What difference does a critical awareness of imperial history make for the study of British Romanticism? Material that was formerly the domain of anthropologists, art historians, archaeologists, military historians and historians of empire has become an important archive both for re-thinking canonical texts and for re-imagining the social and cultural dynamics of Georgian society.

Important critical studies have laid the groundwork for expanding scholars’ sense of the ways in which Romantic discourse was thoroughly permeated by global geopolitical concerns.

We can read the editorial consensus among recent anthologies of British Romanticism, all of which contain subsections on anti-slavery and orientalism, as a symptomatic recognition of the importance of these materials. That said, there are also few surprises here. Earlier scholars such as David Erdman established beyond question the importance of imperial problematics to Blake’s work, and there are many other similar examples. What remains constant is a recognition that the period conventionally associated with Romantic discourse saw crucial transformations in imperial governance and colonial discourse. And yet there has been a remarkable containment of this recognition by relegating this scholarship into sub-fields. Scholars who work on British India are well aware of this predicament, for in spite of widespread recognition of the importance of developments on the Indian subcontinent to British society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, important work on Romantic interculturalism, on the emergence of proto-anthropological disciplines, on models of racialization, on global economics and other topics remains either the domain of a few scholars bridging the divide between literary studies and history or it remains largely unexplored. A similar problem exists for scholars of trans-Atlantic Romanticism whose work has the potential to undermine the recalcitrant division of literary studies into the study of national literatures.

In the process, I am going to make at least two grand claims, hardly new, but which inform everything which follows. The first concerns the unabated prosecution of war throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Mary Favret has persuasively argued, Romantic literature is a wartime literature, and from the Seven Years War onward Britain’s wars were global affairs.

The second follows from the first and has to do with chronology. The more that one reads the imperial archive, the more it becomes clear that consideration of the emergence and practice of what we call Romanticism needs to start with the loss of the American colonies. In my opinion, the preponderance of scholarship on the French Revolution is one of the decisive critical obstacles to a genealogical analysis of the relationship between Romanticism and empire because it so frequently re-inscribes the nation as the primary political entity. This is not to say that this scholarship is invalid or wrong-headed, but rather that it radically limits the historical purview of cultural analysis.

Historians as differently motivated as J.G.A. Pocock and Dror Wahrman have argued that something fundamental happens to British culture and society during the American crisis.

Pocock’s influential account of the political crisis in the Atlantic traces the problem of imperial governance back to two key problems: the lack of any coherent theory of confederation in British political thought and the troubling duality of the term “imperium”. As he states, ‘the primary meaning in English of “empire” or imperium had been “national sovereignty”: the “empire” of England over itself, of the crown over England in the church as well as state, the independence of the English church-state from all other modes of sovereignty.(257)’ Empire in this sense denoted sovereignty of the British realm over itself. This primary meaning came crashing into another meaning of empire following “the momentous if transitory establishment of an English-speaking universal empire in the North Atlantic and Alleghanian America” following the Seven Years War. Instabilities in the governance of this extensive empire undermined triumphalist rhetoric from an early stage and thus analysis of the colonial challenge to imperial rule looked back to earlier moments of instability in the realm. The recent experience of the historical trauma of civil war and the hard won sense of stability following the Glorious Revolution and the quelling of the Jacobite rebellion inflected all of the responses to the American crisis. “Englishmen could see that the American programme entailed the separation of crown from parliament, threatening the unity of ‘empire’ which was the only guarantee against civil war and dissolution of government, those deep and still bleeding wounds in their historical memory”.

This history proved to be decisive for Britain, because it meant that “the heart of the American problem for Britain was less the maintenance of imperial control than the preservation of essentially English institutions which the claims of empire were calling into question”.

