“Bodies changed into new forms”: Michael Field and the Trans Antique

As a number of Michael Field critics have observed, Bradley and Cooper frequently drew on historical source material in order to reflect on the present moment or to express their thoughts about modernity. For example, Ana Parejo Vadillo suggests that their verse dramas set in Ancient Rome use history as “a screen upon which to discuss the contemporaneous.”Footnote ¹⁶ Scholarship on Michael Field’s engagement with classical antiquity has often concentrated on Long Ago, their volume of lyric poems expanding and reimagining Sappho’s original fragments, with particular attention to their revision of Sappho’s work in order to forge their own models of queer and lesbian sexuality. Stefano Evangelista, for instance, claims that Michael Field’s engagement with the classical past allows Bradley and Cooper to “overthrow the gendered social and cultural expectations placed on Victorian femininity,” while Yopie Prins argues that, through reimagining Sappho, Michael Field develop “new configurations of gender and sexuality.”Footnote ¹⁷ More recently, Ehnenn proposes that in Long Ago, Michael Field capitalize on the affordances of the fragment—such as the sense of loss and absence—to forge their own “queer-feminist archive.”Footnote ¹⁸

While scholarship has focused on Michael Field’s use of classical antiquity to reimagine female sexuality, Bradley and Cooper also used the classical past to contemplate and transform masculinity. Their Roman plays, for example, contain fascinatingly complex characterizations of masculinity, from the shape-shifting dancer Pylades to the Emperor Commodus. In reimagining masculinity through the texts and images of Roman antiquity, Michael Field were certainly not alone: as Laura Eastlake has shown, we can uncover “manifold receptions of ancient Rome in Victorian literature and culture,” whose wide range of interpretations suggest that “the precise meaning of Rome” in Victorian culture was “no more fixed and no more stable than the meaning of masculinity itself.”Footnote ¹⁹ While Michael Field’s engagement with antiquity has largely been restricted to their reimagining of women’s history in existing criticism, their work also raises wider questions about the use of the classical past to, in Eastlake’s terms, forge “useable models of masculinity.”Footnote ²⁰

Scholarship in the history of sexuality has documented the uses of the past to “create a sense of community or shared identity in the present stretching through time.”Footnote ²¹ Recent work in trans studies has likewise stressed how gender is not an isolated project, and how all gender categories are “social and interpersonal,” not simply self-determined and individual, as seen in Jana Funke’s work on histories of trans-lesbian-modernism as expressed through the life and work of Michael Field’s younger contemporary, Christopher St John (1871–1960).Footnote ²² We propose to bring these two approaches in the history of gender and sexuality together in our discussion of “Caenis Caeneus” in order to understand the kinship and affinities that transmasculinity in the classical world afforded Michael Field. How did “the past,” or more specifically the tale of Caeneus as it reached across antiquity and into the modern period, provide a model of masculinity for Michael Field and, more specifically, for Cooper? What did it mean for Cooper to come across, read, enjoy, reflect on, and rework an antique tale of gender transition?Footnote ²³

Frustratingly, Michael Field’s collaborative diary Works and Day contains no reference to the sources or editions that Cooper consulted to write “Caenis Caeneus.” When conceiving the poem during a visit to the New Forest in September 1900, however, Cooper claimed that her mind had “been to its old sources & found them deeper.”Footnote ²⁴ The claim to return to “old sources” perhaps suggests that Cooper had reread Ovid’s Metamorphoses to find the story of Caeneus, which Michael Field had earlier used to write their other poem of gender-transition, poem LII of Long Ago about Tiresias. As companion poems, the pieces demonstrate Michael Field’s long-standing engagement with the tales of “bodies changed into new forms” (corpora mutata) that make up the Metamorphoses. Footnote ²⁵ While some scholars have argued that Ovid’s presentation of Caeneus “undermines” a tale of heroism and manly virtue, recent work by Charlotte Northrop has foregrounded the heroic transmasculinity of Caeneus, arguing that Caeneus attains his heroic status “not despite of, but because of” his transmasculinity.Footnote ²⁶ Caeneus first appears briefly in Book 8 of the Metamorphoses, when he is noted simply as being “no longer a woman.”Footnote ²⁷ It is not until Book 12 that Caeneus’s history is fully laid out. The Greeks have prepared a magnificent feast to celebrate the triumph of Achilles over the invulnerable warrior Cycnus in the Trojan War. King Nestor compares Cycnus with another invulnerable warrior, Caeneus, invoking the precedence of the Iliad, in which King Nestor describes Caeneus as the epitome of virtue and heroism, the “mightiest” of all men, whose like the king has “never since seen, or shall see.”Footnote ²⁸ Ovid’s King Nestor, however, adds a new part of Caeneus’s life story. In a “gotcha” moment reminiscent of twentieth-century transploitation films, Nestor delivers a shocking twist for his assembled audience: Caeneus, the invulnerable warrior, “had been born a woman.”Footnote ²⁹ Ovid, in addition to subverting the story of Caeneus in the Iliad, also adds tales narrating the story of Caenis the maiden into the mix, notably Hesiod’s Catalogue of Great Women. Ziogas has argued that Nestor’s speech in the Metamorphoses “activates a generic and gendered clash” between the tale of Caeneus narrated in the Iliad and the tale of Caenis found in Hesiod.Footnote ³⁰

