Felicia Hemans

When I compare Felicia Hemans’ to Dorothy Wordsworth’s it is hard for me to say whom I prefer. Each woman has a completely different style of writing and different messages. I personally enjoyed the works by Hemans much better.

The “Wife of Asdrubal” was a very baffling work that I found to be very different from the other selections of her work. While I read this I understood how she could be so angry at the father of her children because he had left them in order to save his own life. I would have been just as livid. However, when I got to the part where she kills her own children and then takes her life, I was very unhappy.

“Bright in her hand the lifted dagger gleams,
Swift from he children’s hearts the life-blood streams;” (408)

I understand that she was taking the very thing that Asdrubal loved the most away from him and that it was his punishment for leaving them because there is no greater punishment then losing your child. But how could you take your own children’s lives while they cling to you and look to you to save them.

“Are those her infants, that with suppliant –cry
Cling round her, shrinking as the flame draws nigh,
Clasp with their feeble hands her gorgeous vest,
And fain would rush for shelter to her breast?” (407)

I would never be able to let my children die without fighting to save them and much less could I be the one to ever kill them. Since her father left her as a child and her husband left her to take care of their 5 children all alone, I cannot help but wonder if Hemans ever truly thought about killing her children and herself. However, even with that thought, I do not believe that this poem was meant for people to think this way. I believe this was a way for her to release her feelings of anger and maybe in an emblematical way take her children from their father. Perhaps to symbolically kill them as far as their father was concerned.

On a completely different page, Hemans writes to celebrate the way women live their lives. In “The Homes of England,” Hemans praises women for their traditional roles as house keepers and mothers to children. What I like so much about this poem is that she celebrates all the women in each of the different classes of society. It shows that no matter what level of class you are, as a woman you can do amazing things. She praises the women of aristocracy in their “stately homes of England,” the women of higher class and their “merry homes of England,” the woman of the church in the “blessed homes of England” and even the peasant women in their in the “cottage homes of England.” And she praises each of these women because of their gender and because no matter what class they each possess the same domestic roles.