As Pocock demonstrates, American secession allowed for the maintenance of “colony” as a constitutive outside for British sovereignty because America acceded to the condition of a state. Thus one of the crucial adjustments in the era following the American war was a redefinition of coloniality itself such that colonial governance was carried out not by legislatures, but rather by governors, “often military men, [who] directly exercised their sovereign’s authority, representing him in his personal, imperial and parliamentary character” (Pocock 301). This new imperial regime stabilized both the notion of King-in-Parliament, and the global economic networks which it governed.

Losses in America in the early 1780s are inextricably bound up with reverses in India during the same period. As Linda Colley has reminded us, news of Haider Ali’s victory over the British at Pollilur in 1780 arrived in London in 1781 and provoked ‘universal consternation’ in part because the news coincided with reports of the fall of Yorktown.(270) To commentators in the American colonies, in Britain and in India at this time, the East India Company’s hold over territory in India empire seemed in equal jeopardy. Like the first war with Mysore in 1767-9, the Second Mysore War ended inconclusively in 1784, and it cost the East India Company a great deal both in resources and confidence. According to a British medical officer stationed in Calcutta at the time, ‘There appears to be nothing wanting but an European enemy to act in concert with the country powers, to hurl destruction among the company’s possessions in that part of the world.

’ The close affiliation between Tipu Sultan and French forces not only raised the question of renewed French intervention in India, but also replicated the trajectory of the American campaign, in which the French played a decisive role from 1778 onward. Metropolitan anxiety about these defeats was at its height throughout the 1780s, and when the Third Mysore War commenced in 1790 both the newspapers and the print satirists predicted further humiliation of the British forces. Cornwallis defeated Tipu in the Third Mysore War and the elaborate settlement which ensued from his victory at Seringapatam played a crucial part in the shift from anxiety to triumphalism in the 1790s.

In contrast to Stephen Conway’s influential argument that the experience of the American conflict did not alter British attitudes to war and empire (315), this essay contends that the transit from the early 1780s to the early 1790s involved extremely complex shifts in British subjectification—i.e. the processes through which subjects make themselves accountable to normative discourses which in turn recognise and make them visible—and that these shifts are perceptible in the cultural field.

This essay looks at two seemingly unconnected texts—William Hodges’s Travels in India During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (1793) and William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak” (ca. 1791)—to explore not only how changes in imperial governance can be traced in the formal and aesthetic elements being analyzed, but also how close reading of these formal elements can elucidate the historical dynamics of global empire. In both cases, I argue that the works themselves act as conduits from the early 1780s to the early 1790s, from one revolutionary situation to another, and thus need to be considered in light of this transit through historical time. Specifically, I will be looking at the emblematic representation of trees as metaphors for governance in order to show how each reconfigures the relationship between men and things in a way that cancels the memory of past imperial reverses. Lurking in the centre of the essay is brief reading of another notable tree, Burke’s famous oak from the Reflections on the Revolution in France, in order to show how the figural exchange between empire and nation can productively engage with extant scholarship on the 1790s. In my readings of Hodges, Burke and Cowper, these botanical figures become surrogative in Joseph Roach’s sense of the term in that they overwrite a historical wound in order to allow an enabling supplemental fantasy to gain traction in a time of national and imperial crisis (2). As prosthetic devices to overcome the loss of the American colonies, Hodges’s deployment of the Banyan tree, and Cowper’s re-orientation of the oak metaphor allow us to see what kind of cultural work was needed to reconfigure imperial subjectivity at this transitional juncture.

William Hodges’s Travels in India is a text literally structured by war. Hodges’s journey and his narrative are repeatedly interrupted by armed conflict between the forces of the East India Company and resistant native powers across the subcontinent. The first chapter records the humiliating loss at Pollilur in the Second Mysore War which not only raised questions regarding Warren Hastings’s bellicosity, but also haunted representations of British rule in India until the final defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799. Later chapters are closely intertwined with the East India Company’s response to Chait Singh’s rebellion and many of the most famous images—the picturesque rendering of hill fortresses at Bidjegur and Gwalior—have an integral relation to siege operations carried out while Hodges was traveling with Hastings’s retinue.

