Lalla Rookh

Overview

Author

Thomas Moore (1779–1852), Irish poet, satirist, biographer and song-writer, best known before Lalla Rookh for the Irish Melodies (1808–1834)

Published

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 22 May 1817, in quarto

Genre

Oriental verse romance: four narrative poems set inside a prose frame-tale, with extensive learned notes

The frame

The Mughal princess Lalla Rookh travels from Delhi to Kashmir to marry the young king of Bukhara; the poet Feramorz entertains her with the four tales, and the court chamberlain Fadladeen criticises each one

The four tales

The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan; Paradise and the Peri; The Fire-Worshippers; The Light of the Haram

Metre

Mostly rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter and tetrameter; The Light of the Haram and many of the inset songs use anapaestic measures

Settings

Eighth-century Khorasan and Transoxiana; India, Egypt and Syria; the Persian Gulf after the Arab conquest of Iran; Mughal Kashmir under Jahangir

Payment

£3,000 from Longman, agreed in 1814 before the poem was written: the highest sum yet paid for a single poem in English

Afterlife

Many editions and translations; set to music by Spontini, Schumann, Félicien David, Anton Rubinstein, Sterndale Bennett, Stanford and others

This edition

The four verse tales only, from Project Gutenberg #8187; the prose frame, the songs sung within the frame and Moore's notes are not included. Line numbers in this guide count the verse lines of each tale in this text

Context

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin in 1779, the son of a Catholic grocer, and entered Trinity College Dublin in 1795, soon after the relief act of 1793 opened it to Catholics. There he knew young radicals of the United Irishmen, among them Robert Emmet, who was executed after the failed rising of 1803. Moore made his name in London with a translation of Anacreon (1800) and light amorous verse, and from 1808 with the Irish Melodies, songs set to traditional airs that turned Irish grievance into drawing-room music and made him, for English and Irish readers alike, the national poet of Ireland (Kelly 2008) (White 1977).

By 1812 Moore had resolved to write a long poem, and in 1814 the publishers Longman agreed to pay £3,000 for it, unseen, a sum without precedent for a single poem. Byron, whose Turkish tales were then selling in enormous numbers, encouraged him to set it in the East, and Moore, who never travelled east of Europe, spent several years reading for it in a cottage in Derbyshire. Lalla Rookh appeared on 22 May 1817 and sold extremely well; William St Clair's figures place it among the most commercially successful poems of the period (Moore 1817) (St Clair 2004) (Vail 2001) (Jones 1937).

The poem belongs to the Romantic vogue for the Orient that followed the work of Sir William Jones and other scholars of the East India Company, the movement Raymond Schwab called the 'Oriental Renaissance'. Moore's notes, omitted from this edition, cite Barthélemy d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale (1697), the travels of Chardin, Tavernier and Bernier, and a long list of translations and histories; he took pride in their accuracy. Modern critics have asked what this display of learning was for. After Edward Said's Orientalism the poem has been read as a fantasy of the East made for Western consumption, but also, by Nigel Leask, Mohammed Sharafuddin and others, as a work that uses the East to think about politics, religion and empire at home (Herbelot 1697) (Schwab 1984) (Said 1978) (Leask 1992) (Sharafuddin 1994).

The four tales are held together by a prose frame, which this edition does not contain. Lalla Rookh ('tulip cheek'), daughter of the emperor Aurangzeb (Moore's Aurungzebe), travels from Delhi to Kashmir to marry the young king of Lesser Bukhara, whom she has never seen. To relieve the tedium of the journey, a young Kashmiri poet, Feramorz, recites the tales on successive evenings, and the princess falls in love with him. Each recital is followed by the verdicts of Fadladeen, the pompous Great Nazir or chamberlain of the harem, who finds fault with metre, diction, theology and politics; after The Fire-Worshippers he scents sedition. When the procession reaches Kashmir, the bridegroom is revealed to be Feramorz himself, and Fadladeen hastily discovers that he admired the poems all along. The frame lets Moore mock the reviewers, including the Edinburgh critic Francis Jeffrey, with whom he had nearly fought a duel in 1806, and it presents each tale as a performance before a listener (Vail 2001) (Kelly 2006).

