It has been a long time since the poetry of Adelaide Anne Procter, a favorite of Queen Victoria, captured much interest from readers of poetry, whether they be anthology aficionados, scholars, or students. Now considered a minor poet of the period, she was nevertheless a quintessential poet activist of her day, raising money for and working with the Providence Row Night Refuge, editing and contributing to the English Women's Journal alongside the Langham Place Feminists and the Society for the Employment of Women. She published volumes of her own poems, one of which ran to as many as nineteen editions between 1858 and 1881, and her work was featured regularly in Charles Dickens's periodical Household Words. Her legacy stands as a powerful testimony to the way ideas and tastes change over time. Full of angels, Christmases, quietly suffering children, and pious nuns (she converted to Catholicism in 1851), her poetry is often dismissed as sentimental and clichéd. A glance at her forms reveals many straightforward tetrameters with expected alternating, end-stopped rhymes, an easiness that seems to ally form and content. If Adorno had ever taken the time to read her poetry, he probably would have hated it, not just for its Catholic faith and its frequent focus on sin and redemption, but for its attempt “to work at the level of fundamental attitudes,” typical of committed art.Footnote ¹ Consider these lines from her frequently anthologized “Homeless,” which asks readers to recognize that their society takes better care of animals, criminals, and commodities than of the homeless poor:

Though her poetry often exemplifies commitment, one of her poems in particular, “Homeward Bound,” raises uncomfortable questions, rather than exhorting sympathy for the unfortunate, in a way that Adorno might have approved of. Read enough Procter and you will expect to be asked to sympathize with the poor and with fallen women. But when Procter touches on slavery in “Homeward Bound,” a subject she hardly ever addressed, her commitments are harder to discern. I argue that the attempt to do so can create a “shudder” or even the “shock of the unintelligible”—for Adorno one of the only proper functions of art. As much as Procter's poetry is an unlikely place to find a shudder that Adorno might approve of, Procter also reminds us that the concept of commitment is much broader than just aesthetic bad faith. Procter's implicit comparison of the commitment of marriage with a moral obligation to enslaved people in distant places and times encourages readers to ask: If we were committed to a particular person in the past, or a type of people, or a group of people, what are our obligations to them in the present and in the future? Procter's broad appeal has expired, in the sense that it is past its sell-by date. But she continues to encourage us to ask how, when, and why personal and political commitments might expire, or when they cease to bind us.

“Homeward Bound” was originally published in the 1856 Christmas issue of Household Words, in which other authors’ contributions appear within a frame tale by Dickens. In “The Wreck of the Golden Mary,” a ship headed for the California gold rush founders, leaving its passengers and crew starving on lifeboats in the middle of the ocean, telling stories to pass the time. The narrator of “The Wreck,” the captain of the ship, prefaces Procter's narrative poem within the story, here titled “The Old Sailor's Story,” by calling it a “curious sort of tuneful no-tune,” signaling its recognizable but unconventional ballad meter (a point I discuss in more detail further below). An old sailor recounts how he was shipwrecked and taken into slavery on the Barbary coast. After being ransomed by Catholics, he returns home after a decade to find his wife remarried to a friend and his child dead. While the sailor's vision of his wife sustains him through his enslavement, after he is absent for a decade, the wife assumes him to be dead, and her own commitment to him therefore expires. The poem questions the extent of commitment in marriage, of our ethical obligations to other people in faraway places, over long periods of time. Most ambiguously, the poem casts doubt on its own commitments regarding the question of slavery. Appearing in 1856, six years after the brutal Fugitive Slave Act in the United States—which required northern states to return escaped slaves to the South—its reference to white enslavement in North Africa, which had waned by the mid-1700s, cannot help but remind readers of the ongoing practice of slavery in North America. The juxtaposition of the white enslavement of the past (on a much smaller scale) with the ongoing slavery of the poem's present raises questions about what happens to commitments, moral obligations to resist injustice, over time. While a number of Procter's poems clearly exhort readers to view the poor and underprivileged with sympathy, the politics of “Homeward Bound” toward slavery are not so clear. In terms of American politics in 2020, the poem participates in a kind of “all slaves matter,” color-blind racism. Worse, but very much in the mode of nineteenth-century writing about slavery, it places slavery as a prop to both an adventure story and a sentimental yarn. At the same time, it calls attention to the way that slavery and, more broadly, global imperialism separate and destroy families. For Adorno, aesthetic pleasure undermines the political purpose of artistic representations of pain; here, in the genre of the sentimental ballad, the pathos and pain, both of the sailor's forced labor and of his long-delayed return, constitute part of the aesthetic pleasure of the poem.

