1.         This electronic edition makes available a tremendous archival deposit: Mary Tighe's Verses Transcribed for H.T. (1805), a 266-page two-volume bound autograph manuscript collection of 121 original Tighe poems and 72 original Tighe illustrations the National Library of Ireland acquired in 2004 (MS 49,155/2). Tighe began transcribing and illustrating Verses as she was contemplating the publication of a volume of poetry that would feature her epic romance "Psyche; or, the Legend of Love" accompanied by a selection of her lyrics, a project her husband Henry Tighe (H.T.) and friends such as Thomas Moore urged her to pursue while she was in England seeking treatment for a consumptive cough from June 1804 to August 1805. Generally averse to commercial publication, but happy to circulate her work among the members of her various literary coteries, [1]  Tighe opted to print 50 copies of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805) without any additions from Verses in a small private edition that she dedicated and distributed to family and friends. That private edition of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love made Tighe famous: hundreds of enthusiastic readers borrowed and shared copies of the poem (often making their own manuscript copies and thereby increasing the poem's circulation). Although readers and critics frequently recommended the publication of Psyche, and Tighe found the calls to publish flattering, she remained a coterie poet till the end of her days. Had she only pursued the larger project urged by Henry Tighe and Thomas Moore in 1804-1805, she would have prepared her own version of what became the subsequently posthumous edition of Psyche, with Other Poems that her family published with the Longman group in 1811. That edition offered a carefully culled selection of 29 lyrics from the 120 in Verses as well as another 10 lyrics not included in Verses. [2]  The multiple printings of Psyche, with Other Poems established Tighe's literary reputation for good and ill throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, bringing her notable attention for Psyche, but barely hinting at the lyric range of the "Other Poems" displayed in Verses. [3] 

2.         A beautifully and self-consciously constructed aesthetic artifact, Verses Transcribed for H.T. radically revises our prior knowledge of Tighe's literary, visual, and material production:

• 65 of the 121 poems had not appeared in any known print sources as of yet;
• 17 of the 121 poems contain significant variants from the published versions;
• 72 of the 121 poems are illustrated with elegant tailpieces that cast light on the poems they illuminate and provide a visual travelogue of the spas, sites, and ruins the Tighes visited in the 1790s and early 1800s;
• 39 of the 121 are translations or imitations of Latin, Italian, French, or German writers which Tighe scholars thought were lost;
• 35 of the 121 are sonnets, including a distinct set of 30 that are showcased in a numbered "Sonnets" section suggesting a sonnet cycle;
• at least 15 of the 121 are written in the voice of characters from Tighe's 1803 manuscript novel Selena, versus the 11 of the 15 that are printed in the novel;
• dozens attest to Tighe's full-scale engagement with contemporary poetics and politics: the discourse of sensibility, Della Cruscan poetry, coterie culture, the sonnet revival, Romantic antiquarianism, the 1794 Treason Trials, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the 1801 Act of Union, and more.

Verses reveals a Tighe we have never seen: beyond the new poems it introduces to literary history, beyond the new information it provides about the dates, places, and sources of already published poems, beyond the images it makes visible, it presents Mary Tighe as the determining editor of her own collected poems.

3.         Tighe arranges the lyrics in Verses in clusters or sets of poetic experiences, unlike the genre-based structure of Psyche, with Other Poems (epic, sonnets, occasional lyrics), or the chronological structure of the lyrics presented in Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years, a second privately printed posthumous family edition of Tighe's lyrics that appeared in 1811 (with lyrics written between 1789 and 1809). [4]  And she foregrounds her representation of herself as a poet articulating the dilemmas of Petrarchan desire, versus the sober classical scholar mourned in Psyche or the spiritually redeemed soul elegized in Mary. Volume I begins with a set of coterie poems that include poems of friendship and poems of sorrow, moves nearly seamlessly to the poems from or for the characters in Selena, and concludes with a firmly designated section of sonnets. Volume II dramatically shifts from the more internal gaze of the sonnets to the more external gaze of a series of poems concerned with history, politics, and the world, then presents an extended section of continental translations, and ends with a return to more personal poems (interspersed with additional translations). Although many of the poems towards the end of the second volume date from the latter period of Tighe's life (1804 on), including six written after the 1805 title page inscription, the careful juxtaposition of earlier poems from the late 1790s and early 1800s among the later poems indicates deliberate design. [5]  In Verses Tighe establishes the contours and contents of a definitive collection of her poems.

Tighe's Determination Not to Publish

4.         The extraordinary quality of the material in Verses makes it particularly unfortunate that Tighe rejected the prospect of editing her own Psyche, with Other Poems in 1805 or sharing Verses Transcribed for H.T. (or her novel Selena) with the reading public. But as a relatively privileged member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, Tighe experienced no economic need to publish and some social constraint not to publish. Born in Dublin on October 9, 1772, she was the second child of Marsh librarian Rev. William Blachford (1730-1773) and Methodist leader Theodosia Tighe Blachford (1744-1817), 20 months younger than her brother John (1771-1817). Her father died seven months after her birth, leaving her mother a wealthy widow who focused on educating her children and engaging in charitable activities. Many members of Tighe's family published, including her mother, who translated The Life of the Baroness de Chantal (1787), her uncle Richard Tighe, who wrote a life of William Law, her uncle Edward Tighe, the theater critic "Melantius," and her cousin William Tighe, author of Statistical Observations Relative to the County of Kilkenny (1802) and The Plants (1808). But as many or more members of the family and well-placed friends engaged in a thriving coterie culture of shared manuscripts, albums, and commonplace books, often centered at Rossana, the Wicklow county home of Tighe's aunt and mother-in-law Sarah Fownes Tighe. Tighe grew up in a generously intellectual familial environment that offered multiple models for expression and immediate access to appreciative readers in Ireland, England, and Wales. After she and Henry Tighe consummated their troubled courtship with an equally troubled marriage in 1793, they spent most of the 1790s in London and its environs, a move that expanded Tighe's literary and social network and caused her some spiritual agony as she rued and reveled in the pleasure she took in being admired (she was renowned for her great beauty). [6]  When the Tighes resettled in Ireland in 1801, Tighe focused intensively on her writing, completing Psyche in 1802 and Selena in 1803.