Lalla Rookh was translated into most European languages, illustrated many times (notably by John Tenniel in 1861), and adapted for the stage and the concert hall. In Berlin in 1821 the Prussian court staged a festival of tableaux and songs from the poem with music by Gaspare Spontini, who expanded it into the opera Nurmahal (1822). Robert Schumann's oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (1843), Félicien David's opera Lalla-Roukh (1862), Anton Rubinstein's Feramors (1863), William Sterndale Bennett's overture Paradise and the Peri (1862) and Charles Villiers Stanford's opera The Veiled Prophet (first performed 1881) are among its many musical offspring. By the early twentieth century the poem had fallen from favour, and it is now read chiefly for what it reveals about Romantic Orientalism, Irish politics and the literary market (St Clair 2004) (Jordan 1975).

Plot overview

In the frame, the princess Lalla Rookh sets out from Delhi with a splendid retinue to marry the king of Bukhara in the Vale of Kashmir. On the journey the young poet Feramorz tells her four stories in verse, and the chamberlain Fadladeen delivers a pedantic critique after each. The princess falls in love with the poet, and is in despair until she reaches Kashmir and finds that Feramorz and her royal bridegroom are the same man.

The first tale, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, tells how Mokanna, a false prophet who hides his face behind a silver veil, raises a revolt against the Caliph under the banner of freedom. The young warrior Azim joins him, only to find that his lost love Zelica, driven mad by grief, has been seduced by the impostor and bound to him by an oath. Mokanna is defeated, poisons his last followers and destroys himself in a cistern of burning liquid; Zelica, wearing his veil, throws herself on Azim's spear, and Azim spends the rest of his life praying at her grave.

Paradise and the Peri is a short allegory. A Peri, a spirit shut out of Eden, may be readmitted if she brings the gift most dear to Heaven. A patriot's last drop of blood and a dying bride's last sigh are not enough; the tear of a hardened criminal who repents at the sight of a child at prayer opens the gate.

The Fire-Worshippers is a tragedy of national resistance. Hinda, daughter of the Arab emir Al Hassan, who is crushing the last Zoroastrian rebels in Persia, loves a mysterious stranger who proves to be Hafed, the rebel leader. Betrayed by a traitor, Hafed and his men die in a last stand, and Hafed burns himself on the sacred fire; Hinda, watching from a boat, leaps into the sea. The last tale, The Light of the Haram, is a comedy of reconciliation: in Kashmir at the Feast of Roses, the emperor Selim (Jahangir) and his wife Nourmahal have quarrelled, and with the help of an enchantress's spell Nourmahal wins him back by singing to him in disguise.

Part by part

Characters

The prose frame

Lalla Rookh

Daughter of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, betrothed to the young king of Bukhara. Her name means 'tulip cheek'. On her journey to Kashmir she falls in love with the poet Feramorz, believing she must give him up for a husband she has never met.

Feramorz (Aliris)

A young poet of Kashmir who recites the four tales to the princess. At the end he is revealed as Aliris, king of Bukhara, her bridegroom, who joined the procession in disguise to win her love for himself.

Fadladeen

Great Nazir or chamberlain of the harem, a self-important judge of everything from conserves of rose-leaves to epic poems. His solemn criticisms parody the reviewers of Moore's day; when the poet turns out to be a king, he discovers new merits in the verses.

The Veiled Prophet

Mokanna

The Veiled Prophet, a deformed impostor who claims divine light and preaches freedom while despising humanity. Based on the historical al-Muqanna'. He corrupts Zelica, makes war on the Caliph and destroys himself and his followers when defeated.

Azim

A young warrior of Bukhara, an idealist inspired by the memory of Greek liberty, who joins Mokanna believing in his cause, discovers the truth, and becomes the Caliph's champion. He kills Zelica unknowingly and spends his life praying for her.

Zelica

Azim's childhood love, driven mad by false news of his death, drawn into Mokanna's harem and bound by a charnel-house oath. Her final disguise in the veil and her death on Azim's spear bring her redemption.