At the same time, if, for Adorno, art can only “resist by its form alone,” then the poem's temporal dislocations raise uncomfortable questions, themselves perhaps a form of resistance.Footnote ³ In “Commitment,” this resistance by form is the opposite of an attempt to “spotlight alternatives.” I read form in that essay as anything structural. Adorno variously associates it with abstraction, image, parable, picture-book technique—even the “primacy of lesson” can be a “formal device.” For my part, I understand Procter's use of form to include the genre of the sentimental ballad but, more importantly, the way she shapes time narratively, contextually, and metrically. “Homeward Bound”’s temporal dislocations appear in the incongruities of its publication and historical context, in the representation of the sailor's experience, and in the poetic meter. The sailor is at once precise about his timeline—he was enslaved for ten years and has been voyaging the oceans for twenty-six more—and yet lost in history, a European Barbary slave transplanted from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth. Europeans, particularly Catholics who donated to ransom funds, Procter suggests, used to be committed to rescuing slaves. The very date of publication, in conjunction with the sailor's historical dislocation, seems to ask, What has happened to that commitment? Has it expired? I use this word to highlight how our moral obligations can have term limits or can emerge from an agreement that becomes “void through lapse of time” (OED). If his experience of time as a slave is distorted, and his wife, his community, and his rescuers aim to sympathize with him, should their sense of time be similarly distorted? Or is the ability to feel and act on sympathy dependent on our perception of time, on our understanding of when obligations have expired? For the sailor's wife, and implicitly for Europeans, who in 1858 have abolished slavery, commitments can expire. Living along their own clear time lines, familial and historical, they can let go of commitments and create new ones. The formerly enslaved sailor, however, remains trapped with the “tender vision” of his wife, and with his persistent aspiration of connecting his past to his future, which remains permanently interrupted. Global imperialism, shipping, and slavery, Procter's poem suggests, alter the timescales in which we live. That temporal rupture damages our commitment to other humans, those in our families and those in the world at large.

The sailor begins his account of his enslavement with a description of its profound temporal distortion, the way that it both extends and shrinks his experience of time at once, rendering it immeasurable. Procter's version of ballad meter here captures that confusion, in a “curious sort of tuneful no-tune,” as the frame in Household Words prefaces the ballad. One might certainly scan “Homeward Bound” in alternations of unrhymed tetrameters with rhymed trimeters of ballad meter, but that requires a heavily accentual rather than an accentual-syllabic approach. If we attempt an accentual-syllabic scansion, the opening lines might alternate between a trochaic tetrameter and an iambic trimeter, with anapestic substitution in the first foot: “I have seen a fiercer tempest, / Known a louder whirlwind blow.” Or is it two anapestic/iambic trimeters, without the stress on “I” in the first line? Or two trochaic tetrameters with a stress on “Known” in the second? The poem holds forth possibilities for ballad meter to alternate not just between lines of three and four feet, as is standard, but within the lines themselves. These lines invite readers to play a game of metrical “choose your own adventure.” Consider this stanza, in which the sailor describes the temporal distortions of his captivity:

Only the rhymes are consistent, with unrhymed feminine endings alternating with masculine rhymes, letting us know, in a way the meter does not, that this is a ballad. Not knowing whether we're reading trochaic tetrameters or anapestic trimeters mimics the enslaved sailor's experience of time: intervals that should be predictable and regular can be hard to know and feel. The ambiguity of whether or not to stress “Ten,” the first word of the stanza, signals the difficulty of measuring time and of relying on the certainty of our measurements. Likewise, the “one” of “one long day” might not be stressed, leaving us to wonder how much emphasis to place on the figurative, hyperbolic measurement, on the number that signals both a count and an inability to differentiate. The ambiguity of the ballad meter also underscores the ambiguity of the poem's position on slavery: Does Procter mean to condemn the American practice of slavery? If so, why would she do it in such a roundabout way? Does she just exploit it to create a satisfyingly sentimental ballad? While we cannot know what thoughts Procter might have formulated about slavery, we can read her poem's temporal distortion, represented in the sailor's experience, alluded to in the poem's reference to Barbary slavery as though it was part of the recent past in 1856, and embodied in its metrical ambiguity.

Knowing what time it is, how to beat the rhythm of the poem, is key to identifying commitments, not just in terms of political alignment but in terms of moral obligations to other people. I do not mean to suggest that only if we can correctly scan the poem, can we access Procter's message about slavery. Rather, reading the meter helps to take us beyond the surface pathos of the story and into its moral quandaries. Reading through the various metrical possibilities reveals the very arbitrariness of the boundaries we create within time. Those temporal boundaries, as Tricia Lootens reminds us with her concept of “abolition time,” can often serve as convenient moral boundaries, which, she shows, are no less arbitrary. Abolition time marks a before and after abolition laws but also exists in time zones. At the passage of emancipation acts, enslaved people in different places, such as the West Indies or the United States, could suddenly be on opposite sides of abolition time at exactly the same time. Lootens notes that abolition time is “simultaneously discrete and ambiguous, definitive and reversible.”Footnote ⁴ The metrical instability of “Homeward Bound” mirrors not only the sailor's experience of time as both precisely measured and undifferentiated but also, perhaps, Procter's own uncertainty about the application of temporal boundaries to moral ones. For Procter, is it abolition time because Barbary slavery and British slavery have ended, or is she telling her readers that it should be abolition time in the United States and everywhere? Along with the sailor's description of the excruciating slowness of captivity, of days that feel like years, the meter's ambiguity might suggest that it is not important to know what time it is, for, as Lootens suggests, it is always time to abolish slavery. In this reading, any attempt at definitive scansion, or to read the poem with a rhythm more consistent than “a no-tune,” is to fall back on the need for arbitrary temporal demarcations, which can divide the responsible from the absolved.

For the sailor, his captivity will leave him always in the ambiguous abolition time, forever altered, forever imagining a future that will never happen. During his captivity, the sailor tries to imagine how time is passing at home, an attempt that imagines mutual sympathy despite the distance and passage of time:

He tries to imagine her not just in the “tender vision” of the way she and their baby were when he left, the vision he says is sustaining him, but as they will have developed in his absence. Not only does this attempt convey the difficulty of maintaining interpersonal commitment under cruel forced separation, but it also places empathy at the heart of commitment. He imagines her worry for him, the very exhaustion of not knowing what has happened to someone you love, a feeling of her own and for him at once. His insistence that he “felt her sorrow” is striking in its compassion as well as in its necessity to the maintenance and development of his “tender vision.” Most clearly, this is a poem about a commitment in marriage, a promise to another person, rather than the persistent support of an ideal. Yet in the instance of a prolonged absence, those two types blur together; for the sailor, his marriage exists only as an ideal. The difficulty of imagining across time emerges in the meter of the sailor's mental image “Holding its small hands together,” a dactyl and a spondee making a trimeter line feel more like a tetrameter. The reader can slow down and stumble rhythmically over the classically sentimental image of a child praying, all the better to notice the pronoun “its,” suggesting the child's gender is, if not forgotten, then no longer salient in the sailor's imagination.