In spite of the fact that the Travels appears to be a pro-Hastings document, published in London at the turning point in the impeachment proceedings against the former Governor-General of Bengal, the narrative disjunctions instantiated by these earlier conflicts destabilize Hodges’s explicit argument that British governance in the region is not only benevolent, but also reminiscent of prior examples of enlightened Moslem rule.

This rhetorical battle within Hodges’s narrative has significant implications for analyses of British governance and of British representation of India at this juncture. The text’s strategies of exemplification, negation and obfuscation intervene not only in the rhetorical assault on Warren Hastings, but also in the attemp to justify British rule during the Cornwallis era. What I wish to demonstrate, through the close reading of compositional adjacency and metonymic contiguity in one image and one fragment of text, is how Hodges’s rendering of the banyan tree coalesces with larger historical and political developments which transformed not only British rule in the Asian subcontinent, but also the very notion of empire itself.

How are we to understand the inaugural gesture of the first chapter, which opens with a detailed account not of the Company’s victory over Chait Singh’s insurgency, but of the Company’s humiliating defeat at Pollilur? It is important to recognize the chain of associations invoked by this material. The loss at Pollilur resulted in the captivity and enslavement of numerous British soldiers. As Kate Teltscher and Linda Colley have demonstrated, accounts of their forced conversion and circumcision were widely circulated throughout the 1780s, and they generated significant anxiety regarding the blurring of lines between Mysorean and British identities.

These anxieties were exacerbated by reports of British atrocities at Anantpaur, of the overall mismanagement of the second Mysore war and of the indecisive treaty of Mangalore. In short, war with Mysore in the 1780s is traversed by fantasies of castration, loss and failure that are largely responsible for the construction of Tipu Sultan as the arch-enemy of British imperial activity in India.

This entire assemblage of associations establishes a frame of imperial anxiety and, like Giles Tillotson, I believe that the war with Mysore casts a long shadow in the Travels.

Describing his time in Madras, Hodges presents the conflict with Hyder Ali as an interruption in artistic and commercial production: ‘I prepared eagerly for a tour through the country; but my route was scarcely fixed, when I was interrupted by the great scourge of human nature, the great enemy of the arts, war, which, with horrors perhaps unknown to the civilized regions of Europe, descended like a torrent over the whole face of the country, driving the peaceful husbandman from his plow, and the manufacturer from his loom. (5)’ This image of the manufacturer separated from his loom is extremely important not only because there is an implicit comparison between his inactivity and the inactivity of the artist, but also because this trope becomes a lynch-pin in Hodges’s later account of the banyan tree. At this point in the text, the populace is starving and the reader is starved for images. This passage is followed by an extended and detailed account of the British reversals and by the introduction of the volume’s first plate—a view of the great pagoda at Tanjore, which Hodges emphasizes was worked up from “an accurate drawing from Mr. Topping.”

In other words, the text opens not with an assertion of Hodges’s aesthetic commitment to plein air landscape painting but rather with its repudiation by historical events. Chapter 1 therefore is about military and aesthetic failure. And it is about surrogation: here is something else in lieu of what I could not give you. This is important because Chapter 2 opens with a turning away from this problematic: Hodges removes to Bengal, comes more directly under the patronage of Hastings and undertakes the journey towards Benares and Agra which became the basis of much of his representation of India.

