Who was Casabianca? Why do you think he is described as a "gallant child" In the poem
Answers
Answer:
Casabianca (1826)
Felicia Hemans
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 rolled on – he would not go,
Without his father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.
He called 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 he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
– And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.
Upon his brow he felt their breath
And in his waving hair;
And look’d from that lone post of death,
In still yet brave despair.
And shouted but once more aloud,
‘My father! must I stay?’
While o’er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.
They wrapped the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed 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.
BACKGROUND TO THE POEM
The opening line of this poem is probably one of the best known lines in English literature, even though many people might not know anything about the rest of the poem, let alone who wrote it. ‘Casabianca’ was memorised and recited by vast numbers of English‑speaking children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Casabianca was a thirteen‑year‑old Corsican boy sailor who died at the Battle of the Nile, refusing to leave his ship when it had caught fire. The poem’s appeal as a recitation piece in the nineteenth century is fairly obvious. In addition to its easy‑to‑remember, galloping rhythm, it is a morally uplifting tale of dutiful heroism. But ‘Casabianca’ contains surprises, and not least in terms of its rhythm. Where are the stresses in that famous first line?
The opening offers an almost nightmarish picture of the young sailor, surrounded by dead bodies illuminated by the encroaching flames. The boy will not leave his post until his father, the admiral of the ship, gives him permission, but the man is already dead.
Consider the dramatic tension in the description of the boy’s plight and the graphic account of the boy literally blown to pieces by the exploABOUT FELICIA HEMANS
Felicia Hemans’s‘ Casabianca’ took on such a vibrant life of its own after her death that, somehow, its author became almost irrelevant. In fact, Hemans was an accomplished and prolific poet who wrote over twenty volumes of verse before her death at the age of forty‑two.
After she had given birth to five children, Hemans’s husband deserted her to live in Italy, and her writing served to help support her large family. She became a literary celebrity, garnering praise from the likes of Wordsworth and George Eliot, but her work was also criticised for its simplicity and sentimentality.
Felicia Hemans may now be a relatively neglected poet, but her popularity and influence in the middle‑ and upper‑class homes of nineteenth‑century England should not be underestimated. In more recent times, her sequence of poems recording the experiences of women in the nineteenth century, Records of Women, has been much admired.