5.         In January 1804 Tighe exhibited symptoms of the consumption that took her to England that August, where her ongoing commitment to her work prompted family and friends to suggest publication. She took the suggestion seriously but declined. Surprisingly, in light of the plenitude of verses in Verses, one of the reasons Tighe opted not to publish her own version of Psyche, with Other Poems in 1805 centered on her fear that the lyric poems would serve as mere ballast to Psyche, or "the straw appendages of a kite," as she put it in a Christmas Eve 1804 letter to her friend and sometime mentor Joseph Cooper Walker, the Irish antiquarian:

Tighe's important invocation of the "butchers" at the Edinburgh Review provides a crucial context for her fears. No matter how much she enjoyed the approbation of her coterie readers, she was not prepared to risk her reputation as a "proper lady" and be reassigned to Richard Polwhele's band of "unsex'd females" by exposing the sensuality of Psyche and the eroticism of her lyrics to reviewers who might see her stepping beyond the bounds of female decorum. [7]  Her 1802 preface to Psyche had already made those concerns explicit in contrasting the potential reception of a general reading public with that of her coterie readers, acknowledging her anxiousness that even her coterie readers might condemn her depiction of love:

6.        Despite the concerns Tighe expressed in the 1802 preface—and the 1804 Christmas Eve letter to Walker—she did continue to think about commercial publication throughout the spring of 1805, while she was preparing the private edition of Psyche. On April 19, 1805 she described her frustration with the taxing process of print production in another letter to Walker that wonders how much worse it would be if she were "publishing":

7.         Printing the private edition would not have precluded publishing a commercial volume that paired Psyche with selections from Verses, the initial impetus spurring its more pleasurable, handcrafted production. But the very act of transcribing poems for Verses must have made Tighe realize how difficult it would be to select enough appropriate smaller poems and maintain her status as a proper lady. Readers might easily misconstrue imagination for experience, a dilemma she dramatizes in Selena, when the characters Selena Miltern and Lady Emily Trevallyn discuss the implications of Angela Harley's passionate poem "The Picture" (transcribed in Verses and Selena, and ultimately included in the 1811 Psyche, with Other Poems):

Selena takes the poem as direct evidence of Angela's fall from grace: "'if poor Angela did indeed write those verses, I fear she is lost not only to happiness and her poor Mother, but even to innocence. What virtuous girl could bear thus openly to boast a passion for which it is evident she even then doubted of meeting a faithful return?'" (324). Lady Trevallyn assures Selena that Angela very certainly wrote the poem—because Angela, like Tighe, filled the pages with her own scratches—but disagrees with Selena's conclusion, citing the power of imagination to enhance feeling during the act of poetic composition: "'I know when the fit of writing seizes a person who is in the habit of this dangerous indulgence, one is inclined to express in even stronger language than the heart at other times feels the sentiments we scarce allow ourselves in plain prose to speak'" (325). Although Lady Trevallyn probably voices Tighe's aesthetic position, Tighe scripts Lady Trevallyn as a victim of excessive sensibility whose reputation suffers when she misreads a set of social cues that the morally sensitive Selena more accurately assesses. [9] 

8.         Any doubts as to the predictive accuracy of assessments like Selena's would have been laid to rest when Tighe witnessed the infamous reception of Moore's Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), a reception mortifying to Tighe on several fronts. [10]  As a close friend Tighe was pained by the reviewers' cruel castigations of Moore as a "pander of posterity" (Annual Review 499), a "literary pimp" (Eclectic Magazine 811), "a pander to loose thoughts and foul actions" (Monthly Mirror 182), or "the most licentious of modern versifiers . . . [devoted] to the propagation of immorality" (Edinburgh Review 456). [11]  As a coterie companion Tighe correctly recognized that publishing her lyric exchanges with Moore in her Verses could subject her to an equally painful and perhaps even more disciplinary critique, especially since he had already published his poems to her in his Epistles (as well as his 1801 The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq.). The Literary Journal sternly reproved the "ladies of fashion" who allowed Moore to use their names in his poems, equating them with courtesans in a brothel:

Better and worse, the Critical Review specifically attacked Moore for having the audacity to publish a poem praising Tighe's Psyche—"To Mrs. Henry T-ghe, on reading her Psyche" [12] —and positioned Tighe as the moral antithesis to Moore in the concluding paragraph of the review: What might the Critical Review say about Tighe's "delicacy and purity" if they saw the Verses poems she shared with Moore? What might the Edinburgh Review say, which had warned about the pernicious influence of Moore's Epistles on women just like Tighe, who were venturing "more freely and largely into the fields of literature": Tighe never gave the reviewers the chance to say anything at all. She reluctantly considered going forward with a commercial edition of Psyche; or the Legend of Love in February 1806 when she heard that an unlicensed edition had been advertised in London, but directed Carpenter to threaten prosecution and thus successfully averted unintentional publication: Although Tighe continued to receive public and private requests to publish her work, she never did, remaining, as she put it in a letter to Walker, "a great coward as to publication" (c. 1804, 1461/7/221).

