Welby, Amelia (Bell) Coppuck

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WELBY, Amelia (Bell) Coppuck

Born 3 February 1819, Saint Michaels, Maryland; died 3 May 1852, Louisville, Kentucky

Daughter of William and Mary Shield Coppuck; married George H. Welby, 1838; children: one

Soon after Amelia Coppuck Welby's birth, her father, a mason, moved his family to Baltimore, where Welby received some formal education, and in 1834 the family moved to Louisville. By 1837 poems signed "Amelia" appeared in the Louisville Daily Journal. Welby's poems were quickly copied and circulated in other local papers, and by the 1840s she had gained national popularity. Five years later, her poems were collected in her only book, Poems by Amelia (1845); by 1860, it had appeared in 15 editions.

At the age of nineteen, Welby married an English businessman. While she continued to write verse after her marriage, it appears the work Welby had found important to her from girlhood no longer attracted her so powerfully toward the end of her life. She died two months after the birth of her only child.

Welby's poetic techniques and subjects are generally standard. She usually writes in slavishly exact and repetitive meter of nature, love, death, children, and religion; romanticized peasants, disappointed lovers, and sentimentalized brides abound. Equally conventional are the themes of her reflective lyrics and occasional dramatic narratives (such as "The Dying Girl" and "The Dying Mother"), in which she often juxtaposes innocence and sin. "The American Sword" and "My Own Native Land" reveal a passionate if sometimes brutal patriotism.

But Welby's sentimental conventionality does not obscure her real if unsustained strengths. Her poetry reveals a fanciful imagination and sensitive humor. She freely assumes the voice of the dew in "The Dew-Drop" and of the violet in "The Violet's Song to the Lost Fairy." Her humor appears less frequently in her earlier than in her later poems, in which she is able to smile even at love.

Welby shows understanding of character and skill in exploring first person speakers. For example, in appropriately childlike rhythms, she reveals her understanding of a small boy and his stepmother in "The Little Step-Son"; here, through the voice of the stepmother, Welby admires the cute but realistic child in stanzas punctuated by the refrain, "My sturdy little stepson, that's only five years old." With apparent ease, she assumes the male voice of a lover (as in "The Golden Ringlet" or in "Lines—to a Lady"), of a boy (as in "The Captive Sailor Boy") or of a soldier (as in "The American Sword"). She also uses her personae to explore her vague frustrations with her role as a woman; in "My Own Native Land," she writes: "Oh, had I the strength of my heart in my hand, / I'd fight for thy freedom, my own native land."

Whether expressed through her clearly fictional or suggestively autobiographical speakers, Welby's concern with various voices reveals an interest in self that never quite fully informs her poetry; still, her exploration of the first person rewards the careful reader as the poet writes as "I…a Minstrel Girl" in "The Stars" or as "I, the youngest, wildest one" in "The Sisters."

Bibliography:

Coggeshall, W. T., The Poets and Poetry of the West (1860). Poe, E. A., in the Democratic Review (Dec. 1844). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977).