casabianca Name the boy,
What was the boy doing?
Where was the boy?
Where were all the other people?
What has been described in stanza one?
Why didn't the boy follow the others?
Was the boy frightened? How can you tell?
Mention two qualities of the boy that have
been brought out in stanza two.
Why would the boy not go?
What was the reason that prevented the fathe
from hearing his son calling out to him?
The poet builds up a sense of urgency, How
does she do that?
What was the boy's task?
Who had assigned the task to the boy?
What did the boy hear? What was he
expecting to hear?
► Whose breath did the boy feel upon his
brow?
Explain the phrase lone post of death.
Explain the line "They wrapt the ship in
splendour wild
1
Answers
Explanation:
The best-selling Liverpudlian poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an ambitious, prolific writer, who produced larger-scale works than "Casabianca" (1826). She has deserved some recent efforts at reappraisal, but my question is not about her overall reputation. It's whether this poem deserves the 21st century's attention. Is it diamond or paste?
"Casabianca" was soon taken up by the parodists. As we've recently discussed on this forum, a good parody demands such close reading it might almost be thought an ironical act of love. But most of the anonymous parodists of "Casabianca" didn't get beyond the first verse. "The boy stood on the burning deck./ His feet were covered in blisters./ He'd burnt the socks right off his feet/ And had to wear his sister's" was the version I heard as a child. There is a slightly more risqué one the adults didn't repeat, at least in my hearing.
cLast week on the books blog, posters discussed a possible feature on forgotten bestselling novels. The idea converts well to poetry, because, while even excellent works of fiction tend to disappear if they haven't quite made the grade as "classics", once-popular poems stay around, evergreen in the traditional anthologies that still sit, fat and dusty, on most people's bookshelves.
We've sometimes pulled out poems or poets from the Poem of the week bookshelf that are undeservedly neglected. Some were neglected even in their own time. This week, I'm asking you to train your jeweller's spy-glass on an old favourite, "Casabianca", perhaps the most loved and widely-anthologised poem of the 19th century.