The Posthumous Psyche and Verses

9.         After Tighe's death in March 1810 the family decided to go ahead with the project Tighe never pursued and published Psyche, with Other Poems in May 1811. [14]  They prominently demarcated it as a posthumous edition "by the late Mrs. Henry Tighe" with a note to the reader that justified the publication of her poems as not just a monument to her good taste (and her physical suffering) but to her capacity to "improve the best sensations of the human heart," presumably the guiding principle that governed their selection of the "smaller poems":

Although the editor begs indulgence for the smaller poems because they lacked Tighe's final corrections, the resulting implication that the 29 lyrics from Verses were less polished than Psyche is misleading on two counts. First, the 1811 Psyche published in the Longman edition offers a lightly revised version of the 1805 Psyche printed by Carpenter, without explaining whether Tighe herself corrected the 1805 version or, more likely, the 1811 editor. Second, the 29 lyrics from Verses were highly finished and painstakingly transcribed by Tighe for H.T. in direct relation to publication (initially as prelude and subsequently as alternative to publication).

10.         Unfortunately Tighe's worry that the "smaller poems" might serve as simple ballast or a tail for Psyche was borne out by the reviews the posthumous edition received, which offered a great deal of praise for Psyche but paid minimal if any attention to the lyrics, often dismissing them after citing the editor's apologia (Monthly Review 149) or seeing them as a light "wreath" at the end of the volume, "lovely indeed, but scarcely worth the brow of Psyche" (Eclectic Review 228). [15]  Thus Tighe's reputation rested primarily on Psyche during most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, without much attention to or awareness of her lyrics. One can only wonder what might have happened had Tighe gone forward with her project and prepared her own version of Psyche, with Other Poems, and which of the poems from Verses she would have selected for inclusion.

11.         As a highly wrought material object it is curious that the two substantial volumes of Verses remained largely invisible for more than 200 years (akin to the comparable history of Tighe's five-volume manuscript novel Selena, although Selena only disappeared for a century or so). Neither Tighe's mother Theodosia Blachford nor her cousin and sister-in-law Caroline Hamilton mention Verses in their biographical essays on Tighe, the primary sources for contemporary information about Tighe's life and literary production, although Hamilton may be pointing to it in her comment on the tailpieces Tighe designed for her manuscripts: "the only use she made of her skill in drawing was to ornament with appropriate tail pieces, her occasional little Poems of which she has left many neatly written manuscripts" (252). [16]  It is also possible that Hamilton used Verses as the source text for the many Tighe poems she copied into her numerous albums (however Hamilton's versions often vary from the versions in Verses and might have been transcribed from memory). [17]  It's clear that eight of the 13 poems family friends Henry and Lucy Moore transcribed in their 1809 and 1811 albums come from Verses; almost all the poems transcribed in the 1811 album contain an endnote that states "copied from Mrs Tighe's M.S. Innistiogue - May - 1811." [18]  Half of the 16 previously unpublished poems privately printed in Mary come from Verses without any attribution (as well as 10 of the 14 poems reprinted from Psyche). [19]  Verses also provides the most likely source for the 12 unpublished poems E. I. Fox transcribed in "Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe. Including Twelve Poems not published with Psyche" [20]  and probably provides the source for the four poems printed in The Churchman's Monthly (1847) by an anonymous reviewer of William Howitt's Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets who notes that the poems are unpublished. [21] 

12.         Most intriguingly, and ironically, Verses might well be one of the Tighe memorials Felicia Hemans lamented reading in her 1834 sonnet "On Records of Immature Genius: Written after reading Memorials of the late Mrs. Tighe" because the memorials transformed Hemans's sense of Tighe as a proper lady and role model:

Hemans first wrote about Tighe as the unnamed woman poet in her 1827 "The Grave of a Poetess" (subsequently published as the concluding poem of her 1828 sequence Records of Woman), imagining herself looking at Tighe's gravesite with admiration and envy because she envisioned Tighe as a spiritual exemplar who transcended the vicissitudes of life and art through death. Her impression of Tighe dramatically changed after she moved to Dublin in 1831 and actually visited Tighe's grave (commemorated in her 1831 lyric "Written after Visiting a Tomb, Near Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny"). During the visit to Woodstock she not only met Henry Tighe, who failed to impress her by presenting her with his Latin translation of her "The Graves of a Household," but she learned details about Tighe's life that caused her to "give up my beau ideal of Mrs. Tighe's Character . . . much of her domestic sorrow I learned, was caused by her excessive passion for shining in Society, which quite carried her away from Home-enjoyments, until her Health gave way, and she was compelled to relinquish this career of dissipation" (Letter to Clara Graves, July 1831). [23] 

13.         Although Hemans' several letters about this visit do not mention Verses, Henry Chorley's 1834 Memorials of Mrs. Hemans notes that Hemans wrote "Records of Immature Genius" after "reading some of [Tighe's] earlier poems in manuscript" (2:219). [24]  If Chorley means Verses, it is inaccurate (at best) for Hemans to consider the lyrics Tighe collected in 1805—when she was nearly 33—as records of immature genius except insofar as they shatter the image that she was finally "from passion-gusts made free!" (14). [25]  That image and story—of a Tighe who turns from seducing passions to sober spirituality—is constructed by the posthumous edition of Psyche, with Other Poems, and perhaps not untrue biographically, but very different from the impression conveyed by the often unsettling and unsettled poems in Verses.