The Caliph Mahadi

The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, who leads the 'Swords of God' against Mokanna and besieges him at Neksheb.

Paradise and the Peri

The Peri

A spirit of the fallen race of Peris, excluded from Eden, who searches the earth for the gift that will readmit her and finds it in a penitent's tear.

The Angel

The keeper of the gate of Eden, who sets the Peri her task and twice turns her gifts away.

The patriot, the lovers and the penitent

The human figures of the three episodes: an Indian warrior killed defying Mahmud of Ghazni; a plague victim in Egypt and the bride who dies with him; and a Syrian criminal who repents at the sight of a child at prayer.

The Fire-Worshippers

Hafed

Leader of the last Gheber rebels against Arab rule, feared by the Arabs as a demon and loved by Hinda, who knows him first only as a stranger. Betrayed, he dies on the sacred fire of the mountain temple. Often read as a figure of the Irish patriot.

Hinda

Daughter of the emir Al Hassan, gentle and devout, who loves Hafed across the divide of faith and nation. She warns him of the betrayal and drowns herself when she sees him die.

Al Hassan

The Arab emir of Harmozia, a fanatical persecutor of the Ghebers who loves his daughter but cannot see her grief. He uses the traitor to destroy Hafed.

The traitor

A Gheber who survives the rebels' last sally and sells the secret path to the mountain stronghold for gold. Unnamed, he is the object of one of the narrator's most violent curses.

The Light of the Haram

Nourmahal

The 'Light of the Haram', wife of the emperor Selim, based on the historical Nur Jahan. Parted from him by a quarrel, she regains his love through an enchanted song.

Selim

The emperor Jahangir, son of Akbar, who forgets his empire for Nourmahal and is reconciled to her at his feast in the Shalimar gardens.

Namouna

An ageless enchantress who lives on the scent of flowers and weaves the moonlight wreath that summons the Spirit of music.

The Spirit of Chindara

A spirit of music from the fountain of Chindara who visits Nourmahal in a dream and gives her lute and voice their magic.

Themes

Imposture, fanaticism and true faith

The poem is preoccupied with the abuse of belief. Mokanna exploits credulity with a veil, a false moon and promises of paradise; Al Hassan kills in the name of the Koran; in the frame the critic Fadladeen exercises a petty tyranny of orthodoxy over poetry. Against these Moore sets a private, tender piety: the prayers of Zelica and Azim, the Peri's pity and the penitent's tear.

Because the impostor and the persecutor are Muslims, the poem has been read as hostile to Islam, but its satire of 'State Priests' and 'incredible creeds' is general, and readers have heard in it the Irish Catholic Moore's resentment of established religion (Sharafuddin 1994) (Leask 1992).

Liberty, rebellion and betrayal

Freedom is the word on Mokanna's banner and the cause for which Hafed dies, and the poem distinguishes the false liberty of a demagogue from the true liberty of a people defending its land and faith. The patriot's blood in Paradise and the Peri is called holy. Betrayal is the recurring disaster: of his followers by Mokanna, and of Hafed by the informer.

These contrasts give the poem its political meaning in 1817, after the Napoleonic wars and in the long aftermath of the Irish rising of 1798 (Vail 2005) (Wright 2007).

Love across division

All four tales are love stories in which an obstacle separates the lovers: Zelica's oath, Hinda's nation and religion, Nourmahal's quarrel, and in the frame the princess's betrothal. Two end in death, one in reconciliation, and the frame in a marriage that dissolves the obstacle entirely. Moore's women are often more faithful than his men, and love is repeatedly the means of moral redemption.

Memory and lost innocence

Characters are moved by the memory of childhood and first love: Zelica and Azim by the groves of Bukhara, the singer by the bower of roses by Bendemeer, the criminal by his own childhood prayers, Hinda by the gazelle that died. The elegy for a lost happier state links the personal and the national, for Iran too mourns its lost glory.

The power of song

Lalla Rookh is a poem about poetry and music in performance. Feramorz wins the princess by reciting; songs are set into every tale; Nourmahal's enchanted song reunites her with Selim. Moore, the author of the Irish Melodies, presents art as both seduction and healing, and the critic Fadladeen as its comic enemy.

