Casabianca (poem) - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

This poem was a staple of elementary school readers in the United Kingdom and the United States over a period of about a century spanning, roughly, the 1850s through the 1950s. So often memorized and recited as to lose any shred of meaning or emotion, it is today remembered mostly as a tag line and as a topic of parodies.

McGuffey's New Fourth Eclectic Reader (1866) takes this poem as the topic of Lesson LV. After urging the reader to "Utter distinctly each consonant: terrible, thunders, brave, distant, progress, trust, mangled, burning, bright," it introduces and presents the poem, following it with a set of questions: "What is this story about? Who was Casabianca? By whose side did he stand in the midst of battle? What happened to his father? What took fire? What did the sailors begin to do? What did the little boy do? Why did he stand there amid so much danger? What became of him?"

A character in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh draws an unorthodox moral from the poem:

Then he thought of Casabianca. He had been examined in that poem by his father not long before. 'When only would he leave his position? To whom did he call? Did he get an answer? Why? How many times did he call upon his father? What happened to him? What was the noblest life that perished there? Do you think so? Why do you think so?' And all the rest of it. Of course he thought Casabianca's was the noblest life that perished there; there could be no two opinions about that; it never occurred to him that the moral of the poem was that young people cannot begin too soon to exercise discretion in the obedience they pay to their papa and mamma.

A version of the poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop refers to elements of Hemans's original work as an allegory for love.

In History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984), Kamau Brathwaite alludes to the poem as an example of imperial education and hopes those who have had to recite its lines will be able to express themselves in nation language instead of imposed language (and poetry).

The first line of the poem serves as the title and the inspiration for the short story of the same name by C. S. Forester. In this version the hero, Ed Jones, remains at his station aboard the fictitious USS Boon during the Battle of Midway. A fire started in the bilge beneath his station in the engine room, but Jones remained at his station slowly roasting while the battle rages. At the conclusion of the battle he is relieved by a damage control party. Burned, he nonetheless survives the war.