14.         The Mary Tighe who shapes her poetic performance in Verses is neither ready to be buried as the unnamed pattern poetess in Hemans' "The Grave of a Poetess" nor beatified as the late Mrs. Henry Tighe in Psyche, with Other Poems, which concludes with the plaintive final request of "On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon Which Flowered at Woodstock. December, 1809" to be remembered "with fond regret" and "lingering thoughts" (311). The Mary Tighe of Verses is a passionate, playful, ambitious poet whose most powerful poems pulsate with the frustrated energies of unfulfilled Petrarchan desire voiced from a complex feminine position.

The Structure of Verses

15.         Tighe positions herself first and last as a practicing poet in Verses. In the opening lyric, "The Vartree," she dedicates herself to the pastoral pursuit of poetry versus the "vain bustle of the senseless crowd" (29), emphasizing her identity as a poet by referring to herself via her coterie name "Linda," [26]  and affiliating herself with a particular set of poetic forebears through the epigraph from Molza's "La Ninfa Tiberina" (incorrectly attributed to Poliziano):

In the closing lyric, "Sonnet In reply to M.rs Wilmot," which elegantly thanks Lady Dacre for her complimentary sonnet "To Psyche, on Reading Her Poem," [27]  Tighe expresses regret for her languishing lyre even as she firmly situates herself as the author of Psyche and a sister poet:

16.         The poems that follow "The Vartree" and precede the "Sonnet in reply to Mrs. Wilmot" further Tighe's projection of herself as a coterie poet. She follows the dedicatory pastoralism of "The Vartree" with the Della Cruscan sensuality of "The Kiss," one of several "kiss" poems she and Moore wrote in conversation with one another: [28] 

Right after the demonstrative poetics of "The Kiss," "The Hours of Peace" reasserts the theme of "The Vartree" as Tighe/Linda celebrates a literary life that consists of producing work like "The Kiss," to be shared during pleasurable social evenings at home, listening to Moore/Anacreon sing his songs instead of pursuing the temptations of idle society: Similarly, the poem that precedes the final sonnet to Lady Dacre, "Sonnet to W. Parnell written at Avondale 1808," commemorates another coterie member, William Parnell, [29]  regretting that the worldly business that calls him from his estate on a summer evening prevents him from experiencing "the Muse's gentler influence," which Tighe makes manifest in the sonnet itself: Tighe not only situates herself again as a poet, who displays the favor of the Muse's influence, her invocation of Parnell in this penultimate poem subtly calls attention to her status as a known literary figure in Ireland. When Parnell published an Irish edition of William Smyth's English Lyricks (Dublin, 1806) in a larger effort to restore the business of printing to Ireland after the destructive impact of the Act of Union, he dedicated the edition to "Mrs. Henry Tighe": Thus the poems that initiate and conclude Verses Transcribed for H.T. insistently frame Tighe's representation of herself as a poet who undertakes her lyric journey with an act of dedication to the muses and ends with a bittersweet affirmation of the journey's success.

17.         The journey Tighe transcribes in Verses follows a thematic versus chronological or strictly genre-based structure, organized in sets or clusters of poetic modes. If there is a story the two volumes tell, the story begins with a group of coterie poems that map physical and emotional landscapes Tighe visited during the mid- to late-1790s and early 1800s (the first 17 poems), modulates into a set of poems ostensibly voiced by the characters from Selena (most of the next nine poems), introduces a mini-cluster of four translations, and offers a transitional poem that returns to the present and Tighe's personal lyric voice ("Verses Written in Sickness Dec.r 1804") before showcasing the 30-poem sonnet cycle that completes the first volume (61 poems in all). The second volume opens with 10 poems focused on history and politics followed by a set of 29 translations; the remaining 21 poems fall into mini-clusters of political poems, thank you poems, translations, and sonnets (60 poems in all). Neither volume adheres rigidly to a particular pattern—Tighe doesn't place all the sonnets in the sonnet cycle, or all the translations in the translation section, or all the Selena poems in a Selena cluster—but there is a clear design ordering her presentation. The slight messiness of the trajectory towards the end of volume two might indicate that Tighe lost some steam towards the culmination of this major project, which she began in 1805 but continued to work on through 1808 (as her health declined). But her inclusions and omissions at the end of the second volume maintain the intentionality of the volumes' comprehensive construction. She not only juxtaposes early and late poems in the final sequence of nine poems (dated 1804, 1806, 1801, 1808, undated, undated, 1799, 1808, 1807), she omits six late lyrics that her coterie readers appreciated enough to copy into their own commonplace books. She could have added these poems, given the blank pages at the end of both volumes of Verses, to transform our sense of the ending. [30]  Tighe ends as she begins: as a self-reflexive poet delimiting the parameters of her collection.

