Andromeda and Other Poems

Andromeda and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Charles Kingsley, published in 1858. Kingsley is now remembered mostly for his prose, but he wrote poetry seriously throughout his life and considered himself in part a poet. The Andromeda collection brings together his most ambitious long poem with a selection of shorter pieces from various periods of his career.

The title poem is the longest and most ambitious piece in the book. Andromeda retells the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda in English hexameters, the same unrhymed six beat line that Longfellow had used in Evangeline. Kingsley had been interested in classical metre for years and the poem is in part an experiment in whether English can sustain the long classical line over an extended narrative. The retelling itself follows the basic shape of the myth, with Andromeda chained to the rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster, Perseus arriving with the Gorgon’s head and the winged sandals, and the rescue and marriage that follow. Kingsley adds some original material around the central rescue and gives the poem his own moral and religious framing.

The shorter poems in the collection vary in subject and tone. There are several ballads on English historical subjects, in the style of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. There are nature poems drawn from Kingsley’s love of the Devon and Hampshire countryside. There are devotional and religious pieces, some of which became hymns. The Three Fishers and The Sands of Dee are the most famous of the shorter pieces and have stayed in anthologies of Victorian verse. Both are short narrative ballads with a strong sense of place and a quiet sadness that suits Kingsley’s voice in the shorter forms.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is best read in pieces rather than straight through. The long Andromeda is an interesting experiment but the shorter poems are where Kingsley is at his most reliable. For readers who want to see this side of him, the collection is the best single volume. It pairs naturally with his prose retellings of Greek myth in The Heroes, a children’s book from a few years earlier that handles similar material in prose.