From the period immediately prior to the passing of the Regulating Act to the East India Company Charter Act, the governance of the East India Company generated significant controversy regarding the appropriate form and quality of colonial rule. Michel Foucault, in his essay “Governmentality,” defined “Government as the right disposition of things,” and his notion of disposition is useful here, because it draws attention to how power is distributed by the very selection and arrangement of populations, commodities and flows. Hodges’s text engages with this problematic by presenting figures of the right disposition of men and things. The absence of women in this phrase is intended because it lies at the core not only of Hodges image of the banyan tree, but also in key developments in colonial discourse in the early 1790s. Harriet Guest’s recent reading of the deployment of femininity in Hodges’s narrative argues that the “great distinction” between Indian and European society is negotiated by the ascription of femininity to Indian peoples, places and things (2007, 28-32). Within the chain of images engraved for the Travels, the banyan tree image is caught in the tangle of gendered fantasies which inflected much of the European and specifically British account of imperial rule. It is preceded by a Mughal painting of a Zenanah (24) and followed by a highly sentimental image of “Mahommedan Women attending the Tombs of their Parents, Relatives, or Friends at Night” (28). Two of the next three images focus specifically on Hindu women: first, an image of mother and child (30) and then the famous stele-like image of the “Procession of a Hindoo woman to sacrifice on the funeral pile” (84). At the risk of simplifying this chain of images, I would suggest that the banyan tree is ensconced in a series of proto-ethnographic images which focus almost exclusively on the lives of women. The subjects here are not incidental for they are connected to precisely the social and religious practices most frequently remarked upon by European travelers—the sequestration of women, marital constancy and suttee—as signs either of Moslem despotism or Hindu fanaticism/superstition. And each in their own way argues against prior visualizations of these elements of Indian sociability. The Zenanah image hands over representational agency to an unnamed Mughal artist, thereby squelching any imputation of voyeurism. The mourning image figures it as a scene of exemplary sensibility; and the suttee scene is rendered as a scene of horrified yet erotically charged observation.

The tree occupies the entire middle ground, shading two swain-like figures resting beneath its boughs. The image emphasizes the tree’s remarkable extension and carefully renders the dependent pods which made the tree a natural curiosity. Descriptions of the species were commonplace in travel narratives and botanical monographs throughout the eighteenth-century because ‘the boughs...bending to the earth, take root and grow up again like the mother-plant, whence one of them will have forty bodies and upwards, and spreading themselves far around afford shelter for a regiment of soldiers under its branches; which bearing leaves that are ever green, afford a noble shade. Under these the gentoos frequently place their devotees reside, and perform those penances which appear extremely surprising to all Europeans....

’ The tree’s reproductive strategies and its physical extension provided figural possibilities which were capitalized on in different ways at different historical moments.

As we will see, the figural connections to maternality, Hindu superstition and militarism which surface in the description are crucial issues in Hodges’s representations of the banyan tree.

Understanding Hodges’s intervention in this figural economy requires that we recognize the most important prior European visual representation of the banyan tree. Bernard Picart’s discussion of Tavernier’s account of “the penitance of the faquirs” in The ceremonies and religious customs of the various nations of the world... was widely circulated throughout Europe from the late 1730's onward. The English translation featured an extraordinary engraving of all manner of religious prostrations, enthusiasms and mortifications conducted under the boughs of a banyan tree.

Bernard Picart, “Divers Pagods and the Penitence of the Faquirs,” engraving from The ceremonies and religious customs of the various nations of the world... vol.4 (London: William Jackson, 1733). Reproduction courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

That monstrous excess is figured forth by the face on the tree’s trunk, which occupies the centre of the composition, and which is framed by the central temple. Picart’s adjoining text identifies that face: ‘You may see, says he [Tavernier], about the Borders of Surat, under a spacious Tree where the Banians resort, several Pagods, consecrated to their Idols. The Pagod that leans against the Body of the Tree is dedicated to Mamaniva, whose formidable Head may be discerned in the Middle of the hollow Trunk. Hither resort several Votaries, who prostrate themselves before this monstrous Idol, and a Bramin collects at the same time their Free-will offerings, which consist of Rice, Millet, &c. Whoever comes to offer up their Supplications before this Pagod of Mamaniva, are marked on the Forehead with Vermillion, with which they beautify and adorn their Idol. Honoured with this Mark, their Votaries imagine no evil Spirit can have the least prevailing Power over them. (7-8)’ Mamaniva is a corruption of Mahadevi the great mother goddess of Hinduism, therefore both the metonymical and metaphorical correlations of the image conspire to represent Hindu religion, and by extension, its practitioners, as a monstrous mother which reproduces either autonomously or with its own children. In this light, the framing function of the central pagod gains a certain eloquence because it effectively envaginates the face. The hyper-maternalization of the scene effectively evacuates the father from this visual and textual assemblage.