The audience is amazed at Nestor’s revelation, and a fascinated Achilles asks Nestor to speak more about Caeneus. Nestor explains that Caenis had once been one of the “most lovely of all the maids of Thessaly.”Footnote ³¹ After Poseidon had raped the girl, however, Caenis asked to be made a man, after which he wandered, invulnerable, around the earth. Caeneus reappears at the marriage of Pirithous as a heroic warrior, mocked by the centaurs who taunt him that “woman shall you always be to me, Caenis shall you be.”Footnote ³² Despite their derision, however, the centaurs are themselves humiliated when they realize that Caeneus is invulnerable, proclaiming that it is an affront to their race to be “defied by one, and he scarcely a man.”Footnote ³³ To overcome Caeneus’s invulnerability, the centaurs bury the warrior alive under a mound of trees, following which Caeneus, to the disbelief of his friends, is transformed into a beautiful bird with golden wings.

Michael Field’s “Caenis Caeneus” follows the structure of Nestor’s speech after Achilles’ request for further details. The poem opens in medias res, with Caenis’s wish described (by a seemingly omniscient narrator) as already accomplished: “Yea, from the sea she won her will/From Neptune of the restless waves” (1–2). Notably, Cooper withholds both the protagonist’s name and prayer for gender transition until later in the poem, only emphasizing a longing for change: “to let her life be altered to the core/Dissevering it from what had been before” (7–8).Footnote ³⁴ In fact, the opening stanzas of the poem do not really focus on Caenis at all but rather on Neptune, the god of “changeful channels and unfathomed caves” (3), who is described in the second stanza journeying to the surface of the sea in his brine-spouting “car” pulled by dolphins (12). In the third stanza, Caenis’s desire for change is compared to that of the sea itself, as the waves churn in equivalent frustration at Neptune’s control: “as the ocean round his wheels/Itself will voice impatience” (18–19). However, Michael Field emphasizes that the sea cries “in vain,” since Neptune would relinquish “His realm for ever […]/If he could give dejected waves/The new existence that his ocean craves” (31–35). As if in compensation for that impossibility, the narrator implies, Neptune will heed Caenis’s petition, granting the request that “She shall be changed […]/And she become a man in form and thought” (39–40).

In comparison to Ovid’s tale, the poem is rather ambiguous on the motivations behind Caenis’s desire for metamorphosis, implying (but not stating explicitly) that she and Neptune have met before and alluding to her wish for “solace unessayed” (6), her “discontent” (17), and her “lips and eyes” that “Press for a mercy” (30–31). Such allusions to consolation and “mercy” hint at the antique texts that describe Caenis’s gender transition as resulting from Neptune’s rape, as does the objectifying gaze that he directs at her “urgent face” and the splashes he leaves upon her breast (25, 43). The moment of transformation is described in terms of physical dominance and engulfment: “toward her with magnificence he swayed. // Close in a mist he shut her round” (48–49). This description is strikingly similar to poem LXI of Long Ago (also written by Cooper), which tells the tale of Dryope, a maiden who is raped by Apollo, disguised as a serpent. Michael Field’s Dryope, like Caenis, is physically engulfed by the god and emerges transformed as a result: “He must dominate, enthrall/By the rapture of his sway,/[…] For the spell is round her now/Which has made old prophets bow.”Footnote ³⁵ Within a comparable cocoon, the speaker of “Caenis Caeneus” tells us, Neptune “rent her soul away,” and when the mist “unwound,” he bids “adieu/Light-fingered to the youth that stood in view” (52–56). Though the proximity of “rent” and “unwound” subtly encodes the rape-and-reparation plot of ancient sources, Michael Field’s poem places greater emphasis on the joys of Caeneus’s new beginning as a man than any previous wrongs experienced as Caenis.

Following his transition, Caeneus wanders the earth as he does in Ovid, the gaps in the Ovidian tale fleshed out by stories of Caeneus scaling the cliffs and hunting in the countryside, finally entering towns where he gains his heroic status and wins “Men’s praises” (90). Caeneus’s invulnerability is introduced with the observation that “never was his piercing might/Struck down nor staggered by the rival’s blow” (94–95), despite the fact he “would no chance of quarrel shun” (93). The poem, glossing over the details of how or when this invulnerability was granted, therefore contains elements of both Hesiod’s tale, in which Caenis demands invulnerability, and the Ovidian version, in which invulnerability is the decision of Neptune. As a heroic warrior, Caeneus participates in some of the greatest adventures of Greek legend:

While these lines emphasize the epic extent of Caeneus’s adventures, the poem is comparably coy about Caeneus’s sexual experiences—although it does describe his encounters with local maidens, whose flirtatious glances provoke confusion:

Caeneus’s gaze implies a mixture of desire and curiosity, mingled with incomprehension at the reason for his confusion (“a question in the stare”). He loiters, watching “washers at their toil” (126), as if fascinated by this constrained drudgery, in comparison to his life of unbridled physical freedom. Finally, when he does find a lover, his attraction is tinged with fear: “when he wooed the girl whom he would kiss/Oft deemed he shared her shrinking from her bliss” (127–28). Caeneus’s hesitation is ambiguous: perhaps the encounter triggers a specter of his sexual trauma or hints at his bewilderment at finding a flicker of himself as Caenis, an uncanny sensation that, as this article will later discuss, he repeatedly experiences but cannot explain. Certainly, in “shar[ing] her shrinking,” Caeneus’s sexuality, as framed through his uncertain gaze and physical recoil, is presented as fraught and unsettled. Building on Funke’s work on the significance of asexuality and celibacy in transmasculine culture in this period, Caeneus’s “shrinking” might be seen less as a failure to inhabit either a legibly cis-male sexuality, or a coherent lesbian gaze, and instead part of the complex, and elusive, stakes of desiring embodiment that Caeneus grapples with throughout the poem.Footnote ³⁶

During the fight at Pirithous’s wedding, in which Caeneus leads the charge against the “ravishers,” the “cunning Centaurs” forge a scheme to overcome the invulnerable warrior: they “weighed his wound-proof weight” and bury him under tree trunks in a “funeral heap” (138–44). Caeneus’s lingering death in stanza 19 is marked by a moment of subtle formal disruption in the poem; this is the only instance where the second and third lines of the stanza do not rhyme (“Immovable, but living long/Without a sigh through the hot summer day,” 146–47), though Cooper’s manuscript reveals that this line originally read “living lay,” so the lack of rhyme may be the result of a transcription error.Footnote ³⁷ As in Ovid’s version, Caeneus transforms into a bird after being buried alive. The poem stresses the inattention of the enemy to Caeneus’s transformation, as “Above their foe a bird, the Caenis, passed” (151). This bird begins a “fresh life” filled with the joy of the natural world (152) and, as in the “avis unica” of the Metamorphoses, is presented as a nongendered or nonbinary figure.Footnote ³⁸

However, unlike in the Metamorphoses, a “nipping frost” (162) kills the bird, who descends into the Underworld for eternity—as Caenis. For the first time in the poem, Caenis speaks in the first person to bewail her fate: “And I am Caenis: once again/Her life of shadows I resume” (177–78). This transformation in the underworld weaves in a new source for Michael Field’s Caeneus. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Caeneus is transformed back into Caenis in the Underworld, having been “once a youth, now a woman, and again turned back by Fate into her form of old.”Footnote ³⁹ There, she takes her place in the “Mourning Fields” amongst women who are all victims of love and afflicted by a “cruel wasting.”Footnote ⁴⁰ “Caenis Caeneus” likewise describes how “The maiden Caenis in her narrow days/Must ponder on” (175–76). Unlike in Virgil’s tale, however, where Caenis is in the company of other women, Michael Field present Caenis as entirely alone, traumatized by both her forced detransition and separation from the natural world, spending her lonely days “weep[ing]” and “sob[bing]” (201, 208). Caenis’s inconsolable grief, expressed in the first person, signals a major departure from the classical tradition, demonstrating the poem’s repeated attention to the embodied experience of its protagonist. In contrast to her current world of shadows, Caenis mourns a former life filled with sensation, pleasure, and action, in which “Mine was the doing: for the rest no heed” (192). In face of this eternity of passivity, Caenis “runs away to the woods” to utter a final cry that closes the poem: “Ah, would I were a bird!” (208).

This section has shown how Michael Field combine different elements of classical mythology in their poem and add some of their own flourishes to Caeneus’s narrative. As the final line of the poem suggests, and the next section explores in more depth, Michael Field’s reflections on transmasculinity and nonbinary forms of being were inextricably linked to their sense of connectivity with the natural world, reflecting the New Forest setting in which the poem was conceived.

“I am the Forest’s & the Forest is mine”: Trans Ecologies

When Cooper proclaimed that she had returned to her “old sources & found them deeper” while writing the poems for Dedicated, she was alluding not only to a potential return to textual sources but a return to another site of inspiration: to “our primative [sic] inspiration, with earth.”Footnote ⁴¹ In May 1900 Michael Field traveled to the New Forest to stay at Holmsely in a “live, not stuffed” keeper’s cottage and enjoy the arrival of spring in their accommodation lodged deep in the woods.Footnote ⁴² “How necessary it is to learn one’s spring every year,” Bradley wrote in Works and Days, while Cooper described that she had “never felt more deeply shaken & delighted than in this companionship with the Forest.”Footnote ⁴³ For Cooper, finding “companionship” with the forest was a life-enhancing experience and a source of revelatory creative rejuvenation. Throughout the stay in the New Forest, Cooper dwells on the “stupendous experience” of the forest, registering in detail the effects of the climate and surroundings on her body and mind in the animacy of the Forest with its trees that “strain & grunt.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In July, Michael Field were back again in the New Forest, and once more the forest took center stage. On August 30, 1900, for instance, Cooper disregarded unwelcome news received in a letter, because “today the autumn sun has shone & healed me. I have been received back into the forest.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Cooper’s attachments to the natural world are described in a quasi-spiritual language, in which the enmeshment with the natural world becomes a site of poetic reinvigoration:

Cooper’s experience in the New Forest demonstrates a wish for, and belief in, interconnectivity with nature, or what she earlier described as a “companionship” with the natural world. Increasing attention has been paid to Michael Field’s ecological imagination and their exploration, as Ehnenn has described, of an “individual subject’s inextricable relation with the natural world.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Critical work has attended to the queerness of these attachments: Kate Thomas to Michael Field’s identifications with plant life, Dennis Denisoff to the surrenders of self in Sight and Song, and Ehnenn to “eco-entanglement” in their volume Underneath the Bough.Footnote ⁴⁸ The poems gathered together in Dedicated demonstrate another instance of Michael Field’s entanglement with the natural world, with the whole volume, as Cooper later explained, ultimately bearing “witness” to the “influence” of the New Forest.

With this in mind, we suggest that “Caenis Caeneus” might be read as an example of Victorian trans ecologies. Trans ecology is an emerging field in Victorian studies that highlights, as Gregory Luke Chwala has explained, how “bodies and environments are assemblages, becomings and unbecomings—matter always in transition.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Building on Elizabeth Parker’s work, we point to the “potential interconnections between ‘the environment’ and specifically ‘trans-’ experiences” to call attention to the interconnectivity and porousness of bodies, species boundaries, and subjectivity explored in “Caenis Caeneus.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This follows Denisoff’s recent call to resist “reifying an eco-queer identity” and consider instead how Michael Field’s ecological imagination persistently “breach[es] the knowledge structure that scaffolds the concept of identity itself.”Footnote ⁵¹ Caeneus’s transition is, from the outset, mediated through the natural world. As we have already seen, transition is visualized and embodied in the longings of the ocean to undergo its own change:

Nature, throughout the poem, prompts self-realization and introspection, enfolding Caeneus’s subjectivity into an extended communion with the surrounding landscape. Following his transition, the “youth” Caeneus finds himself washed up on the shore, where he is compelled to seek land as he looks toward the cliffs and feels a “curious joy” (61) on beholding them. After scaling the cliffs, he moves joyfully through the landscape, feeling the “tang of fern” and the “grasses, shivering with nods,” with apparently limitless physical sensation (77, 71). When he sails on the seas, he is impassioned by its forms and rhythms; “he loved the sea he never might forget” (104). Caeneus finds himself in and through the environment: it is both a mirror of, and crucible for, his own strength, vitality, and movement.

This coming-of-age narrative structure might be read as a proto-“transgender road narrative,” a genre Nicole Seymour has defined as “tales of transsexual, genderqueer, and/or gender non-conforming persons heading out on the highway and looking for adventure, work, or ‘themselves.’”Footnote ⁵² Like the protagonist of a transgender road narrative, Caeneus moves rapturously across land and then sea, ceaselessly crossing environments on his quest of self-discovery. He crosses “the unpeopled plain” (75) to a place “where countryfolk abide” (83), before being endowed with the “noblest sport” from Fame to “hunt the Arcadian boar” (97–98). Drinking and rampaging as he goes, he “loved and sailed and sang,/And fought in battle with his peers” (129–30), presenting a masculinity of unbridled vigor and adventure. As Seymour explains, going “on the road” signifies two kinds of movement: “the geographical movement of characters and their ability to be moved: to undergo spiritual or emotional awakenings and to be awed, along with viewers or readers, by striking natural landscapes.”Footnote ⁵³ As Caeneus moves through the world, nature also moves him and becomes his site of self-realization. The joy he first feels at looking at the cliffs propels him to act, “made him to himself propose/The conquest of that overhanging height/That faces him with challenge of its light” (62–64). As he roams “High on the summit’s scarcely-woven clods,” his heroic masculinity is woven tighter and tighter, since he “felt no fright, he knew no pain” (72, 74). Caeneus finds an embodied and exuberant masculinity through these encounters with the landscape, growing up from the “boy” (57) on the shore who climbs the cliffs with wonder to the heroic warrior endowed with “manhood’s sovereignty” (189) who sails across the seas and to whom “Fame” grants her greatest conquest.

Like Seymour, however, we are uninterested in a straightforward reclamation of the transgender road narrative or in celebrating its early arrival in 1900. Instead, we are interested in how this Victorian proto-transgender road narrative, through its depiction of Caeneus as a heroic hunter, soldier, and frontier-crosser, presents a previously overlooked example of imperial transmasculinity that derives its energy from the classical past. In this way, our work extends scholarship on the formation of imperial masculinities through classical precedence, to argue that transmasculinity was equally imbricated in the imperial imaginaries of the fin de siècle. Alex Murray has shown how aesthetic and decadent writers, including Michael Field, were “swept up” in the fervor and jingoism of fin de siècle imperialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, as Bradley Deane has argued, “the untamed frontiersman, the impetuous boy, and the unapologetically violent soldier” had emerged as new aspirational models of masculinity.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, as Laura Eastlake has shown, the decadent effeminacy of men in the cities was being contrasted with the vigorous, hygienic masculinity of men situated on the “imperial periphery.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The poem shows Caeneus growing up, from boy to man, a maturity defined through his discovery and use of the landscape. At home only in the wild expanses of land and sea, the heroic Caeneus belongs to the “unpeopled” (75) space of the imperial periphery, crossing the frontiers of the known world and eventually fighting the half-human centaurs. As he moves through the world, his interactions with the environment are persistently defined in terms of “conquest” (63): he “feasted” on the air (65), “started the birds to veer in shoals” (70), “chased the fleeting creatures wide” (82), and feels the blood “lust” of the hunter (80).

