7 - Conclusion: neither wild thing nor tame

Summary

I cannot remember my country,

The land whence I came;

Whence they brought me and chained me and made me

Nor wild thing nor tame.

This only I know of my country

This only repeat: –

It was free as the forest, and sweeter

Than woodland retreat.

When the chain shall at last be broken,

The window set wide;

And I step in the largeness and freedom

Of sunlight outside;

Shall I wander in vain for my country?

Shall I seek and not find?

Shall I cry for the bars that encage me,

The fetters that bind?

Amy Levy's posthumously published poem ‘Captivity’ (1889) meditates on the fate of the caged lion and bird which, having strained against their confinements, are unable when freed to live without them. In these last four stanzas, the poem moves into the first-person lyric voice and takes on broader allegorical connotations. The theme of captivity invokes, as Cynthia Scheinberg argues, the tradition of Hebrew poetry on the pain of Jewish exile. But the metaphor of enchainment also links Levy's writing to the imagery of the Anglo-Jewish emancipation campaign in the 1830s and 40s, and the Christian and abolitionist rhetoric that stood behind it. What is noticeable in Levy's poem, moreover, in contrast to the literature I have examined earlier in this study, is the more or less overt suggestion of an analogy between the politics of women's and Jewish emancipation. Both, however, produce not expectations of millennial transformation but profound uncertainties.