The text achieves this rhetorical sleight of hand through the careful management of adjacent sentences and figures. The first sentence indicates that it is Cleveland who not only governs the district, but also fosters Hodges’s artistic production. This has a kind of inaugural effect because Hodges ostensibly made no art in Madras during the campaign against Mysore. This frames the next four sentences which specifically address the banyan tree. The final three sentences of the paragraph then suddenly cut back to the framing issue by speaking directly about good governance. If we break the paragraph into these three, the gap between the internal description of the tree and the framing remarks on governmentality become immediately conspicuous. It is literally the paratactic adjacency of the frame to the internal description that allows the tree to figure for good government. And each of the sentences of this internal unit is notable for how it re-writes prior descriptions of the banyan tree. By describing the tree as a natural curiosity which “cannot fail to excite the attention of the traveller”, Hodges invokes the long line of travel narratives and quasi-scientific accounts of Asia, which includes Tavernier, Picart and Fenning. However, the subsequent sentence performs a key divagation from these prior discourses when it refuses to refer to the tree as a mother and when it rigorously separates the child-like dependent shoots from the newly rooted “parents of others”. This effectively counters not only the feminization of the tree, and hence its connection to Mamaniva in Picart, but also replaces non-normative sexuality with a carefully managed sphere of reproduction where parents and children are never confused.

So much for the threat of monstrous maternal Hinduism nascent in Picart. The next sentence picks up on the tree’s ability to shade “hundreds of people”, but does not refer to this group as a regiment as in Fenning. This erases the military in favour of a subject people and thus erases both native insurgency and British military activity in one rhetorical stroke.

The face of Mamaniva is doubly displaced, and I would argue that this doubling poses a series of complex problems. The architectural element in the background still occupies the precise centre of the composition, but it no longer frames the trunk and if anything its tiny church-like spire replaces the envaginated female face in Picart with a certain quiet phallicism. Could we not argue that the monstrous mother of Hinduism has been replaced by a pagod whose undecidable construction suspiciously resonates with the Christian discourse used to legitimate Cleveland’s governance? The compositional displacement and the undecidable architectural element figures forth a form of Hindu culture dissociated from fanaticism at precisely the moment when the question of Chrisitianizing the Asian subcontinent is very much in the air.

The very undecidability of the architectural figure is resonant because it sits at the juncture of two governmental paths—one aimed at containing Hindu excess and one aimed at converting the population—when arguments for both options were being weighed and counter-weighed.

In this context the tree itself becomes iconically phallic or indeed hyper-phallicized. As a huge penis with myriad dependent penises, this figure for the governmentality of the East India Company not only puts thousands of years of Hindu religious and social practices into abeyance, but also equates the Company with the autonomous production of both food and art. This is bolstered by the final sentence of the paragraph which links this new period of productivity to earlier periods of Mughal stability, presumably under the Akbar’s rule, wherein good governance fostered art and happiness. This linkage between Akbar and Hastings not only legitimates Company rule as a repetition of past models of good government, but also firmly locates any competent form of Moslem rule in the historical past. As Tobin, Eaton and others have argued,

Hodges’s picturesque aesthetic is particularly well suited to rendering India society and culture as one vast ruin, and this same thematic suffuses Hodges’s description of Akbar’s tomb: ‘A blazing eastern sun shining full on this building, composed of such varied materials, produces a glare of splendour almost beyond the imagination of an inhabitant of these northern climates to conceive; and the present solitude that reigns over the whole of the neglected garden, excites involuntarily a melancholy pensiveness....The inside of the tomb is a vast hall, occupying the whole space of the interior of the building....In the center the body is deposited in a sarcophagus of plain white marble, on which is written, in black marble inlaid, simply the name of’ ‘ACBAR’ ‘....This fine country exhibits, in its present state, a melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government, of wild ambition, and horrors attending civil dissentions; for when the governors of this country were in plenitude of power, exercised their rights with wisdom, from the excellence of its climate, with some degree of industry, it must have been a perfect garden; but now is all desolation and silence. (122-3)’

