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"The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" is the familiar name most often given to the poem "Casabianca" by Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793-1835). Hemans was without doubt the most widely read woman poet in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, one of the few standard poets to be found in middle-class homes on both sides of the Atlantic, despite being routinely disparaged as a “merely” feminine poet. Born in Liverpool though largely raised in Wales, Hemans published her first two books the age of 14. Very much a conservative who attacked the policital thinking of Byron and Shelley in verse (and was urged by Shelley in correspondence to give up her "infatuation" with patriotic wars) she was greatly supported (at least ideologically) by both Scott and John Murray. A prolific writer, she raised five sons on her own (earning money solely by writing) after her husband left her in 1818. She visited Sir Walter Scott in Scotland ("The Funeral Day of Sir Walter Scott" and "A Farewell to Abbotsford") and Wordsworth in the Lake District ("To Wordsworth") in later life and died of TB in 1835 at the relatively young age of 42. Her poetry is informed by a wide ranging understand of the natural world, an awareness of the details of the era of discovery during which she lived, and powerful sensitivity to the condition of women's lives. Casabianca is probably her most famous poem in the present era. Most often seen as an exhortation to duty in its time, it is beginning to be read more, almost despite itself, as a more oblique and c ertainly more powerful anti-war (anti-obedience to the dictates of war) statement: the roll of the flames and their "banners in the sky" tower over the frightened yet thoroughly "drilled" child are certainly appalling enough to repulsion and helpless pity, not admiration of blind duty. GIven Hemans' passion for children and those who raise them, it seems likely this reading is one of which she was fully aware. The poem itself (based on the true story of Captain Casabianca's young son, who lost his life during battle) still rings with as terrible a power as made it both reknown and infamous in its own time. One of those pieces that hugely rewards re-reading, reassessment from our own vantage point and at different stages in one’s own life, its placing of words and relentless onward pace is simple, direct and fearful.
Casabianca
by Felicia Dorothea Browne
The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.
The flames roll'd on...he would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.
He call'd aloud..."Say, father,say
If yet my task is done!"
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.
"Speak, father!" once again her cried
"If I may yet be gone!"
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames roll'd on.
Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death,
In still yet brave despair;
And shouted but one more aloud,
"My father, must I stay?"
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud
The wreathing fires made way,
They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And stream'd above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky.
There came a burst of thunder sound...
The boy-oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea.
With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
That well had borne their part;
But the noblest thing which perished there
Was that young faithful heart.