milne5

Leigh Hunt 'Abou Ben Adhem' [intended for an unfinished book on poetical manuscripts]

In what Charles Dickens himself recognised to be 'the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words' he cruelly ridiculed his old friend Leigh Hunt as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House:

'He was a little bright creature, with a rather large head; but a delicate face, and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety, that it was fascinating to hear him talk...he had more the appearance, in all respects, of a damaged young man, than a well-preserved elderly one...he must confess to two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was, that he had no idea of time; the other, that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact business, and never knew the value of anything! Well!!! So he had got on in life, and here he was! He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making funny sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art. All he asked of society was, to let him live. That wasn't much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more... '

It was not of course 'an absolute reproduction of the real man' as Dickens claimed, since it omitted many aspects of his victim's polymathy. Hunt's career encompassed the roles of editor, journalist, poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer (Keats's first) and autobiographer (famously), reviewer, music-, art- and threatre-critic, translator, reformer and radical, and promoter of emerging literary talent. His own brilliance resided rather in his personality and in the sheer variety of his achievements than in an absolute mastery of any one of them, and in each he was overshadowed by his more gifted contemporaries. He perhaps deserves to be more widely enjoyed, although as an admittedly minor voice, but it has been rightly observed that he 'wrote too much and edited too little.' To scholars he is now most interesting for his friendships with virtually all the literary figures of his day and for his influence, not always deemed beneficial, on other writers, particularly Keats and Shelley. His major contribution to Keats was made by freeing him from the stranglehold of the closed couplet in favour of enjambment. Hunt achieved personal and popular immortality as a poet with his two most anthologised works, 'Jenny kissed me' and 'Abou Ben Adhem'.

'Abou Ben Adhem', written out in, and perhaps for, Mrs S.C. Hall's album, was first published by her husband in a gift book, The Amulet, in 1834. There 'Abou' appears consistently as 'Abon', an understandable misreading even in Hunt's notably legible (called 'exquisite copperplate' by Charles Ollier), though sometimes very tiny handwriting. Other than in punctuation and elision, the major differences between the texts in The Amulet, the present manuscript and The Poetical Works (1923) are that in the first two the title is extended to '& the Angel'; in the manuscript the ninth line begins 'And, in a tone' where elsewhere it starts 'And with a look'; and in The Amulet the fourteenth line reads "Write me for [not as] one who loves his fellow men.'

Hunt's source for the poem, based on the Islamic belief that on the night of Nous Shaaban God takes the golden book of mankind and crosses off the names of those he is calling to him in the coming year (that is, those whom he loves), was D'Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, 1781

' On rapporte de lui (Abou-Ishak-Ben-Adhem), qu'il vit en songe un ange qui écrivoit, et que lui ayant demandé ce qu'il faisot, cet ange lui répondit: "J'écris le nom de ceux qui aiment sincèrement Dieu, tels que sont Malek-Ben-Dinar, Thaber-al-Benani, Aioud-al-Sakhtiani; &c." Alors il dit à l'ange, "Ne suis-je point parmi ces gens-là?" -- "Non," lui répondit l'ange. "Hé bien," répliqua-t-il, "écrivez-moi, je vous prie, pour l'amour d'eux, en qualité d'ami de ceux qui aiment Dieu." L'on ajoute, que le même ange lui révéla bientôt après, qu'il avoit reçu ordre de Dieu de le mettre à la tête de tous les autres" (Milford, p. 707)'

The point has been made that while he used his source fairly closely, the real significance of the poem lies in the slight twist that Hunt gave to the story by making Abou ask to be written down 'as one that loves his fellow-men' when told that his was not among the 'names of those who love the Lord.' Hunt, it has been said, 'deserves the credit for making him, in the best sense, the complete humanitarian'.

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, in his stimulating if sometimes laborious study of Leigh Hunt's poetry, seems unnecessarily critical of the poem, which, while recognising it to be Hunt's most famous, he castigates as one of his least distinguished:

' ...its weakness lies in its nerveless, sagging metre. In "Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom" the stress on "and" fractures the dactyls, but fails to establish an iambic force of its own. Only at one point does the meter rise to the challenge: the point where it rolls out its great credal statement: "Write me as one that loves his fellow-men"...'

A pioneer of alternatives to classical decorum, no poet before him appears to have written anapestic verse in such quantity as Hunt. It was his copy of Keats's Lamia that was found in Shelley's pocket when he drowned. Before Tennyson's appointment Hunt had been considered for the office of Poet Laureate. The epitaph on his tomb at Kensal Green read: 'Write me as one that loves his fellow-men'

Bibliography: The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, edited by H.S. Milford, 1923; Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt: a Biography, 1930; Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy, 1994; Ann Blainey, Immortal Boy: a Portrait of Leigh Hunt, 1985; Timothy Luloffs and Hans Ostrom, Leigh Hunt: a Reference Guide, 1985; Ernest Leisy, 'Hunt's Abou Ben Adhem', The Explicator 5 (1946), item 9; T.O. Mabbott, 'Hunt's Abou Ben Adhem', The Explicator 5 (1946), item 39 Joseph and Linda Woolfe,'An Earlier Version of 'Abou'', Notes and Queries 105 (1960): 113; The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, edited by Thornton Hunt, 1862