Felicia Hemans was the daughter of a well-connected importer of Italian wines based in Liverpool and Wales. A gifted linguist and poet, she was acquainted with Wordsworth and Shelley. Though highly popular and widely read, her reputation declined in the decades after her death—a common plight of women writers in the 18th and 19th century. That trend has been reversed over the past thirty years, however, and her work now appears in many anthologies.
In 1817 Hemans anonymously published Modern Greece. Written in the metrical style of Byron’s Childe Harold from two years earlier, the poem was initially attributed to Byron, despite Hemans’ decidedly different attitude toward Lord Elgin’s seizure of the Parthenon Marbles, as shown in the following passage.
| From Modern Greece | ||
| 86 | Oh! live there those who view with scornful eyes All that attests the brightness of thy prime? Yes; they who dwell beneath thy lovely skies, And breathe th’ inspiring ether of thy clime! Their path is o’er the mightiest of the dead, Their homes are midst the works of noblest arts; Yet all around their gaze, beneath their tread, Not one proud thrill of loftier thought imparts. Such are the conquerors of Minerva’s land, Where Genius first reveal’d the triumphs of his hand! |
thy prime: the poem is addressed to the land of Greece, great in its “prime,” but lying now in ruins
conquerors of Minerva’s land: the Turks, who conquered Athens in 1456. |
| 87 | For them in vain the glowing light may smile O’er the pale marble, colouring’s warmth to shed, And in chaste beauty many a sculptured pile Still o’er the dust of heroes lift its head. No patriot feeling binds them to the soil, Whose tombs and shrines their fathers have not rear’d, Their glance is cold indifference, and their toil But to destroy what ages have revered, As if exulting sternly to erase Whate’er might prove that land had nurs’d a nobler race. |
For them: the Turks |
| 88 | And who may grieve that, rescued from their hands, Spoilers of excellence and foes to art, Thy relics, Athens! borne to other lands, Claim homage still to thee from every heart? Though now no more th’ exploring stranger’s sight, Fix’d in deep reverence on Minerva’s fane, Shall hail, beneath their native heaven of light, All that remain’d of forms adored in vain; A few short years—and, vanish’d from the scene, To blend with classic dust their proudest lot had been. |
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| 89 | Fair Parthenon! yet still must fancy weep For thee, thou work of nobler spirits flown. Bright, as of old, the sunbeams o’er thee sleep In all their beauty still—and thine is gone! Empires have sunk since thou wert first revered, And varying rites have sanctified thy shrine. The dust is round thee of the race that rear’d Thy walls; and thou—their fate must soon be thine! But when shall earth again exult to see Visions divine like theirs renew’d in aught like thee? |
Citation: Hemans, Felicia. Modern Greece, 1817. Text from Project Gutenberg, 2021. Edited by Charles Henebry, 2023. hum104.commacafe.org/modern-greece