The Sable Venus Ode

The Sable Venus. An Ode

This controversial poem was written by Isaac Teale (1717-64), probably in 1763. Teale was the tutor and friend of Bryan Edwards (1743-1800), who was presumably responsible for the publication of the ode after Teale’s death, as:

The Sable Venus. An Ode. Inscribed to Bryan Edwards, Esq; Kingston, in Jamaica: Printed by Bennett and Woolhead in Harbour Street. M,DCC,LXV. [1765]

Edwards later reprinted the ode in his own collections of verse: Poetical Essays (unpublished, c.1775), and Poems, written chiefly in the West Indies (Kingston, 1792). He also reprinted it in his History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793, and subsequent editions). From the second edition (1794) onwards it was illustrated by an engraving from a lost painting by Thomas Stothard titled “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies”.

Synopsis of the poem

The fictional premise is that the Venus of classical mythology has a black sister who is identical except in colour (lines 85-90). At the bidding of the “sable queen of love”, the poet visits Mt Helicon to pay his respects to Apollo and the muses and to seek their permission to compose a song in her honour. They say nothing but he takes silence for consent (1-24). Bidding farewell therefore to the realm of Venus Aphrodite (“Paphian bow’rs”, 30), he transfers his service to Angola, seat of her “sable” sister, who rules over an empire stretching from the East to the West Indies (25-48). The longest section of the poem (49-114) concerns her voyage from Africa to Jamaica, in the course of which she is seduced by Neptune, disguised as captain of a warship; their son (a second Cupid) thus becomes ruler of the “saffron” (mixed blood) race (49-114). On arrival in Jamaica she is rapturously received by a cavalcade of people, including some “great ones”, who pay homage to her as their goddess (115-32). For himself, the poet declares that he is not being fickle in switching his worship from the Cyprian goddess to the sable Venus, but showing his gratitude for her “superior kindness”. He vows fidelity to her in whatever guise she appears, whether as “gentle Phibba”, “artful Benneba”, “Mimba”, “Cuba” or “Quasheba” (all standard West Indian names for female slaves (133-150). The following stanza appears only in the 1765 version (151-156).

Just now, in Auba’s easy mein [sic];
I think I saw my roving queen,
I will be sure to night:
Send Quaco, gentle girl, from home,
I would not have him see me come;
Why should we mad him quite?

Finally, admitting that the poem might appear improper for someone of mature years, the poet blames his young friend for choosing the subject:

Should then the song too wanton seem,
You know who chose th’ unlucky theme
Dear BRYAN tell the truth.

Criticism and discussion: Despite Edwards’s assiduous promotion of the ode, it appears to have made little impression in his time or afterwards. In the last thirty years, however, both the text itself and Stothard’s image have been the target of a barrage of criticism. The following is a selection of significant articles and comments.

Adams, Michael Vannoy (2007), ‘The Sable Venus on the Middle Passage: Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’: International Association for Analytical Psychology in Cape Town, August 15, 2007. www.jungnewyork.com

Allen, Regulus, ‘“The Sable Venus” and Desire for the Undesirable’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 51 (2011), 667-691.

Bush, Barbara, “’Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women’s identities, c. 1650-1838”, Women’s History Review 9 (2000), 761-789.

Cooper, Carolyn, Noises in the Blood (1993), 23, 27.

Couti, Jacqueline, ‘Sexual Edge in the Tropics: Colonization, Recolonization and Rewriting the Black Female Body in Raphaël Confiant’s Le Nègre at L’Amiral and Reverend Isaac Teale’s “Sable Venus: An Ode”’, Sargasso: Placing the Archipelago: Interconnections and Extensions, I & II (2012).

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, ‘Colonial Modernity and the Poesis of Bare Sex: A Theory of New World Gender’: paper presented to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Seminar Series (2007).

Gilmore, John, ‘Sable Venus, The’, in The Oxford Companion to Black British History, eds. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones (2007).

Gourlay, Alexander, ‘“Art Delivered”: Stothard’s The Sable Venus and Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies31 (2008), 529-50.

Honour, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4 (1989), 33-34.

Kriz, Kay Dian, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the West Indies 1700-1840 (2008), 94-96.

McCrea, Rosalie Smith, ‘Dis-Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century. The Voyage of the Sable Venus: Connoisseurship and the Trivialising of Slavery’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies, ed. Sandra Courtman (2004), 275-297.

Mohammed, Patricia, ‘Gendering the Caribbean Picturesque’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 1 (2007), 1-30.

Nussbaum, Felicity A., The Limits of the Human: fictions of anomaly, race, and gender in the long eighteenth century (2003), 153-155.

Young, Robert J.C., Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and race (1995), 143-158.