The relationship between the journey of the self and the progress of the “Empire” was intimately linked for the Fields. In their customary end-of-year reflections in 1899, a year marked by their intense preoccupation with the events of the Boer War, Cooper made an explicit connection between the two: “Like our Country we shall face the difficulties of Empire-building when circumstances are stubborn. I believe both England & Michael Field will win.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As Murray notes, in this diary entry Michael Field align their own work with the project of empire-building, “to manufacture with their vision of the past all the heroism, valor, and pride they wished to see displayed on the battlefields of southern Africa.”Footnote ⁵⁸ While criticism has focused overwhelmingly on Michael Field’s ecological subjectivity as a relinquishing of identity categories, it is clear that the relationship with nature in “Caenis Caeneus” is also about shoring up a masculine, individualized subjectivity, through which Caeneus, England, and Michael Field “will win.” Caeneus knows no borders: he crosses land and sea, sailing on the Argo and fighting with his comrades across the world. As both a brave hunter and frontier-crosser, the poem resonates with the New Imperialist trope of the “imperial pioneer and hunter” widely disseminated in popular literature and the periodical press.Footnote ⁵⁹ The “boy” Caeneus first learns through nature, by having “discovered, rifled” (68) the birds in their nests, echoing calls by the nature studies movement for boys to engage in direct observation of nature, including the gathering of birds’ nests.Footnote ⁶⁰ Once he has taught himself through observation, Caeneus begins to hunt, finding the “lust” (80) of the hunter first through chasing deer and then participating in the most infamous of hunts, the Calydonian Hunt. The hunt, as John Mackenzie and others have demonstrated, was a major part of British imperial experience by 1900, and images of colonial rule were saturated by dead animals and men with rifles, whose conquest of the animal kingdom served as a direct analogy for the subjugation of land and people around them.Footnote ⁶¹ The poem presents nature as a playground to be explored by the boyish Caeneus and the natural kingdom as a site to be conquered by the explorer and warrior Caeneus, presenting a journey of finding, inhabiting, and loving masculinity within a rubric of imperial masculinity that would have been insistently familiar to readers around 1900.

Yet, at the same time as the environment is presented as the site for shoring up Caeneus’s imperial transmasculinity, nature is simultaneously shown to be an unruly force. In the midst of his heroic adventures, the sea shatters Caeneus’s unthinking conquest, bringing him back involuntarily to a bodily memory he cannot quite place: “he felt,/As he beheld it fall and climb,/Misgivings, intimation of a time/Before he lived a man as now” (105–8). Echoing the earlier connection between the sea and transition in the poem, the sea evokes a strange feeling of longing that Caeneus tries to repress, “He put the strange, unguarded thought to rest” (112), but it insistently returns, “when it came to him it charmed,/It harrowed him and made him reel/With sense of things too far away to feel” (113–15). Despite his lusty singing with sailors, when he “ample-throated sang their song” (118), his gaze is irresistibly drawn back to the sea: “But with his eyes still on the fluent bars/Of sunny foam or grey beneath the stars” (119–20). Caeneus’s encounters with the natural world engender an unsettling affect, which moves him somewhere between “reel[ing]” and “feel[ing].” In the wide expanse of the sea, sensation is literally “too far away to feel.” Nature, the poem suggests, is the force that grants transition: just as the maiden Caenis “won her will” from the sea, Caenis in the underworld wonders if she could yet “breast the sea/and lure from it the gift of change!” (1, 185–86).

Caeneus’s interconnectivity with the natural world even surpasses species boundaries—not only in its affects and affinities between Caeneus and the ocean but in its forms of embodiment—when Caeneus transitions into the Caenis bird. This porosity between species undoes the firm edges of the human body: Caeneus, in the end, is simply matter in transition. Embodiment is not finite, and transition is not one-directional; it is all considerably messier, with potential implications for the reader’s own expectations and experiences, as the heroic model of soldier and explorer is ultimately overturned and unmade. As Denisoff has noted, Michael Field’s work repeatedly confronts “the question of how one’s affective or desiring immersion within an organic environment can be realised for others.”Footnote ⁶² In this sense, “Caenis Caeneus” both fits within and subverts narratives of imperial masculinity, and the environment is the site in which these tensions play out. While the transgender road narrative bolsters an image of heroic imperial transmasculinity, it also presents nature as a disruptive force in Caeneus’s life, and one that he ultimately cannot conquer.

