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Emily J. Dolive »

Emily J. Dolive currently teaches at Eastside Catholic School in Seattle, after completing her PhD in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Baylor University. Her dissertation and book project, ‘Staking Out Space: British Women’s War Poetry, 1780–1840’ examines how women poets navigated and reshaped the literary marketplace during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Her newest work places Mary Robinson’s poetry and politics in dialogue with John Thelwall and is forthcoming in the European Romantic Review.

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This article is © 2025–26 The Author and is the result of the independent labour of the scholar credited with authorship. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) International License.
Date of acceptance: 4 March 2025.

Referring to this Article

E. J. DOLIVE. ‘ “Pause, Reader, Pause”: Lessons in Mourning by Romantic Women Poets’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 25 (Summer 2024), pp. 50–56.

Online: Internet (date accessed): https://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt25_n04/
PDF DOI:10.5281/zenodo.20016014

‘Pause, Reader, Pause’

Lessons in Mourning by Romantic Women Poets

09 May 2026

Abstract Abstract

Abstract: A familiar strategy of elegy, anagnorisis is a form of teaching or guiding readers to a deep understanding of the poem’s subject through gradual, symbolic imagery and allusion. This paper argues that the spatial construction of the printed page became part of a new mode to gradually teach Romantic readers in the midst of a twenty-year conflict how to properly morn. Not only does spatial construction, as I define it, consist of the interplay of topic and genre on the periodical page, but its building blocks include intricate stanza shifts, locative words, and a collective voice. Mary Robinson’s ‘Stanzas supposed to be written near a tree, over the grave of an officer, who was killed at Lincelles, in Flanders, in August 1793’—despite its precise title—locates the act of mourning in the physical space of the poem. Her changing addresses and pronouns repeatedly tell readers and the gravesite itself what to do ‘Here’ so that correct acts are ‘record[ed]’ for future generations. Thus, I argue that the aim of such texts is to teach active mourning instead of effusion or meditation on personal loss. Active mourning typically consists of an obligation to the living, attention to ‘recording’ via the printed page, and close reading which is likened to travel. Such construction is reconsidered at the end of the long conflicts between Britain and France by critically overlooked poet Jane Alice Sargant. Her ‘Monody’ abruptly shifts from a meditation on death to a living, speaking ‘Warrior’ who finds a gravesite despite ‘no sculptur’d marble’ to mark it. Sargant’s text implies that ‘This mournful spot’ can only be found through the act of reading. The paper treats these two poems by Robinson and Sargant, respectively, with brief comparisons to other, anonymous periodical poems and to Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’.

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