The Contents of Verses

18.         The contents of Verses open up multiple new ways of thinking about Tighe's contributions to literary history. First and foremost, Verses provides manuscript access to some exceptional poems that illustrate Tighe's strength as a poet. A prime example is her previously unpublished ekphrastic lyric on "The Faded Flowers," which offers a thoughtful meditation on the relation between nature and art that shifts from querying the potential of the imitative arts to capture nature to pondering the role of memory in containing or recreating past desire, Tighe's great theme. In the first five stanzas the poem describes the speaker's efforts to sketch a group of flowers before they die; in the pivotal sixth stanza the poem allusively cites Shakespeare's inconstant lover Proteus before offering another five stanzas that reflect on the cheating power of memory to create the temporary illusion of restoration:

As with so many lyrics in Tighe's oeuvre, "The Faded Flowers" speaks with characteristic ambivalence on the power of memory and art to recover or control desire, like Sonnet VIII ("As one who late hath lost a friend ador'd"), where the "shivering heart" seeks to re-experience "bliss once tasted" through portraits and poems that revive memories which initially beguile but then enhance present loss of those "scenes from which it wept to part" (11-14). So too "Address to my Harp," where the "sickening heart" hopes to simulate the function of an absent harp to relieve "secret pain" (23) yet induce "pensive, pleasing pain" (15) through memories that ultimately return that pain: "Yet still thy strings, in Fancy's ear, / With soothing melody shall play, / Thy silver sounds I oft shall hear, / To pensive gloom a silent prey" (37-40). The tailpieces that follow all three poems nicely complement the verbal paradoxes with an additional visual ambiguity by depicting vibrant images of static objects and scenes: the scentless flowers of "The Faded Flowers" (figure 1), the unwalkable landscape of "Sonnet VIII" (figure 2), and the silent harp of "Address to my Harp" (figure 3). Thus "The Faded Flowers," like "Sonnet VIII" or "Address to my Harp," manifests success and failure at once: as poet and artist Tighe powerfully immortalizes the image of the flowers before they droop, but her perfect representation of their "lustre" still "mocks" her "hope" in that her "imitative care" can never reproduce or replace experience itself, can only memorialize and thereby heighten loss.

19.         Verses also provides manuscript access to poems that demonstrate Tighe's engagement with the poetic, aesthetic, and political concerns of her cultural moment, unlike the lyrics selected for Psyche, with Other Poems, which largely refer to local places or personal acquaintances. [31]  In Verses Tighe leaves a direct and indirect trail of references to a wide range of contemporary or near-contemporary poets through title dedications, epigraphs, translations, and invocations that cite Thomas Gray, Francis Greville, Thomas Warton, Salomon Gessner, William Cowper, James Beattie, James Macpherson, Hannah More, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, Évariste de Parny, Vincenzo Monti, Mary Robinson, Charles Demoustier, William Bowles, Lady Dacre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Moore (as well as Metastasio). Sometimes those invocations operate with great subtlety, as in the August 15, 1804 sonnet "Addressed to the Rev.d W: L: Bowles" (XV), which concludes with the classic image of "the sad nightingale soft [who] pours her throat / While the thorn presses on her wounded breast" (13-14). That image does not appear in Bowles's 1789 Fourteen Sonnets [32]  but appears with great frequency in Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1811), which Tighe was thinking about in 1804. A letter to Walker dated January 28, 1804 mentions "Charlotte Smith's distresses" (1461/5/156). Sometimes those invocations suggest an ongoing conversation, such as "Verses Imitated from Du Moustier," which presents a fairly loose verse translation of Demoustier's lyric "Je vais boire l'onde glacée," his version of Sappho's stanzas to Phaon before she takes the leap of Leucata (in Lettres à Émilie, sur la mythologie [1786-98]), but also speaks to Robinson's more significant and more radical sonnet cycle Sappho and Phaon (1796). Similarly Tighe's sonnet "Addressed to the Ladies of Langollen Vale" (XIV) not only addresses Butler and Ponsonby but participates in a dialogue with Seward's "Llangollen Vale" (1796), which prompted Seward to offer rare praise for Tighe's sonnet (rare for Seward, that is). [33]  So too Tighe's sonnet "Written on the acquittal of Hardy &c — Dec:r 1794," which not only celebrates Thomas Erskine's successful defense of Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, and John Horne Tooke in the 1794 Treason Trials but speaks to Coleridge's complementary sonnet "To Erskine," published in the Morning Chronicle on December 1, 1794 (when the Tighes were living in England). [34] 

20.         The sonnets to Bowles/Smith and the Ladies of Llangollen/Seward reflect Tighe's contemporary aesthetic commitment to the sonnet revival, [35]  a demonstration made more potent through Tighe's clustering those two sonnets with two Petrarch imitations at the very heart of her sonnet cycle (XII-XV). Tighe's central engagement with the discourse of sensibility is also made more explicit in Verses through poems like "The Kiss," with its display of Della Cruscan eroticism, "Verses Written for Emily 1799," which begs "Insensibility" to "Stop the streams which feeling hallows / Smother each impassioned sigh" (39-40), "Song to Oberon," which models itself on Greville's "A Prayer for Indifference," "To Tranquility," which asks "Ador'd Tranquillity! / This fever'd heart to health restore, / Or lull to Apathy" (30-32), or "Sensibility," which follows More's poetical epistle "Sensibility" (not to mention the poems that cite Gray, Warton, Macpherson, or Beattie and other such exemplars). In tandem with poems that evince the discourse of sensibility are poems that exhibit Tighe's antiquarian bent ("Cleuen An Elegy" or "Morven and Miruna from Ossian") and her interest in ballads and songs, captured in at least 14 lyrics, such as "Song Post nublia Phoebus," "Forget me not!" (based on Mozart's version of Lorenz Schneider's lied "Vergiss Mein Nicht"), "Song to Oberon," or "Song to my Harp 1798." [36] 