As much as Caeneus has loved his life as a soldier, the Caenis bird is shown to be blissfully interconnected with nature. Just as Caeneus scaled the rocks, so the bird “love[s] to climb/the topmost bough” (165–66).Footnote ⁶³ While the warrior Caeneus was invulnerable, all it takes is a “nipping frost” (162) to kill the bird, who loved to sing a “sweet” song for hours on end (168), like Caeneus joining in with the song of the sailors. At the same time as the poem emboldens an image of heroic transmasculinity, therefore, it also frays at its edges through worrying at the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, between individuated subjectivity and interconnected kinship. The transecological imagination of “Caenis Caeneus” is a fraught place, and one that the dead Caenis in the underworld cries out to Neptune to regain, for “I loved my life/Should leaven earth” (194). If the environment and the body are both matters constantly in transition, Caenis in the underworld is finally robbed of that transformational possibility. The poem closes with a final lament, “Ah, would I were a bird!” (208). Sealing the wish for transspecies transition, Michael Field’s transecological imaginary presents nature as an endless, if cruel, site of embodied change.

“In form and thought”: Trans Poetics

In his reflections on Michael Field’s transecological imagination, Dennis Denisoff notes: “I am particularly interested in ways in which the authors use style and formal techniques to render their experiences of trans-species intimacies beyond physical engagements.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Recent studies in contemporary poetry have also suggested that trans is not just a matter of theme but also of form. Bearing this in mind, we now ask: do Caeneus’s transitions take place on the level of form, as well as narrative content, in Michael Field’s poem? The concept of “trans poetics” is a subject of recent and growing discussion among poets and theorists, most notably in the collection Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013), edited by T. C. Tolbert and Trace Peterson. As Tolbert explains in the introduction to this pioneering volume, commissioned poets were asked to provide short essays to accompany their poems, in which they reflected on the “intersections (and/or disconnections) between one’s experience of the body (as a trans and/or genderqueer person) and the way one uses language.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Contributors were also asked to consider: “Is there such a thing as a trans and genderqueer poetics? A trans and genderqueer genre? A trans and genderqueer form?”Footnote ⁶⁶ The resulting responses offer diverse insights into how contemporary trans and genderqueer poets understand the relationship between bodies and lived identities (both their own and those of others) as well as the language, imagery, and poetic forms in which they work. As several contributors make clear, trans poetics cannot be reduced to theme or subject-matter; for example, as Joy Ladin puts it: “Trans poetics aren’t a matter of poetic content. Poems that describe or refer to trans experience may not utilise trans poetics—and poems that are not about the trans experience may.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Instead, trans poetics are defined by Ladin and other contributors in terms of revisionary approaches to poetic form and style, as “techniques that enable poetic language to embody or enact some aspect of trans experience.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Several poets within the anthology articulate the view that new poetic forms are needed in order to express trans and genderqueer identities. For example, j/j hastain explains: “As a genderqueer writer/maker of things my body speaks of/as a constant state of generative genesis. It asks this question: ‘What is it for an identity to be in a continuity of beginnings? Always extant. Always reaching. And what forms must be invented in order to make space for that identity?’”Footnote ⁶⁹ According to hastain, established poetic forms are incapable of articulating this fluid experience of identity as an unbounded and constant state of becoming, due to these forms’ rigidity and entanglement with long-standing hegemonic structures:

For hastain and other poets in Troubling the Line, established poetic forms are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) associated with the rigidity of the gender binary and with other systems of oppression. This desire for radically new forms is reflected in the poems included in the anthology, the majority of which are experimental in style, eschewing conventional structures, established meters, and recognizable rhyme schemes in favor of free-verse forms, typographical innovations, and experiments with generic hybridity (for example, the volume features several prose poems and instances of the combining of poetic and visual material).

In light of these reflections from contemporary poets, what might a late Victorian “trans poetics” look like? Is such a thing even possible? Given that existing conceptualizations of trans poetics have been primarily articulated by contemporary poets focused on the breaking of form, does this mean that nineteenth-century poems, which tend to adhere (at least at first glance) to established formal conventions, are irrelevant to the concept of trans poetics? “Caenis Caeneus” offers an intriguing case study for conceptualizing a potential fin de siècle trans poetics because, although it largely follows what appears to be a conventional, or at least recognizable, pattern on the surface, closer attention reveals that the poem is subtly subversive on the level of form as well as content.

Michael Field’s poem is composed of twenty-five eight-line stanzas (or octaves), rhymed abbcacdd. This pattern bears a close relationship to ottava rima, an Italian stanza form comprised of octaves rhymed abababcc. Ottava rima is associated with the heroic verse of the Italian Renaissance (early examples of its usage include Boccaccio, for instance) and later with mock epic, particularly as it is employed in Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24)—a poem that shares certain other intriguing similarities with “Caenis Caeneus,” such as the linking of sea voyages, imperialism, and gender subversion.Footnote ⁷¹ However, in line with the subtle formal innovations that LeeAnne M. Richardson argues characterize Michael Field’s oeuvre as whole, in “Caenis Caeneus,” Bradley and Cooper offer their own twist on this established poetic form.Footnote ⁷² First, they begin each stanza with what, at first, appears to be envelope rhyme (abba) rather than the anticipated alternate rhymes of ottava rima. However, even this expectation is swiftly further unsettled by the appearance of the c rhyme in the fourth line. In the final quatrain of each octave, the a and c rhymes recur, but the latter does not reappear where we might expect to encounter it. Michael Field carefully withhold the satisfaction of another rhyming couplet until the final d-rhymed couplet, imbuing the end of each stanza with the finality (and in the case of Byron’s poem, the comic banality) found in traditional ottava rima.

