The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Hemans, Felicia. “Casabianca,” Poetry by Heart, https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/casabianca/.

Note that all parenthetical citations with the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Born in 1793, Felicia Hemans was an early nineteenth-century English poet, though she herself identified as Welsh. From a young age, Hemans demonstrated vast literary talent – she was educated in the classics, knew numerous European languages, and favored Shakespeare at six years old. Hemans was a prolific writer – she published nineteen books while she was alive. She was considered the paragon of women’s poetry, and her works on the lives of Victorian women were highly acclaimed and popular.

But Hemans’s popularity on the mass market proved to be the undoing of her literary reputation. Only recently have critics reexamined her entire body of poetry as a whole and understood its wider literary significance. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hemans’s poetry was popular in schoolrooms for moralizing to children. “Casabianca,” perhaps Hemans’s most famous and popular work, is also part of the complex legacy of her poetry. While the tone of the poem is serious, the poem was widely taught and memorized in children’s school rooms.

However, much like with many of Hemans’ other poems, the popularity of "Casabianca" undermined its tragic themes and truly critical appraisal of its contents. Now, its dramatic qualities have rendered it frequently a device for poetic parody.

In terms of content, “Casabianca” is inspired by true historical events – the heroic of death of Luc-Julien-Joseph Casabianca and his son, Giocante, during the 1798 Battle of the Nile between the British and the French. Because of the few details known about the death of the father-son duo, their demise has achieved nearly legendary status, with one account of the events claiming that the French Giocante purposely set fire to his ship to prevent the British from capturing it, though this account is almost certainly false. Hemans’s retelling in “Casabianca” also plays into the quasi-legendary status of the death of the father-son duo. While the fate of Casabianca and Giocante are predetermined – they cannot avoid their historical death in battle – Hemans approaches the events from a more emotional perspective by suggesting what Giocante might have felt in his final moments while calling out to his father with no hint of a response.