The style of paternal masculinity which Hodges associates with both Akbar and Hastings resonates with the emergence of a crucial trope—both visual and textual—from Britain’s ongoing struggles with Mysore. In his careful management of the famous hostage transaction which ended the third Mysore War in 1793, Cornwallis, and those representing the event, did everything possible to suggest that Tipu Sultan’s sons would receive a form of paternal care previously unknown to them in their father’s household. This declaration of paternal benevolence was explicitly mobilized to contrast with the treatment of British captives by Hyder Ali following Pollilur.

This gesture coalesced with the emergence of a proto-ethnographic “explanation” for why Indian populations were incapable of governing themselves that linked subject populations to non-normative sexualities. In this rhetoric, the native population of India was divided along religious and ethnic lines and polarized by gendered fantasies of identity.

Between the poles of always already feminized Hindu subjects and hyper-masculinized present Moslem rulers, such as Tipu Sultan, lies an internal capsule of normative masculinity. Hodges’s complex deployment of gender and sexuality in the description of the banyan tree speaks to the ongoing spectre of loss in Mysore set into motion in the first chapter of the Travels, but it does so in a way that both forecloses and opens the problematic of governmentality. In Hodges’s text, the former rule of Akbar and the present example of the East India Company exist uneasily in this realm of normativity because the distinction between past and present is the only thing preventing the collapse between Moslem and Christian rule.

If we take one last look at the banyan tree image we can discern three layers of displacement. In the background, the ancient pagod which framed Mahadewi in Picart’s picture has given way to an image from the future: a small parsonage superimposed on a now obsolete Hindu temple. In the middle ground, Mahadewi’s envaginated face has been erased and the tree itself emerges as a fantasy of phallic British rule. And the ancient religious practices of the faqirs have been replaced by present commerce. And in the foreground, something new emerges. The aged Hindu man looking out at the viewer is not only detached from the past of Picart’s image, but he seems to hail the viewer, or perhaps even Hodges, into a new temporal relationship beyond the conventional aesthetic objectives of the picturesque. It is as though the old man’s gaze establishes precisely what Hodges and by extension his audience desired all along: a relationship which figures forth the artist/observer as a phallic ruler over the subject of the image. Remember Hodges asserts that during the time of truly successful native insurgency there is no art. Here in 1793 following what was supposed to be victory over Tipu, Hodges text can revel in the power of domination. Isn’t that what is coded into the penitential pose of the figure in the foreground, for this is not an intersubjective glance, but a gaze of subjection. And the viewer accedes to the scene of paternal forgiveness perhaps needed to overcome the psychic, governmental and historical impasse occasioned in 1781. In this re-figuring of the past Hodges has sketched the future for himself and for those to whom he wishes to sell the Travels—a future that brings his art through the picturesque distancing from the political towards the moral exemplifications and re-invigorated Georgic tropes associated with Romanticism.

After his return from India, Hodges’s time was divided between preparing his Indian paintings and drawings for publication either in Select Views in India or Travels in India and embarking on a series of exemplary moral landscapes of notable British sites. Arguably the most significant of these, prior to the famous pair of paintings The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War of 1794, was his South View of Windsor, taken from the Great Park.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1787 and quickly transformed into a very high quality engraving “following the same format he was simultaneously adopting for the striking prints of A View of the Emperor Shere Shah at Sasseram in Bahar and A View of the Gate of the Tomb of the Emperor Akbar at Secundrii....In this sense, Hodges implicitly offers Windsor as the centre of the Britain’s empire as well as the nation, through such comparisons with Mughal dynastic sites”.