Each stanza’s lack of formal balance is also reflected in the poem’s metrical shifts. “Caenis Caeneus” employs a mixture of iambic tetrameter and pentameter, rather than the consistent iambic pentameter conventionally used in ottava rima. The third, seventh, and eighth lines of each stanza are iambic pentameter, while the rest are tetrameter, with the result that the second b rhyme is longer than the first, generating a sense of mismatched elongation even within apparently matching couplets; for example, in the first stanza:

When summarizing the form of “Caenis Caeneus,” however, it is important to acknowledge the poem’s general uniformity. Within the bounds of its slightly out-of-kilter stanzaic and metrical patterns, there is little variation across the poem’s twenty-five stanzas—with the exception of a few reversed (trochaic) feet, the occasional lengthier line, and a significant variation in the nineteenth stanza, describing Caeneus’s death at the hands of the centaurs, in which the second and third lines do not rhyme (which, as we noted previously, is probably the result of a transcription error). Even taking account of its stylistic quirks, it would therefore be misrepresentative to say that “Caenis Caeneus” is, formally, a radical poem. Nonetheless, Michael Field’s poem suggests the capacity for fixed forms to capture, in hastain’s words, the sense of identity as “a continuity of beginnings [… ] Always extant. Always reaching”—although it achieves this in a rather different manner than contemporary experimental poetry.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, in defining trans poetics, Ladin raises the possibility that traditional forms may also contain their own potential trans poetic affordances: “Trans poetics may be unheard of, outlandish, shocking—or they may be familiar poetic means deployed for trans poetic ends. Think of rhyme: the use of sound to call attention to likeness in unlikeness, the revelation that different semantic bodies harbour the same sensuous soul.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Developing a theory of trans poetics for the fin de siècle through the lens of Michael Field’s work, “Caenis Caeneus” helps us perceive the trans poetic affordances inherent in established poetic forms. For example, as we have seen, the poem does not reject rhyme entirely; instead, the poem “transes” rhyme by playing with ottava rima, resituating the anticipated correspondences and elongating the meter within couplets, generating the sense of “likeness in unlikeness” (and unlikeness in likeness) that Ladin describes. In a narrative recounting a series of abrupt transformations, the poem’s formal shifts and stanzaic asymmetry make total sense, as expected rhymes are disrupted by unexpected returns, and established patterns are subverted within the bounds of an apparently fixed form—just as the poem combines various iterations of classical myth to develop its own version of Caeneus’s story.

“Caenis Caeneus” can thus be said to engage in trans poetics on several different levels. Thematically, it is concerned with a series of transformations: metamorphoses that undo divisions between human and animal and between dead and alive as well as the disruption of gender categories. As we have seen, the poem transes classical myth by combining different versions of Caeneus’s narrative from diverse sources (Ovid, Homer, and others) to forge a new story. In a similar manner, the poem transes poetic form, not by rejecting formal conventions, but by playing on and with readers’ formal expectations. By bringing recent discussions of trans poetics in contemporary poetry into dialogue with our formal analysis of Michael Field’s poem, we can therefore enrich and complicate our understanding of what trans poetics are, and could be. As Tolbert puts it, “To use language is to believe one has the power to make a world of our own choosing exist. The form of the work is, for me, the poem’s gender. […] The poem is my body. My bodies. They better be something I can live inside.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In forming and transforming Caeneus’s story, as part of their wider ongoing project of constantly revising their personal and poetic identities, Michael Field too sought to make a poetry they could live inside.

Conclusion: Future Transformations

As articulated in our introduction, this article was prompted by two interconnected questions: What insights can transgender studies offer to Michael Field scholars, and what might engaging with Michael Field’s work bring to transgender studies? We have focused our response to these potentially unwieldy questions through the close reading of a single poem, but the implications of our study resonate far beyond a single text. Reading “Caenis Caeneus” across the axes of classical reception, ecology, and poetics reveals the trans possibilities rife in Victorian literature and life-writing. Late Victorian writers, for instance, used classical sources to imagine transgender lives, in addition to voicing the queer desires and feminine identities discussed in previous criticism. However, as we have seen, these seemingly subversive visions of masculinity were formed via imperialistic discourses that were intimately bound up with the conservative and racist ideologies which characterized late nineteenth-century colonialism and empire-building. An exploration of transmasculinity can, as we have suggested, shore up the white Victorian status quo as much as disrupt it. Yet we have also seen how Michael Field’s transecological imagination simultaneously pushes against their imperialistic transmasculine fantasies, undermining their own narrative of nature’s domination, as unruly ecological forces influence and transform Caeneus throughout the course of the poem. Our reading thus offers a significant instance of how the rich potential offered by ecological criticism both augments and complicates the otherwise apparently fixed boundaries of nationality, race, and transmasculinity depicted in Michael Field’s poem.

