The Internationalism of Ernest Jones's Dialectical Prosody

Abstract

AbstractThis article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conference Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introduction by Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whose aim was to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. The papers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic and Victorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by the University of Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.The cluster is made up of the following articles: Jason David Hall, ‘Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster’.Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's “There Was a Boy” ’.Ross Wilson, ‘Robert Browning's Compounds’.Margaret A. Loose, ‘The Internationalism of Ernest Jones's Dialectical Prosody’.Nancy Jiwon Cho, ‘Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn‐Writers’ Use of Metre, 1760–1900’.Ashley Miller, ‘Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory’.Summer Star, ‘ “For the Inscape's Sake”: Sounding the Self in the Metres of Gerard Manley Hopkins’.***The poems, essays and fiction of the Chartist Ernest Jones (1819–69) consistently demonstrate his notion that British labourers cannot attain social justice without a principled solidarity with the labourers of other countries. This essay examines some prosodic tensions in ‘A Song for May’ (1847), an unlikely example of his internationalism because its topic has nothing to do with it. However, the formal features of the poem – from its stanzaic organization to its metrical choices, its focus on the plight of individuals to its communal nature as a Chartist song – call for a dialectical negotiation of its public and private qualities that maps onto Jones's nuanced treatment of personal and collective identities in his internationalist writing. His emphasis on the individual's ability to define itself would seem to contradict his broader intention to foster a mass, class‐based identity that seeks social justice through collective action. But it is precisely that power which permits one to choose one's loyalties and national identity, choices that might not coincide with the accidents of birth and ancestry, and which thus open the way for a border‐crossing solidarity. A dialectical prosody illuminates Jones's poetics and could also cast light on the junction of poetry and politics in the writing of authors both within and beyond Chartism.