While poems by early Romantic-era women such as Charlotte Smith often demonstrate taxonomic acumen in natural history, Felicia Hemans’s works exemplify an aesthetic shift toward an alternate compatibility of science and feminine propriety. I chart this transition in women’s scientific writings directly within Hemans’s verse by analyzing two of her geological poems: “Epitaph on Mr. W—, a Celebrated Mineralogist” (ca. 1814-1816) and “The Image in Lava” (1827). Exhibiting clear knowledge of geology in the “Epitaph” on her mineralogist friend, C. Pleydell N. Wilton, who was still very much alive at the time of the poem’s composition, Hemans’s verses participate in a genre of geological satire that became popular among naturalists themselves. Yet, Hemans did not publish this epitaph in her lifetime; its first appearance in print occurred posthumously in 1836. One Victorian editor wrote of the work, “As may easily be supposed, [these verses] were never intended for publication” due to their lack of “feminine delicacy.” Hemans’s verses on “fossils, flints, and spars,” granite, chalcedony, quartz, schist, gneiss, strata, and various other concepts and materials associated with geology, display a tone and specificity that her posthumous editor viewed as unbecoming of a serious female poet. Her “Image in Lava,” on the other hand, written over a decade after the epitaph, embodies the high poetry of Romantic imagination. Despite the poem’s dependence on readers’ familiarity with the pumice rock resulting from lava flows, Hemans’s depiction of a catastrophic destruction that preserves in ashes the tender relation between mother and child dominates the poem, subverting scientific concerns with those of domesticity. Differing markedly in content and public reception, her two geological poems dramatize the change in women’s versification of natural history in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that this altered sense of feminine propriety connects not only with the movement toward Victorian ideals, but also with the evolution in Romantic aesthetics that ensured the earlier depopularization of scientific verses like those of Erasmus Darwin and the increased valuing of emotive capacity in the poems of, for instance, Wordsworth and Keats.