Perhaps because of that forced idealization, his attempts to imagine the family he left behind fail, rather spectacularly, when he is so disoriented by the sight of his wife with her new baby that he forgets about his own child. Upon his reappearance, the sailor, the wife, and the new husband can only sob together:

Were each perhaps crying with rather different foci on their collective family tragedy? At this point, the sailor blesses his (now former) wife and goes. If his commitment to her has not expired in his mind, it has, with distance and time, transformed. The poem ends with the sailor's continued hope that he will, presumably in heaven, return to his wife and child:

He needs that ideal to sustain him in his postemancipation life as much as he needs it during his enslavement. His devotion to her, his commitment to the impossible return to the life he left behind, cannot possibly expire. Traumatized and bereft, he is unable to create new commitments. Neither the sailor nor the poem seems to blame the wife for remarrying and starting over. She seems safe in her assumption that he was dead, the expiration of the marital commitment for her. He, however, is carrying that marital bond to his grave and beyond.

Procter's poem asks us to compare the interpersonal commitment in marriage to a commitment to ethical (and for her, religious) ideals, particularly leading us to question whether marital or religious commitments last longer. As Gill Gregory suggests, Procter's own strongest commitment was to the Catholic Church, and the Catholics come through in “Homeward Bound” as the most stalwartly committed to the sailor in their devotion to rescuing slaves. In historical accounts of European slaves held in Barbary in the seventeenth century, Catholic countries, closer geographically to North Africa, were more affected and took up collections from congregations to buy the freedom of some of these slaves. British slaves and Protestants were rescued less often. Here is how Procter inserts that history into her poem:

“Some exiles.” “Christian captives.” Are we running up against the limits of a “self-devoted band” or the limits of Procter's antislavery commitment? Having seen the limits of marriage, do we now see how ethical action on behalf of others, which Procter implies is stronger than marriage, is circumscribed? Procter had little to say elsewhere about our ethical duty toward slaves. Her father's expression of antislavery sentiment in a letter is about as close as we can get to discerning her views.Footnote ⁵ Might she have been gently nudging her British and American audiences to form their own self-devoted bands? How would prevalent anti-Catholic sentiment at the time have undermined such a goal? Might she have been simply noting a mark on the scorecard for Catholic charity? Procter's commitments here are ambiguous at best.

Adorno's essay on commitment becomes most pertinent to Procter, Christmas annuals, and Victorian transatlantic literature in its consideration of how art might handle extreme atrocity:

Nothing else in Adorno's essay quite describes Procter's “Homeward Bound” so well. Barbary slavery, long over by the mid-nineteenth century, is such a “limiting situation,” part of a cultural heritage, rather than of a horrifying present. The rescue of the sailor by the Catholic “band” demonstrates a flourishing humanity, as does the sailor's persistent thoughts of his family and intention to return to them. For Procter, this “flourishing humanity” is a commitment to other people, people in our families, and, more troublingly, people in her religion, her race, and her culture. Certainly, the victims and executioners, or slave masters, are blurred here, though not by reference to their shared humanity, but rather by virtue of Procter's historical dislocation, her reference to the enslavement of white Europeans by North Africans at the peak of the institution of slavery in the American South. The historical reference to white enslavement on the Barbary coast in a poem that takes place in an 1856 Christmas issue, set in the ocean near the southern tip of South America, is like the return of the long, lost sailor to his wife, a reminder that commitments thought to be expired can still hold. Perhaps Procter was asking whether white, Catholic, European commitment to liberating enslaved people had, like the wife's commitment to her husband, expired. Because transatlantic slavery happened on such a larger scale, and because European imperialism was cruelly subjugating people across the globe, the comparison between the two is a false equivalence, offensively blurring the racial identities of “executioner” and “victim.” As a work of committed literature that Adorno would deplore, “Homeward Bound” opposes the Barbary slavery of the sailor, celebrates his rescue, and laments his forlorn solitude that follows it. Yet Procter's forms resist nonetheless, because they illustrate the troublingly arbitrary temporal and spatial boundaries that too easily cordon off moral responsibility. The poem's formal distortion of time, in the meter, in narrative experience, and in historical setting, leaves open important questions. How long do we sustain our commitments, and when do we lose hope? In reading this poem now, whether we seek an antislavery message or recoil from the poem's implicit racism, we have to ask how we as readers can keep our commitments from expiring so that we can resist “play[ing] along with the culture which gave birth to murder.”