Second, examining Michael Field’s poetics has revealed the trans capacities nestled within established poetic forms. While existing definitions of trans poetics tend to focus on contemporary poets breaking form, the example of “Caenis Caeneus” suggests that a poem does not necessarily need to be written in free verse or to radically reject conventional forms in order to articulate a trans poetics. Michael Field’s work reveals the transgender affordances already inherent in recognizable devices such as rhyme and metrical patterns. This opens up further possibilities to recognize trans poetics in nineteenth-century verse. Poets beyond Michael Field are ripe for such consideration: for example, Swinburne’s near-obsessive use of rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration can be read in terms of trans poetics. Natalie Prizel has, for example, described Swinburne’s use of “liminal forms” in “Hermaphroditus” as “an intersex aesthetic […] brought to life through the transgenre mediation of the ekphrastic gesture that turns stone into print.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The notion of “transgenre” that Prizel draws on here, described by Trish Salah as “cross genre writing and writing that interferes with or intervenes in the classification of gender,” is also a useful concept for approaching Michael Field’s wider work.Footnote ⁷⁷ Beyond “Caenis Caeneus” and the lyric revisionism recently analyzed by Ehnenn and Richardson, Michael Field also experimented more widely with generic hybridity across their oeuvre, writing numerous poetic dramas and prose croquis, for instance—not to mention the startling textual variety offered by their extensive diaries, as recently discussed by Carolyn Dever.Footnote ⁷⁸

As Works and Days (1888–1914) attests, Bradley, Cooper, and Michael Field’s gender identities are complicated, mercurial, and relational, intersecting with several other categories of identity and desire (lesbian, queer, cross-generational, incestual) in ways that are fascinating but also deeply troubling and problematic, entangled as they are with issues of exploitation, power differentials, manipulation, and abuse. Rather than regarding this as undermining Michael Field’s position and potential within trans and queer history, though, we propose that a deeper exploration into these enmeshed aspects will prove illuminating, rather than undermining, for future scholarship into the history of Victorian gender and sexuality.

Pioneering work on Michael Field’s diaries and correspondence by Sharon Bickle, Dever, and Ehnenn has already begun to unfold the complexity of this lifelong record of entangled queer lives.Footnote ⁷⁹ Once digitized, the online version of Works and Days will build on this scholarship, offering an accessible and indispensable resource for research in gender and sexuality studies; enabling researchers to track, for example, the shifting pronouns and names used by Bradley, Cooper, and their associates. This digitization project also provides an opportunity for scholars to think through how to represent transgender identities accurately through encoding and notation, combining insights from transgender studies and digital humanities.Footnote ⁸⁰ The online diary also has potential to engage students, alongside Michael Field’s published work, as a valuable teaching resource. However, as those who have experienced it know well, introducing Michael Field’s work to students can be a complicated endeavor. As recent critics have observed, at first glance, Michael Field appear to resonate with twenty-first-century understandings of gender fluidity that are familiar to many of our students. As Richardson notes:

When teaching Michael Field, we have often found that students are fascinated and repelled in equal measure. As trans scholars have long warned, any wish to find recuperable “ancestors” is likely to be a frustrating exercise, especially when confronted by a writer like Michael Field.Footnote ⁸² While students frequently find discovering traces of queer, gender-fluid, nonbinary, and transgender identities in the past exciting and inspiring, they are just as frequently disturbed by the host of other issues that Bradley and Cooper’s lives and work bring to the surface: incest, potential grooming and abuse, racism and imperialism, misogyny and class snobbery among them. As this article has shown, Michael Field’s complex identity cannot, and should not, be disentangled from the problematic crucible in which this identity was forged. Michael Field are queer in ways that are ethically and ideologically unsavory, to say the least, but they are also truly queer in the sense that they are radically different from us as well as (in some respects) the same as us. Acknowledging Bradley and Cooper’s queerness in all its complexity is essential to a truly comprehensive engagement with the trans capacities of Michael Field’s work.

In tune with Bradley and Cooper’s own revisionist response to history, Ehnenn concludes her recent book by proposing that we read Michael Field’s writing strategically out of time. Reflecting on the diaries, she writes: “I am interested a bit less in what the diaries mean for Michael Field’s life, and a bit more in what they might mean and do for us, now,” before asking: “What are we looking for, what are our aims as readers of the archive? Maybe these questions about ourselves are just as important as those we pose about our ‘subjects.’”Footnote ⁸³ In raising these questions, Ehnenn follows Heather Love’s provocative call to stop asking “were there gay people in the past” and instead ask: “Why do we care so much if there were gay people in the past?”Footnote ⁸⁴ In contemplating similar questions while exploring Michael Field and transgender studies, we asked ourselves: What do Michael Field do for us now? What might they do? This article is one response to those lines of enquiry. Our close examination of “Caenis Caeneus” has analyzed and expanded Michael Field’s work not only for those already interested in Bradley and Cooper’s work, and in Victorian poetry, but also for scholars of trans literature and history. But we have also kept in mind our own students who may be inspired by perceiving transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary possibilities in the poem, and in Michael Field as a gender-nonconforming figure. In this sense, we hope to have enhanced Michael Field studies through our engagement with the insights offered by transgender scholarship, but also to have shown how Michael Field’s rich and complex poem speaks to and illuminates our present moment.