The picture itself is perhaps not surprising. As Quilley and Bonehill indicate, “the picture gives a panoramic view across the park and countryside with the focal point of the castle in the centre distance, in an evocation of an ordered, harmonious landscape that is to be understood as at once natural and political” (194). The pair of oaks on the right frames both the stags in the foreground and the castle in the background, and thus perform precisely the sheltering function that oaks had performed in numerous contexts from at least the time of Locke. Pope’s “Windsor Forest” comes to mind no less than patriotic evocations of oak trees by William Whitehead throughout the American war.

But something is amiss. In both Pope and Whitehead, British oaks have a global reach either through their transformation into warships in the case of Windsor Forest, or through a certain political extension in Whitehead.

Here is Whitehead writing as Laureate on the eve of the American War:

Beyond the vast Atlantic tide

Extend your healing influence wide,

Where millions claim your care:

Inspire each just, each filial thought,

And let the nations round be taught5

The British oak is there.

 

Tho’ vaguely wild its branches spread,

And rear almost an alien head

Wide-waving o’er the plain,

Let still, unspoil’d by foreign earth,10

And conscious of its nobler birth,

The untainted trunk remain.

⁽²⁸⁾

”Ode XXIX For his Majesty’s Birth-Day, June 4, 1775", 7-18.

It is for this reason that Burke’s figure sacrifices extensibility to duration by intertwining the life cycle of the tree with the bonds of the family: ‘Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete....In this choice of inheritance we have given our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic affections.... (120)’ This is a confusing passage precisely because the image of “a relation in blood” does not sit well with “the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression”. Burke wants the constitution to be both an “incorporation of the human race” and something which shelters the polity of Britain. This strange hybridization of blood and oak, human and tree, through its very overdetermination, performs a rhetorical intensification which separates him from his predecessors. By collapsing the distinction between humans and plants, Burke has opened the door for a racial interpretation of the constitution: “we have given our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood”. And this racialization of governance lays claim to historical constancy by aligning itself with the durability at the heart of the oak figure. The tension between the symbolics of blood nascent in Burke’s analogy between family and constitution on the one hand, and the more subtle invocation of the tree on the other, not only signals the struggle to re-define the oak figure for a new imperial era, but also opens the door for—and perhaps even demands—a re-evaluation of the relationship between extension and duration in the notion of British liberty.

Could we not argue that Burke’s reactivation of the oak metaphor is the trigger which allows for a series of rememorative utterances which seek to address the imperial wound of 1781? We know that at least one poet responded to the Reflections in precisely this way and that his poetic meditation on the figure had a profound impact on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare and others.

Cowper’s “Yardley Oak” , which was written in response to Burke’s text, explicitly addresses the re-evaluation of extension and durability in the oak metaphor, and in so doing re-calibrates imperial and national relations in quite remarkable ways.

As with my analysis of Hodges, we need to go back to the global war of the early 1780s in order to move forward. In early December of 1781, less than two months after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, William Cowper sent an imaginary “sociable conversation” to his friend Joseph Hill in which Cowper articulated his thoughts on the American War. After stating that he knew of no one up to the task of leading Britain out of the conflict, Cowper offered the following summary of the state of the empire: ‘If we pursue the war, it is because we are desperate; it is plunging and sinking year after year in still greater depths of calamity. If we relinquish it, the remedy is equally desperate, and would prove, I believe, in the end no remedy at all. Either way we are undone—perseverance will only enfeeble us more, we cannot recover the Colonies by arms. If we discontinue the attempt, in that case we fling away voluntarily, what in the other we strive ineffectually to regain, and whether we adopt the one measure or the other, are equally undone. For I consider the loss of America as the ruin of England; were we less encumbered than we are, at home, we could but ill afford it, but being crushed as we are under an enormous debt that the public credit can at no rate carry much longer, the consequence is sure. Thus it appears to me that we are squeezed to death between the two sides of that sort of alternative, which is commonly called a cleft stick, the most threat’ning and portentous condition in which the interests of any country can possibly be found.

