"The Old Familiar Faces" (1798) is a lyric poem by the English man of letters Charles Lamb. Written in the aftermath of his mother's death and of rifts with old friends, it is a lament for the relationships he had lost. It has long been Lamb's most popular poem, and was included in both The Oxford Book of English Verse [1] and Palgrave's Golden Treasury. [2]
Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?
I had a mother, but she died, and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desart I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Lamb's biographer E. V. Lucas identified the friend in the fifth stanza as the poet Charles Lloyd, and that in the seventh as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lamb's old schoolfellow. The phrase some are taken from me he interpreted as a reference to Lamb's sister Mary, who had recently been confined in a lunatic asylum during one of her periodic fits of madness, in the first of which she had killed her mother. The "fairest among women" of the fourth stanza was, he thought, a Hertfordshire girl called Ann Simmons whom Lamb loved in his earliest youth and whom he elsewhere wrote about under the names "Anna" and "Alice W—". [3] A later biographer, Winifred F. Courtney, largely concurred with Lucas's identifications, but suggested that the plural form of the phrase some are taken from me indicated that Lamb was referring to Ann Simmons as well as Mary Lamb. [4]
"The Old Familiar Faces" was written in January 1798 in circumstances Lamb himself described in a note to his friend Marmaduke Thompson. [5]
I spent an evening about a week ago with Lloyd. White, and a miscellaneous company was there. Lloyd had been playing on a pianoforte till my feelings were wrought too high not to require Vent. I left em suddenly & rushed into ye Temple, where I was born, you know – & in ye state of mind that followed [I composed these] stanzas. They pretend to little like Metre, but they will pourtray ye Disorder I was in. [6]
The disorder Lamb mentions may have been caused by Mary's recent mental health crisis and confinement, or perhaps by their father's decline in physical health. [7] The loose metre he apologises for can be interpreted as a reminiscence of the dactylic metre he and Coleridge had studied in Latin verse at school, [8] though he may also have been influenced by the unstressed final syllables which characterise the Jacobean playwright Philip Massinger's works. [9]
Lamb published "The Old Familiar Faces", along with six others of his own poems and more by his friend Charles Lloyd, in their Blank Verse (1798). [10] He reprinted it in The Works of Charles Lamb (1818), [11] but without the opening four lines referring to Mary's killing of their mother, doubtless having come to the conclusion that those events were no business of the reading public. [12] Later anthologies have often printed the poem in this curtailed form. [13]
Lamb is not now principally known as a poet, "The Old Familiar Faces" and "Hester" being the only two of his poems that are still read and valued. [14] Popular as it is, there is no critical consensus as to whether "The Old Familiar Faces" is an artistic success. Lamb himself confessed that he had no skill in the handling of metre, but A. C. Ward argued that this is no handicap in a poem that depends instead on rhythm. [15] Robert Graves complained of the "rambling incompetence of the argument"; he suggested improvements, but claimed that even they could make the poem no more than "a macabre account of what would now be called 'a regressive infantile fixation'." [16] Others have called it Lamb's most successful poem, [17] a work which shows him "at his bleakest and most powerful", [18] "transcend[ing] the particulars of his situation to express his feelings about it in universal terms". [19] The poet Edmund Blunden was struck by the poem's dreamlike, almost Alice in Wonderland treatment of the universal, everyday experience of loss. "The very cadence of the household word is heard as a peculiar intimation. Objects a few doors off are seen as from beyond the grave." [20] E. V. Lucas thought it "unsurpassed in the language" for its "tragic tenderness and melancholy". [21]
There have been at least two settings by notable composers:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Edmund Charles Blunden was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.
Charles Lamb was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).
"Mary Had a Little Lamb" is an English language nursery rhyme of nineteenth-century American origin, first published by American writer Sarah Josepha Hale in 1830. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 7622.
Edward Verrall Lucas, CH was an English humorist, essayist, playwright, biographer, publisher, poet, novelist, short story writer and editor.
Mary Anne Lamb was an English writer. She is best known for the collaboration with her brother Charles on the collection Tales from Shakespeare (1807). Mary suffered from mental illness, and in 1796, aged 31, she stabbed her mother to death during a mental breakdown. She was confined to mental facilities for most of her remaining life. She and Charles presided over a literary circle in London that included the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem by Robert Frost, written in 1922, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it "my best bid for remembrance".
"For the Fallen" is a poem written by Laurence Binyon. It was first published in The Times in September 1914. It was also published in Binyon's book "The Winnowing Fan : Poems On The Great War" by Elkin Mathews, London, 1914.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
"We are Seven" is a poem written by William Wordsworth and published in his Lyrical Ballads. It describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a "little cottage girl" about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her. The poem turns on the question of whether to account two dead siblings as part of the family.
On Receiving an Account that his only Sister's Death was Inevitable was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1794, and deals with the death of Coleridge's step-sister Ann (1791), as well as that of his brother Luke (1790). A later poem, was written for Coleridge's friend Charles Lamb and seeks to comfort him after the loss of his sister.
Religious Musings was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1794 and finished by 1796. It is one of his first poems of critical merit and contains many of his early feelings about religion and politics.
"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge during 1797. The poem discusses a time in which Coleridge was forced to stay beneath a lime tree while his friends were able to enjoy the countryside. Within the poem, Coleridge is able to connect to his friend's experience and enjoy nature through him, making the lime tree only a physical prison, not a mental one.
Fears in Solitude, written in April 1798, is one of the conversation poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem was composed while France threatened to invade Great Britain. Although Coleridge was opposed to the British government, the poem sides with the British people in a patriotic defense of their homeland. The poem also emphasizes a desire to protect one's family and to live a simple life in harmony with nature. The critical response to the poem was mixed, with some critics claiming that the work was "alarmist" and anti-British.
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things.
The 19th-century English writer Charles Lamb's letters were addressed to, among others, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Thomas Hood, all of whom were close friends. They are valued for the light they throw on the English literary world in the Romantic era and on the evolution of Lamb's essays, and still more for their own "charm, wit and quality".
"Poor Susan" is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth composed at Alfoxden in 1797. It was first published in the collection Lyrical Ballads in 1798. It is written in anapestic tetrameter.
Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse is a long narrative poem by William Wordsworth, written in 1798, but not published until 1819.
Poems on Various Subjects (1796) was the first collection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including also a few sonnets by Charles Lamb. A second edition in 1797 added many more poems by Lamb and by Charles Lloyd, and a third edition appeared in 1803 with Coleridge's works only. All three editions included poems in Coleridge's early Miltonic style, such as his Religious Musings and Monody on the Death of Chatterton, alongside lyrics and some of his first conversation poems, such as The Eolian Harp, in a style suggested by the works of William Cowper. The book was on the whole well received by reviewers; modern critics value it more for its shorter and lighter poems than for its formal set-pieces.
