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Updated: July 25, 2025
In 1877 the three whaling vessels, Rising Sun, Ellen Rizpah, and Edward Lee, while pursuing their legitimate business under the American flag, outside of Cuban waters, were fired upon and detained for days, with circumstances of peculiar hardship and brutality. The United States government investigated the outrage with care, and demanded of Spain an indemnity of $19,500.
Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, "Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five minutes beside me, to tell you all!"
"Could you get them to care for anything of the kind? Do you know that a seaman is the most absolutely conservative of the human race?" "We must begin. You give the men light, and I'll be bound that some of us will make them like sweetness. If Miss Dearsley were to read 'Rizpah, or 'Big Tom, or any other story of pathos or self-sacrifice, she would do the men good.
In Lord Tennyson's case we see how wisdom may preserve a man's power. The poet who gave us "Ulysses" so long ago, the poet who brought forth such a magnificent work as "Maud," retained his power so fully that thirty years after "Maud" he gave us "Rizpah."
The first is a prayer for peace and rest in the coming of the new day of the birth of Christ. The second is a protest that neither God nor man has befriended man as he should, and the third is an assurance that men will do for man even if God will not. Now, that is not Christian, but the Bible phrases are all through it. So when he writes his poem bemoaning Poland, he needs must head it "Rizpah."
But she would kneel down by his little bed at night at the deep, still midnight with the stars that kept watch over Rizpah shining down upon her, and tell God what I have now told you, that she feared she loved her child too much, yet could not, would not, love him less; and speak to Him of her one treasure as she could speak to no earthly friend.
Sad world! in which the innocent so often bear the sins of the guilty, when will thy groans, ever ascending into the ears of Almighty love, be heard and bring release? The sentence was executed. Two sons of Saul by Rizpah, his inferior wife, and five of Merab his eldest daughter, whom Michal had, for some reason, educated, were delivered up and hung by the Gibeonites.
I sit here in Jabesh and wait till I shall be with those whom I loved, with Saul, Armoni, and his brother. I go down into the darkness with them, but it will be better than the light. Maybe though dark I shall see them, and be something of a queen I, Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, queen of the first king of Israel, he who has made it a nation.
In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in ‘Rizpah,’ make a character live in an imagined situation.
Only in the Ballads and Other Poems was something like a distinctly new note struck in the two splendid patriotic pieces on "The Last Fight of the Revenge" and the "Defence of Lucknow," which, even more than the poet's earlier "Charge of the Light Brigade," deserve the title of the best English war-songs since Campbell; in "Rizpah," an idyll of a sterner and more tragic kind than anything he had previously attempted; and in the "Voyage of Maeldune," this last in some respects the most interesting of the whole.
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