’ Of the myriad statements of imperial doom from this period, Cowper’s remark stands out because the metaphor of the cleft stick captures the predicament of imperial subjectivity at this moment so vividly. To be cleft is to be split or divided to a certain depth, but the expression “a cleft stick” uses the notion of bifurcation to figure the two horns of a dilemma: as the OED states, it indicates “a position in which advance and retreat are alike impossible”. For Cowper, the nation, and by extension the imperial subject, is entangled to the point of being unable to move. Disentangling the imperial subject from this painful, static, almost abject, position involves a phantasmatic re-configuration of the political beyond the limits of specific policies and actions. In short, the predicament seems to call forth a new kind of political and poetic utterance.

This same sense of Providential retribution suffuses “Yardley Oak”, but it is played out not only with more rhetorical force, but also with more historical specificity:

Survivor sole, and hardly such, of all

That once lived here thy brethen, at my birth

(Since which I number threescore winters past)

A shatter’d vet’ran, hollow-trunk’d perhaps

As now, and with excoriate forks deform,5

Relicts of Ages!....

⁽³²⁾

William Cowper, “Yardley Oak” in The Poems of William Cowper ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980-), 77-82. All subsequent references will be given by line number in the text.

(1-6)

Cowper’s address does two things. First it establishes a relation of intimacy between this last surviving oak and the aged speaker. This is achieved by constructing the effect of physical proximity between speaker and oak: the poem’s descriptive specificity is one of the poem’s most prominent rhetorical strategies. And this effect of intimacy is intensified almost immediately by the syntactical ambiguity introduced by the parenthetical phrase in line three. Cowper’s sudden specification of the speaker’s age suspends the syntax at the end of line four and thus allows “A shatter’d vet’ran” in line 4 to figure not only for the oak, but also for the speaker. This figural ambiguity sets up the possibility for complex identifications between the speaker and the tree which will have important political ramifications as the poem unfolds. At this point it is enough to recognize that this establishes the potential for precisely the same collapse between the body of the subject and the arborial figure for governance that animated Burke’s overdetermined deployment of the oak in the Reflections. As we will see, Cowper does not allow that collapse to occur.

With the loss of its arms, the tree’s capacity to figure forth shelter has been permanently compromised. From this figural dismemberment comes a different possibility for metaphor. This tree becomes notable not for its arms, but for its screaming mouth:

Embowell’d now, and of thy ancient self

Possessing nought but the scoop’d rind that seems

An huge throat calling to the clouds for drink

Which it would give in rivulets to thy root,

Thou temptest none, but rather much forbidd’st5

The feller’s toil, which thou could’st ill requite.

Yet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock,

A quarry of stout spurs and knotted fangs

Which crook’d into a thousand whimsies, clasp

The stubborn soil, and hold thee still erect. (110-19)10

This oak tree tempts no one because it offers no shade and provides no suitable timber for arms. With the capacity to subdue enemies and to provide shelter for the polity shorn away, the tree becomes a remarkable figure for the poet. It becomes a mouth calling for sustenance from the sky so that it can sustain the only thing worth sustaining—its roots.

It is in this sense that the tree is a “shatter’d vet’ran” and why the syntactical ambiguity which allows the phrase to also refer to the speaker in the opening verse paragraph is so important. Cowper is laying the groundwork for a different kind of relationship between patriotic poet and national figure. There is an analogy between tree and speaker here, but it does not conform to Burke’s “philosophical analogy” between constitution and blood. The analogy does not rest on the capacity for auto-generation nascent in Burke’s naturalization of the constitution or in Hodges’s fantasy of the banyan tree as an auto-reproductive structure, but rather on the capacity for mediating between sky and soil that Cowper aligns not only with expressivity, but also with patriotic Christian humility. This mediating function in the face of physical, spiritual and national decline is the ultimate task of the poet in the time of national and imperial crisis, when the oak can no longer protect anyone due to ill usage.