Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini was first published in 1816. Parts of it (canto 3 and a ‘small part’ of canto 4) were written while Hunt was in Surrey Gaol for allegedly libelling the Prince Regent. In its stylistic mannerisms, which emphasize freedom from conventional handling of the couplet and in its opposition to hierarchical pride and its advocacy of the affections, the poem exemplifies what John Strachan calls Hunt’s ‘literary avant‐gardism’.1 It is preceded by a dedicatory letter to Byron, who is addressed with egalitarian want of ceremony as ‘MY DEAR BYRON’, an ‘(over‐) familiarity much‐criticised in the Tory press’ (p. 323). That defiant address is suggestive of the poem’s mainly genial assault on the hidebound and hierarchical, and its preference for the natural and the free, words used in the Preface, each carrying a considerable ideological freight.
Jane Stabler puts the matter well when she depicts ‘Hunt’s ideal of his own literary persona’ as ‘extravagantly and yet gently set against cold custom’.2 Hunt argues in the Preface that his ‘endeavour’ is ‘to recur to a freer spirit of versification’ and to deploy ‘a free and idiomatic cast of language’ (p. 167). One notices ‘recur’: Hunt’s attempt is to recover freedoms he feels have been lost as a result of the regularity favoured by ‘Pope and the French school of versification’ (p. 167). Hunt wishes freedoms that are excluded from Pope’s practice, the freedom to vary the position of the caesura, to extend the unit of sense beyond the couplet boundary, to depart from linguistic decorum in the interests of freshness, novelty, up‐to‐dateness, to use feminine rhymes frequently. He presents himself as a slicker, more urban version of the Wordsworth who sought to return to ‘a selection of the language really used by men’ (Wordsworth’s use of ‘selection’ allows him to avoid identifying the poet with a mere transcriber of daily speech).3 At the same time Hunt is aware of the dangers inherent in ‘exaggerations of simplicity’. Indeed, the Preface to The Story of Rimini is a fascinating piece of critical writing as it positions Hunt between extremes of ‘the artificial style’ and ‘the natural’ (p. 168).
A touchstone cited in the Preface is Lear’s ‘I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward’ (qtd p. 168): lines said to exhibit ‘all that criticism can say, or poetry can do’. But in his narrative expansion of the Paolo and Francesca episode from Dante’s Inferno, canto 5, Hunt’s idiom is brisker, more aggressively intent on challenging ideas of decorum. Siding with the lovers and opposed to Dante’s understanding of sin, ‘the whole melancholy absurdity of his theology’, as he characterizes the matter in the Preface, Hunt deploys an idiom in sympathy with what he calls ‘one genuine impulse of the affections’ (p. 165).
This ‘genuine impulse’ is the subject of the third canto, a remarkable study of the growing attraction between Francesca and Paolo, her husband’s brother and the man whom she was led, mistakenly, to suppose would be her husband. Without vulgarizing Dante’s incomparable depiction of erotic obsession and consequent damnation, Hunt transposes it into the key of the novel of sentiment: a work such as Rousseau’s Julie, pored over by Shelley in the year in which Rimini was published, might be a distant progenitor of Hunt’s poem, with its attention to the intricate ethical issues raised by love. Hunt captures well the ‘conscious’ quality of the lovers’ response to one another at the outset of their fatal meeting, where ‘conscious’ means ‘aware, co‐knowing in a slightly guilty way’:
There’s apt to be, at conscious times like these,
An affectation of a bright‐eyed ease,
An air of something quite serene and sure,
As if to seem so, were to be, secure … (3.585–8)
The jauntiness of ‘apt to be’ and ‘bright‐eyed ease’ speaks less of Hunt’s inability to match Dante’s tragic pathos than of his good‐humoured awareness that his poem is itself seeking to be ‘quite serene and sure’, even as it must confront pain and suffering. The subsequent moment of passion, when Paolo ‘felt he could no more dissemble, / And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble’ (603–4), uses its feminine rhyme to create a sympathetic image of the lovers driven by ‘one genuine impulse of affection’. Hunt understates the achievement of canto 3 when in the fourth and last canto, as if in reaction to the feelings that the lovers’ plight creates in him, he defines ‘Sorrow’ (17) as ‘but the discord of a warbling sphere, / A lurking contrast’ (18–19). His discomfort with his story’s sadness offers itself as the source of the vigour with which he turns his attention to the response of spectators to Francesca’s death – ‘They saw her tremble sharply, feet and all, — / Then suddenly be still’ (4.408–9); there ‘tremble’ contrasts mordantly with its earlier use (quoted above). But this discomfort also suggests his own affecting wish not to dwell exclusively on the darker side of experience.
The thrust of the poem, from the start, is a sympathy with impulse, affection, naturalness. The first paragraph in this poem of very unPopean rhymed couplets is a case in point, with its vivid investment in all the goings on of the present: ‘The sun is up, and ’tis a morn of May / Round old Ravenna’s clear‐shewn towers and bay’ (1–2) is how the poem opens, locating the poem in the here and now. In accord with the poem’s resistance to Augustan practice, the opening couplet does not endstop its unit’s sense after line 2, but allows it to flow on into a description of ‘A morn, the loveliest which the year has seen’ (3). The unashamed use of the intensifying ‘loveliest’ accompanies an alertness to the visual and physical that makes Hunt’s diction surprisingly reinvigorating rather than pert or hackneyed. So, we’re told that ‘A balmy briskness comes upon the breeze; / The smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees’ (9–10). Hunt’s verbs ‘comes’ and ‘goes’ along with ‘briskness’ and ‘dancing’ prevent the rhyme of ‘breeze’ and ‘trees’ from being merely banal; it, too, participates in a shared sense of vitality, ‘nature, full of spirits’ (15). There’s a comparable energy of observation in the account of how
the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with scattery light,
Come gleaming up, true to the wished‐for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay. (21–4)
The passage shows Hunt’s ability to turn narrative into momentary lyric and it makes one think of Tennyson’s lines, in ‘Tears, Idle Tears’: ‘Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, / That brings our friends up from the underworld’ (6–7):4 lines that add a sadder, more sombre tinge to Hunt’s, but a tinge that is present in Hunt’s lines precisely because it is potently absent. A poem about transgressive love and its fatal consequences wishes also to hymn the essential goodness of life. In that sense, Hunt’s moment of lyric intensity, in which narrative seems to be interrupted in favour of description and comparison, has a bearing on the overall story: ‘joyful hands’, his fine simile, is a phrase that suggests what should be possible in life, but, because of custom and human malevolence, too often isn’t. The repetition of ‘come up’ suggests a freshness deep down things always ready to emerge, while the final alexandrine illustrates the poem’s readiness to experiment in the interests of stylistic variety; ‘scattery light’, toned down in 1832 to ‘scatter’d light’ in deference no doubt to the criticisms of indecorum heaped on the poem (see p. 324) is leapingly exuberant and prepares us for Hunt’s central moral, uttered in the course of his analysis of Giovanni, Francesca’s proud husband:
He lost the sight of conduct’s only worth,
The scattering smiles on this uneasy earth (3.71–2)
It’s not a moral that would have satisfied Dante. But in its robust defence of sexual attraction and the virtues of sympathy and love, and in its generous response to natural beauty, The Story of Rimini, a poem of great significance for Keats among others, is still a Romantic poem deserving of the closest study.