21.         Perhaps most interesting are the poems that overtly or covertly address contemporary political events—the 1794 Treason Trials, the 1798 Rebellion, the 1801 Act of Union—which Tighe sets in two clusters in volume two, effectively encouraging more politicized readings of poems that might otherwise seem ahistorical but for their clustered proximity. Tighe positions the first cluster at the very beginning of volume two with six poems that invite close attention to Ireland's historical moment through suggestive dates and references: "Cleuen An Elegy," "Written in an Almanack 1805," "The World," "Imitation from Jeremiah Chap XXXI. Ver 15. Nov:r 1800," "Psalm CXXX. Imitated. Jan.y 1805," and "Verses Written when a detachment of Yeomen were sent against the rebel army" (dated Dublin, July 13, 1798). In the first poem, "Cleuen An Elegy," Tighe's speaker narrates the fatal consequences of a doomed love triangle, but frames that narration against the backdrop of England's colonization of Ireland, made visible in the ruins that line the Nore river:

Given Tighe's family position as a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, she sometimes sides with the oppressor. While the politics of Cleuen critique England's imperialism, the narrative offers a mostly sympathetic portrait of the heartbroken young Englishman Aldred who joins a "daring and adventurous crew, / With them from Albion's friendly coast was born, / And plough'd the waves Hibernia to subdue" (130-32). The closing poem in the sequence, "Verses Written when a detachment of Yeomen were sent against the rebel army," prays for the success of Wicklow yeomen like her husband against the "savage" rebels [37]  (Henry Tighe led a troop of cavalry through the Wicklow mountains in the summer of 1798):

22.         Tighe positions four poems between "Cleuen" and "Yeoman": "Written in an Almanack 1805," "The World," "Imitation from Jeremiah Chap XXXI. Ver 15. Nov:r 1800," and "Psalm CXXX. Imitated. Jan.y 1805." All four lend themselves to politicized readings by being placed between these two overtly political poems. "Written in an Almanack 1805" seems particularly apolitical as a simple 12-line poem that appears to be a copy of an inscription Tighe wrote in a gift book. But the most popular almanac in Dublin, The Gentleman's and Citizen's Alamack, provided an annual listing of "The Marriages and Deaths of the Princes of Europe. The Names of the Lord Lieutenant; of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, and of the Lords and Commons of Parliament, (Printed by Authority:) Also, the Judges, and several other Persons in Places of High Trust, and Office in Ireland, both Civil and Military." Coming right after "Cleuen" and that poem's depiction of the colonization of Ireland, "Written in an Almanack 1805" invites attention to the transitory (or transitioning) nature of political power. Similarly, the spiritual rejection of "The ungrateful World!" (2) voiced in "The World" takes a political cast through Tighe's loaded use of the word "votive" — "Oh! sacrifice no more thy peace, thy joys / To the ungrateful World! it but insults / Thy wasted anguish, and thy votive cares" (1-3) — a potential reference to the Tighe family's futile votes against the Act of Union. That subtle reference becomes sharper as Tighe follows "The World" with the pointedly dated "Imitation from Jeremiah Chap XXXI. Ver. 15. Nov:r 1800," which implicitly aligns the promised restoration of Rachel's children to their own border with the pending dissolution of the Irish Parliament. Like the imitation of Jeremiah 31:15, Tighe's verse translation of Psalm 130 resonates with the politics of her times as she invokes mercy for all God's children: "And still at mercy's sacred seat / Let all thy children; Lord! be found" (33-34). Without the context of the cluster "Psalm CXXX. Imitated. Jan.y 1805" reads as a prayer for inward peace; within the context of the cluster the prayer extends that call to the nation.

23.         A comparable effect occurs towards the end of volume two as Tighe sequences the powerful political ballad "Bryan Byrne founded on truth" within a cluster that includes "Song 1806," "Bryan Byrne," "Written for Angela," Song to my Harp 1798," and "Song" ("Still as on Liffey's banks I stray"). While "Song 1806," "Written for Angela," and "Song" seem to read as simple love songs—invoking renewal ("Song 1806"), cherishing the moment that is about to pass ("Written for Angela"), and anticipating an uncertain return ("Song")—Tighe juxtaposes those three songs with two songs that speak to the troubles of 1798, as if to weave a larger tale about the intersection of personal history and national strife. "Song 1806" begins the sequence by asking a beloved to turn his blue eyes on her and smile as he did long ago, "Oh! smile, as when / Our youthful loves were in their spring, / And teach this thrilling heart again / The song of joy to sing!" (14-16). But if the next song was inspired by the beloved's smile, it is anything but joyful in relating the tragic tale of Bryan Byrne's violent death at the hands of a loyalist mob in 1798, a murdered nonpartisan still mourned by his grieving widow Ellen, his son and his father-in-law (who also mourn the deaths of Ellen's brother and three cousins). To turn from "Bryan Byrne" to "Written for Angela" is to turn from Ireland's history to a poem intended for Tighe's novel Selena, seemingly nonpolitical except in its rendering of the speaker's desperate valuing of the moment before parting from another blue-eyed beloved. That parting suddenly takes on greater political heft when followed by "Song to my Harp 1798," a second harp poem in Verses that now notes how Tighe's/Linda's harp foregoes pleasure to focus on the dark times at hand with "prophetic power" (24):

