Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) was born in Liverpool to local merchant George Brown and Felicity Wagner, she was the fifth of seven children. Perhaps more than any other poet Hemans cemented the lasting popular appeal of the Mayflower myth through her poem ‘The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England’ (1825) which saw remarkable success in both Britain and America.
Hemans’ poem is a highly Romantic interpretation of the 1620 Atlantic crossing focusing on natural imagery and personal emotion. The opening stanza emphasises the peril of the voyage with dramatic descriptions of an ocean storm:
The breaking waves dash’d high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches toss’d.
This scene takes place on a ‘dark’ and ‘heavy night’ which combined with imagery of a desolate ‘rock-bound’ coast set again ‘breaking waves’ and a ‘stormy sky’ edges close to high Gothic melodrama. Indeed, as Glen A. Omans comments, ‘modern readers may find Hemans's expression bombastic […] [b]ut contemporaries were charmed’. In particular, American audiences were receptive to the poem’s depiction of the colonists and their religious mission, and schoolchildren were frequently taught to memorize the poem well into the twentieth-century. The pilgrims are described as a noble ‘band of exiles’ who arrive in America ‘not as the conqueror comes [...] for the trumpet that sings of fame’ but rather ‘in silence and fear’. Hemans contrasts the Pilgrims with mercantile colonialists; the former do not seek ‘Bright jewels of the Mine’, ‘the wealth of seas’ or ‘the spoils of war’. Instead, there’s is a spiritual enterprise for people seeking only the ‘Freedom to worship God’. The religious virtue and moral purity of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’ is central to Hemans poem. The poem is composed in a traditional hymn form which further heightens the religious inflection.The closing stanza gives specific emphasis to the purity of the pilgrims’ journey: ‘The soil where first they trod!’ is noted to be ‘left unstained’ by their settlement. Hemans therefore provides an acceptable moral basis for the settlement of America.
You can read more of the impressive afterlife of Hemans poem here.