Motifs

Veils and masks

Mokanna's silver veil, Zelica's mourning veil, Hinda's hidden beauty, Nourmahal's mask, and in the frame the disguise of the king as Feramorz: the poem repeatedly plays on concealment and revelation, sometimes of horror, sometimes of love.

Drops and tears

A drop of blood, a sigh and a tear are the Peri's gifts; Zelica's tears thaw her frozen heart; the healing drop that falls on Egypt is compared to repentance. Small offerings carry great moral weight.

Gardens and flowers

From Mokanna's harem to the Feast of Roses, the poem is filled with gardens, often places of temptation or false paradise set against the true Eden the Peri seeks.

Inset songs

Each tale contains songs in contrasting metres, such as the bower of Bendemeer, the Spirit of Love, the lament for Araby's daughter and the Elysium songs, which were printed and sung separately and helped make the poem popular.

Symbols

The Silver Veil

Mokanna's veil promises divine light and hides deformity: an emblem of imposture, and in Vail's reading of revolutionary promises masking violence (Vail 2005).

The sacred fire

The fire of the Ghebers, still burning on the abandoned mountain altar, stands for a faith and a nation that outlast defeat; Hafed's death makes it a martyr's pyre.

The gate of Eden

The crystal bar that opens only to the right gift marks the scale of values in Paradise and the Peri, placing repentance above even patriotic sacrifice.

The Feast of Roses

The festival in Kashmir symbolises the renewal of love; Nourmahal's last words recall it, and the frame-tale ends in the same valley with the royal wedding.

Critical debates

Orientalism: learning or fantasy?

Moore was proud of the accuracy of his local colour, and his notes display a great range of reading in travel writing and Oriental scholarship. Early readers praised this learning; later ones saw the poem as a costume drama in which the East is a storehouse of perfumes, jewels and harems.

Since Said, the debate has turned on the relation between knowledge and power. Nigel Leask placed Moore among the Romantics whose Eastern poems register the anxieties of empire; Mohammed Sharafuddin argued that Moore, like Southey and Byron, made a serious imaginative effort to enter Islamic culture, even when his sympathies were divided; Raymond Schwab's broader history shows how much of this material was new to Europe (Said 1978) (Leask 1992) (Sharafuddin 1994) (Schwab 1984).

The Irish allegory of The Fire-Worshippers

Moore's later preface acknowledged that the Irish cause inspired The Fire-Worshippers, and contemporaries noticed the parallel at once. The question is how far the allegory extends: whether Hafed is Emmet, whether the traitor recalls the informers of 1798, and whether Moore's sympathy for doomed rebellion is a call to action or an elegy that turns politics into sentiment.

Joseph Lennon has placed the poem in a long tradition of 'Irish Orientalism' that linked Ireland with the East; Julia M. Wright has read it alongside Irish writing about India as a reflection on colonial rule; Joep Leerssen's account of Irish cultural memory helps explain why lost causes appealed to Moore's readers (Moore 1841) (Lennon 2004) (Wright 2007) (Leerssen 1996).

Mokanna and the French Revolution

Is the Veiled Prophet a political allegory too? Jeffery Vail argues that the poem pairs a condemnation of Jacobin revolution, embodied in Mokanna's false liberty and the violence behind his veil, with a defence of legitimate national revolt in The Fire-Worshippers, while the happy ending of the frame points towards reform. Others read Mokanna more generally, as a study of fanaticism and of the corruption of an idealist like Azim (Vail 2005) (Leask 1992).

The frame and the critic

The prose frame was long treated as padding, but it shapes how the tales are read. Fadladeen's criticisms anticipate objections to the poem's diction, morality and politics, and laugh at them in advance. The joke that the critic changes his mind when the poet proves to be a king is aimed at reviewers who judged by rank and party; Moore's biographers connect it with his old quarrel with Francis Jeffrey, who in the event reviewed the poem favourably (Vail 2001) (Kelly 2008) (Jones 1937).

