TIGHE (MARY)

Manuscript notebook titled "Sonnets", on the first leaf, containing some 140 poems, written in ink in a fine closely written hand, including poems from "Verses Transcribed for H.T." and later works, [n.p.], c.1806

Footnotes

'OH THOU! WHOM NE'ER MY CONSTANT HEART/ ONE MOMENT HATH FORGOT/ THO' FATE SEVERE HAS BID US PART/ YET STILL FORGET ME NOT': A rediscovered notebook from the poet who inspired Keats.

Irish poet Mary Tighe (1772-1810) '...was a crucial force in shaping British Romanticism. With remarkable vitality and virtuosity, her poetry engaged the central issues of the period, often in advance of writers now considered canonical, and commanded the attention and respect of her contemporaries....These poems demonstrate the technical virtuosity with which Tighe movingly wrote about the tensions between love and loss, duty and desire, the spiritual and the sensuous, loyalty and betrayal, nation and family, the Irish and the British, and much more, while struggling with debilitating illness...' (Paula R. Feldman & Brian C. Cooney, The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe, 2016, p.1).

The majority of the poems in our volume are included in 'Verses Transcribed for H.T.', an illustrated manuscript in two volumes dedicated and presented to her husband (and cousin) Henry Tighe, now held in the National Library of Ireland as part of the Hamilton of Hamworth Papers (MS 49, 155/2). These volumes were copied out by the poet sometime between 1803 and June 1808 and incorporate fair copies of her poems written at Brompton, London, where she spent the winter of 1804 to the summer of 1805 with beautifully drawn calligraphic headings and pen and ink vignettes. This manuscript is seen, until now, as the most authoritative text for most of Tighe's shorter poems: 'She carefully chose their arrangement; for example, she grouped all of her sonnets together, and she did not use strict chronology. Some of her extant poems were absent, but these omissions may have been a result of her not having them immediately at hand... Poems composed very late in her life are also not included...' (Feldman & Cooney, p.17). It may be that she used our volume as a source for the 'Verses' and, rather than the poems being not available to her, she made the editorial decision to leave them out.

Much of the content tallies with that of the 'Verses' but with notable differences in the order. The first thirty or so poems follow the same order as the 'Sonnets' section of Volume I but "Written on the acquittal of Hardy" is included before "Addressed to the Ladies of Llangollen Vale", thus causing a change to the numbering. In the final version of 'Verses' she moves the Hardy poem to Volume II. Whilst the 'Verses' include 113 poems, our manuscript has around 140, and includes additional material from what bibliographers Feldman and Cooney call her 'Late Poems & Fugitive Verse', such as "Eclipse", "In Memory of Margaret Tighe taken from us June 7th 1804" and "Verses written in Solitude". She ends our manuscript by showing off her extensive classical education encouraged by her mother Theodosia Tighe (Methodist leader, friend of John Wesley, and co-founder of the Dublin House of Refuge) with translations from Horace, Catullus and Petrarch. The Tighes were living in times of great upheaval in Ireland and much of her work is highly political – included here her long ballad "Bryan Byrne" which was based on real people and events.

Our manuscript appears to be a working document with many amendments and neat crossings out – a half leaf with three additional verses has been bound into the poem "Bryan Byrne" for example. In several places the poet has made corrections to our manuscript which made their way into the finished NLI manuscript (in "Adorea" she replaces "soothed and enraptured" with "soothed or enraptured" for example – and in "Pleasure", her note on the Senegal River has been much amended). In addition, some poems are lacking the titles that would be included in the final version. There would thus seem to be new material here which would bear much further research.

Tighe published only one work in her lifetime, Psyche; or, the Legend of Love, which was put out in a private edition of fifty copies for the benefit of family and friends in 1805. However, whilst having many admirers amongst her literary circle (including Thomas Moore, Joseph Cooper Walker and the Ladies of Llangollen) it was the posthumous publication of Psyche, with Other Poems, in 1811 and in several later editions, that made her name widely known and established her literary reputation. Whilst she became to be seen as '...an exemplar of patiently (and picturesquely) long-suffering femininity...' (Pam Perkins, ODNB), Tighe's work was an influence on several better-known writers such as John Keats, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë and Felicia Hemans. After a hiatus in the twentieth century, her poems are once again enjoying recognition and it was only recently, in 2012, that her novel Selena was finally published for the first time. Tighe is now 'recognised as a great romantic-era woman poet of the sublime, who offered a complex, sophisticated, and aesthetically rich portrait of female sense and sensibility in her work' (Harriet Kramer Linkin, DIB).

There is no volume matching the description of ours listed in the definitive Bibliography of Manuscript Sources in the latest Collected Poetry, so it could therefore be supposed that ours is a hitherto unknown, or at least rediscovered manuscript. The National Library of Ireland, Dublin holds the greater proportion of her extant manuscript works in the form of notebooks and fair copies of her poems, including 'Verses Transcribed for H.T.'. The family destroyed her journals after her death, but other manuscript material can be found in various commonplace books held elsewhere.

Provenance: Henry Tighe (1771-1836) of Rosanna, Co. Wicklow (bookplate); thence by descent to the present owner.