edited by Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957).

10

For an authoritative text of Coleridge's Rime (including both the 1798 and the revised 1834 versions),
see The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I, edited by Mays (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton UP, 2001) 365–419. For a reliable version of Mary Shelley's novel, see Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (The 1818 version), edited by Macdonald and Scherf (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview, 1999).

11

For an authoritative version of Malory's Le Morte Darthur, see Works, edited by Vinaver (London:
Oxford UP, 1971).

12

For a good recent edition of Blake's poetry, with examples of the Romantic's visual art, see Johnson and
Grant's Blake's Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

13

13. For an authoritative text of Wordsworth's ‘Alice Fell’, see Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems,
1800–1807, edited by Curtis (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1983) 120–23.

14

See Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), for extensive discussion of 19th-century treatments of Arthurian source materials.

15
The full title of Yearsley's last book is The Rural Lyre; A Volume of Poems: Dedicated to the Right
Honourable The Earl of Bristol, Lord Bishop of Derry (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796).

16

For a good recent edition of Shakespeare's tragedy, see Macbeth, edited by Braunmuller (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997).

17

The full title of Baillie's debut volume of poems is Poems; Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain
Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners; and also, to Point out, in Some Instances, the Different
Influence which the Same Circumstances Produce on Different Characters (London: Joseph Johnson,
1790).