Casabianca (poem)

*Destruction of L'Orient at the Battle of the Nile* by George Arnald; the scene of the boy's death

"Casabianca" is a poem by the English poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, first published in The Monthly Magazine, Vol 2, August 1826.^[1]

The poem starts:

The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle's wreck

Shone round him o'er the dead.

It is written in ballad meter with the rhyme scheme ABAB. It is about the true story of a boy who was obedient enough to wait for his father's orders, not knowing that his father is no longer alive. It is perhaps not widely realised that the boy in the poem is French and not English; his nationality is not mentioned.

^ Not The New Monthly Magazine as sometimes reported. It was also reproduced in The Kaleidoscope; or Literary and Scientific Mirror, Liverpool, August 26, 1826, p. 60, The Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, Philadelphia, October 1826, p. 343 and Whitaker's Monthly and European Magazine, 1826.

[1] Not The New Monthly Magazine as sometimes reported. It was also reproduced in The Kaleidoscope; or Literary and Scientific Mirror, Liverpool, August 26, 1826, p. 60, The Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, Philadelphia, October 1826, p. 343 and Whitaker's Monthly and European Magazine, 1826.

[1]