Eliot George - The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot

THE PICKERING MASTERS

Volume 1

To Graham Handley, who urged me to start work on this edition and remained on hand with valuable support and advice.

Edited by

Antonie Gerard van den Broek

Consulting Editor

William Baker

Volume 1

First published 2005 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Taylor & Francis 2005

Copyright Antonie van den Broek introduction and notes 2005

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or othe r means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered tradem arks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Eliot, George, 18191880

The complete shorter poetry of George Eliot.

(The Pickering masters)

1. Eliot, George, 18191880 Criticism and interpretation I. Title II. Van den Broek, A. G. III. Baker, William, 1944
823.8

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Eliot, George, 18191880.

[Poems. Selections]

The complete shorter poetry of George Eliot / edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek; consulting editor, William Baker.

p. cm. (Pickering masters)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 1-85196-796-6 (acid-free paper)

I. Van den Broek, A. G. II. Baker, William, 1944 III. Title. IV. Series.

PR4666.A1 2005

ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-796-4 (set)

New material typeset by P&C

A project like this is always a collaborative effort since it is difficult for the lone editor to keep up with George Eliots extraordinary range of interests. I have been fortunate to lean on the scholarship of Gordon S. Haight, John Clark Pratt, Victor A. Neufeldt, Joseph Wiesenfarth, William Baker, John C. Ross, Thomas Pinney, Jane Irwin, Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, and others whom I have acknowledged in notes but none more than Cynthia Ann Secor. My copy of her unpublished dissertation, The Poems of George Eliot (1967), has been a constant companion, and I am deeply indebted to her pioneering work.

I would also like to thank the following libraries for their efficient and courteous responses to my many requests for assistance and material: the British Library; Dr Williamss Library, London; the Dreadnought Library, Greenwich University; and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

I am grateful to Jonathan G. Ouvry, the great-great-grandson of George Henry Lewes, for giving me permission to quote from copyright material.

I want to thank family, friends and colleagues who have helped me at various stages by generously offering assistance, advice, translations and/or proof-reading services: my mother Kathleen van den Broek, my aunt Patricia Piperno, Sr Bridgid, Tiree Macgregor, Marcus Pethers, Francisco Montero, Adrienne Gould, Mary McKenzie, Ruth Davis, Beryl Gray, William Baker and my editor Julie Wilson at Pickering & Chatto.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Judy, and daughter, Stacy, who have remained wonderfully cheerful and supportive throughout.

Finally, I want to acknowledge Graham Handley for his generosity, friendship, encouragement and help over the years. In partial repayment I dedicate this edition to him.

All facsimile pages are reproduced by permission of the British Library, with the exception of the Jubal 1878 title pages and the extract from Rose Cleveland, George Eliots Poetry and Other Studies (1885), both of which are reproduced from Antonie van den Broeks personal collection.

Antonie Gerard van den Broeks edition of The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot makes available a fascinating and important genre by one of Victorian Britains greatest writers. George Eliots poetry has been neglected. Part of this neglect is due to the lack of access; so few of her poems are available in recent selections from her writings. For instance, A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warrens George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (1990) publishes three poetic extracts. The first is the second scene from Armgart (1870), a dramatic poem focusing upon a woman who turns down marriage to concentrate on her singing career and subsequently loses her voice. The second consists of a selection from the first and third books of the lengthy dramatic poem set in Spain just before the 1492 expulsion of its Jewish population. Byatt and Warren choose the opening of The Spanish Gypsy (written in 1867, published in 1868) and the passage where Fedalma, the Gypsy princess, accepts the renunciation of her love for a Spanish Duke, Silva. They also print, in their entirety, the eleven poems constituting Eliots Shakespearean sonnet sequence Brother and Sister. First published in Jubal and Other Poems in 1874, these sonnets are intensely autobiographical, having as their foundation Eliots complex relationship with her estranged brother Isaac. Written in 1869, Eliot draws upon the same relationship as she did for the central plot of The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860.

The eleven Brother and Sister sonnets are included in Daniel Karlins The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1998), and in Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundles The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999), which also includes, with very sparse introduction and notation, O May I Join the Choir Invisible, extracts from the first and third books of The Spanish Gypsy and Armgart. Byatt and Warren provide brief overall introductions to their selections, no more than a page each in length. Their annotations are limited to six explications of lines from The Spanish Gypsy. This is at least more detailed than the annotation provided in Lucien Jenkinss George Eliot Collected Poems, published in 1989. With the exception of four notes by Eliot on The Spanish Gypsy no annotation is provided, only a short Note on the Text and an Introduction.

Before van den Broeks present edition the most authoritative edition of Eliots poetry was Cynthia Ann Secors unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Her The Poems of George Eliot: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes is a Cornell dissertation presented in September 1969. An eight-page Preface to the Text is followed by an Introductory Essay of just under one hundred pages. Each poem is prefaced by the instance of its first publication and texts collated. Textual variations follow at the foot of the page and there is an extensive commentary on the poem. This encompasses date of composition, its biographical context and other points of interest. The first poem in Secors work is Knowing that shortly I must put off this tabernacle. First published in the