"warrior-millions heard / The fiat of his dread command!— / Now polished be the sword—the brand!—"

Regarding The Maiden of Moscow: A Poem, in Twenty-One Cantos, I can only conclude that Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley's household was on short rations of periods when she was writing it, forcing her to make do with the home farm's bumper crop of dashes, colons, question marks, and especially exclamation points.* It is tempting to speculate that the family of her husband, Charles Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, had been routinely profligate with their punctuation ever since his grandfather added both hyphens to the family tree, but that would be ungenerous. Not to mention, yanno, a lack of evidence.

As for the poem itself, I cannot tell whether it is overheated Scott or underbaked Byron -- possibly both.** Certainly, I am glad my pop-culture knowledge of the Grande Armée comes from Tolstoy instead of this stuff.

Also, can someone explicate the 19th aristocratic naming conventions whereby Lady Emmeline took on, or at least wrote under, only two of husband's three last names?


* Which last especially are of a size and quantity that receives ribbons at parish fairs.

** As opposed to this, which is clearly aiming to be one of Byron's oriental tales setting-swapped into Norse mythology*** -- much more clearly than this Moscow-thingy.

*** You can apply Byronism to ANYTHING. Even toasters, I suspect.

---L.