Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: Cultural Appropriation, or Cross Pollination? (1)

In the 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley found inspiration for his famous poem, “The Indian Serenade,” in Middle Eastern poetry.  There was actually a movement or school of poetry known as the English Orientalists, whose work Shelley greatly admired.

The Turkish Patrol, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436116

To Europeans, the Middle East was a mysterious place.  Until Napoleon’s army occupied Egypt in 1801, not many Europeans had actually been to the Middle East (Meagher). Even after 1801, many creatives were inspired, not by real-life visits to this exotic destination, but by artwork and descriptions provided by others. (Meagher).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artwork created by the Orientalists was biased in favor of European culture and against Middle Eastern peoples and their cultures. In fact, it was so biased that today, some have defined Orientalism as a form of racism:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous (Arab American National Museum).

Given that some artists deliberately created “propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule” (Meagher), it’s not surprising that there were exaggerations and distortions; nor is it surprising that many Europeans readily accepted this interpretation of Middle Eastern culture. It fit handily into their preconceived notions, reinforced their Eurocentric world view and justified the exploitation of those nations.

Nevertheless, many British Orientalists studied Middle Eastern culture with a more open mind, and genuinely admired the literature and artwork of these exciting foreign places.

Works Cited

Meagher, Jennifer. “Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/euor/hd_euor.htm (October 2004).

Arab American National Museum. “What Is Orientalism?” What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, Arab American National Museum, 2011, arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.

A Serenade Inspired by a Song - But Which Song?

You might think that if a famous poem were inspired by a song, literary critics or music historians might have a clue, but in the instance of "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, that is not actually the case.  What we have instead are competing theories. You can pick your favorite.

B.A. Park believes that Shelley was inspired by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (who wrote the lyrics to the now-famous “Minstrel Boy”) to write lyrics for an Indian melody:

“The habit appears to have been introduced by Thomas Moore of composing poems to fit wordless or foreign popular melodies, with his Irish Melodies of 1807-1828, and his National Airs of 1819-1828. Shelley’s poem appears to have been written to such a wordless tune from India, played for him by a friend” (9). 

Chauncey B. Tinker thought that he had discovered a different source for the same poem:

“The love-song is associated with Miss Sophia Stacey, a young lady whose the Shelleys met in the last months of the poet’s life. She used to sing to Shelley, an experience which always moved him to an intensity of passion and not infrequently to the composition of verses.  One recalls Jane Williams and her singing to the accompaniment of a guitar, which awakened sentiments of the most intense delight in the poet’s heart. ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ may very well have come into existence as the text for some air sung to him by Sophia, though of this there is no proof” (71).

 However, Tinker does not believe that “the loved one” of the poem is Miss Stacey (71).

A third theory is that the poem may have originated during a contest between two now-famous poets:

...perhaps (as Trelawny testified in a manuscript now at John Murray's) to use in a competition with Byron, in which each was to compose lyrics to be sung to an Indian or Arabic melody. But whether Shelley recomposed from memory--or else pretended to compose for the first time--a poem that he had already used to impress Stacey, either to demonstrate his poetic facility vis-a-vis Byron, or to express his feelings for Jane Williams, we are faced with judgments of his motives (Reiman).

Judgments aside, Jessica K. Quillin gives us the most Romantic and compelling narrative:

“…the prosodic arrangement of ‘An Indian Serenade’ fits into the general scheme of Mozart’s music for ‘Ah perdona, al primo affetto,’ revealing the possibility that Shelley wrote the lyric with the melody or at least the words of the aria in mind. In any event, the correspondences between ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ and Mozart’s aria reveal the extent to which music formed part of Shelley’s conception of poetic form toward the end of his life. This theory is lent further support in light of Reiman and O’Neill’s hypothesis that Shelley had the fair copy manuscript of ‘An Indian Serenade’ containing the lines from Mozart with him when his boat, the Don Juan, sank off the coast of Viargeggio” (NP).

What could be more appropriate than a Romantic poet dying with both Mozart and a fair copy of a love poem in his possession during a fatal storm that sinks his boat and takes his life? Even if this turns out not to be true, it's a great origin myth and I want the movie rights!

WORKS CITED

Park, B.A. “The Indian Elements of the ’Indian Serenade.’ Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol 10, Winter 1961.  pp. 8-12. [JSTOR]

Quillin, Jessica K.  Sheely and the Music-Poetics of Romanticism. Abingdon-on_Thames, UK: Routledge, 2016.

Reiman, Donald H.  “Shelley Comes of Age: His Early Poems as an Editorial Experience,” Romantic Circles. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/earlyshelley/reiman/reiman.html

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. pp. 70-72 (JSTOR).

Reflections on "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1)

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale’s complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must on thine,

Oh! beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1817

 

My initial impulse was to dismiss this poem as overwrought and ridiculous.  However, after completing some research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem, I realized there was more to it than I had initially thought.

I discovered that the poem had a history, not merely as a Romantic love poem, but also as song lyrics. Arthur Farwell published a setting of this poem in 1899 (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186954/).  Apparently, there were many versions of this poem set to music: one author remarked: “Mid-Victorian composers tumbled over one another to set Shelley to music…. Choral settings are abundant...” (Evans 594).

Curiously enough, it was once even popular among college students at Yale: “ “The final splendour of Shelley’s serenade is that it easily wedded to music, and serves the purpose of expressing and releasing the passion in a lover’s heart.  So far as I am aware, it is the only poem of Shelley’s that ever became a well-known song.  I recall its popularity in the singing at the fence on the old campus, when boys in their early twenties sang it with an emotion which could hardly have arisen from the beauty of the poetry in which is is couched, and who dis- / covered to their surprise that it was the production one of the greatest lyricists in English or any other language.  The air sung at the fence was written by F.B. Tourtellot….” (Tinker 71,72).

Even today, there are versions of it on YouTube, such as this contemporary one:

Works Cited

Evans, Edwin, ed. Musical News and Herald. London: Publishing Office, 1992.

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. Pp. 70-72 (JSTOR),