By the time the sequence concludes with "Song," what might otherwise read as simple anxiety about the faithfulness of a returning beloved becomes fraught with political implications as the speaker thinks about "banishment" on the banks of the Liffey (the location of the Four Courts, [38]  whose distinctive dome Tighe images in "La Cittadina"):

24.         Akin to the political clusters and the poems that reference contemporary or near-contemporary poets, the stunning visual displays of ruins, prospects, spas, monuments, landscapes, scenery, and assorted tourist sites in the tailpieces situate Tighe more actively in the physical environs of her time and place: at Glendalough in Wicklow, at Muckross Abbey in Killarney, at the Devil's Bridge in Cardiganshire, at the Avon River in Bristol, at Harling Hall in Norfolk, or at Plas Newydd in Llangollen. They also demonstrate her keen engagement with the picturesque and her participation in the burgeoning verbal-visual print culture of views, tours, sketches, and guides. [39]  If one of the signal revelations of the collection lies in the simple fact that Tighe did illustrate so many of her lyrics, one of the greater pleasures Verses provides is the opportunity to see how Tighe illustrated some of her most famous poems, including sonnets of named places such as "III Written at Scarborough Augt 1799," "IX Written in the Church yard at Malvern," and the three Killarney sonnets, "XVIII Written at the Eagle's Nest Killarney July 26. 1800" (figure 4), "XIX Written at Killarney July 29. 1800" (figure 5), and "XX On Leaving Killarney August 5. 1800" (figure 6).

Like the complex ekphrasis of "The Faded Flowers" Tighe's visual images sometimes complement and sometimes controvert the mental landscapes depicted in the lyrics. Thus while the illustrations for the Killarney sonnets elegantly capture the views and moments celebrated in the lyrics, the sheer corporeality of the images that accompany the Scarborough and Malvern sonnets provide a surprising contrast to the delicate ephemerality of the psychological states the lyrics articulate. Similarly, the tailpiece to the first sonnet in the sonnet sequence, "I. Composed on the White Sands near Arklow" (figure 7), deceptively images the landscape of the remembered past (the caves and cliffs between the Dawlish and Exe rivers) rather than the named landscape prompting the recollection (the caverns and white sands of Arklow).

25.         Other illustrations provide tantalizing interpretive suggestions, as in the tailpiece for Sonnet VI ("Poor, fond deluded heart! wilt thou again"), where the monument's inscription ("Credule, quid frustra simulacra fugacia captas? / Quod petis est nusquam") directs us to Ovid's Metamorphosis and the tale of Echo and Narcissus, or "Sonnet XXII Written for Angela 1802," whose tailpiece rendering of Muckross Abbey at Killarney hints at directions Tighe might have contemplated pursuing in the plot of Selena (the character Angela Harley never visits Killarney, a crucial location in the fifth volume). [40]  Just as the tailpiece for “Sonnet XXII” images an alternate narrative development for Selena, Tighe’s dedicated sequence of Selena poems in volume one calls attention to the ways in which the characters Angela Harley and Lady Emily Trevallyn mirror one other’s emotional, sexual, and traumatic situations via a cluster of six poems that modulate back and forth between their voices, from “The Picture Written for Angela. 1802” to “Elegy Written for Emily 1802,” “Stanzas Written for Angela 1800” to “Verses Written for Emily 1799,” and “Verses Written for Angela 1804” to “Song to Oberon.” Although Tighe’s mother claimed that Tighe completed Selena by the end of 1803, the dating of “Verses Written for Angela 1804”—not printed in the manuscript of the novel—indicates that Tighe continued thinking about and working on Selena after 1803; and the tailpiece’s illustration of a child leaning against a monument inscribed to Angela (figure 8) offers an intriguing glimpse of different outcomes Tighe might have considered.

26.        In addition to scenes, prospects, monuments, and ruins, the illustrations evidence Tighe's interest in botany, [41]  displayed in the beautifully detailed (and sometimes labeled) specimens of flowers and trees in "Forget me not!," "V Written in Autumn 1795," "XVI Written at Rossana. Novr 18, 1799," or "Written in an Almanack 1805" (figure 9).

So too her attention to the emblem tradition, materialized in the numerous images of cupids, harps, helmets, garlands and more that appear in the tailpieces to “The Kiss,” “The Hours of Peace,” “The Picture Written for Angela. 1802,” “Verses Written for Emily 1799,” “The Minstrel,” “Verses Written in Sickness Dec.r 1804,” “Cupid’s Quiver,” or “Song Adapted to an Air by Mozart 1806.”

27.         Just as Verses documents Tighe's energetic participation in the verbal-visual print culture of the Romantic era, it showcases Tighe's work as a translator with 37 verse imitations of classical and contemporary poetry and prose selections originally written in Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German (nearly one third of the total contents of the collection). [42]  Hamilton's biographical essay on Tighe notes that Tighe began translating French and Italian literature as a child under her mother's direction (252-3) and took up a serious course of Latin studies after her marriage to Henry, whose daily instructions enabled her to translate "with his help, a variety of authors" (254). When and where Tighe acquired knowledge of Greek and German is not known (and seemingly minimal), but her letters to Walker and her reading journal are rich resources recording her lifelong study of Italian, the more linguistic aspects of her interest in antiquarian studies (including a belated attention to Gaelic), and the degree to which members of her literary circle shared or commented upon each other's verse translations (notably Thomas Moore's Anacreon, Lady Dacre's Petrarch, Henry Boyd's Dante, and Walker's Monti, among others). [43] 