Moore and Byron

Lalla Rookh was written in close dialogue with Byron's Eastern tales, which had made Byron the most successful poet of the age. Byron urged Moore towards the East and dedicated The Corsair (1814) to him. Critics have asked whether Moore's poem imitates Byron or answers him, offering, for example, redemptive and more sentimental counterparts to Byron's isolated, guilty heroes; Moore's letters and journal record the friendship from his side (Vail 2001) (Moore 1964) (Moore 1991) (Moore 1856).

Popularity and reputation

The commercial history of the poem is extraordinary: the record payment, the many editions, the translations, the operas and the illustrations. William St Clair's study of the book trade uses such evidence to show how literary reputations were made in the period. The question for criticism is why so successful a poem fell so far, and whether the reasons were literary, such as its ornament and sentiment, or a change in the politics and taste that had made it popular (St Clair 2004) (Jordan 1975) (White 1977).

Women and the harem

Harems appear in three of the tales, and the poem dwells on the beauty of women gathered from every land. Some readers see this as typical Orientalist voyeurism; others note that Moore's heroines, Zelica, Hinda and Nourmahal, are moral agents whose fidelity redeems or outshines the men, and that the frame lets the princess's judgement prevail over the critic's (Leask 1992) (Sharafuddin 1994) (Kelly 2006).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Moore frame the four tales with the story of Lalla Rookh, Feramorz and Fadladeen?

   Think about performance and audience, the satire of critics, and the final revelation of the poet's identity.

2. What does Mokanna's veil conceal, and how does its meaning change when Zelica wears it?

   Compare the unveiling scenes with Zelica's death on Azim's spear.

3. Why is Azim drawn to Mokanna, and what does his story suggest about idealism?

   Consider his experience in Greece and the banner 'Freedom to the World'.

4. Why are the patriot's blood and the lover's sigh not enough to open the gate of Eden?

   Look at the order of the three gifts and what the penitent's tear represents.

5. How far can The Fire-Worshippers be read as an allegory of Ireland?

   Think about conquest, religion, the word 'rebellion', the traitor, and Moore's own background.

6. How does the love of Hafed and Hinda complicate the politics of The Fire-Worshippers?

   Consider Hinda's loyalty to her father and her faith, and the narrator's sympathy for her.

7. What role do the inset songs play in the poem?

   Look at the Bendemeer song, the Elysium songs and the lament for Araby's daughter, and remember Moore's Irish Melodies.

8. Is the poem hostile to Islam, or to religious fanaticism in general?

   Compare Mokanna, Al Hassan and the child at prayer in Paradise and the Peri.

9. Why does The Light of the Haram come last?

   Consider its comic plot, its setting in Kashmir and the ending of the frame-tale.

10. What do the success of Lalla Rookh in 1817 and its later decline tell us about Romantic taste?

    Think about Orientalism, Byron's Eastern tales, the book trade and the poem's musical afterlife.

Further reading

• Herbelot, Barthélemy d'. Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l'Orient. Paris: Compagnie des Libraires, 1697.
• Jones, Howard Mumford. The Harp That Once—: A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore. New York: Henry Holt, 1937.
• Jordan, Hoover H. Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore. 2 vols. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975.
• Kelly, Linda. Ireland's Minstrel: A Life of Tom Moore: Poet, Patriot and Byron's Friend. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.
• Kelly, Ronan. Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore. Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008.
• Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1996.
• Lennon, Joseph. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.
• Moore, Thomas. Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817.
• Moore, Thomas. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Ed. Lord John Russell. 8 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853–1856.
• Moore, Thomas. The Journal of Thomas Moore. Ed. Wilfred S. Dowden. 6 vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–1991.
• Moore, Thomas. The Letters of Thomas Moore. Ed. Wilfred S. Dowden. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
• Moore, Thomas. The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Collected by Himself. 10 vols. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840–1841.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• Sharafuddin, Mohammed. Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient. London: I. B. Tauris, 1994.
• St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Vail, Jeffery W. '"The Standard of Revolt": Revolution and National Independence in Moore's Lalla Rookh'. Romanticism on the Net 40 (November 2005). doi:10.7202/012459ar.
• Vail, Jeffery W. The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
• White, Terence de Vere. Tom Moore: The Irish Poet. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
• Wright, Julia M. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.