28.         The translations Tighe includes in Verses do not simply showcase scholarship, however; they trace affinities with other writers whose works and passions resonate with hers, offering a discreet or safe venue to express what might be otherwise inexpressible. While Tighe only presents three translations from Petrarch in Verses, those three imitations underscore the larger Petrarchan sensibility that operates in so many of the translations and original poems, voiced from the position of the tormented lover who has lost at love, who desperately struggles to resist succumbing to the emotional and spiritual paralysis of despair, who understands too well the danger of seeking solace and basing poetry in memories of past pleasure, but whose very prayer to experience relief through forgetfulness undermines that potential relief by recalling the source of present pain. Thus "Verses Imitated from Du Moustier" begins and ends with a command to forget, but the six stanzas between the opening and closing injunction viscerally catalogue and make manifest all that is impossible to forget, not only transforming the more conventional listing of Petrarchan physical attributes into affective experiences but showing how the wise and moral framework fails to regulate or contain emotional embodiment:

Similarly, in "Verses Imitated from the Chev. Du Parney Il est tems mon Eleonore!&c 1798" the lover repeatedly insists on the twinned duty of parting and forgetting but through the course of the poem comes to understand that absence will not produce oblivion: "Accustom'd to this cruel pain / My heart may absence learn to bear, / But still thy image shall retain / 'Till life shall throb no longer there!" (37-40). And just so the fervent plea for oblivion versus a hopeless wish for the return of a lost beloved’s affection that materializes in Tighe's translation of Catullus's "Si qua recordanti" (Carmina 76) — "I ask not Heaven with purely, constant fire / That cold and faithless bosom to inspire, / My own relief is all I now implore, / This suffering soul at last to health restore; / From these indignant pangs in mercy save, / And steep my anguish in oblivion's wave" (33-38) — is answered in her translation of Metastasio's "Il Primo Amore," which once again shows the impossibility of forgetting: Like Petrarch, Parny, Dumoustier, or Metastasio, many of Tighe's greatest lyrics set out to offer peaceful resolutions to tortured souls but ultimately reincarnate loss (and sometimes perversely exult in the intense emotion that reincarnation produces): the lost romantic joy of "The Faded Flowers," the dead child of "Verses Written at the Commencement of Spring. 1802," the silent harp of "Address to my Harp," the mourning lover of "Verses Written at the Devil's Bridge in Cardigan," or the formerly exiled friend of "To ----," whose glance reawakens every hushed feeling, so that "Once more my melting heart with love o'erflows, / Laments its former loss, and weeps forgotten woes" (lines 31-32).

29.         The Petrarchan sensibility that underscores so many of the translations provides an even more important trajectory in shaping the arc of the sonnet cycle, which also owes a great deal to Smith in beginning with a set of nine elegiac poems that lament lost love and youth as well as the teasing power of memory to provide the illusion of a return to the past that therein deepens the pain of the present. The cycle continues by turning from the temporary and deeply problematic panacea of memory to more enduring possibilities: the passage of time that lessens all loss (X), the coming of death, which loosens all ties (XI), and the production of poetry, which potentially transforms the present into eternity (XII-XV, which directly invoke Petrarch and Bowles). With the turn to poetry as the pivot point of the cycle, Tighe looks to present pleasures, contemplating solace in the calm of domestic love and the possibility of creating new memories and moments in the now of Rossana and Killarney (XVI-XX). But it is sonnet XXI's address to William Hayley's biographical representation of William Cowper and Mary Unwin that provides transition to the cycle's most dramatic shift as Tighe suddenly introduces a named speaker for XXII and XXIII—the tragic Selena character Angela Harley—who vocalizes experiences and perspectives that sound exactly like those informing the regrets and longings of the unnamed speaker of the first nine sonnets. Rather than a coded regression to the torments of the past, Tighe's use of a named persona marks her staging her progressive journey as a poet who has learned how to sublimate and recast the seemingly autobiographical as art. Though Tighe only marks XXII and XXIII as "Written for Angela 1802," and designates XXVI as an Angela poem through the tailpiece, XXIV, XXV, XXVII, XXVIII and XXIX easily fit the framework and plot of Selena. [44]  The introduction of Angela as an external persona masterfully complicates the performing identity Tighe constructs for the last third of the sonnet cycle until she firmly re-establishes herself as speaking subject in the final sonnet "XXX. Addressed to my Brother 1805," which concludes both the sonnet cycle and the first volume of Verses.

This sonnet's acknowledgment of the fragility of mortality and the grateful appreciation it expresses for an interested reader even as Tighe is transcribing Verses serves as a powerful forerunner to the sonnet to Lady Dacre that will ultimately conclude Verses as a whole to insist on Mary Tighe's identity as poet.

Not a Conclusion but a New Beginning

30.         Verses Transcribed for H.T. provides a remarkable opportunity to re-evaluate our historical understanding of Mary Tighe and her place in the literary, visual, material, and cultural productions of Romanticism. Its rich array of sonnets, translations, illustrations, political poems, coterie poems, poems for Selena, and references to contemporary poets and poetics not only showcases Tighe's power as a lyric poet, it foregrounds her representation of herself as a lyric poet, just as she foregrounds herself as a visionary poet in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love. Like Tighe's 1805 private edition of Psyche, Tighe's 1805 manuscript edition of Verses asserts her vision of herself as the designing poet, shaping her own story.